THE

COURAGE TO
CREATE
BY ROLLO MAY
IN NORTON PAPERBACK

The Courage to Create

The Discovery of Being
Psychology and the Human Dilemma
The Meaning of Anxiety
Power and Innocence
Freedom and Destiny
Contents

Preface
ONE The Courage to Create
TWO The Nature of Creativity
THREE Creativity and the Unconscious
FOUR Creativity and Encounter
FIVE The Delphic Oracle as Therapist
SIX On the Limits of Creativity
SEVEN Passion for Form

Notes
Preface

A LL MY LIFE I have been haunted by the fascinating questions of creativity.

Why does an original idea in science and in art “pop up” from the
unconscious at a given moment? What is the relation between talent and the
creative act, and between creativity and death? Why does a mime or a dance
give us such delight? How did Homer, confronting something as gross as the
Trojan War, fashion it into poetry which became a guide for the ethics of the
whole Greek civilization?
I have asked these questions not as one who stands on the sidelines, but as
one who himself participates in art and science. I ask them out of my own
excitement, for example, at watching two of my colors on a paper merge into an
unpredictable third color. Is it not the distinguishing characteristic of the human
being that in the hot race of evolution he pauses for a moment to paint on the
cave walls at Lascaux or Altamira those brown-and-red deer and bison which
still fill us with amazed admiration and awe? Suppose the apprehension of
beauty is itself a way to truth? Suppose that “elegance”—as the word is used by
physicists to describe their discoveries—is a key to ultimate reality? Suppose
Joyce is right that the artist creates “the uncreated conscience of the race”?
These chapters are a partial record of my ponderings. They had their birth as
lectures given at colleges and universities. I had always hesitated to publish them
because they seemed incomplete—the mystery of creation still remained. I then
realized that this “unfinished” quality would always remain, and that it is a part
of the creative process itself. This realization coincided with the fact that many
people who had heard the lectures urged that they be published.
The title was suggested by Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be, a debt I am
glad to acknowledge. But one cannot be in a vacuum. We express our being by
creating. Creativity is a necessary sequel to being. Furthermore, the word
courage in my title refers, beyond the first few pages of the first chapter, to that
particular land of courage essential for the creative act. This is rarely
acknowledged in our discussions of creativity and even more rarely written
about.
I want to express my gratitude to several friends who have read all or part of
the manuscript and have discussed it with me: Ann Hyde, Magda Denes, and
Elinor Roberts.
More than is usually the case, this book was a delight to compile, for it gave
me cause to ponder all these questions over again. I only hope the book gives as
much pleasure to the reader as it did to me in the compiling of it.

Rollo May
Holderness, New Hampshire
ONE
THE COURAGE TO CREATE

W E ARE living at a time when one age is dying and the new age is not yet
born. We cannot doubt this as we look about us to see the radical changes
in sexual mores, in marriage styles, in family structures, in education, in religion,
technology, and almost every other aspect, of modern life. And behind it all is
the threat of the atom bomb, which recedes into the distance but never
disappears. To live with sensitivity in this age of limbo indeed requires courage.
A choice confronts us. Shall we, as we feel our foundations shaking,
withdraw in anxiety and panic? Frightened by the loss of our familiar mooring
places, shall we become paralyzed and cover our inaction with apathy? If we do
those things, we will have surrendered our chance to participate in the forming
of the future. We will have forfeited the distinctive characteristic of human
beings—namely, to influence our evolution through our own awareness. We will
have capitulated to the blind juggernaut of history and lost the chance to mold
the future into a society more equitable and humane.
Or shall we seize the courage necessary to preserve our sensitivity,
awareness, and responsibility in the face of radical change? Shall we consciously
participate, on however small the scale, in the forming of the new society? I
hope our choice will be the latter, for I shall speak on that basis.
We are called upon to do something new, to confront a no man’s land, to
push into a forest where there are no well-worn paths and from which no one has
returned to guide us. This is what the existentialists call the anxiety of
nothingness. To live into the future means to leap into the unknown, and this
requires a degree of courage for which there is no immediate precedent and
which few people realize.

1. WHAT IS COURAGE?

This courage will not be the opposite of despair. We shall often be faced with
despair, as indeed every sensitive person has been during the last several decades
in this country. Hence Kierkegaard and Nietszche and Camus and Sartre have
proclaimed that courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to
move ahead in spite of despair.
Nor is the courage required mere stubbornness—we shall surely have to
create with others. 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.
A chief characteristic of this courage is that it requires a centeredness within
our own being, without which we would feel ourselves to be a vacuum. The
“emptiness” within corresponds to an apathy without; and apathy adds up, in the
long run, to cowardice. That is why we must always base our commitment in the
center of our own being, or else no commitment will be ultimately authentic.
Courage, furthermore, is not to be confused with rashness. What
masquerades as courage may turn out to be simply a bravado used to compensate
for one’s unconscious fear and to prove one’s machismo, like the “hot” fliers in
World War II. The ultimate end of such rashness is getting one’s self killed, or at
least one’s head battered in with a policeman’s billy club—both of which are
scarcely productive ways of exhibiting courage.
Courage is not a virtue or value among other personal values like love or
fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues
and personal values. Without courage our love pales into mere dependency.
Without courage our fidelity becomes conformism.
The word courage comes from the same stem as the French word coeur,
meaning “heart.” Thus just as one’s heart, by pumping blood to one’s arms, legs,
and brain enables all the other physical organs to function, so courage makes
possible all the psychological virtues. Without courage other values wither away
into mere facsimiles of virtue.
In human beings courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible.
An assertion of the self, a commitment, is essential if the self is to have any
reality. This is the distinction between human beings and the rest of nature. The
acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is
necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and
being are identical in creatures like them. But a man or woman becomes fully
human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them. People
attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by
day. These decisions require courage. This is why Paul Tillich speaks of courage
as ontological—it is essential to our being.

2. PHYSICAL COURAGE
This is the simplest and most obvious kind of courage. In our culture, physical
courage takes its form chiefly from the myths of the frontier. Our prototypes
have been the pioneer heroes who took the law into their own hands, who
survived because they could draw a gun faster than their opponent, who were,
above all things, self-reliant and could endure the inevitable loneliness in
homesteading with the nearest neighbor twenty miles away.
But the contradictions in our heritage from this frontier are immediately clear
to us. Regardless of the heroism it generated in our forebears, this kind of
courage has now not only lost its usefulness, but has degenerated into brutality.
When I was a child in a small Midwest town, boys were expected to fistfight.
But our mothers represented a different viewpoint, so the boys often got licked at
school and then whipped for fighting when they came home. This is scarcely an
effective way to build character. As a psychoanalyst, I hear time and again of
men who had been sensitive as boys and who could not learn to pound others
into submission; consequently, they go through life with the conviction that they
are cowards.
America is among the most violent of the so-called civilized nations; our
homicide rate is three to ten times higher than that of the nations of Europe. An
important cause of this is the influence of that frontier brutality of which we are
the heirs.
We need a new kind of physical courage that will neither run rampant in
violence nor require our assertion of egocentric power over other people. I
propose a new form of courage of the body: the use of the body not for the
development of musclemen, but for the cultivation of sensitivity. This will mean
the development of the capacity to listen with the body. It will be, as Nietszche
remarked, a learning to think with the body. It will be a valuing of the body as
the means of empathy with others, as expression of the self as a thing of beauty
and as a rich source of pleasure.
Such a view of the body is already emerging in America through the
influence of yoga, meditation, Zen Buddhism, and other religious psychologies
from the Orient. In these traditions, the body is not condemned, but is valued as
a source of justified pride. I propose this for our consideration as the kind of
physical courage we will need for the new society toward which we are moving.

3. MORAL COURAGE

A second kind of courage is moral courage. The persons I have known, or have
known of, who have great moral courage have generally abhorred violence.
Take, for example, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian author who stood up
alone against the might of the Soviet bureaucracy in protest against the inhuman
and cruel treatment of men and women in Russian prison camps. His numerous
books, written in the best prose of modern Russia, cry out against the crushing of
any person, whether physically, psychologically, or spiritually. His moral
courage stands out the more clearly since he is not a liberal, but a Russian
nationalist. He became the symbol of a value lost sight of in a confused world—
that the innate worth of a human being must be revered solely because of his or
her humanity and regardless of his or her politics. A Dostoevskian character out
of old Russia (as Stanley Kunitz describes him), Solzenitsyn proclaimed, “I
would gladly give my life if it would advance the cause of truth.”
Apprehended by the Soviet police, he was taken to prison. The story is told
that he was disrobed and marched out before a firing squad. The purpose of the
police was to scare him to death if they could not silence him psychologically;
their bullets were blanks. Undaunted, Solzhenitsyn now lives as an exile in
Switzerland, where he pursues his gadfly role and levels the same kind of
criticism at other nations, like the United States, at the points where our
democracy obviously stands in need of radical revision. So long as there exist
persons with the moral courage of a Solzhenitsyn, we can be sure that the
triumph of “man, the robot” has not yet arrived.
Solzhenitsyn’s courage, like that of many persons of similar moral valor,
arose not only out of his audaciousness, but also out of his compassion for the
human suffering he saw about him during his own sentence in the Soviet prison
camp. It is highly significant, and indeed almost a rule, that moral courage has
its source in such identification through one’s own sensitivity with the suffering
of one’s fellow human beings. I am tempted to call this “perceptual courage”
because it depends on one’s capacity to perceive, to let one’s self see the
suffering of other people. If we let ourselves experience the evil, we will be
forced to do something about it. It is a truth, recognizable in all of us, that when
we don’t want to become involved, when we don’t want to confront even the
issue of whether or not we’ll come to the aid of someone who is being unjustly
treated, we block off our perception, we blind ourselves to the other’s suffering,
we cut off our empathy with the person needing help. Hence the most prevalent
form of cowardice in our day hides behind the statement “I did not want to
become involved.”
4. SOCIAL COURAGE

The third kind of courage is the opposite to the just described apathy; I call it
social courage. It is the courage to relate to other human beings, the capacity to
risk one’s self in the hope of achieving meaningful intimacy. It is the courage to
invest one’s self over a period of time in a relationship that will demand an
increasing openness.
Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at
the outset how the relationship will affect us. Like a chemical mixture, if one of
us is changed, both of us will be. Will we grow in self-actualization, or will it
destroy us? The one thing we can be certain of is that if we let ourselves fully
into the relationship for good or evil, we will not come out unaffected.
A common practice in our day is to avoid working up the courage required
for authentic intimacy by shifting the issue to the body, making it a matter of
simple physical courage. It is easier in our society to be naked physically than to
be naked psychologically or spiritually—easier to share our body than to share
our fantasies, hopes, fears, and aspirations, which are felt to be more personal
and the sharing of which is experienced as making us more vulnerable. For
curious reasons we are shy about sharing the things that matter most. Hence
people short-circuit the more “dangerous” building of a relationship by leaping
immediately into bed. After all, the body is an object and can be treated
mechanically.
But intimacy that begins and remains on the physical level tends to become
inauthentic, and we later find ourselves fleeing from the emptiness. Authentic
social courage requires intimacy on the many levels of the personality
simultaneously. Only by doing this can one overcome personal alienation. No
wonder the meeting of new persons brings a throb of anxiety as well as the joy
of expectation; and as we go deeper into the relationship each new depth is
marked by some new joy and new anxiety. Each meeting can be a harbinger of
an unknown fate in store for us but also a stimulus toward the exciting pleasure
of authentically knowing another person.
Social courage requires the confronting of two different kinds of fear. These
were beautifully described by one of the early psychoanalysts, Otto Rank. The
first he calls the “life fear.” This is the fear of living autonomously, the fear of
being abandoned, the need for dependency on someone else. It shows itself in
the need to throw one’s self so completely into a relationship that one has no self
left with which to relate. One becomes, in effect, a reflection of the person he or
she loves—which sooner or later becomes boring to the partner. This is the fear
of self-actualization, as Rank described it. Living some forty years before the
days of women’s liberation, Rank averred that this kind of fear was most typical
of women.
The opposite fear Rank called the “death fear.” This is the fear of being
totally absorbed by the other, the fear of losing one’s self and one’s autonomy,
the fear of having one’s independence taken away. This, said Rank, is the fear
most associated with men, for they seek to keep the back door open to beat a
hasty retreat in case the relationship becomes too intimate.
Actually, if Rank had lived on into our day he would have agreed that both
kinds of fear have to be confronted, in varying proportions to be sure, by both
men and women. All our lives we oscillate between these two fears. They are,
indeed, the forms of anxiety that lie in wait for anyone who cares for another.
But the confronting of these two fears, and the awareness that one grows not
only by being one’s self but also by participating in other selves, is necessary if
we are to move toward self-realization.
Albert Camus, in Exile and the Kingdom, wrote a story that illustrates these
two opposite kinds of courage. “The Artist at Work” is a tale of a poor Parisian
painter who could scarcely get enough money to buy bread for his wife and
children. When the artist is on his death bed, his best friend finds the canvas on
which the painter was working. It is blank except for one word, unclearly written
and in very small letters, that appears in the center. The word can either be
solitary—being alone; keeping one’s distance from events, maintaining the
peace of mind necessary for listening to one’s deeper self. Or it can be solidary
—“living in the market place”; solidarity, involvement, or identifying with the
masses, as Karl Marx put it. 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.

5. ONE PARADOX OF COURAGE

A curious paradox characteristic of every kind of courage here confronts us. It is

the seeming contradiction that 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, and gives the lie to the simplistic definitions that identify courage
with mere growth.
People who claim to be absolutely convinced that their stand is the only right
one are dangerous. Such conviction is the essence not only of dogmatism, but of
its more destructive cousin, fanaticism. It blocks off the user from learning new
truth, and it is a dead giveaway of unconscious doubt. The person then has to
double his or her protests in order to quiet not only the opposition but his or her
own unconscious doubts as well.
Whenever I heard—as we all did often during the Nixon-Watergate days—
the “I am absolutely convinced” tone or the “I want to make this absolutely
clear” statement emanating from the White House, I braced myself, for I knew
that some dishonesty was being perpetrated by the telltale sign of overemphasis.
Shakespeare aptly said, “The lady [or the politician] doth protest too much,
methinks.” In such a time, one longs for the presence of a leader like Lincoln,
who openly admitted his doubts and as openly preserved his commitment. It is
infinitely safer to know that the man at the top has his doubts, as you and I have
ours, yet has the courage to move ahead in spite of these doubts. In contrast to
the fanatic who has stockaded himself against new truth, the person with the
courage to believe and at the same time to admit his doubts is flexible and open
to new learning.
Paul Cézanne strongly believed that he was discovering and painting a new
form of space which would radically influence the future of art, yet he was at the
same time filled with painful and ever-present doubts. The relationship between
commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is
healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt. To believe fully and
at the same moment to have doubts is not at all a contradiction: it presupposes a
greater respect for truth, an awareness that truth always goes beyond anything
that can be said or done at any given moment. To every thesis there is an
antithesis, and to this there is a synthesis. Truth is thus a never-dying process.
We then know the meaning of the statement attributed to Leibnitz: “I would
walk twenty miles to listen to my worst enemy if I could learn something.”

