CREATIVITY AND PSYCHOSIS IN SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH

The stereotype of the scientist, so different from how a creative artist is usually perceived, is perhaps one of the factors that hinders the study of creativity in the field of science. Fea-tures such as rationality, skepticism, and obsess-sion for accuracy and objectivity seem in fact far removed from both creative and psychotic activ-ity. The real scientific innovator, however, does not base his task on the features named above-which can be criticized as belonging to "scien-tificists " rather than to scientists- but rather on a series of special cognitive processes that trans-form or substitute conceptualizations of reality, which up to then had been universally accepted. Early descriptions of some of these processe