Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to consider the interrelation between development, creativity and culture. Although the development of creativity has been a topic of interest for decades in psychology and increasingly more authors raise the issue of development and culture, joining the three together is not exactly common. However, it is not only the case that development, creativity and culture are deeply connected, but that to understand one without the others is virtually impossible, or at least reductive. Drawing on the foundational scholarship of important figures within psychology, psychoanalysis and philosophy, like Lev Vygotsky, Donald Winnicott and James Mark Baldwin, we are able to observe how the child’s development of the capacity to symbolise constitutes simultaneously a creative and cultural achievement. The chapter concludes that one can never conceive of creativity without culture and the other way around, and cannot think about their interdependence outside a developmental perspective.
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Acknowledgements
The author would like to express his gratitude for support received from the Niels Bohr Centre for Cultural Psychology and the Qualitative Studies group at Aalborg University, Denmark, as well as the research group Education and Diversity International (EDI), in the process of formulating and writing this chapter.
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Glăveanu, V.P. (2015). Unpacking the Triad of Creativity, Culture, and Development: An Exercise in Relational Thinking . In: Tan, AG., Perleth, C. (eds) Creativity, Culture, and Development. Creativity in the Twenty First Century. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-636-2_2
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