6. CREATIVE COURAGE

This bring us to the most important kind of courage of all. Whereas moral
courage is the righting of wrongs, creative courage, in contrast, is the
discovering of new forms, new symbols, new patterns on which a new society
can be built. Every profession can and does require some creative courage. In
our day, technology and engineering, diplomacy, business, and certainly
teaching, all of these professions and scores of others are in the midst of radical
change and require courageous persons to appreciate and direct this change. The
need for creative courage is in direct proportion to the degree of change the
profession is undergoing.
But those who present directly and immediately the new forms and symbols
are the artists—the dramatists, the musicians, the painters, the dancers, the poets,
and those poets of the religious sphere we call saints. They portray the new
symbols in the form of images—poetic, aural, plastic, or dramatic, as the case
may be. They live out their imaginations. The symbols only dreamt about by
most human beings are expressed in graphic form by the artists. But in our
appreciation of the created work—let us say a Mozart quintet—we also are
performing a creative act. When we engage a painting, which we have to do
especially with modern art if we are authentically to see it, we are experiencing
some new moment of sensibility. Some new vision is triggered in us by our
contact with the painting; something unique is born in us. This is why
appreciation of the music or painting or other works of the creative person is also
a creative act on our part.
If these symbols are to be understood by us, we must identify with them as
we perceive them. In Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, there are no intellectual
discussions of the failure of communication in our time; the failure is simply
presented there on the stage. We see it most vividly, for example, when Lucky,
who, at his master’s order to “Think,” can only sputter out a long speech that has
all the pomposity of a philosophical discourse but is actually pure gibberish. As
we involve ourselves more and more in the drama, we see represented on stage,
larger than life, our general human failure to communicate authentically.
We see on the stage, in Beckett’s play, the lone, bare tree, symbolic of the
lone, bare relationship the two men have as they wait together for a Godot who
never appears; and it elicits from us a similar sense of the alienation that we and
multitudes of others experience. The fact that most people have no clear
awareness of their alienation only makes this condition more powerful.
In Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, there are no explicit discussions of
the disintegration of our society; it is shown as a reality in the drama. The
nobility of the human species is not talked about, but is presented as a vacuum
on the stage. Because this nobility is such a vivid absence, an emptiness that fills
the play, you leave the theater with a profound sense of the importance of being
human, as you do after having seen Macbeth or King Lear. O’Neill’s capacity to
communicate that experience places him among the significant tragedians of
history.
Artists can portray these experiences in music or words or clay or marble or
on canvas because they express what Jung calls the “collective unconscious.”
This phrase may not be the most felicitous, but we know that each of us carries
in buried dimensions of our being some basic forms, partly generic and partly
experiential in origin. It is these the artist expresses.
Thus the artists—in which term I hereafter include the poets, musicians,
dramatists, plastic artists, as well as saints—are a “dew” line, to use McLuhan’s
phrase; they give us a “distant early warning” of what is happening to our
culture. In the art of our day we see symbols galore of alienation and anxiety.
But at the same time there is form amid discord, beauty amid ugliness, some
human love in the midst of hatred—a love that temporarily triumphs over death
but always loses out in the long run. The artists thus express the spiritual
meaning of their culture. Our problem is: Can we read their meaning aright?
Take Giotto in what is called the “little Renaissance”, which burgeoned in
the fourteenth century. In contrast to the two-dimensional medieval mosaics,
Giotto presents a new way of seeing life and nature: he gives his paintings three
dimensions, and we now see human beings and animals expressing and calling
forth from us such specific human emotions as care, or pity, or grief, or joy. In
the previous, two-dimensional mosaics in the churches of the Middle Ages, we
feel no human being is necessary to see them—they have their own relationship
to God. But in Giotto, a human being viewing the picture is required; and this
human being must take his stance as an individual in relation to the picture. Thus
the new humanism and the new relation to nature that were to become central in
the Renaissance are here born, a hundred years before the Renaissance proper.
In our endeavor to grasp these symbols of art, we find ourselves in a realm
that beggars our usual conscious thinking. Our task is quite beyond the reach of
logic. It brings us to an area in which there are many paradoxes. Take the idea
expressed in Shakespeare’s four lines at the end of Sonnet 64:
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.
If you have been trained to accept the logic of our society, you will ask: “Why
does he have to ‘weep to have’ his love? Why can he not enjoy his love?” Thus
our logic pushes us always toward adjustment—an adjustment to a crazy world
and to a crazy life. And worse yet, we cut ourselves off from understanding the
profound depths of experience that Shakespeare is here expressing.
We have all had such experiences, but we tend to cover them over. We may
look at an autumn tree so beautiful in its brilliant colors that we feel like
weeping; or we may hear music so lovely that we are overcome with sadness.
The craven thought then creeps into our consciousness that maybe it would have
been better not to have seen the tree at all or not to have heard the music. Then
we wouldn’t be faced with this uncomfortable paradox-knowing that “time will
come and take my love away,” that everything we love will die. But the essence
of being human is that, in the brief moment we exist on this spinning planet, we
can love some persons and some things, in spite of the fact that time and death
will ultimately claim us all. That we yearn to stretch the brief moment, to
postpone our death a year or so is surely understandable. But such postponement
is bound to be a frustrating and ultimately a losing battle.
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.

Consider James Joyce, who is often cited as the greatest of modern novelists. At
the very end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he has his young hero
write in his diary:
Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of
experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my
race.
What a rich and profound statement that is!—“I go to encounter for the millionth
time.” In other words, every creative encounter is a new event; every time
requires another assertion of courage. What Kierkegaard said about love is also
true of creativity: every-person must start at the beginning. And to encounter
“the reality of experience” is surely the basis for all creativity. The task will be
“to forge in the smithy of my soul,” as arduous as the blacksmith’s task of
bending red-hot iron in his smithy to make something of value for human life.
But note especially the last words, to forge “the uncreated conscience of my
race.” Joyce is here saying that conscience is not something handed down ready-
made from Mount Sinai, despite reports to the contrary. It is created, first of all,
out of the inspiration derived from the artist’s symbols and forms. Every
authentic artist is engaged in this creating of the conscience of the race, even
though he or she may be unaware of the fact. The artist is not a moralist by
conscious intention, but is concerned only with hearing and expressing the vision
within his or her own being. But out of the symbols the artist sees and creates—
as Giotto created the forms for the Renaissance—there is later hewn the ethical
structure of the society.
Why is creativity so difficult? And why does it require so much courage? Is
it not simply a matter of clearing away the dead forms, the defunct symbols and
the myths that have become lifeless? No. Joyce’s metaphor is much more
accurate: it is as difficult as forging in the smithy of one’s soul. We are faced
with a puzzling riddle indeed.
Some help comes from George Bernard Shaw. Having attended a concert
given by the violinist Heifitz, he wrote the following letter when he got home:
My dear Mr. Heifitz,
My wife and I were overwhelmed by your concert. If you continue to play
with such beauty, you will certainly die young. No one can play with such
perfection without provoking the jealousy of the gods. I earnestly implore you to
play something badly every night before going to bed….
Beneath Shaw’s humorous words there is, as there often was with him, a
profound truth—creativity provokes the jealousy of the gods. This is why
authentic creativity takes so much courage: an active battle with the gods is
occurring.
I cannot give you any complete explanation of why this is so; I can only
share my reflections. Down through the ages, authentically creative figures have
consistently found themselves in such a struggle. Degas once wrote, “A painter
paints a picture with the same feeling as that with which a criminal commits a
crime.” In Judaism and Christianity the second of the Ten Commandments
adjures us, “You shall not make yourself a graven image, or any likeness of
anything that is in the heavens above or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in
the water under the earth.” I am aware that the ostensible purpose of this
commandment was to protect the Jewish people from idol worship in those idol-
strewn times.
But the commandment also expresses the timeless fear that every society
harbors of its artists, poets, and saints. For they are the ones who threaten the
status quo, which each society is devoted to protecting. It is clearest in the
struggles occurring in Russia to control the utterances of the poets and the styles
of the artists; but it is true also in our own country, if not so blatant. Yet in spite
of this divine prohibition, and despite the courage necessary to flout it, countless
Jews and Christians through the ages have devoted themselves to painting and
sculpting and have continued to make graven images and produce symbols in
one form or another. Many of them have had the same experience of a battle
with the gods.
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.
As I tried to puzzle out the riddle of the battle with the gods, I went back to
the prototypes in human cultural history, to those myths that illuminate how
people have understood the creative act. 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. 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.
In ancient Greek civilization, there is the myth of Prometheus, a Titan living
on Mount Olympus, who saw that human beings were without fire. His stealing
fire from the gods and giving it to humankind is taken henceforth by the Greeks
as the beginning of civilization, not only in cooking and in the weaving of
textiles, but in philosophy, science, drama, and in culture itself.
But the important point is that Zeus was outraged. He decreed that
Prometheus he punished by being bound to Mount Caucasus, where a vulture
was to come each morning and eat away his liver which would grow again at
night. This element in the myth, incidentally, is a vivid symbol of the creative
process. All artists have at some time had the experience at the end of the day of
feeling tired, spent, and so certain they can never express their vision that they
vow to forget it and start all over again on something else the next morning. But
during the night their ‘liver grows back again.” They arise full of energy and go
back with renewed hope to their task, again to strive in the smithy of their soul.
Least anyone think the myth of Prometheus can be brushed aside as merely
an idiosyncractic tale concoted by playful Greeks, let me remind you that in the
Judeo-Christian tradition almost exactly the same truth is presented. I refer to the
myth of Adam and Eve. This is the drama of the emerging of moral
consciousness. As Kierkegaard said in relation to this myth (and to all myths),
the truth that happens internally is presented as though it were external. The
myth of Adam is re-enacted in every infant, beginning a few months after birth
and developing into recognizable form at the age of two or three, though ideally
it should continue enlarging all the rest of one’s life. The eating of the apple of
the tree of the knowledge of good and evil symbolizes the dawn of human
consciousness, moral conscience and consciousness being at this point
synonymous. The innocence of the Garden of Eden—the womb and the
“dreaming consciousness” (the phrase is Kierkegaard’s) of gestation and the first
month of life—are destroyed forever.
The function of psychoanalysis is to increase this consciousness, indeed to
help people eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It should not
surprise us if this experience is as terrifying for many people as it was for
Oedipus. Any theory of “resistance” that omits the terror of human
consciousness is incomplete and probably wrong.
In place of innocent bliss, the infant now experiences anxiety and guilt
feelings. Also, as part of the child’s legacy is the sense of individual
responsibility, and, most important of all, developing only later, the capacity to
love. The “shadow” side of this process is the emergence of repressions and,
concomitantly, neurosis. A fateful event indeed! If you call this the “fall of
man,” you should join Hegel and other penetrating analysts of history who have
proclaimed that it was a “fall upward”; for without this experience there would
be neither creativity nor consciousness as we know them.
But, again, Yahweh was angry. Adam and Eve were driven out of the garden
by an angel with a flaming sword. The troublesome paradox confronts us in that
both the Greek and the Judeo-Christian myths present creativity and
consciousness as being born in rebellion against an omnipotent force. Are we to
conclude that these chief gods, Zeus and Yahweh, did not wish humankind to
have moral consciousness and the arts of civilization? It is a mystery indeed.
The most obvious explanation is that 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. These are the “idols” of our society that are worshiped by multitudes of
people. But this point does not go deeply enough to give us an answer to the
riddle.
In my search for some illumination, I went back again to the myths to read
them more carefully. I discovered that at the end of the myth of Prometheus
there is the curious addendum: Prometheus could be freed from his chains and
his torture only when an immortal would renounce his immortality as expiation
for Prometheus. This was done by Chiron (who is, incidentally, another
fascinating symbol—half horse and half man, renowned for his wisdom and skill
in medicine and healing, he brought up Asclepius, the god of medicine). This
conclusion to the myth tells us that the riddle is connected with the problem of
death.
The same with Adam and Eve. Enraged at their eating of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil, Yahweh cries out that He is afraid they will eat of
the tree of eternal life and become like “one of us.” So! Again the riddle has to
do with the problem of death, of which eternal life is one aspect.
The battle with the gods thus hinges on our own mortality! Creativity is a
yearning for immortality. We human beings know that we must die. We have,
strangely enough, a word for death. We know that each of us must develop the
courage to confront death. Yet we also must rebel and struggle against it.
Creativity comes from this struggle-out of the rebellion the creative act is born.
Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it
must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion
to live beyond one’s death. Michelangelo’s writhing, unfinished statues of
slaves, struggling in their prisons of stone, are the most fitting symbol for our
human condition.

