The Courage to Create

by Rollo May

The creative process must be explored not as the product of sickness, but as representing the highest degree of emotional health, as the expression of the normal people in the act of actualizing themselves.

Creativity must be seen in the work of the scientist as well as in that of the artist, in the thinker as well as in the aesthetician; and one must not rule out the extent to which it is present in captains of modern technology as well as in a mother’s normal relationship with her child. Creativity, as Webste...

The first thing we notice in a creative act is that it is an encounter. Artists encounter the landscape they propose to paint—they look at it, observe it from this angle and that. They are, as we say, absorbed in it. Or, in the case of abstract painters, the encounter may be with an idea, an inner vision, that in turn may be led off by the brilliant colors on the palette or the inviting rough whiteness of the canvas.

The encounter may or may not involve voluntary effort—that is, “will power.” A healthy child’s play, for example, also has the essential features of encounter, and we know it is one of the important prototypes of adult creativity. The essential point is not the presence or absence of voluntary effort, but the degree of absorption, the degree of intensity (which we shall deal with in detail later); there must be a specific quality of engagement.

Escapist creativity is that which lacks encounter. This was illustrated vividly to me when I worked with a young man in psychoanalysis. A talented professional, this man had rich and varied creative potentialities, but he always stopped just short of actualizing them. He would suddenly get the idea for an excellent story, would work it out in his mind to a full outline which could have then been written up without much further ado, and would relish and enjoy the ecstasy of the experience. Then he would stop there, writing down nothing at all. It was as though the experience of seeing himself as one who was able to write, as being just about to write, had within it what he was really seeking and brought its own reward. Hence he never actually created.

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.