The Courage to Create

by Rollo May

One day the patient came in to announce that he had made an exciting discovery. The evening before, while reading, he had gotten his customary sudden creative flow of ideas for a story and had taken his usual pleasure in the fact. At the same time he had had a peculiar sexual feeling. He had then recalled for the first time that he had always had this sexual feeling at precisely such an abortively creative moment. I shall not go into the complex analysis of the associations, which demonstrated that this sexual feeling was both a desire for comfort and sensual gratification of a passive sort and a desire for the unconditional admiration of any woman. I only wish to indicate that the upshot was clearly that his creative “bursts” of ideas were ways of getting admiration, gratification from his mother; that he needed to show mother and other women what a fine, gifted person he was. And once he had done that by getting the beautiful, lofty visions, he had achieved what he wanted. He was not really interested in this context in creating, but in being about to create; creativity was in the service of something quite else.