The Courage to Create

by Rollo May

In Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, there are no explicit discussions of the disintegration of our society; it is shown as a reality in the drama. The nobility of the human species is not talked about, but is presented as a vacuum on the stage. Because this nobility is such a vivid absence, an emptiness that fills the play, you leave the theater with a profound sense of the importance of being human, as you do after having seen Macbeth or King Lear. O’Neill’s capacity to communicate that experience places him among the significant tragedians of history. Artists can portray these experiences in music or words or clay or marble or on canvas because they express what Jung calls the “collective unconscious.” This phrase may not be the most felicitous, but we know that each of us carries in buried dimensions of our being some basic forms, partly generic and partly experiential in origin. It is these the artist expresses.