The Courage to Create

by Rollo May

I do not use this term myth in the common present-day deteriorated meaning of “falsehood.” This is an error that could be committed only by a society that has become so inebriated with adding up empirical facts that it seals off the deeper wisdom of human history.

Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.

Art in the same way requires limits as a necessary factor in its birth.

People must recover the “lost” aspects of their personalities, lost under a pile of inhibitions, if they are to become integrated in any effective sense.

The trouble begins whenever anyone dogmatically sets himself or herself up to defend either extreme. On the one hand, when an individual insists on his or her own subjectivity and follows exclusively his or her own imagination, we have a person whose flights of fancy may be interesting but who never really relates to the objective world. When, on the other hand, an individual insists that there is nothing “there” except empirical reality, we have a technologically minded person who would impoverish and oversimplify his or her and our lives. Our perception is determined by our imagination as well as by the empirical facts of the outside world.