The Courage to Create

by Rollo May

courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.

But if you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. Also you will have betrayed our community in failing to make your contribution to the whole.

the most prevalent form of cowardice in our day hides behind the statement “I did not want to become involved.”

Opposites though they are, both solitude and solidarity are essential if the artist is to produce works that are not only significant to his or her age, but that will also speak to future generations.

we must be fully committed, but we must also be aware at the same time that we might possibly be wrong. This dialectic relationship between conviction and doubt is characteristic of the highest types of courage,

Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt.

The need for creative courage is in direct proportion to the degree of change the profession is undergoing.

a “dew” line, to use McLuhan’s phrase; they give us a “distant early warning” of what is happening to our culture.

By the creative act, however, we are able to reach beyond our own death. This is why creativity is so important and why we need to confront the problem of the relationship between creativity and death.

What Kierkegaard said about love is also true of creativity: every-person must start at the beginning.

Degas once wrote, “A painter paints a picture with the same feeling as that with which a criminal commits a crime.”

A host of other riddles, which I can only cite without comment, are bound up with this major one. One is that genius and psychosis are so close to each other. Another is that creativity carries such an inexplicable guilt feeling. A third is that so many artists and poets commit suicide, and often at the very height of their achievement.

I use myth as meaning, rather, a dramatic presentation of the moral wisdom of the race. The myth uses the totality of the senses rather than just the intellect.

myths present creativity and consciousness as being born in rebellion against an omnipotent force.

the creative artist and poet and saint must fight the actual (as contrasted to the ideal) gods of our society—the god of conformism as well as the gods of apathy, material success, and exploitative power.

Does the theory deal with creativity itself, or does it deal only with some artifact, some partial, peripheral aspect, of the creative act?

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.

William James once said that we learn to swim in the winter and to skate in the summer.

it is still clear that creativity goes on in varying degrees of intensity on levels not directly under the control of conscious willing.

what is entirely clear is that they pertain to those areas in which the person consciously has worked laboriously and with dedication.

“Creativity,” to rephrase our definition, “is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his or her world.”

anxiety comes from not being able to know the world you’re in, not being able to orient yourself in your own existence.

“Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.”

insights emerge not chiefly because they are “rationally true” or even helpful, but because they have a certain form, the form that is beautiful because it completes an incomplete Gestalt.

Tools and techniques ought to be an extension of consciousness, but they can just as easily be a protection from consciousness.

What you say must have some place in their world, must at least be partly known to them. Inevitably, then, originality, the breaking of frontiers, the radical newness of ideas and images are at best dubious and at worst totally unacceptable.

The relation between moralistic puritanism and this preoccupation with behavior is by no means entirely fictitious or accidental. Is not our emphasis on behavior a carry-over of our “inherent strain of puritanism,”

If we accept it as a presupposition, does it not lead to the greatest mistake of all, from the point of view of this chapter—namely, a denial by fiat of the significance of irrational, subjective activity by subsuming it under the guise of its external results?

The dogmatists then try to take over the artist. The church, in certain periods, harnessed him to prescribed subjects and methods. Capitalism tries to take over the artist by buying him. And Soviet realism tried to do so by social proscription. The result, by the very nature of the creative impulse, is fatal to art. If it were possible to control the artist—and I do not believe it is—it would mean the death of art.

The etymology of the term demonstrates the prototypical fact that knowledge itself—as well as poetry, art, and other creative products—arises out of the dynamic encounter between subjective and objective poles.

If you write poetry during your afternoon nap, it will be perused that way.

This chapter is thus an essay on the creating of one’s self. The self is made up, on its growing edge, of the models, forms, metaphors, myths, and all other kinds of psychic content which give it direction in its self-creation. This is a process that goes on continuously. As Kierkegaard well said, the self is only that which it is in the process of becoming.

creativity itself requires limits, for the creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.

transcendence can occur only to those who accept the fact of their limitation to begin with.

Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations,

Our perception is determined by our imagination as well as by the empirical facts of the outside world.

As imagination gives vitality to form, form keeps imagination from driving us into psychosis.

Artists are the ones who have the capacity to see original visions. They typically have powerful imaginations and, at the same time, a sufficiently developed sense of form to avoid being led into the catastrophic situation. They are the frontier scouts who go out ahead of the rest of us to explore the future. We can surely tolerate their special dependencies and harmless idiosyncracies. For we will be better prepared for the future if we can listen seriously to them.

it enables the person to overcome his or her sense of alienation from the human kind. But it does not suffice in itself for a genuine experience of new form. It assuages, but it doesn’t produce the new form. An overcoming of the chaos on a deeper level is required, and this can only be done with some kind of insight.