When I use the word rebel for the artist, I do not refer to revolutionary or to such
things as taking over the dean’s office; that is a different matter. Artists are
generally soft-spoken persons who are concerned with their inner visions and
images. But that is precisely what makes them feared by any coercive society.
For they are the bearers of the human being’s age-old capacity to be insurgent.
They love to emerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God
created form out of chaos in Genesis. Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the
apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds. Thus are they
the creators of the “uncreated conscience of the race.”
This requires an intensity of emotion, a heightened vitality—for is not the
vital forever in opposition to death? We could call this intensity by many
different names: I choose to call it rage. Stanley Kunitz, contemporary poet, state
that “the poet writes his poems out of his rage.” This rage is necessary to ignite
the poet’s passion, to call forth his abilities, to bring together in ecstasy his
flamelike insights, that he may surpass himself in his poems. The rage is against
injustice, of which there is certainly plenty in our society. But ultimately it is
rage against the prototype of all injustice—death.
We recall the first lines of a poem by another contemporary poet, Dylan
Thomas, on the death of his father:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should bum and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And the poem ends:
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Note that he does not ask merely to be blessed. “Curse … me … with your fierce
tears.” Note also that it is Dylan Thomas, and not his father, who writes the
poem. The father had to confront death and in some way accept it. But the son
expresses the eternally insurgent spirit—and as a result we have the piercing
elegance of this poem.
This rage has nothing at all to do with rational concepts of death, in which
we stand outside the experience of death and make objective, statistical
comments about it. That always has to do with someone else’s death, not our
own. We all know that each generation, whether of leaves or grass or human
beings or any living things, must die in order for a new generation be born. I am
speaking of death in a different sense. A child has a dog, and the dog dies. The
child’s grief is mixed with deep anger. If someone tries to explain death in the
objective, evolutionary way to him—everything dies, and dogs die sooner than
human beings—he may well strike out against the explainer. The child probably
knows all that anyway. His real sense of loss and betrayal comes from the fact
that his love for his dog and the dog’s devotion to him are now gone. It is the
personal, subjective experience of death of which I am speaking.
As we grow older we learn how to understand each other better. Hopefully,
we learn also to love more authentically. Understanding and love require a
wisdom that comes only with age. But at the highest point in the development of
that wisdom, we will be blotted out. No longer will we see the trees turning
scarlet in the autumn. No longer will we see the grass pushing up so tenderly in
the spring. Each of us will become only a memory that will grow fainter every
year.
This most difficult of truths is put by another modern poet, Marianne Moore,
into these words:
What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage …
And then, after considering death and how we can confront it, she ends her
poem:
So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,
this is eternity.
Thus mortality is at last brought into antiphony with its opposite, eternity.

For many people the relating of rebellion to religion will be a hard truth. It
brings with it the final paradox. In religion, it is not the sycophants or those who
cling most faithfully to the status quo who are ultimately praised. It is the
insurgents. Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have been
the same person. Socrates was a rebel, and he was sentenced to drink hemlock.
Jesus was a rebel, and he was crucified for it. Joan of Arc was a rebel, and she
was burned at the stake.
Yet each of these figures and hundreds like them, though ostricized by their
contemporaries, were recognized and worshiped by the following ages as having
made the most significant creative contributions in ethics and religion to
civilization.
Those we call saints rebelled against an outmoded and inadequate form of
God on the basis of their new insights into divinity. The teachings that led to
their deaths raised the ethical and spiritual levels of their societies. They were
aware that Zeus, the jealous god of Mount Olympus, would no longer do. Hence
Prometheus stands for a religion of compassion. They rebelled against Yahweh,
the primitive tribal god of the Hebrews who gloried in the deaths of thousands of
Philistines. In place of him came the new visions of Amos and Isaiah and
Jeremiah of the god of love and justice. Their rebellion was motivated by new
insights into the meaning of godliness. They rebelled, as Paul Tillich has so
beautifully stated, against God in the name of the God beyond God. The
continuous emergence of the God beyond God is the mark of creative courage in
the religious sphere.
Whatever sphere we may be in, there is a profound joy in the realization that
we are helping to form the structure of the new world. This is creative courage,
however minor or fortuitous our creations may be. We can then say, with Joyce,
Welcome, O life! We go for the millionth time to forge in the smithy of our
souls the uncreated conscience of the race.
TWO
THE NATURE OF CREATIVITY

W HEN 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. Essentially we
have come up with truisms or irrelevancies at which the artists and poets smile
and about which they say, “Interesting, yes. But that’s not what goes on within
me in the creative act.” Fortunately during the last twenty years a change has
been occurring, but it is still true that creativity is a stepchild of psychology.
And in psychoanalysis and depth psychology the situation has been little
better. I well recall an incident of some twenty years ago that brought vividly
home to me the over simplification and inadequacy of the depth-psychology
theories of creativity. One summer I was traveling with a group of seventeen
artists through central Europe, studying and painting peasant art. While we were
in Vienna, Alfred Adler, whom I had known and whose summer school I had
attended, invited us all to his home for a private lecture. In the course of his
lecture, in his parlor, Adler touched upon his compensatory theory of creativity
—that human beings produce art, science, and other aspects of culture to
compensate for their own inadequacies. The oyster producing the pearl to cover
up the grain of sand intruding into its shell is often cited as a simple illustration.
Beethoven’s deafness was one of the many famous examples Adler cited,
showing how highly creative individuals compensate for some defect or organ
inferiority by their creative acts. Adler also believed that 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. Then Adler, having entirely forgotten he was addressing a group
of artists, looked around the room and remarked, “Since I see that very few of
you are wearing glasses, I assume that you are not interested in art.” The
oversimplification this theory of compensation is subject to was thus
dramatically exposed.
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.
Because of this I learned very early in my psychological career to regard
with a good deal of skepticism current theories explaining creativity. And I
learned always to ask the question: Does the theory deal with creativity itself, or
does it deal only with some artifact, some partial, peripheral aspect, of the
creative act?
The other widely current psychoanalytic theories about creativity have two
characteristics. First, they are 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. I emphatically disagree with the implication that
creativity is 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? This dichotomy, as well as many others, arises from the reductive
theories. Furthermore, 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? We must indeed take a strong stand
against the implications, however they may creep in, that talent is a disease and
creativity is a neurosis.
1. WHAT IS CREATIVITY?

When we define creativity, we must make the distinction between 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.
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. These poets and other creative persons
are the ones who express being itself, he held. As I would put it, these are the
ones who enlarge human consciousness. Their creativity is the most basic
manifestation of a man or woman fulfilling his or her own being in the world.
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 week ends!
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.

2. THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Let us now inquire into the nature of the creative process, and seek our answers
by trying to describe as accurately as possible what actually happens in
individuals at the moment of the creative act. I shall speak mostly about artists
because I know them, have worked with them, and, to some extent, am one
myself. This does not mean that I underestimate creativity in other activities. I
assume that the following analysis of the nature of creativity will apply to all
men and women during their creative moments.
The first thing we notice in a creative act is that it is an 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. The paint, the canvas, and the other materials then become a secondary
part of this encounter; they are the language of it, the media, as we rightly put it.
Or scientists confront their experiment, their laboratory task, in a similar
situation of encounter.
The encounter may or may not involve voluntary effort—that is, “will
power.” A healthy child’s play, for example, also has the essential features of
encounter, and we know it is one of the important prototypes of adult creativity.
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.
Now we come upon 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. This was illustrated vividly to me when
I worked with a young man in psychoanalysis. A talented professional, this man
had rich and varied creative potentialities, but he always stopped just short of
actualizing them. He would suddenly get the idea for an excellent story, would
work it out in his mind to a full outline which could have then been written up
without much further ado, and would relish and enjoy the ecstasy of the
experience. Then he would stop there, writing down nothing at all. It was as
though the experience of seeing himself as one who was able to write, as being
just about to write, had within it what he was really seeking and brought its own
reward. Hence he never actually created.
This was a fairly baffling problem to him and to me. We had analyzed many
aspects of it: his father had been a somewhat gifted writer but a failure; his
mother had made much of his father’s writings, but had shown only contempt for
him in other realms. The young man, an only child, had been pampered and
overprotected by his mother and often had been shown preference over his father
—for instance, by being served special food at meals. The patient was clearly
competing with his father, and faced a dire threat if he should succeed. All this
and more we had analyzed in some detail. A vital link of experience, however,
was missing.
One day the patient came in to announce that he had made an exciting
discovery. The evening before, while reading, he had gotten his customary
sudden creative flow of ideas for a story and had taken his usual pleasure in the
fact. At the same time he had had a peculiar sexual feeling. He had then recalled
for the first time that he had always had this sexual feeling at precisely such an
abortively creative moment.
I shall not go into the complex analysis of the associations, which
demonstrated that this sexual feeling was both a desire for comfort and sensual
gratification of a passive sort and a desire for the unconditional admiration of
any woman. I only wish to indicate that the upshot was clearly that his creative
“bursts” of ideas were ways of getting admiration, gratification from his mother;
that he needed to show mother and other women what a fine, gifted person he
was. And once he had done that by getting the beautiful, lofty visions, he had
achieved what he wanted. He was not really interested in this context in creating,
but in being about to create; creativity was in the service of something quite else.
Now no matter how you may interpret the causes of this pattern, one central
feature is clear—the encounter was lacking. Is not this the essence of escapist
art? Everything is there but the encounter. And is not this the central feature of
many kinds of artistic exhibitionism—what Rank calls the artiste manqué? We
cannot make a valid distinction by saying one kind of art is neurotic and the
other healthy. Who is to judge that? We can only say that in exhibitionistic,
escapist forms of creativity there is no real encounter, no engagement with
reality. That isn’t what the young man is after; he wants to be passively accepted
and admired by mother. In cases of this kind it is accurate to speak of regression
in the negative sense. But the crucial point is that we are dealing with something
quite different from creativity.
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.

3. INTENSITY OF THE ENCOUNTER

This leads us to the second element in the creative act—namely, the 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.
Now this intensity of awareness is not necessarily connected with conscious
purpose or willing. It may occur in reverie or in dreams, or from so-called
unconscious levels. An eminent New York professor related an illustrative story.
He had been searching for a particular chemical formula for some time, but
without success. One night, while he was sleeping, he had a dream in which the
formula was worked out and displayed before him. He woke up, and in the
darkness he excitedly wrote it down on a piece of tissue, the only thing he could
find. But the next morning he could not read his own scribbling. Every night
thereafter, upon going to bed, he would concentrate his hopes on dreaming the
dream again. Fortunately, after some nights he did, and he then wrote the
formula down for good. It was the formula he had sought and for which he
received the Nobel prize.
Though not rewarded so dramatically, we have all had similar experiences.
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.
But let it be said immediately that unconscious insights or answers to
problems that come in reverie do not come hit or miss. They may indeed occur at
times of relaxation, or in fantasy, or at other times when we alternate play with
work. But what is entirely clear is that they pertain to those areas in which the
person consciously has worked laboriously and with dedication. Purpose in the
human being is a much more complex phenomenon than what used to be called
will power. 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.
We must also point out that this “intensity of encounter” is not to be
identified with what is called the Dionysian aspect of creativity. You will find
this word Dionysian used often in books on creative works. Taken from the
name of the Greek god of intoxication and other forms of ecstasy, the term refers
to the upsurge of vitality, the abandon, which characterized the ancient orgiastic
revels of Dionysus. Nietzsche, in his important book The Birth of Tragedy, cites
the Dionysian principle of surging vitality and the Apollonian principle of form
and rational order as the two dialectical principles that operate in creativity. This
dichotomy is assumed by many students and writers.
The Dionysian aspect of intensity can be studied psychoanalytically easily
enough. Probably almost every artist has tried at some time or other to paint
while under the influence of alcohol. What happens generally is what one would
expect, and it happens in proportion to how much alcohol is consumed—namely,
that the artist thinks he or she is doing wonderful stuff, indeed much better than
usual, but in actual fact, as is noted the next morning while looking at the
picture, has really performed less well than usual. Certainly Dionysian periods of
abandon are valuable, particularly in our mechanized civilization where
creativity and the arts are all but starved to death by the routine of punching
clocks and attending endless committee meetings, and by the pressures to
produce ever greater quantities of papers and books, pressures that have infested
the academic world more lethally than the industrial world. I long for the health-
giving effects of the periods of “carnival,” such as they still have in the
Mediterranean countries.
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.
The important and profound aspect of the Dionysian principle is that of
ecstasy. It was in connection with Dionysian revels that Greek drama was
developed, a magnificent summit of creativity which achieved a union of form
and passion with order and vitality. Ecstasy is the technical term for the process
in which this union occurs.
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.
But it is not to be thought of merely as a Bacchic “letting go”; 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.
What I am saying may sound strange in the light of our traditional academic
psychology. It should sound strange. Our traditional psychology has been
founded on the dichotomy between subject and object which has been the central
characteristic of Western thought for the past four centuries. Ludwig Binswanger
calls this dichotomy “the cancer of all psychology and psychiatry up to now.”1 It
is not avoided by behaviorism or operationalism, which would define experience
only in objective terms. Nor is it avoided by isolating the creative experience as
a purely subjective phenomenon.
Most psychological and other modern schools of thought still assume this
split without being aware of it. 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.
The Dionysian and the Apollonian must be related to each other. Dionysian
vitality rests on this question: What manner of encounter releases the vitality?
What particular relation to landscape or inner vision or idea heightens the
consciousness, brings forth the intensity?

