Book Annotation 2: The Courage to Create — Rollo May
Commentary Series 2
The Nature of Creativity — Rollo May
Chapter two of Rollo May’s book ‘The Courage to Create’ begins with laying down the conditions and perceptions of creativity in the world of psychological studies and writings.
He stated:
When we examine the psychological studies and writings on creativity over the past fifty years, the first thing that strikes us is the general paucity of material and the inadequacy of the work. In academic psychology after the time of William James and during the first half of this century, the subject was generally avoided as unscientific, mysterious, disturbing, and too corruptive of the scientific training of graduate students. And when some studies of creativity actually were made, they dealt with areas so peripheral that creative people themselves felt they had next to nothing to do with real creativity.
The following are the sub-topics I gleaned from reading the entire second chapter of the ‘The Courage to Create’ by Rollo May. These include:
1. Theories that Oversimplify Creativity in Psychology
2. What is Creativity?
3. The Creative Process
3.1 Intensity of the Encounter
4. Ecstasy
5. Encounter as Interrelating with the World
1.1 Compensatory Theory of Creativity
Through May’s encounter with a group of artists through central Europe, he met Alfred Adler who tackled his ‘compensatory theory of creativity’. According to Adler, civilization was created by human beings to compensate for their relatively weak position on this unfriendly crust of earth as well as for their inadequacy of tooth and claw in the animal world. Adler cited how highly creative individuals compensate for some defect or organ inferiority by their creative acts. But Rollo, on the other hand, has something major to say about Adler’s theory:
The theory does have some merit and is one of the important hypotheses that must be considered by students in the field. But its error is that it does not deal with the creative process as such. Compensatory trends in an individual will influence the forms his or her creating will take, but they do not explain the process of creativity itself. Compensatory needs influence the particular bent or direction in culture or science, but they do not explain the creation of the culture or science. (p.28)
Hence, a good deal of skepticism is important in this matter for Rollo. He later on has learned to always ask: Does the theory deal with creativity itself, or does it deal only with some artifact, some partial, peripheral aspect, of the creative act?
Rollo argued, if we create out of some transfer of affect or drive, as implied in sublimation, or if our creativity is merely the by-product of an endeavor to accomplish something else, as in compensation, does not our very creative act then have only a pseudo value?
1.2 Current Psychoanalytic Theories about Creativity
The other widely known current theories have two characteristics: reductive — that is, they reduce creativity to some other process. Second, they generally make it specifically an expression of neurotic patterns. The usual definition of creativity in psychoanalytic circles is “regression in the service of the ego.” Immediately the term regression indicates the reductive approach.
To which Rollo has emphatically disagreed with the implication that creativity needs to be understood by reducing it to some other process, or that it is essentially an expression of neurosis.
Creativity is certainly associated with serious psychological problems in our particular culture — Van Gogh went psychotic, Gauguin seems to have been schizoid, Poe was alcoholic, and Virginia Woolf was seriously depressed. Obviously, creativity and originality are associated with persons who do not fit into their culture. But this does not necessarily mean that the creativity is the product of the neurosis. The association of creativity with neurosis presents us with a dilemma — namely, if by psychoanalysis we cured the artists of their neuroses would they no longer create? (p.28)
2. What is Creativity?
Rollo believed that in defining creativity, there must be a clear distinction between defining its pseudo-forms, on the one hand — that is, creativity as a superficial aestheticism. And, on the other, its authentic form — that is, the process of bringing something new into being. The crucial distinction is between art as artificiality (as in “artifice” or “artful”) and genuine art. Plato, for example contends that poets and artists that express the latter kind of art, are the ones who express being itself.
They are the ones who enlarge human consciousness and that their creativity is the most basic manifestation of a person fulfilling one’s own being in the world.
This is a distinction that artists and philosophers have struggled all through the centuries to make clear. Plato, for example, demoted his poets and his artists down to the sixth circle of reality because, he said, they deal only with appearances and not with reality itself. He was referring to art as decoration, a way of making life prettier, a dealing with semblances. But in his later, beautiful dialogue, the Symposium, he described what he called the true artists — namely, those who give birth to some new reality. (p.29)
Now we must make the above distinction clear if our inquiries into creativity are to get below the surface. We are thus not dealing with hobbies, do-it-yourself movements, Sunday painting, or other forms of filling up leisure time. Nowhere has the meaning of creativity been more disastrously lost than in the idea that it is something you do only on weekends!
