Gombrich,Galenson,and Beyond: Integrating Case Study and Typological Frameworks in the Study of Creative Individuals

Art historian E. H. Gombrich raised challenging questions about creativity that remain neglected in contemporary psychological research. Emphasizing continuity with tradition, expertise, evaluation, and learning, Gombrich's foci exemplify a particular kind of creator, dubbed “seekers” by Galenson (2001, 2005). Gombrich's place in Galenson's typology and his own views on categories of creators motivate an overview of existing creative typologies. While in principle such typologies have great promise for bridging nomothetic and ideographic approaches to creativity, they have important limitations, like predominantly uni-dimensional structures and limited reliability and validity. Following Gombrich's (1960) principle of “ping and pong,” I argue that a further proliferation of such typologies would be counterproductive; a more informative strategy is to integrate them at the level of their components, rather than reconciling broad category labels.