4. ENCOUNTER AS INTERRELATING WITH THE 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. 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. 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.
How artists encounter their world is illustrated in the work of every
genuinely creative painter. Out of the many possible examples of this, I shall
choose the superb exhibition of the paintings of Mondrian shown at the
Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1957–58. From his first realistic works in
1904 and 1905, all the way to his later geometrical rectangles and squares in the
1930s, one can see him struggling to find the underlying forms of the objects,
particularly trees, that he was painting. He seems to have loved trees. The
paintings around 1910, beginning somewhat like Cézanne, move further and
further into the underlying meaning of tree—the trunk rises organically from the
ground into which the roots have penetrated; the branches curve and bend into
the trees and hills of the background in cubistic form, beautifully illustrative of
what the underlying essence of tree is to most of us. Then we see Mondrian
struggling more and more deeply to find the “ground forms” of nature; now it is
less tree and more the eternal geometric forms underlying all reality. Finally We
see him pushing inexorably toward the squares and rectangles that are the
ultimate form of purely abstract art. Impersonal? To be sure. The individual self
is lost. But is this not precisely a reflection of Mondrian’s world—the world of
the decades of the twenties and thirties, the world in the period of emerging
fascism, communism, conformism, military power, in which the individual not
only feels lost, but is lost, alienated from nature and others as well as himself?
Mondrian’s paintings express creative strength in such a world, an affirmation in
spite of the “lostness” of the individual. In this sense his work is a search for the
foundation of individuality that can withstand these anti-human political
developments.
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.
Nowhere was this encounter demonstrated more vividly than in the famous
seventy-fifth anniversary exhibit of Picasso’s works, presented in New York in
1957. Broader in temperament than Mondrian, Picasso is a spokesman for his
time par excellence. Even in his early works around 1900, his vast talent was
already visible. And in the stark, realistic paintings of peasants and poor people
in the first decade of this century, his passionate relationship to human suffering
was shown. You can then see the spiritual temper of each succeeding decade in
his work.
In the early 1920s, for example, we find Picasso painting classical Greek
figures, particularly bathers by the sea. An aura of escapism hovers about these
pictures in the exhibit. Was not the 1920s, the decade after the first World War,
in reality a period of escapism in the Western world? Toward the end of the
twenties and in the early thirties, these bathers by the sea become pieces of
metal, mechanical, gray-blue curving steel. Beautiful indeed, but impersonal,
unhuman. And here one was gripped in the exhibit with an ominous foreboding
—the prediction of the beginning of the time when people were to become
impersonal, objectivized, numbers. It was the ominous prediction of the
beginnings of “man, the robot.”
Then in 1937 comes the great painting Guernica, with figures torn apart,
split from each other, all in stark white, gray, and black. It was Picasso’s pained
outrage against the inhumanity of the bombing of the helpless Spanish town of
Guernica by fascist planes in the Spanish revolution; but it is much more than
that. It is the most vivid portrayal imaginable of the atomistic, split-up,
fragmentized state of contemporary human beings, and implies the conformism,
emptiness, and despair that were to go along with this. Then in the late thirties
and forties, Picasso’s portraits become more and more machinelike—people
turned literally into metal. Faces become distorted. It is as though persons,
individuals, do not exist any more; their places are taken by hideous witches.
Pictures now are not named, but numbered. The bright colors the artist used in
his earlier periods and which were so delightful are now largely gone. In these
rooms at the exhibit one feels as though darkness has settled upon the earth at
noon. As in the novels of Kafka, one gets a stark and gripping feeling of the
modern individual’s loss of humanity. The first time I saw this exhibit, I was so
overcome with the foreboding picture of human beings losing their faces, their
individuality, their humanity, and the prediction of the robot to come, that I
could look no longer and had to hurry out of the room and onto the street again.
To be sure, all the way through Picasso preserves his own sanity by
“playing” with paintings and sculptures of animals and his own children. But it
is clear that the main stream is a portrayal of our modern condition, which has
been psychologically portrayed by Riesman, Mumford, Tillich, and others. The
whole is an unforgettable portrait of modern man and woman in the process of
losing their person and their humanity.
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.”
THREE
CREATIVITY AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

E VERYONE uses from time to time such expressions as, “a thought pops up,”
an idea comes “from the blue” or “dawns” or “comes as though out of a
dream,” or “it suddenly hit me.” These are various ways of describing a common
experience: the breakthrough of ideas from some depth below the level of
awareness. I shall call this realm “the unconscious” as a catchall for the
subconscious, preconscious, and other dimensions below awareness.
When I use the phrase “the unconscious,” I, of course, mean it as a
shorthand. There is no such thing as “the unconscious”; it is, rather, unconscious
dimensions (or aspects or sources) of experience. I define this unconscious as the
potentialities for awareness or action which the individual cannot or will not
actualize. These potentialities are the source of what can be called “free
creativity.” The exploration of unconscious phenomena has a fascinating
relationship to creativity. What are the nature and characteristics of the creativity
that has its source in these unconscious depths of personality?

I wish to begin our exploration of this topic by relating an incident from my own
experience. When I was a graduate student doing research on The Meaning of
Anxiety, I studied anxiety in a group of unmarried mothers—i.e., pregnant young
women in their late teens and early twenties in a shelter home in New York
City.1 I had a good, sound hypothesis on anxiety, approved by my professors and
approved by me—that the predisposition toward anxiety in individuals would be
proportionate to the degree to which they had been rejected by their mothers. In
psychoanalysis and psychology this had been a generally accepted hypothesis. I
assumed the anxiety of people like these young women would be cued off by the
anxiety-creating situation of being unwed and pregnant, and I could then study
more openly the original source of their anxiety—namely the maternal rejection.
Now I discovered that half the young women fitted my hypothesis
beautifully. But the other half did not fit it at all. This latter group included
young women from Harlem and the Lower East Side who had been radically
rejected by their mothers. One of them, whom I shall call Helen, was from a
family of twelve children whose mother drove them out of the house on the first
day of summer to stay with their father, the caretaker of a barge that went up and
down the Hudson River. Helen was pregnant by her father. At the time she was
in the shelter, he was in Sing Sing on a charge of rape by Helen’s older sister.
Like the other young women of this group, Helen would say to me, “We have
troubles, but we don’t worry.”
This was a very curious thing to me and I had a hard time believing the data.
But the facts seemed clear. As far as I could tell by the Rorschach, TAT, and
other tests I used, these radically rejected young women did not carry any
unusual degree of anxiety. Forced out of the house by their mothers, they simply
made their friends among other youngsters on the street. Hence, there was not
the predisposition to anxiety we would have expected according to what we
know in psychology.
How could this be? Had the rejected young women who had not experienced
anxiety become hardened, apathetic, so that they did not feel the rejection? The
answer to that seemed clearly no. Were they psychopathic or sociopathic types,
who also don’t experience anxiety? Again, no. I felt myself caught by an
insoluble problem.
Late one day, putting aside my books and papers in the little office I used in
that shelter house, I walked down the street toward the subway. I was tired. I
tried to put the whole troublesome business out of my mind. About fifty feet
away from the entrance to the Eighth Street station, it suddenly struck me “out of
the blue,” as the not-unfitting expression goes, that those young women who
didn’t fit my hypothesis were all from the proletarian class. And as quickly as
that idea struck me, other ideas poured out. I think I had not taken another step
on the sidewalk when a whole new hypothesis broke loose in my mind. I
realized my entire theory would have to be changed. I saw at that instant that it is
not rejection by the mother that is the original trauma which is the source of
anxiety; it is rather rejection that is lied about.
The proletarian mothers rejected their children, but they never made any
bones about it. The children knew they were rejected; they went out on the
streets and found other companions. There was never any subterfuge about their
situation. They knew their world—bad or good—and they could orient
themselves to it. But the middle-class young women were always lied to in their
families. They were rejected by mothers who pretended they loved them. This
was really the source of their anxiety, not the sheer rejection. I saw, in that
instantaneous way that characterizes insights from these deeper sources, that
anxiety comes from not being able to know the world you’re in, not being able to
orient yourself in your own existence. I was convinced there, on the street—and
later thought and experience only convinced me the more—that this is a better,
more accurate, and more elegant theory, than my first.

What was going on at the moment when this breakthrough occurred? Taking this
experience of mine as a start, we notice, first of all, that the insight broke into
my conscious mind against what I had been trying to think rationally. I had a
good, sound thesis and I had been working very hard trying to prove it. The
unconscious, so to speak, broke through in opposition to the conscious belief to
which I was clinging.
Carl Jung often made the point that there is a polarity, a kind of opposition,
between unconscious experience and consciousness. He believed the relationship
was compensatory: consciousness controls the wild, illogical vagaries of the
unconscious, while the unconscious keeps consciousness from drying up in
banal, empty, arid rationality. The compensation also works on specific
problems: if I consciously bend too far one way on some issue, my unconscious
will lean the other way. This is, of course, the reason why the more we are
unconsciously smitten with doubts about an idea, the more dogmatically we fight
for it in our conscious arguments. This is also why persons as different as Saint
Paul on the Damascus road and the alcoholic in the Bowery go through such
radical conversions—the repressed unconscious side of the dialectic erupts and
takes over the personality. The unconscious seems to take delight (if I may so
express it) in breaking through—and breaking up—exactly what we cling to
most rigidly in our conscious thinking.
What occurs in this breakthrough is not simply growth; it is much more
dynamic. It is not a mere expansion of awareness; it is rather a kind of battle. A
dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what he or she consciously
thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is
struggling to be born. The insight is then born with anxiety, guilt, and the joy
and gratification that is inseparable from the actualizing of a new idea or vision.
The guilt that is present when this breakthrough occurs has its source in the
fact that the insight must destroy something. My insight destroyed my other
hypothesis and would destroy what a number of my professors believed, a fact
that caused me some concern. Whenever there is a breakthrough of a significant
idea in science or a significant new form in art, the new idea will destroy what a
lot of people believe is essential to the survival of their intellectual and spiritual
world. This is the source of guilt in genuine creative work. As Picasso remarked,
“Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.”
The breakthrough carries with it also an element of anxiety. For it not only
broke down my previous hypothesis, it shook my self-world relationship. At
such a time I find myself having to seek a new foundation, the existence of
which I as yet don’t know. This is the source of the anxious feeling that comes at
the moment of the breakthrough; it is not possible that there be a genuinely new
idea without this shake up occurring to some degree.
But beyond guilt and anxiety, as I said above, the main feeling that comes
with the breakthrough is one of gratification. We have seen something new. We
have the joy of participating in what the physicists and other natural scientists
call an experience of “elegance.”

A second thing that occurred in the breakthrough of this insight is that

everything around me became suddenly vivid. I can remember that on the
particular street down which I walked the houses were painted an ugly shade of
green that I normally would prefer to forget immediately. But by virtue of the
vividness of this experience, the colors all around were sharpened and were
imbedded in my experience, and that ugly green still exists in my memory. The
moment the insight broke through, there was a special translucence that
enveloped the world, and my vision was given a special clarity. I am convinced
that this is the usual accompaniment of the breakthrough of unconscious
experience into consciousness. Here is again part of the reason the experience
scares us so much: the world, both inwardly and outwardly, takes on an intensity
that may be momentarily overwhelming. This is one aspect of what is called
ecstasy—the uniting of unconscious experience with consciousness, a union that
is not in abstracto, but a dynamic, immediate fusion.
I want to emphasize that I did not get my insight as though I were dreaming,
with the world and myself opaque and cloudy. It is a popular misconception that
perception is dull when one is experiencing this state of insight. I believe that
perception is actually sharper. True, one aspect of it resembles a dream in that
self and world may become kaleidoscopic; but another aspect of the experience
is a sharpened perception, a vividness, a translucence of relationship to the
things around us. The world becomes vivid and unforgettable. Thus the
breakthrough of material from unconscious dimensions involves a heightening
of sensory experience.
We could, indeed, define the whole experience that we are talking about as a
state of heightened consciousness. Unconsciousness is the depth dimension of
consciousness, and when it surges up into consciousness in this kind of polar
struggle the result is an intensification of consciousness. It heightens not only the
capacity to think, but also the sensory processes; and it certainly intensifies
memory.
There is a third thing we observe when such insights occur—that is, the
insight never comes hit or miss, but in accordance with a pattern of which one
essential element is our own commitment. The breakthrough does not come by
just “taking it easy,” by “letting the unconscious do it.” The insight, rather, is
born from unconscious levels exactly in the areas in which we are most
intensively consciously committed. The insight came to me on that problem to
which, up till the moment I put my books and papers away in the little office that
I occupied, I had devoted my best and most energetic conscious thought. The
idea, the new form which suddenly becomes present, came in order to complete
an incomplete Gestalt with which I was struggling in conscious awareness. One
can quite accurately speak of this incomplete Gestalt, this unfinished pattern, this
unformed form, as constituting the “call” that was answered by the unconscious.
The fourth characteristic of this experience is that the insight comes at a
moment of transition between work and relaxation. It comes at a break in periods
of voluntary effort. My breakthrough came when I had put away my books and
was walking toward the subway, my mind far away from that problem. It is as
though intense application to the problem—thinking about it, struggling with it
—starts and keeps the work process going; but some part of the pattern that is
different from what I am trying to work out is struggling to be born. Hence the
tension that is involved in creative activity. If we are too rigid, dogmatic, or
bound to previous conclusions, we will, of course, never let this new element
come into our consciousness; we will never let ourselves be aware of the
knowledge that exists on another level within us. But the insight often cannot be
born until the conscious tension, the conscious application, is relaxed. Hence the
well-known phenomenon that the unconscious breakthrough requires the
alternation of intense, conscious work and relaxation, with the unconscious
insight often occurring, as in my case, at the moment of the shift.
Albert Einstein once asked a friend of mine in Princeton, “Why is it I get my
best ideas in the morning while I’m shaving?” My friend answered, as I have
been trying to say here, that often the mind needs the relaxation of inner controls
—needs to be freed in reverie or day dreaming—for the unaccustomed ideas to
emerge.