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 Webster’s rightly indicates, is basically the process of making, of bringing into being.
Now Rollo, not only attempts to elucidate but he fluently spoke about the creative act itself — a series of analysis of the nature of creativity that applies to all men and women during their creative moments.
3. The Creative Process
The first thing he brought up that occurs in the process of any creative act was encounter. He defined this as the language of creativity — the media. That in the context of painting; the paint, the canvas, and the other materials then become a secondary part of this 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. He further stated that the encounter may or may not involve voluntary effort — that is, will power.
The essential point is not the presence or absence of voluntary effort, but the degree of absorption, the degree of intensity; and that there must be a specific quality of engagement.
Rollo also asserted that one important distinction between pseudo, escapist creativity on the one hand and that which is genuine on the other. Escapist creativity is that which lacks encounter.
The concept of encounter also enables us to make clearer the important distinction between talent and creativity. Talent may well have its neurological correlates and can be studied as “given” to a person. A man or woman may have talent whether he or she uses it or not; talent can probably be measured in the person as such. But creativity can be seen only in the act. If we were purists, we would not speak of a “creative person,” but only of a creative act. Sometimes, as in the case of Picasso, we have great talent and at the same time great encounter and, as a result, great creativity. Sometimes we have great talent and truncated creativity, as many people felt in the case of Scott Fitzgerald. Sometimes we have a highly creative person who seems not to have much talent. It was said of the novelist Thomas Wolfe, who was one of the highly creative figures of the American scene, that he was a “genius without talent.” But he was so creative because he threw himself so completely into his material and the challenge of saying it — he was great because of the intensity of his encounter. (p.32)
3.1 Intensity of the Encounter
Absorption, being caught up in, wholly involved, and so on, are used commonly to describe the state of the artist or scientist when creating or even the child at play.
By whatever name one calls it, genuine creativity is characterized by an intensity of awareness, a heightened consciousness.
Artists, as well as you and I in moments of intensive encounter, experience quite clear neurological changes. These include quickened heart beat; higher blood pressure; increased intensity and constriction of vision, with eyelids narrowed so that we can see more vividly the scene we are painting; we become oblivious to things around us (as well as to the passage of time). We experience a lessening of appetite — persons engaged in a creative act lose interest in eating at the moment, and may work right through mealtime without noticing it. Now all of these correspond to an inhibiting of the functioning of the parasympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system (which has to do with ease, comfort, nourishment) and an activation of the sympathetic nervous division. And, lo and behold, we have the same picture that Walter B. Cannon described as the “flight-fight” mechanism, the energizing of the organism for fighting or fleeing. This is the neurological correlate of what we find, in broad terms, in anxiety and fear. But what the artist or creative scientist feels is not anxiety or fear; it is joy. I use the word in contrast to happiness or pleasure. The artist, at the moment of creating, does not experience gratification or satisfaction (though this may be the case later, after he or she has a highball or a pipe in the evening. Rather, it is joy, joy defined as the emotion that goes with heightened consciousness, the mood that accompanies the experience of actualizing one’s own potentialities. (p.32)
Unconscious levels, defined by Rollo is the intensity of awareness that isn’t necessarily connected with the conscious purpose or will power. These may occur in reverie or in dreams.
Processes of forming, making, building go on even if we are not consciously aware of them at the time. William James once said that we learn to swim in the winter and to skate in the summer.
Whether you wish to interpret these phenomena in terms of some formulation of the unconscious, or prefer to follow William James in connecting them with some neurological processes that continue even when we are not working on them, or prefer some other approach, as I do, it is still clear that creativity goes on in varying degrees of intensity on levels not directly under the control of conscious willing. Hence the heightened awareness we are speaking of does not at all mean increased self-consciousness. It is rather correlated with abandon and absorption, and it involves a heightening of awareness in the whole personality.
Whereas, purpose involves all levels of experience. We cannot will to have insights. We cannot will creativity. But we can will to give ourselves to the encounter with intensity of dedication and commitment. The deeper aspects of awareness are activated to the extent that the person is committed to the encounter.
To delve more about Rollo’s contentions below, follow through the psychoanalytic theories that exist about the creative process. This might help in explaining his point below.
