In this Thinking Allowed Interview, his comments speak directly to our times: He has much to say about creativity and death, about our avarice for money over meaning, and about a joy deeper than ephemeral happiness. In the post-World War II 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, he contributed most notably to helping us honor life’s mystery and meaning and to be courageous and creative in a troubled world.Īs we talk in this disruptive early 21st-century about what it means to to be creative and to be brave, Rollo May merits a place in the conversation. He went on to pursue studies in English, psychotherapy, and even ministry.

He learned early to empathize with those who view reality differently, and he learned early how to fend for himself. For all his lack of dogmatism and modesty, May is out on a slender limb and his impressionistic observation of the ''eternally insurgent spirit'' of the artist is vulnerable on many counts-but then by his own criteria, it would have to be.When Rollo May was a boy, his mother often left him alone with his schizophrenic sister. Art and imagination according to this valuation are not irrational but suprarational the moment of creation a sudden, luminous apprehension which at once assumes ''a kind of immutable, eternal quality.'' Based on a group of lectures delivered over some fifteen years, this is an important though preliminary exploration of a subject traditionally evaded by contemporary pundits. Disappointed with the mechanistic bias of science, May places an awesome responsibility on artists: he argues with Stephen Dedalus that they are the forgers of ''the uncreated conscience of the race,'' always and necessarily a threat to society as the harbingers of new symbols, forms and patterns on which the future will be built. May's stress on arduous work and the intensity and authenticity of the encounter between the artist and his world makes the creative process similar to what the patient undergoes in psychotherapy as new insights erupt from the unconscious.

Nor will he please those ostentatiously Dionysian poets and painters who sit back and wait for inspiration to strike like a divine lightning bolt. May's gentle rebuke to American psychology will be equally unwelcome to behaviorists and orthodox psychoanalysts whose timidity has made the creative process a subject to be avoided as ''unscientific, mysterious, disturbing, and too corruptive of the scientific training of graduate students.'' In fact, May owes more to Paul Tillich, Mondrian and James Joyce than he does to Adler or even Freud whose implication that ''talent is a disease and creativity a neurosis'' he emphatically rejects as both reductive and invidious.

The courage to create