Let us now consider the experience, more complex and richer than mine, of one
of the great mathematicians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
Jules Henri Poincaré. In his autobiography, Poincaré tells us with admirable
clarity how his new insights and new theories came to him, and he describes
vividly the circumstances surrounding the occurrence of one “breakthrough.”
For fifteen days I strove to prove that there could not be any functions like
those I have since called Fuchsian functions. I was then very ignorant; every day
I seated myself at my work table, stayed an hour or two, tried a great number of
combinations and reached no results. One evening, contrary to my custom, I
drank black coffee and could not sleep. Ideas rose in crowds; I felt them collide
until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination. By the next
morning I had established the existence of a class of Fuchsian functions, those
which come from the hypergeometric series; I had only to write out the results,
which took but a few hours.2
Still a young man, he was then called into the military service, and for some
months nothing happened in his thinking. One day in a town in southern France
he was getting on a bus and talking with another soldier. As he was about to put
his foot on the step—he pinpoints the moment that exactly—there broke into his
mind the answer to how these new mathematical functions that he had
discovered were related to the conventional mathematics he had been working
on before. When I read Poincaré’s experience—which was after the above
incident in my own life—I was struck by how similar it was in this special
precision and vividness. He got up on the step, entered the bus, continued
without pause his conversation with his friend, but was completely and
instaneously convinced of the way these functions were related to general
mathematics.
To continue with a later portion of his autobiography, when he returned from
army service:
Then I turned my attention to the study of some arithmetical questions
apparently without much success and without a suspicion of any connection with
my preceding researches. Disgusted with my failure, I went to spend a few days
at the seaside, and thought of something else. One morning, walking on the
bluff, the idea came to me, with just the same characteristics of brevity,
suddenness and immediate certainty, that the arithmetic transformations of
indeterminate ternary quadratic forms were identical with those of non-
Euclidean geometry.3
Poincaré, turning psychologist for the moment, asks himself the question we
posed above: What is going on in the mind that these ideas should break through
at this moment? This is what he proposes in answer to his question:
Most striking at first is this appearance of sudden illumination, a manifest
sign of long, unconscious prior work. The role of this unconscious work in
mathematical invention appears to me incontestable, and traces of it would be
found in other cases where it is less evident. Often when one works at a hard
question, nothing good is accomplished at the first attack. Then one takes a rest,
longer or shorter, and sits down anew to the work. During the first half-hour, as
before, nothing is found, and then all of a sudden the decisive idea presents itself
to the mind. It might be said that the conscious work has been more fruitful
because it has been interrupted and the rest has given back to the mind its force
and freshness.4
Is the appearance of the illumination due to the relief from fatigue—i.e., simply
taking a rest? No, he answers:
It is more probable that this rest has been filled out with unconscious work and
that the result of this work has afterward revealed itself to the geometer just as in
the cases I have cited; only the revelation, instead of coming daring a walk or a
journey, has happened during a period of conscious work, but independently of
this work which plays at most a role of excitant, as if it were the goad
stimulating the results already reached during rest, but remaining unconscious, to
assume the conscious form.5
He then continues with another penetrating comment on the practical aspects
of the breakthrough:
There is another remark to be made about the conditions of this unconscious
work: it is possible, and of a certainty it is only fruitful, if it is on the one hand
preceded and on the other hand followed by a period of conscious work. These
sudden inspirations (and the examples already cited sufficiently prove this) never
happen except after some days of voluntary effort which has appeared absolutely
fruitless and whence nothing good seems to have come, where the way taken
seems totally astray. These efforts then have not been as sterile as one thinks;
they have set agoing the unconscious machine and without them it would not
have moved and would have produced nothing.6
Let us summarize some of the most significant points so far in Poincaré’s
testimony. He sees the characteristics of the experience as follows: (1) the
suddenness of the illumination; (2) that the insight may occur, and to some
extent must occur, against what one has clung to consciously in one’s theories;
(3) the vividness of the incident and the whole scene that surrounds it; (4) the
brevity and consciseness of the insight, along with the experience of immediate
certainty. Continuing with the practical conditions which he cites as necessary
for this experience are (5) hard work on the topic prior to the breakthrough; (6)
a rest, in which the “unconscious work” has been given a chance to proceed on
its own and after which the breakthrough may occur (which is a special case of
the more general point); (7) the necessity of alternating work and relaxation,
with the insight often coming at the moment of the break between the two, or at
least within the break.
This last point is particularly interesting. It is probably something everyone
has learned: professors will lecture with more inspiration if they occasionally
alternate the classroom with the beach; authors will write better when, as
Macaulay used to do, they write for two hours, then pitch quoits, and then go
back to their writing. But certainly more than the mere mechanical alternation is
involved.
I propose that in our day this alternation of the market place and mountain
requires the capacity for the constructive use of solitude. It requires that we be
able to retire from a world that is “too much with us,” that we be able to be quiet,
that we let the solitude work for us and in us. It is a characteristic of our time
that many people are afraid of solitude: to be alone is a sign one is a social
failure, for no one would be alone if he or she could help it. It often occurs to me
that people living in our modern, hectic civilization, amid the constant din of
radio and TV, subjecting themselves to every kind of stimulation whether of the
passive sort of TV or the more active sort of conversation, work, and activity,
that people with such constant preoccupations find it exceedingly difficult to let
insights from unconscious depths break through. Of course, when an individual
is afraid of the irrational—that is, of the unconscious dimensions of experience
—he tries to keep busiest, tries to keep most “noise” going on about him. The
avoidance of the anxiety of solitude by constant agitated diversion is what
Kierkegaard, in a nice simile, likened to the settlers in the early days of America
who used to beat on pots and pans at night to make enough din to keep the
wolves away. Obviously if we are to experience insights from our unconscious,
we need to be able to give ourselves to solitude.
Poincaré finally asks: What determines why a given idea comes through from
the unconscious? Why this particular insight and not one of a dozen others? Is it
because a particular insight is the answer which is empirically most accurate?
No, he answers. Is it because it is the insight which will pragmatically work
best? Again, no. What Poincaré proposes as the selective factor resulting in this
given insight seems to me to be in some ways the most important and gripping
point in his whole analysis:
The useful combinations [that come through from the unconscious] are precisely
the most beautiful, I mean those best able to charm this special sensibility that all
mathematicians know, but of which the profane are so ignorant as often to be
tempted to smile at it.
… Among the great numbers of combinations blindly formed by the
subliminal self, almost all are without interest and without utility; but just for
that reason they are also without effect upon the esthetic sensibility.
Consciousness will never know them; only certain ones are harmonious, and,
consequently, at once useful and beautiful. They will be capable of touching this
special sensibility of the geometer of which I have just spoken, and which, once
aroused, will call our attention to them, and thus give them occasion to become
conscious.7
This is why the mathematicians and physicists talk about the “elegance” of a
theory. The utility is subsumed as part of the character of being beautiful. The
harmony of an internal form, the inner consistency of a theory, the character of
beauty that touches one’s sensibilities—these are significant factors determining
why a given idea emerges. As a psychoanalyst, I can only add that my
experience in helping people achieve insights reveals the same phenomenon—
that 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.
When this breakthrough of a creative insight into consciousness occurs, we
have the subjective conviction that the form should be this way and no other
way. It is characteristic of the creative experience that it strikes us as true—with
the “immediate certainty” of Poincaré. And we think, nothing else could have
been true in that situation, and we wonder why we were so stupid as not to have
seen it earlier. The reason, of course, is that we were not psychologically ready
to see it. We could not yet intend the new truth or creative form in art or
scientific theory. We were not yet open on the level of intentionality. But the
“truth” itself is simply there. This reminds us of what the Zen Buddhists keep
saying—that at these moments is reflected and revealed a reality of the universe
that does not depend merely on our own subjectivity, but is as though we only
had our eyes closed and suddenly we open them and there it is, as simple as can
be. The new reality has a kind of immutable, eternal quality. The experience that
“this is the way reality is and isn’t it strange we didn’t see it sooner” may have a
religious quality with artists. This is why many artists feel that something holy is
going on when they paint, that there is something in the act of creating which is
like a religious revelation.

We now consider some dilemmas which arise from the relation of the
unconscious to techniques and machines. No discussion of creativity and the
unconscious in our society can possibly avoid these difficult and important
problems.
We live in a world that has become mechanized to an amazingly high degree.
Irrational unconscious phenomena are always a threat to this mechanization.
Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are
menaces on the assembly line. Mechanization requires uniformity, predictability,
and orderliness; and the very fact that unconscious phenomena are original and
irrational is already an inevitable threat to bourgeois order and uniformity.
This is one reason people in our modern Western civilization have been
afraid of unconscious and irrational experience. For the potentialities that surge
up in them from deeper mental wells simply don’t fit the technology which has
become so essential for our world. What people today do out of fear of irrational
elements in themselves as well as in other people is to put tools and mechanics
between themselves and the unconscious world. This protects them from being
grasped by the frightening and threatening aspects of irrational experience. I am
saying nothing whatever, I am sure it will be understood, against technology or
techniques or mechanics in themselves. What I am saying is that the danger
always exists that our technology will serve as a buffer between us and nature, a
block between us and the deeper dimensions of our own experience. Tools and
techniques ought to be an extension of consciousness, but they can just as easily
be a protection from consciousness. Then tools become defense mechanisms—
specifically against the wider and more complex dimensions of consciousness
that we call the unconscious. Our mechanisms and technology then make us
“uncertain in the impulses of the spirit,” as the physicist Heisenberg puts it.8
Western civilization since the Renaissance has centrally emphasized
techniques and mechanics. Thus it is understandable that the creative impulses of
ourselves and our forefathers, again since the Renaissance, should have been
channeled into the making of technical things—creativity directed toward the
advance and application of science. Such channeling of creativity into technical
pursuits is appropriate on one level but serves as a psychological defense on a
deeper level. This means that technology will be clung to, believed in, and
depended on far beyond its legitimate sphere, since it also serves as a defense
against our fears of irrational phenomena. Thus the very success of technological
creativity—and that its success is magnificent does not need to be heralded by
me—is a threat to its own existence. For if we are not open to the unconscious,
irrational, and transrational aspects of creativity, then our science and technology
have helped to block us off from what I shall call “creativity of the spirit.” By
this I mean creativity that has nothing to do with technical use; I mean creativity
in art, poetry, music, and other areas that exist for our delight and the deepening
and enlarging of meaning in our lives rather than for making money or for
increasing technical power.
To the extent that we lose this free, original creativity of the spirit as it is
exemplified in poetry and music and art, we shall also lose our scientific
creativity. Scientists themselves, particularly the physicists, have told us that the
creativity of science is bound up with the freedom of human beings to create in
the free, pure sense. In modern physics it is very clear that the discoveries that
later become utilized for our technological gains are generally made in the first
place because a physicist lets his imagination go and discovers something simply
for the joy of discovery. But this always runs the risk of radically upsetting our
previously nicely worked-out theories, as it did when Einstein introduced his
theory of relativity, and Heisenberg introduced his principle of indeterminacy.
My point here is more than the conventional distinction between “pure” and
“applied” science. The creativity of the spirit does and must threaten the
structure and presuppositions of our rational, orderly society and way of life.
Unconscious, irrational urges are bound by their very nature to be a threat to our
rationality, and the anxiety we experience thereupon is inescapable.
I am proposing that the creativity coming from the preconscious and
unconscious is not only important for art and poetry and music; but is essential
in the long run also for our science. To shrink from the anxiety this entails, and
block off the threatening new insights and forms this engenders, is not only to
render our society banal and progressively more empty, but also to cut off as
well the headwaters in the rough and rocky mountains of the stream that later
becomes the river of creativity in our science. The new physicists and
mathematicians, for fairly obvious reasons, have been furthest ahead in realizing
this interrelation between unconscious, irrational illumination and scientific
discovery.
Let me now give an illustration of the problem we face. In the several times I
have been on television, I have been struck by two different feelings. One was
wonder at the fact that my words, spoken in the studio, could be delivered
instantaneously into the living rooms of half a million people. The other was that
whenever I got an original idea, whenever in these programs I began to struggle
with some unformed, new concept, whenever I had an original thought that
might cross some frontier of the discussion, at that point I was cut off. I have no
resentment against emcees who do this; they know their business, and they
realize that if what goes on in the program does not fit in the world of listeners
all the way from Georgia to Wyoming, the viewers will get up, go to the kitchen,
get a beer, come back, and switch on a Western.
When you have the potentialities for tremendous mass communication, you
inevitably tend to communicate on the level of the half-million people who are
listening. 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. Mass communication—wonder as it may be technologically and
something to be appreciated and valued—presents us with a serious danger, the
danger of conformism, due to the fact that we all view the same things at the
same time in all the cities of the country. This very fact throws considerable
weight on the side of regularity and uniformity and against originality and freer
creativity.
6

Just as the poet is a menace to conformity, he is also a constant threat to political

dictators. He is always on the verge of blowing up the assembly line of political
power.
We have had powerful and poignant demonstrations of this in Soviet Russia.
It appeared chiefly in the prosecution and purge of artists and writers under
Stalin, who was pathologically anxious when faced with the threat that the
creative unconscious posed to his political system. Indeed, some students believe
that the present situation in Russia shows an ongoing struggle between
rationality and what we have been calling “free creativity.” George Reavey, in
his introduction to the work of the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko writes:
There is something about the poet and his poetic utterance that has a terrifying
effect on some Russians, and especially on the Authorities, be they Tzarist or
Soviet. It is as though poetry were an irrational force which must be bridled and
subjugated and even destroyed.9
Reavey cites the tragic fate that has befallen so many Russian poets, and
suggests that “it is as though Russia were frightened by the expanding image of
its culture and, feeling threatened by the possible loss of its own simple
theoretical identity, must needs shatter anything more complex as something
alien to itself.” He feels that this “may be due to an inherent strain of puritanism.
Or to the reaction of an archaic form of despotic paternalism.” Or to the present
painful effects of a too sudden transition from serfdom to industrialization. I
would also raise the question as to whether there is among Russians less cultural
and psychological defense against irrational elements in themselves and their
society than among people of other nations. Don’t Russians, in fact, live closer
to irrational elements than the older European countries, and, therefore, being
more threatened by untamed irrationality, have to make a greater effort to
control it by regulation?
Could not the same question be fruitfully raised about the United States—
that is, are not our emphasis on pragmatic rationalism, our practical controls, and
our behavioristic ways of thinking defenses against the irrational elements that
were present on the frontiers of our society only a hundred years ago? These
irrational elements are always bursting out—often to our considerable
embarrassment—in the prairie fires of revival movements of the nineteenth
century, in the Ku Klux Klan, and in McCarthyism, to name mainly negative
examples.
But there is a special point I’d like to make here about preoccupation in the
United States with “behavior.” The sciences of man in America are called
“behavioral sciences,” the American Psychological Association’s national
television program was called “Accent on Behavior,” and our chief original and
only extensive contribution to psychological schools is behaviorism, in contrast
to the many European schools—psychoanalysis, Gestalt structuralism,
existential psychology, etc. Practically all of us as children have heard: “Behave
yourself! Behave! Behave!” 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,”
as Reavey suggests may be the case in Russia? I am, of course, entirely aware of
the argument that we have to study behavior because that’s the only thing that
can be studied with any kind of objectivity. But this could well be—and I
propose it is—a parochial prejudice raised to the level of a scientific principle. 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?
In any case, Reavey states that even though Stalin is dead, the situation of the
poet in Russia is still precarious because the younger poets and some of the
hitherto muzzled older poets have become more determined to express their real
feelings and to interpret the truth as they see it. These poets have not only been
condemning the corrupt substitution of falsehood for truth in Russia, but are
trying to rejuvenate the language of Russian poetry by clearing it of political
clichés and “father images.” During Stalinism this was condemned as
“ideological co-existence” with the “bourgeois world,” and the poet was cut
down for anything that “seemed to endanger the closed, exclusive system of
Soviet Realism.” The only trouble is, any kind of “closed, exclusive system”
destroys poetry as it does all art. Reavey continues:
In a speech pronounced in 1921, Alexander Blok, the great Russian poet, had
argued that “tranquility and freedom” were “essential to the poet in order to set
harmony free.” But he went on to say, “the Soviet authorities also take away our
tranquility and freedom. Not outward but creative tranquility. Not the childish
do-as-you-will, not the freedom to play the liberal, but the creative will—the
secret freedom. And the poet is dying, because there is no longer anything to
breathe; life has lost its meaning from him.” 10
This is a powerful statement of my thesis—namely, that a sine qua non of
creativity is the freedom of artists to give all the elements within themselves free
play in order to open up the possibility of what Blok excellently calls “the
creative will,” 11 The negative part of Blok’s statement is true of poetry in
Stalin’s regime, and was in this country during the McCarthy period. This
“creative tranquility” and this “secret freedom” are precisely what the dogmatists
cannot tolerate. Stanley Kunitz believes the poet is inevitably the adversary of
the state. The poet, he says, is a witness to the possibility of revelation. This the
politically rigid cannot stand.
Dogmatists of all kinds—scientific, economic, moral, as well as political—
are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and
inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together
with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyers of our nicely
ordered systems. For the creative impulse is the speaking of the voice and the
expressing of the forms of the preconscious and unconscious; and this is, by its
very nature, a threat to rationality and external control. 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.
FOUR
CREATIVITY AND ENCOUNTER

