Fooling Around

A volume in Advances in Cultural PsychologySeries Editor: Jaan Valsiner, Clark UniversitySome old ideas can become very new. This is the case of the notion of creativity in psychology.Traditionally conceptualized in the narrow framework of the amazing things poets, composers, painters, andscientists do, creativity research had reached an impassé in its efforts to locate creativity within the confinesof personality characteristics.This is the time for change. The New Look at creativity that is rooted within the sociocultural tradition inpsychology and elaborated in the present book finds creativity in each and every moment of our everydaylives. We are creative when we move around in the streets, dance tango, fool around with our self-imageswhile shopping for clothes, or resist pre-given recipes while cooking dinners. We are being creative even inour bedrooms where we perform the difficult tasks of falling asleep or waking up through arrays of sleepinducers and alarm clocks, not to speak of the time we spend in the very state of sleep. All our actions atnight-ranging from what we later call nightmares--or dreams-are arenas of creativity even if we maybarely remember what we have done.The present monograph by Lene Tanggaard constitutes a powerful multi-pronged exposition of the New Look at Creativity. Its starting point is in themove to pay attention to the processes of acting in everyday life-rather than start from the classification of products of human actions into classes of"creative" versus "non-creative".