Everyday Creativity and New Views of Human Nature

In this provocative collection of essays, eminent thinkers and writers offer their thoughts on how embracing creativity--tapping into the originality of everyday life--can lead to improved physical and mental health as well as new ways of thinking and experiencing the world.

Ruth Richards, MD, PhD, is a board certified psychiatrist and educational psychologist. She is a professor of psychology at Saybrook Graduate School in San Francisco, California; a research affiliate at McLean Hospital, Belmont, Massachusetts (psychiatric affiliate of Massachusetts General Hospital); and a lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts. For many years, Dr. Richards has studied everyday creativity in clinical and educational settings and has published on creativity and social action as well as spiritual development. She is the principal author of The Lifetime Creativity Scales, which broke new ground as a broad-based assessment of real-life everyday creativity in a general population. With Mark A. Runco, Dr. Richards coedited Eminent Creativity, Everyday Creativity, and Health. She served on the executive advisory board for the Encyclopedia of Creativity and is also on the editorial boards of three journals: The Creativity Research Journal; The Journal of Humanistic Psychology; and Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, the journal for APA Division 10 (Society for the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts), where she is also an at-large member of the executive committee. Personally, Dr. Richards draws, writes, plays three instruments badly, and learns even more about creativity from her teenage daughter.