I WISH to propose a theory and to make some remarks about it, arising largely
out of my contacts and discussions with artists and poets. The theory is:
Creativity occurs in an act of encounter and is to be understood with this
encounter as its center.
Cézanne sees a tree. He sees it in a way no one else has ever seen it. He
experiences, as he no doubt would have said, “being grasped by the tree.” The
arching grandeur of the tree, the mothering spread, the delicate balance as the
tree grips the earth—all these and many more characteristics of the tree are
absorbed into his perception and are felt throughout his nervous structure. These
are part of the vision he experiences. This vision involves an omission of some
aspects of the scene and a greater emphasis on other aspects and the ensuing
rearrangement of the whole; but it is more than the sum of all these. Primarily it
is a vision that is now not tree, but Tree; the concrete tree Cézanne looked at is
formed into the essence of tree. However original and unrepeatable his vision is,
it is still a vision of all trees triggered by his encounter with this particular one.
The painting that issues out of this encounter between a human being,
Cézanne, and an objective reality, the tree, is literally new, unique and original.
Something is born, comes into being, something that did not exist before—
which is as good a definition of creativity as we can get. Thereafter everyone
who looks at the painting with intensity of awareness and lets it speak to him or
her will see the tree with the unique powerful movement, the intimacy between
the tree and the landscape, and the architectural beauty which literally did not
exist in our relation with trees until Cézanne experienced and painted them. I can
say without exaggeration that I never really saw a tree until I had seen and
absorbed Cézanne’s paintings of them.

The very fact that the creative act is such an encounter between two poles is
what makes it so hard to study. It is easy enough to find the subjective pole, the
person, but it is much harder to define the objective pole, the “world” or
“reality.” Since my emphasis here is on the encounter itself, I shall not worry too
much at the moment about such definitions. In his book Poetry and Experience,
Archibald MacLeish uses the most universal terms possible for the two poles of
the encounter: “Being and Non-being.” He quotes a Chinese poet: “We poets
struggle with Non-being to force it to yield Being. We knock upon silence for an
answering music.” 1
“Consider what this means,” MacLeish ruminates. “The ‘Being’ which the
poem is to contain derives from ‘Non-being,’ not from the poet. And the ‘music’
which the poem is to own comes not from us who make the poem but from the
silence; comes in answer to our knock. The verbs are eloquent: ‘struggle,’
‘force,’ ‘knock.’ The poet’s labor is to struggle with the meaninglessness and
silence of the world until he can force it to mean; until he can make the silence
answer and the Non-being be. It is a labor which undertakes to ‘know’ the world
not by exegesis or demonstration or proofs but directly, as a man knows apple in
the mouth.” 2 This is a beautifully expressed antidote to our common assumption
that the subjective projection is all that occurs in the creative act, and a reminder
of the inescapable mystery that surrounds the creative process.
The vision of the artist or the poet is the intermediate determinant between
the subject (the person) and the objective pole (the world-waiting-to-be). It will
be non-being until the poet’s struggle brings forth an answering meaning. The
greatness of a poem or a painting is not that it portrays the thing observed or
experienced, but that it portrays the artist’s or the poet’s vision cued off by his
encounter with the reality. Hence the poem or the painting is unique, original,
never to be duplicated. No matter how many times Monet returned to paint the
cathedral at Rouen, each canvas was a new painting expressing a new vision.
Here we must guard against one of the most serious errors in the
psychoanalytic interpretation of creativity. This is the attempt to find something
within the individual which is then projected onto the work of art, or some early
experience which is transferred to the canvas or written into the poem.
Obviously, early experiences play exceedingly important roles in determining
how artists will encounter their world. But these subjective data can never
explain the encounter itself.
Even in the cases of abstract artists, where the process of painting seems
most subjective, the relationship between being and non-being is certainly
present and may be sparked by the artist’s encountering the brilliant colors on
the palette or the inviting rough whiteness of the canvas. Painters have described
the excitement of this moment: it seems like a re-enactment of the creation story,
with being suddenly becoming alive and possessing a vitality of its own. Mark
Tobey fills his canvases with elliptical, calligraphic lines, beautiful whirls that
seem at first glance to be completely abstract and to come from nowhere at all
except his own subjective musing. But I shall never forget how struck I was, on
visiting Tobey’s studio one day, to see strewn around books on astronomy and
photographs of the Milky Way. I knew then that Tobey experiences the
movement of the stars and solar constellations as the external pole of his
encounter.
The receptivity of the artist must never be confused with passivity.
Receptivity is the artist’s holding him or herself alive and open to hear what
being may speak. Such receptivity requires a nimbleness, a fine-honed
sensitivity in order to let one’s self be the vehicle of whatever vision may
emerge. It is the opposite of the authoritarian demands impelled by “will power.”
I am quite aware of all the jokes that appear in The New Yorker and elsewhere
showing the artist sitting disconsolately in front of the easel, brush in passive
hand, waiting for the inspiration to come. But an artist’s “waiting,” funny as it
may look in cartoons, is not to be confused with laziness or passivity. It requires
a high degree of attention, as when a diver is poised on the end of the
springboard, not jumping but holding his or her muscles in sensitive balance for
the right second. It is an active listening, keyed to hear the answer, alert to see
whatever can be glimpsed when the vision or the words do come. It is a waiting
for the birthing process to begin to move in its own organic time. It is necessary
that the artist have this sense of timing, that he or she respect these periods of
receptivity as part of the mystery of creativity and creation.

A remarkable example of the creative encounter is given in the small book

written by James Lord in recounting his experience of posing for Alberto
Giacometti. Having been friends for some time, these two men could be entirely
open with each other. Lord often made notes directly after the posing session of
what Giacometti had said and done, and out of them he has put together this
valuable monograph about the experience of encounter that occurs in creativity.
He reveals, first, the great degree of anxiety and agony that the encounter
generated in Giacometti. When Lord would arrive at the studio for his sitting,
Giacometti would often disconsolately occupy himself half an hour or more
doing odds and ends with his sculpture, literally afraid to start on the painting.
When he did bring himself to get into the painting, the anxiety became overt. At
one point, writes Lord, Giacometti started gasping and stamping his foot:
“Your head is going away!” he exclaimed. “It’s going away completely!”
“It will come back again,” I said.
He shook his head. “Not necessarily. Maybe the canvas will become
completely empty. And then what will become of me? I’ll die of it!” …
He reached into his pocket, pulled out his handkerchief, stared at it for a
moment, as though he didn’t know what it was, then with a moan threw it onto
the floor. Suddenly he shouted very loudly, “I shriek! I scream!”3
Lord goes on at another point:
To talk to his model while he is working distracts him, I think, from the
constant anxiety which is a result of his conviction that he cannot hope to
represent on the canvas what he sees before him. This anxiety often bursts forth
in the form of melan choly gasps, furious expletives, and occasional loud cries of
rage and/or distress. He suffers. There is no doubt about it….
Giacometti is committed to his work in a particularly intense and total way.
The creative compulsion is never wholly absent from him, never leaves him a
moment of complete peace.4
So intense is the encounter that he often identifies the painting on the easel
with the actual flesh-and-blood person posing. One day his foot accidentally
struck the catch that holds the easel shelf at the proper level, which caused the
canvas to fall abruptly for a foot or two.
“Oh, excuse me!” he said. I laughed and observed that he’d excused himself
as though he’d caused me to fall instead of the painting. “That’s exactly what I
did feel,” he answered.5
In Giacometti this anxiety was associated, as it was in his revered Cézanne,
with a great deal of self-doubt.
In order to go on, to hope, to believe that there is some chance of his actually
creating what he ideally visualizes, he is obliged to feel that it is necessary to
start his entire career over again every day, as it were, from scratch. … he often
feels that the particular sculpture or painting on which he happens to be working
at the moment is that one which will for the very first time express what he
subjectively experiences in response to an objective reality.6
Lord correctly assumes that the anxiety is related to the gap between the
ideal vision that the artist is trying to paint and the objective results. Here he
discusses the contradiction that every artist experiences:
This fundamental contradiction, arising from the hopeless discrepancy
between conception and realization, is at the root of all artistic creation, and it
helps explain the anguish which seems to be an unavoidable component of that
experience. Even as “happy” an artist as Renoir was not immune to it.7
What meant something, what alone existed with a life of its own was his
[Giacometti’s] indefatigable, interminable struggle via the act of painting to
express in visual terms a perception of reality that had happened to coincide
momentarily with my head [which Giacometti was then trying to paint]. To
achieve this was of course impossible, because what is essentially abstract can
never be made concrete without altering its essence. But he was committed, he
was, in fact condemned to the attempt, which at times seemed rather like the task
of Sisyphus.8
One day Lord happened to see Giacometti in a café.
And, indeed, miserable was what he did seem to be. This, I thought, was the
true Giacometti, sitting alone at the back of a café, oblivious to the admiration
and recognition of the world, staring into a void from which no solace could
come, tormented by the hopeless dichotomy of his ideal yet condemned by that
helplessness to struggle as long as he lived to try to overcome it. What
consolation was it that the newspapers of many countries spoke of him, that
museums everywhere exhibited his works, that people he would never know
knew and admired him. None. None at all.9
When we see the intimate feelings and inner experiences of an eminent artist
like Giacometti, we smile at the absurd talk in some psychotherapeutic circles of
“adjusting” people, making people “happy,” or training out of them by simple
behavior modification techniques all pain and grief and conflict and anxiety.
How hard for humankind to absorb the deeper meaning of the myth of Sisyphus!
—to see that “success” and “applause” are the bitch goddesses we always
secretly knew they were. To see that the purpose of human existence in a man
like Giacometti has nothing whatever to do with reassurance or conflict-free
adjustment.
Giacometti was rather devoted—“condemned,” to use Lord’s fitting term—
to the struggle to perceive and reproduce the world around him through his own
vision of being human. He knew there was no other alternative for him. This
challenge gave his life meaning. He and his kind seek to bring their own visions
of what it means to be human, and to see through that vision to a world of
reality, however ephemeral, however consistently that reality vanishes each time
you concentrate on it. How absurd are the rationalistic assumptions that all one
has to do is to remove from the world its curtains of superstition and ignorance
and there suddenly will be reality, pristine and pure!
Giacometti sought to see reality through his ideal vision. He sought to find
the ground forms, the basic structure of reality, below the strewn surface of the
arena where bitch goddesses cavort. He could not escape devoting himself
unstintingly to the question: Is there some place where reality speaks our
language, where it answers us if we but understand the hieroglyphics? He knew
the rest of us would be no more successful than he was in finding the answer; but
we have his contribution to work with, and thus we are helped.

Out of the encounter is born the work of art. This is true not only of painting, but
of poetry and other forms of creativity. W. H. Auden once remarked to me in
private conversation: “The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage
the poem is born.” How active this makes language in the creation of a poem! It
is not that language is merely a tool of communication, or that we only use
language to express our ideas; it is just as true that language uses us. Language is
the symbolic repository of the meaningful experience of ourselves and our
fellow human beings down through history, and, as such, it reaches out to grasp
us in the creating of a poem. We must not forget that the original Greek and
Hebrew words meaning “to know” meant also “to have sexual relations.” One
reads in the Bible “Abraham knew his wife and she conceived.” 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.
The sexual metaphor indeed expresses the importance of encounter. In
sexual intercourse the two persons encounter each other; they withdraw partially
to unite with each other again, experiencing every nuance of knowing, not
knowing, in order to know each other again. The man becomes united with the
woman and the woman with the man, and the partial withdrawal can be seen as
the expedient by which both have the ectastatic experience of being filled again.
Each is active and passive in his and her way. It is a demonstration that the
process of knowing is what is important; if the male simply rests within the
woman, nothing will happen beyond the prolonging of the wonder of the
intimacy. It is the continuous experiencing of encounter and re-encounter that is
the significant happening from the viewpoint of ultimate creativity. Sexual
intercourse is the ultimate intimacy of two beings in the fullest and richest
encounter possible. It is highly significant that this is the experience that is also
the highest form of creativity in the respect that it can produce a new being.
The particular forms the offspring take in poems, drama, and the plastic arts
are symbols and myths. Symbols (like Cézanne’s tree) or myths (like that of
Oedipus) express the relationship between conscious and unconscious
experience, between one’s individual present existence and human history.
Symbol and myth are the living, immediate forms that emerge from encounter,
and they consist of the dialectic interrelationship—the living, active, continuous
mutual influence in which any change in one is bound to bring a change in the
other—of subjective and objective poles. They are born out of the heightened
consciousness of the encounter we are describing; and they have their power to
grasp us because they require from us and give us an experience of heightened
consciousness.
Thus in the history of culture artistic discovery precedes other forms. As Sir
Herbert Read puts it, “On the basis of this [artistic] activity, a ‘symbolic
discourse’ becomes possible, and religion, philosophy and science follow as
consequent modes of thought.” This is not to say that reason is the more
civilized form and art the more primitive one, in a pejorative sense—an
egregious error unfortunately often found in our rationalistic Western culture.
This is, rather, to say that the creative encounter in the art form is “total”—it
expresses a wholeness of experience; and science and philosophy abstract partial
aspects for their subsequent study.

