The Courage to Create

The Courage to Create by Rollo May

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Good stuff. Challenging. May asserts that artists, writers, poets, etc. need to genuinely encounter, or engage with the world which they are interpreting in their art.

I'm still mulling over his chapters on the Oracle of Delphi. I THINK that what he was getting at is that artists make new discoveries and create new things with the help of myths and symbols already available to us in our cultures and in the collective unconsciousness.

May does a fantastic job of recommending that rather than analyzing dreams in a simply symbolic manor, or perhaps as traditional psychoanalysis has in the past but instead by considering the visual-spacial relationships of the principal characters in a given dream. This process means visualizing the dream like a painting, or perhaps blocking out the staging of the actors as if it were a stage play or a film. Doing this reveals new insights into the dreamer's relationships to the persons or symbols in the dream. This made sense to me as someone trained in studio and design. Needless to say, this also contributed to my understanding of the expressive possibilities in design.

Rollo May's book helps us see that creative pursuits can help us to make sense of and cope with our lives and our world. This is a great read for anyone interested in creativity (art, music, dance, drama, poetry and writing, etc.) or in psychology.

Rollo May was recommended to me by a friend who, like May, practices depth-psychology and is most interested in existential psychology. I've always tended to lean toward cognitive-therapy or reality-therapy- assuming that they're somehow different than or opposed to the behaviorism that dominates elementary and secondary education in the U.S. This book helped me recognize that really, they're pretty much just derivatives of behaviorism, which is a principally American strain of psychology. This Western convention is very concrete, material, and empirical. Not that there's anything wrong with that (as they said on an episode of Seinfeld). But May suggests that there is a third way, balancing the mythology and almost mysticism of Eastern traditions with this very logical, measurable qualities of the American way. Once again, I am reminded of the text I've been teaching from for years, "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain," in which Dr. Betty Edwards posits that we all are capable of two complimentary ways of thinking, perceiving, experiencing and knowing.

Having read this book, I'm sure that three things will be impacted. 1) My own painting, poetry, and photography. 2) My perceptions, interpretations, and reactions to the creative arts I encounter, from art to film to literature. and 3) Hopefully and I'd like to think most importantly, my teaching



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