Albert Rothenberg, M.D.

Albert Rothenberg, M.D., is Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He is the Principal Investigator of the project entitled “Studies in the Creative Process,” which focuses on the psychiatric and psychological bases of creativity in literature, art, psychotherapy, and science.

He has spent many years treating patients with both severe and moderate mental illness at the hospitals Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts and the Yale Psychiatric Institute in New Haven, Connecticut. He has also conducted outpatient treatment with a large number of patients with a broad range of types and degrees of illness. A native of New York City and Connecticut, he attended Harvard College, Tufts University School of Medicine, and received his psychiatric training at the Yale University Department of Psychiatry where he subsequently became a member of the faculty for several years until moving to Harvard in 1981.

He has been a recipient of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Award, two NIMH Research Career Development Awards, Tufts Medical Alumni Award, U.S. Army Certificate of Merit, the Golestan Award, and the Mesab Kovler Award. He has also been honored with yearlong resident Fellowships at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Wassenar and on two separate occasions at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavior Sciences at Stanford. He is a twenty years long official nominator for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

His major publications include:

Flight from Wonder: An Investigation of Scientific Creativity (Oxford U Press)

The Emerging Goddess: The Creative Process in Art, Science, and Other Fields (U Chicago Press)—awarded Psychology Today Best Behavioral Science Book of the Year

The Creative Process of Psychotherapy (Norton)

Adolescence:Psychopathology, Normality, and Creativity (W.W. Saunders)

Creativity and Madness: New Findings and Old Stereotypes (Johns Hopkins U Press)

(with C.R. Hausman) The Creativity Question (Duke U Press)

Living Color. A novel (York Press)

Madness and Glory. A novel (Pegasus)

He has published 145 scientific articles, 121 of which have been on the topic of creativity.

He is married to professor and artist Julia Johnson Rothenberg. They have spent a good deal of time in Europe, particularly in recent years in the Netherlands, Paris, and throughout the small villages of Provence in the southern part of France. For a six month period in Paris, Dr. Rothenberg occupied the esteemed position of Visiting Professor of Psychiatry at the Salpêtrière Hospital.