One distinguishing characteristic of the encounter is the degree of intensity, or

what I would call passion. I am not referring here to the quantity of emotion. I
mean a quality of commitment, which may be present in little experiences—such
as a brief glance out the window at a tree—that do not necessarily involve any
great quantity of emotion. But these temporally brief experiences may have a
considerable significance for the sensitive person, here viewed as the person
with a capacity for passion. Hans Hofmann, venerable dean of abstract painters
in this country and one of our most expert and experienced teachers, remarked
that art students these days have a great deal of talent but that they lack passion
or commitment. Hofmann went on to say, interestingly enough, that his men
students get married early for reasons of security and become dependent on their
wives, and that often it is only through their wives that he, as their teacher, can
draw out their talent. The fact that talent is plentiful hut passion is lacking seems
to me to be a fundamental facet of the problem of creativity in many fields
today, and our ways of approaching creativity by evading the encounter have
played directly into this trend. We worship technique—talent—as a way of
evading the anxiety of the direct encounter.
Kierkegaard understood this so well! “The present writer …” he wrote about
himself, “can easily foresee his fate in an age when passion has been obliterated
in favor of learning, in an age when an author who wants to have readers must
take care to write in such a way that the book can easily be perused during the
afternoon nap.”

At this point we see the inadequacy of the concept commonly used in

psychoanalytic circles to explain creativity—“regression in the service of the
ego.” In my own endeavors to understand creative people in psychoanalysis and
to understand the creative act in general, I find this theory unsatisfactory. This is
not only because of its negative character, but chiefly because it proposes a
partial solution that diverts us from the center of the creative act and therefore
away from any full understanding of creativity.
In supporting the theory of “regression in the service of the ego,” Ernest Kris
cites the work of the minor poet A. E. Housman, who, in his autobiography,
describes his way of writing poetry as follows. After a full morning of teaching
classes in Latin at Oxford, Housman would have lunch, with which he would
drink a pint of beer, and would then take a walk. And in this somnambulistic
mood, his poems would come to him. Kris, in line with this theory, correlates
passiveness and receptivity with creativity. It is true that most of us find an
appeal in such lines of Housman:
Be still, my soul, be still;
the arms you bear are brittle …
And the appeal does call forth a nostalgic, regressive mood in us as readers as
well as, ostensibly, in Housman himself.
I grant, thus, that creativity often seems to be a regressive phenomenon, and
does bring out archaic, infantile, unconscious psychic contents in the artist. But
is this not parallel to what Poincaré points out (see Chapter Three, pp. 64–65)
when he discusses how his insights come in periods of rest after his great labors?
He specifically cautions us not to assume that it is the rest that produces the
creativity. The rest—or regression—only serves to release the person from his or
her intense efforts and the accompanying inhibitions, so that the creative impulse
can have free rein to express itself. When the archaic elements in a poem or a
picture have genuine power to move others, and when they have a universality of
meaning—that is, when they are genuine symbols—it is because some encounter
is occurring on a more basic, comprehensive level.
If, however, we take as a contrast some lines from one of the major poets of
our day, William Butler Yeats, we find a quite different mood. In “The Second
Coming,” Yeats describes modern man’s condition:
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world …
He then tells us what he sees:
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image …
Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs …
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
What tremendous power in this last symbol! It is a new revelation, with
beauty but with terrible meaning in relation to the situation in which we modern
human beings find ourselves. The reason Yeats has such power is that he writes
out of an intensity of consciousness that includes archaic elements because they
are part of him, as they are of every person, and will emerge in any intensely
aware moment. But the symbol has its power precisely from the fact that it is an
encounter that also includes the most dedicated and passionate intellectual effort.
In writing this poem Yeats was receptive, but by no stretch of the imagination
passive. “The poet’s labor,” MacLeish tells us, is “not to wait until the cry
gathers of itself in his own throat.”10
Obviously, poetic and creative insights of all sorts come to us in moments of
relaxation. They come not haphazardly, however, but come only in those areas
in which we are intensively committed and on which we concentrate in our
waking, conscious experience. It may be, as we have said, that the insights can
break through only in moments of relaxation: but to say this is to describe how
they come rather than to explain their genesis. My poet friends tell me that if you
want to write poetry, or even read it, the hour after a full lunch and a pint of beer
is just the time not to pick. Choose rather the moments in which you are capable
of your highest, most intense consciousness. If you write poetry during your
afternoon nap, it will be perused that way.
The issue here is not simply which poets you happen to like. It is much more
basic—namely, the nature of the symbols and myths that are born in the creative
act. Symbol and myth do bring into awareness infantile, archaic dreads,
unconscious longings, and similar primitive psychic content. This is their
regressive aspect. But they also bring out new meaning, new forms, and disclose
a reality that was literally not present before, a reality that is not merely
subjective but has a second pole which is outside ourselves. This is the
progressive side of symbol and myth. This aspect points ahead. It is integrative.
It is a progressive revealing of structure in our relation to nature and our own
existence, as the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur so well states. It is a road to
universals beyond discrete personal experience. It is this progressive aspect of
symbols and myths that is almost completely omitted in the traditional Freudian
psychoanalytic approach.
This heightened consciousness, which we have identified as characteristic of
the encounter, the state in which the dichotomy between subjective experience
and objective reality is overcome and symbols which reveal new meaning are
born, is historically termed ecstasy. Like passion, ecstasy is a quality of emotion
(or, more accurately, a quality of relationship one side of which is emotional)
rather than a quantity. Ecstasy is a temporary transcending of the subject-object
dichotomy. It is interesting that in psychology we dodge that problem, Maslow’s
work on the peak experience being a notable exception. Or, when we do speak of
ecstasy we are implicitly pejorative or assume that it is neurotic.
The experience of encounter also brings with it anxiety. I need not remind
you, after our discussion of Giacometti’s experience, of the “fear and trembling”
of artists and creative people in their moments of creative encounter. The myth
of Prometheus is the classical expression of this anxiety. W. H. Auden once
remarked that he always experiences anxiety when he writes poetry except when
he is “playing.” Playing may be defined as encounter in which anxiety is
temporarily bracketed. But in mature creativity, anxiety must be confronted if
the artist (and the rest of us who benefit from his work later on) is to experience
the joy in the creative work.
I am impressed by Frank Barron’s studies of creative persons in art and
science,11 for he shows them dirctly confronting their anxiety. Barron designated
his “creative persons” as those who were recognized by their peers as having
made distinguished contributions to their field. He showed them as well as a
control group of “normal” people a series of Rorschachlike cards, some of which
had orderly, systematic designs on them and others disorderly, unsymmetrical,
and chaotic designs. The “normal” people selected the orderly, symmetrical
cards as the designs they liked the most—they liked their universe to be “in
shape.” But the creative persons selected the chaotic, disorderly cards—they
found these more challenging and interesting. They could be like God in the
Book of Genesis, creating order out of chaos. They chose the “broken” universe;
they got joy out of encountering it and forming it into order. They could accept
the anxiety and use it in molding their disorderly universe “closer to the heart’s
desire.”
According to the theory proposed here, anxiety is understandably a
concomitant of the shaking of the self-world relationship that occurs in the
encounter. Our sense of identity is threatened; the world is not as we experienced
it before, and since self and world are always correlated, we no longer are what
we were before. Past, present, and future form a new Gestalt. Obviously this is
only rarely true in a complete sense (Gauguin going to the South Sea Islands, or
Van Gogh becoming psychotic), but it is true that the creative encounter does
change to some degree the self-world relationship. The anxiety we feel is
temporary rootlessness, disorientation; it is the anxiety of nothingness.
Creative people, as I see them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live
with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity,
sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of the “divine madness,” to borrow
the term used by the classical Greeks. They do not run away from non-being, but
by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being. They knock on
silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force
it to mean.*

*Since I have come out in support of meditation earlier (Chapter One), I feel it necessary to state my
disagreement with a claim of one kind of relaxation, namely transcendental meditation, that it is the
“science of creative intelligence” and stimulates creative thinking. True, it does further one aspect of
creativity—namely spontaneity, intuitively “feeling one’s self into the universe,” and similar things
associated with the “comfort” Maharishi talks about so often. These are the aspects of creativity associated
with children’s play. But TM completely omits the element of encounter which is essential for mature
creativity. The aspects of struggle, of tension, of constructive stress—the emotions that Giacometti was
experiencing in Lord’s account—are forgotten in TM.
I have discussed this matter with Frank Barron, psychologist at the University of California at Santa
Cruz and, in my judgment, the foremost authority on the psychology of creativity in this country. Barron,
like myself, has addressed regional conferences of TM. The card test mentioned above has been given to
some groups of transcendental meditators. The results (not yet published) were negative—that is, the
meditators tended to choose the cards with orderly and symmetrical forms. This is the opposite to Barron’s
results with especially creative persons. Also Gary Swartz studied teachers of transcendental meditation and
found that on tests of creativity they scored worse or only as well as control groups. (See Psychology
Today, July, 1975, p. 50).
When I am engaged in writing something important to me, I find that if I engage in the customary
twenty-minute meditation period before writing, my universe has become too straightened out, too orderly.
Then I have nothing to write about. My encounter has vanished into thin air. My “problems” are all solved.
I feel bliss, to be sure; but I cannot write.
I prefer, therefore, to endure the chaos, to face “complexity and perplexity,” as Barron puts it. Then I am
impelled by this chaos to seek order, to struggle with it until I can find a deeper, underlying form. I believe I
am then engaged in what MacLeish describes as struggling with the meaninglessness and silence of the
world until I can force it to mean, until I can make the silence answer and the non-being be. After the
morning’s period of writing, I can then use meditation for its authentic purpose—namely a deep relaxation
of mind and body.
It is unfortunate for the movement—in that it presages a strong reaction against the movement sometime
in the future—that its leaders are not more open to the limitations of TM and of Maharishi. All descriptions
I have seen of TM blandly assume that Maharishi’s gospel has no limitations at all. To those who wish a
more complete picture, I recommend the article by Constance Holden, “Maharishi International University:
‘Science of Creative Intelligence,’” Science, Vol. 187 (March 28, 1975), 1176.
FIVE
THE DELPHIC ORACLE AS THERAPIST

I N THE MOUNTAINS at Delphi stands a shrine that for many centuries was of
great importance to ancient Greece. The Greeks had a genius for locating their
shrines in lovely places, but Delphi is especially magnificent with a long valley
stretching between massive ranges on one side and on the other the deep blue-
green of the Bay of Cornith. It is a place where one immediately feels the awe
and the sense of grandeur which befits the nature of the shrine. Here the Greeks
found help in meeting their anxiety. In this temple, from the chaotic archaic age
down through classical times, Apollo gave counsel through his priestesses.
Socrates was even to find there inscribed on the wall of the entrance hall to the
temple his famous dictum “Know thyself,” which has become the central
touchstone for psychotherapy ever since.
The sensitive Greek, anxious about himself, his family, and his future in
those upset times, could find guidance here, for Apollo knew the meaning of
“the complicated games the gods play with humanity,” writes Prof. E. R. Dodds.
In his excellent study of the irrational in ancient Greek culture, he continues:
Without Delphi, Greek society could scarcely have endured the tensions to
which it was subjected in the Archaic Age. The crushing sense of human
ignorance and human insecurity, the dread of divine phthonos, the dread of
miasma—the accumulated burden of these things would have been unendurable
without the assurance which such an omniscient divine counsellor could give,
the assurance that behind the seeming chaos there was knowledge and purpose.1
The anxiety that Apollo helped people meet was the apprehension that
accompanies a formative, fermenting, creative, powerfully expanding period. It
is important to see that it was not neurotic anxiety, characterized by withdrawal,
inhibition, and the blocking off of vitality. The archaic period in ancient Greece
was the time of emergence and vital growth fraught with distress that resulted
from the chaos of expanding outer and inner limits. The Greeks were
experiencing the anxiety of new possibilities—psychologically, politically,
aesthetically, and spiritually. These new possibilities, and the anxiety that always
accompanies such challenges, were forced upon them whether they wished it or
not.
The shrine at Delphi rose to prominence at a time when the old stability and
order of the family were crumbling and the individual soon would have to be
responsible for himself. In Homeric Greece, Odysseus’ wife Penelope and son
Telemachus could oversee the estate whether Odysseus was there or at the wars
in Troy or tossed for ten years on the “wine-dark sea.” But now, in the archaic
period, families must be welded into cities. Each young Telemachus felt himself
standing on the brink of the time when he would have to choose his own future
and find his own place as part of a new city. How fertile the myth of the young
Telemachus has been for modern writers who are searching for their own
identity. James Joyce presents one aspect of it in Ulysses. Thomas Wolfe refers
often to Telemachus as the myth of the search for the father, which was Wolfe’s
search as truly as it was the ancient Greek’s. Wolfe, like any modern
Telemachus, found that the hard, cold truth was “you can’t go home again.”
The city-states were struggling in anarchy, tyrant following tyrant (a term
that in Greek does not have the usual destructive connotation it carries in
English).2 The upsurging leaders tried to weld the new power into some order.
New forms of governing the city-states, new laws, and new interpretations of the
gods were emerging, all of which gave the individual new psychological powers.
In such a period of change and growth, emergence is often experienced by the
individual as emergency with all its attendant stress.
Into this ferment came the symbol of Apollo and his shrine at Delphi and the
rich myths on which they were based.

