Albert Rothenberg

Albert Rothenberg coined the term 'Janusian Thinking', now 'Janusian process', to refer to the ability to conceive and use multiple antitheses or opposites simultaneously, a capacity Rothenberg found to be a component of genuine creativity. His research has consisted of empirical studies of literary and artistic prize winners and Nobel laureates in chemistry, physics, and medicine or physiology as well as controlled experiments. He has also described the homospatial and sep-con articulation ({cognitive processes}) as critical factors in creative achievement. The homospatial process consists of actively conceiving two or more discrete entities in the same mental space, a conception leading to the articulation of new identities. Sep-con articulation consists of the conception and use of separation (sep) and connection (con) concomitantly with the production of creative integration.

Born in New York, Rothenberg attended Harvard College, graduated in medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine, and received his psychiatric training at the Yale University Department of Psychiatry. He is currently Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He has been a NIMH Research Career Investigator, has received a Guggenheim Award, and he has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. He has recently returned again as a Fellow at the Stanford Center.

In addition to many academic articles and several scientific books on creativity he has written two novels, LIVING COLOR based on the slashing of a famous painting in the modern art museum in Amsterdam and MADNESS AND GLORY, based on Dr. Phillipe Pinel, the first psychiatrist who struck the chains from the mentally ill during the French Revolution. LIVING COLOR was inspired by a wonderful year he had cavorting in Holland and MADNESS AND GLORY was inspired by his many sojourns in France where he and his wife, the artist Julia Johnson Rothenberg, share a second home. His book FLIGHT FROM WONDER: AN INVESTIGATION OF SCIENTIFIC CREATIVITY has recently been published by Oxford University Press.