Albert Rothenberg (born June 2, 1930) is an American psychiatrist who has carried out long term research on the creative process in literature, art, science and psychotherapy.
There was an interruption of two years when Rothenberg served as Captain in the U.S. Army Medical Corps as Chief Psychiatrist for American military personnel in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean area.
In 1979, he became the Director of Research at the Austen Riggs Center, an open psychiatric hospital in Stockbridge, Massachusetts and a member of the Harvard Medical School faculty.
Also, through extensive and intensive research with Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine, Physics, and Chemistry the same processes were found to be operating in their far-reaching and outstanding creative achievements.
[14] Homospatial process (derived from Greek homo) consists of actively conceiving and using two or more discrete entities in the same mental space, a conception leading to the articulation of new identities.
[16] Although, as commonly used, the term creativity has been applied to a wide range of behavior, events, and practices, these have often consisted of simply different or deviant, uncommon, or unusual occurrences.
Many studies have been derived from personal intuition or anecdotes, and have often focused simply on skills, divergent thinking or employment in particular types of artistic or scientific occupations.
Rothenberg's work and findings have consistently focused on a strict definition of creativity as the state or production of both newness and value (intrinsic or instrumental).
The findings produced by his research consist, for the first time, of empirically determined highly specific and operational types of creative processes.