But the intensity of the creative act should be related to the encounter objectively, and not released merely by something the artist “takes.” Alcohol is a depressant, and possibly necessary in an industrial civilization; but when one needs it regularly to feel free of inhibitions, he or she is misnaming the problem. The issue really is why the inhibitions are there in the first place. The psychological studies of the upsurge of vitality and other effects that occur when such drugs are taken are exceedingly interesting; but one must sharply distinguish this from the intensity that accompanies the encounter itself.
The encounter is not something that occurs merely because we ourselves have subjectively changed; it represents, rather, a real relationship with the objective world.
4. Ecstasy
The topic of ecstasy is one to which we should give more active attention in psychology. I use the word, of course, not in its popular and cheapened sense of “hysteria,” but in its historical, etymological sense of “ex-stasis” — that is, literally to “stand out from,” to be freed from the usual split between subject and object which is a perpetual dichotomy in most human activity. Ecstasy is the accurate term for the intensity of consciousness that occurs in the creative act. It involves the total person, with the subconscious and unconscious acting in unity with the conscious. It is not, thus, irrational; it is, rather, suprarational. It brings intellectual, volitional, and emotional functions into play all together.
Rollo asserted:
We have tended to set reason over against emotions, and have assumed, as an outgrowth of this dichotomy, that we could observe something most accurately if our emotions were not involved — that is to say, we would be least biased if we had no emotional stake at all in the matter at hand. I think this is an egregious error. There are now data in Rorschach responses, for example, that indicate that people can more accurately observe precisely when they are emotionally involved — that is, reason works better when emotions are present; the person sees sharper and more accurately when his emotions are engaged. Indeed, we cannot really see an object unless we have some emotional involvement with it. It may well be that reason works best in the state of ecstasy.
5. Encounter as Interrelating with the World
The subjective pole is the conscious person in the creative act itself. But what is the objective pole of this dialectical relationship? I shall use a term that will sound too simple: it is the artist’s or scientist’s encounter with his world. We arrive finally in analyzing the creative act in terms of the question ‘what is this intense encounter with?’ An encounter is always a meeting between two poles.
Objective Pole.
I do not mean world as environment or as the “sum total” of things; nor do I refer at all to objects about a subject. World is the pattern of meaningful relations in which a person exists and in the design of which he or she participates. It has objective reality, to be sure, but it is not simply that.
World is interrelated with the person at every moment. A continual dialectical process goes on between world and self and self and world; one implies the other, and neither can be understood if we omit the other.
This is why one can never localize creativity as a subjective phenomenon; one can never study it simply in terms of what goes on within the person. The pole of world is an inseparable part of the creativity of an individual. What occurs is always a process, a doing — specifically a process interrelating the person and his or her world.
It is absurd to think of artists simply as “painting nature,” as though they were only anachronistic photographers of trees and lakes and mountains. For them, nature is a medium, a language by which they reveal their world.
What genuine painters do is to reveal the underlying psychological and spiritual conditions of their relationship to their world; thus, in the works of a great painter we have a reflection of the emotional and spiritual condition of human beings in that period of history.
If you wish to understand the psychological and spiritual temper of any historical period, you can do no better than to look long and searchingly at its art.
For in the art the underlying spiritual meaning of the period is expressed directly in symbols.
This is not because artists are didactic or set out to teach or to make propaganda; to the extent that they do, their power of expression is broken; their direct relation to the inarticulate, or, if you will, “unconscious” levels of the culture is destroyed. They have the power to reveal the underlying meaning of any period precisely because the essence of art is the powerful and alive encounter between the artist and his or her world.
In this sense genuine artists are so bound up with their age that they cannot communicate separated from it. In this sense, too, the historical situation conditions the creativity. For the consciousness which obtains in creativity is not the superficial level of objectified intellectualization, but is an encounter with the world on a level that undercuts the subject-object split.
“Creativity,” to rephrase our definition, “is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his or her world.
IT’S A WRAP!
This second annotation tackles varied things, but all concerning creativity and every artist’s experience vis-à-vis the self and the world. If you have your digital copy of the book with you, two more examples expounding the last point (5) — Encounter as Interrelating with the World are found in pages 37–38. Further, thank you for reaching this far, and if inquiries emerge throughout the span of your reading, you may want to comment them here for some fruitful discussions to happen.
Engage through, until my next annotation of this book’s chapter three!
