Читать книгу The Creative Arts in Counseling - Samuel Gladding T., Samuel T. Gladding - Страница 15

When examining the creative arts in counseling as an entity, it is crucial to first explore the nature of creativity. This examination is prudent for two reasons. First, by knowing something about the nature of creativity, counselors may understand and better appreciate creative processes. Second, counseling, as mentioned previously, is by its nature a creative endeavor (McCarthy, 2018). Although the arts have much potential to help counselors in assisting clients, they are limited in what they can do unless counselors know how to use them creatively.

Creativity is an overused word that is sometimes talked about without being defined. It is a lot like kissing in that it is so “intrinsically interesting and satisfying that few bother to critically examine it” (Thoresen, 1969, p. 264). A central feature of creativity is divergent thinking, which is thinking in a broad, flexible, exploratory, tentative, inductive, and non-data-based way that is oriented toward the development of possibilities. Divergent thinking includes fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration in thought as well (Carson, 1999). Creativity and divergent thinking are associated with coping abilities, good mental health, resiliency, and couple/family functionality and happiness (Cohen, 2000; Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Pink, 2006). According to Sternberg and Lubart (1996, p. 677), as an overall process, creativity involves “the ability to produce work that is both novel (i.e., original or unexpected) and appropriate (i.e., useful or meets task constraints).” It is positively related to spontaneity and negatively related to impulsivity (Kipper et al., 2010).