It is important to remember that Apollo is the god of form, the god of reason and
logic. Thus it is no accident that his shrine became the important one in this
chaotic time and that through this god of proportion and balance the citizens
sought assurance that there was meaning and purpose behind the seeming chaos.
Form and proportion and the golden mean were essential if these men and
women were to control their deep passions, not in order to tame these passions
but to turn to constructive use the daimonic powers that the Greeks knew so well
in nature and in themselves. Apollo is also the god of art since form—elegance
—is an essential characteristic of beauty. Indeed, Parnassus, the mountain at
Delphi on whose flank Apollo’s shrine stood, has become a symbol in all
Western languages for devotion to the virtues of the mind.
We appreciate more of the rich meaning of such a myth when we note that
Apollo is the god of light—not only the light of the sun, but the light of the
mind, the light of reason, the light of insight. He is often called Helios, the word
in Greek for “sun,” and Phoebus Apollo, the god of brightness and radiance.
Finally, we note the most cogent point of all: Apollo is the god of healing and
well-being, and his son Asclepius is the god of medicine.
All of these attributes of Apollo, created as they were by collective
unconscious processes in the mythology of the dark pre-Homeric centuries, are
interwoven with fantastic literal as well as figurative significance. How
consistent and meaningful it is that this is the god of good counsel, of
psychological and spiritual insight, who will give guidance to a highly vital,
formative age! An Athenian setting out on the trip to Delphi to consult Apollo
would be turning over in his imagination at almost every moment in the journey
this figure of the god of light and healing. Spinoza adjured us to fix our attention
on a desired virtue, and we would thus tend to acquire it. Our Greek would be
doing this on his trip, and the psychological processes of anticipation, hope, and
faith would already be at work. Thus he would be proleptically participating in
his own “cure.” His conscious intentions and his deeper intentionality would be
already committed to the event about to take place. For the one who participates
in them, symbols and myths carry their own healing power.
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. Despite the obvious determinism in
human life—especially in the physical aspect of one’s self in such simple things
as color of eyes, height, relative length of life, and so on—there is also, clearly,
this element of self-directing, self-forming. Thinking and self-creating are
inseparable. When we become aware of all the fantasies in which we see
ourselves in the future, pilot ourselves this way or that, this becomes obvious.
This continuous influencing of the direction of a person’s development goes
on in the ancient Greek or the modern American, deny it as we wish. Spinoza’s
counsel, mentioned above, is one way this piloting function can be actualized.
The mass of myths dealing with the reincarnation of an individual into one or
another life form, its status dependent on how this person has lived his or her
life, attests to the awareness in the experience of the race that the individual does
have some responsibility for how he or she lives. Sartre’s argument that we
invent ourselves by virtue of the multitude of our choices may be overstated, but
its partial truth must nevertheless be admitted.
Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between stimulus and
response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to
throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is
inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness.
We are concerned here with how the oracle at Delphi furthers this process of
self-creation. Clearly self-creating is actualized by our hopes, our ideals, our
images, and all sorts of imagined constructs that we may hold from time to time
in the forefront of our attention. These “models” function consciously as well as
unconsciously; they are shown in fantasy as well as in overt behavior. The
summary terms for this process are symbols and myths. And the shrine of Apollo
at Delphi was a concrete expression of these symbols and myths, and it was
where they were embodied in ritual.

We can see in the superb statues of Apollo carved at this time—the archaic
figure with his strong, straight form, his calm beauty of head, his ordered
features which are eloquent with controlled passion, even down to the slight
“knowing” smile on the almost straight mouth—how this god could be the
symbol in which the Greek artists as well as other citizens of that period
perceived their longed-for order. There is a curious feature in these statues that I
have seen: the eyes are dilated, made more open than is normal in the head of a
living man or in classical Greek statues. If you walk through the archaic Greek
room of the National Museum in Athens, you will be struck by the fact that the
dilated eyes of the marble figures of Apollo give an expression of great alertness.
What a contrast to the relaxed, almost sleepy eyes of the familiar fourth-century
head of Hermes by Praxiteles.
These dilated eyes of the archaic Apollo are characteristic of apprehension.
They express the anxiety—the excessive awareness, the “looking about” on all
sides lest something unknown might happen—that goes with living in a
fomenting age. There is a remarkable parallel between these eyes and the eyes in
the figures Michelangelo painted in another formative period, the Renaissance.
Almost all of Michelangelo’s human beings, powerful and triumphant as they
appear at first glance, have, on closer inspection, the dilated eyes which are a
telltale sign of anxiety. And as if to demonstrate that he is expressing the inner
tensions not only of his age but of himself as a member of his age, Michelangelo
in his self-portraits paints eyes that are again markedly distended in the way that
is typical of apprehension.
The poet Rilke also was struck by Apollo’s prominent eyes with their quality
of seeing deeply. In his “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” he speaks of “… his
legendary head in which the eyeballs ripened,” and then continues,
… But
his torso still glows like a candelabrum
in which his gaze, only turned low,
holds and gleams. Else could not the curve
of the breast blind you, nor in the slight turn
of the loins could a smile be running
to that middle, which carried procreation.
Else would this stone be standing maimed and short
under the shoulders’ translucent plunge
nor flimmering like the fell of beasts of prey
nor breaking out of all its contours
like a star: for there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.3
In this vivid picture we note how well Rilke catches the essence of controlled
passion—not inhibited or repressed passion, as was to be the goal during the
later Hellenistic age of the Greek teachers who had become afraid of vital drives.
What a far cry is Rilke’s interpretation from Victorian inhibition and repression
of drives. These early Greeks, who wept and made love and killed with zest,
gloried in passion and Eros and the daimonic. (Persons in therapy nowadays,
considering the strange spectacle in ancient Greece, remark on the fact that it is
the strong person like Odysseus or Achilles who weeps.) But the Greeks knew
also that these drives had to be directed and controlled. It was the essence, they
believed, of a man of virtue (arete) that he choose his passions rather than be
chosen by them. In this lies the explanation of why they did not need to go
through the self-castrating practice of denying Eros and the daimonic, as modern
Western man does.
The sense of the archaic period is shown even in Rilke’s curious last
sentence, which seems at first (but only at first) to be a non sequitur: “You must
change your life.” This is the call of passionate beauty, the demand that beauty
makes on us by its very presence that we also participate in the new form. Not at
all moralistic (the call has nothing whatever to do with right or wrong), it is
nevertheless an imperious demand which grasps us with the insistence that we
take into our own lives this new harmonious form.

How the oracle of Apollo functioned and where the advice it gave came from
are, of course, fascinating questions. But unfortunately little seems to be known
on this subject. The shrine was veiled in secrecy; those who directed it could not
only give counsel to others but could also keep their own. Plato tells us that a
“prophetic madness” overcame the Pythia, the priestess who served in the temple
as mouthpiece for Apollo. From this “madness” there emerged some “creative
insight,” so Plato believed, which represented deeper-than-normal levels of
consciousness. “It is to their madness,” he writes in his Phaedrus, “that we owe
the many benefits that the Pythia of Delphi and the priestesses of Dodona were
able to bestow upon Greece both privately and in public life, for when they were
in their right minds their achievements amounted to little or nothing.”4 This is a
clear statement of one side of a controversy that has raged through human
history about the source of inspiration—to what extent does creativity come
from madness?
Apollo spoke in the first person through the Pythia. Her voice changed and
became husky, throaty, and quavering like that of a modern medium. The god
was said to enter her at the very moment of her seizure, or enthusiasm, as the
root of that term, en-theo (“in god”), literally suggests.
Before the “seance” the priestess went through several ritualistic acts, such
as special bathing and perhaps drinking from a sacred spring, presumedly with
the customary autosuggestive effects. But the oft-repeated statement that she
breathed vapors issuing from a fissure in the rocks of the shrine which induced a
hypnotic effect is disposed of summarily by Professor Dodds:
As for the famous “vapours” to which the Pythia’s inspiration was once
confidently ascribed, they are a Hellenistic invention…. Plutarch, who knew the
facts, saw the difficulties of the vapour theory, and seems finally to have rejected
it altogether; but like the Stoic philosophers, nineteenth-century scholars seized
with relief on a nice solid materialist explanation.5
Dodds goes on to remark pithily that “less has been heard of this theory since the
French excavations showed that there are to-day no vapours, and no ‘chasm’
from which vapours could once have come.”6 Obviously such explanations are
needless in view of the present-day evidence of anthropology and abnormal
psychology.
The Pythian priestesses themselves seemed to be simple, uneducated women
(Plutarch tells of one who was the daughter of a peasant). But modern scholars
have a high respect for the intelligence system of the oracle. The decisions of
Delphi showed sufficient signs of a consistent policy to convince scholars that
human intelligence, intuition, and insight did play a decisive role in the process.
Although Apollo committed some notorious blunders in his predictions and
advice, especially during the Persian wars, the Greeks, with an attitude like
many people in psychotherapy have toward their therapist today, forgave him
evidently because of the useful advice and help he had given at other times.
The point that interests us most is the function of the shrine as a communal
symbol that had the power to draw out the preconscious and unconscious
collective insights of the Greeks. Delphi’s communal, collective aspect had a
sound foundation: the shrine was originally devoted to the earth goddesses
before being dedicated to Apollo. Also it is collective in the sense that Dionysus,
Apollo’s opposite, was also a strong influence at Delphi. Greek vases show
Apollo, presumably at Delphi, grasping Dionysus’ hand. Plutarch does not
exaggerate much when he writes, “as regards the Delphic oracle the part played
by Dionysus was no less than Apollo’s.”7
Any genuine symbol, with its accompanying ceremonial rite, becomes the
mirror that reflects insights, new possibilities, new wisdom, and other
psychological and spiritual phenomena that we do not dare experience on our
own. We cannot for two reasons. The first is our own anxiety: the new insights
often—and, we could even say, typically—would frighten us too much were we
to take full and lonely responsibility for them. In an age of ferment such insights
may come frequently, and they require more psychological and spiritual
responsibility than most individuals are prepared to bear. In dreams people can
let themselves do things—such as killing their parent or their child, or thinking
“my mother hated me,” for instance–that would normally be too horrible to think
or say in ordinary speech. We hesitate to think these and similar things even in
daydreams since such fantasies are felt to carry more individual responsibility
than night dreams. But if we can have a dream say it, or have Apollo through his
oracle say it, we can be much more frank about our new truth.
The second reason is we escape hubris. Socrates could assert that Apollo at
Delphi had pronounced him the wisest man then living, a claim—whether it be
Socratic wit or not—he could never have made on his own.
How did one interpret the counsel of the priestesses? This is the same as
asking: How does one interpret a symbol? The divinations of the priestess were
generally couched in poetry and often were uttered “in wild, onomatopoeic cries
as well as articulate speech, and this ‘raw material’ certainly had to be
interpreted and worked over.”8 Like mediumistic statements of all ages, these
were sufficiently cryptic not only to leave the way open for interpretation, but to
require it. And often they were susceptible to two or many different
interpretations.
The process was like the interpretation of a dream. Harry Stack Sullivan used
to teach young analysts-in-training not to enterpret a dream as if it were the law
of the Medes and the Persians, but to suggest two different meanings to the
person being analyzed, thus requiring him or her to choose between them. The
value of dreams, like these divinations, is not that they give a specific answer,
but that they open up new areas of psychic reality, shake us out of our customary
ruts, and throw light on a new segment of our lives. Thus the sayings of the
shrine, like dreams, were not to be received passively; the recipients had to
“live” themselves into the message.
During the Persian wars, for example, when the anxious Athenians had
petitioned Apollo to give them guidance, word came from the oracle adjuring
them to trust in “the wooden wall.” The meaning of this enigma was hotly
debated. As Herodotus tells the story, “Certain of the old men were of opinion
that the god meant to tell them the acropolis would escape, for this was anciently
defended by a wooden palisade. Others maintained that the god referred to
wooden ships, which had best be at once got ready.” Thereupon another part of
the oracle caused debate, for some thought they should sail away without a fight
and establish themselves in a new land. But The mistocles convinced the people
that they were intended to engage in a sea fight near Salamis, which they did,
destroying Xerxes’ fleet in one of the decisive battles of history.9
Whatever the intention of the Delphic priests, the effect of ambiguous
prophecies was to force the suppliants to think out their situation anew, to
reconsider their plans, and to conceive of new possibilities.
Apollo, indeed, was nicknamed the “ambiguous one.” Lest some budding
therapists take this as an excuse for their own ambiguity, let us here note a
difference between modern therapy and the divinations of the oracle. The
utterances of the priestess are on a level closer to the recipients’ unconscious,
closer to actual dreams, in contrast to the interpretation of dreams in a
therapeutic hour. Apollo speaks from deeper dimensions of consciousness in the
citizen and the collective group (i.e., the city). Thus there can be a creative
ambiguity, which occurs both in the original saying (or dream) and in the
citizen’s (or patient’s) interpretation of it. The oracle hence has an advantage
over the contemporary therapist. In any case, I believe a therapist ought to be as
succinct as possible, and leave the inescapable ambiguity to the patient!
The counsels of Delphi were not advice in the strict sense, but rather were
stimulants to the individual and to the group to look inward, to consult their own
intuition and wisdom. The oracles put the problem in a new context so that it
could be seen in a different way, a way in which new and as yet unimagined
possibilities would become evident. It is a common misconception that such
shrines, as well as modern therapy, tend to make the individual more passive.
This would be bad therapy and a misinterpretation of the oracles. Both should do
exactly the opposite; they should require individuals to recognize their own
possibilities, enlightening new aspects of themselves and their interpersonal
relationships. This process taps the source of creativity in people. It turns them
inward toward their own creative springs.
In the Apologia, Socrates tells us how he tried to puzzle out what the god
meant by telling his friend Chaerephon that no one in the world was wiser than
he (Socrates). The philosopher came to the conclusion that it meant he was
wisest because he admitted his own ignorance. The god also counseled Socrates
to “know thyself.” Ever since that time, thoughtful men like Nietzsche and
Kierkegaard have been trying to fathom the meaning of the god’s advice, and we
are still stimulated to find new meanings in it. Nietzsche even interprets it as
meaning just opposite to what one would conclude at first glance: “What did the
god mean who proclaimed ‘Know thyself’ to Socrates? Did he perchance mean,
‘Cease to be concerned about thyself,’ ‘Be objective’?” Like the true symbols
and/or myths they are, these utterances of the god yield unending richness as
new and interesting meanings are unfolded.

There is another reason why an oracle can be significant as the embodiment of

the unconscious collective insights of the group. A symbol or myth acts like a
projective screen in drawing out the insight. Like Rorschach cards or Murray’s
Thematic Apperception Test, the oracle and its ceremonies are a screen that
stimulates wonder and calls imagination into action.
But I must hasten to insert a caution. The process going on at such a place
and time may be called “projection,” but we must insist that it is not “projection”
in any pejorative sense of the word, either in the psychoanalytical one in which
an individual “projects” what is “sick” and therefore what he or she cannot face,
nor in the empirical psychological sense in which it is implied that the process is
simply subjective and that the cards or TAT pictures have nothing to do with the
result. In my judgment, both of these pejorative uses of projection result from
the common failure of Western man to understand the nature of symbol and
myth.
The “screen” is not merely a blank mirror. It is, rather, the objective pole
necessary for calling forth the subjective processes of consciousness. The
Rorschach cards are definite and real forms of black and color, even though no
one ever before has “seen” in them the things you or I may see in them. Such
“projection” is in no sense a “regression” by definition or something less
respectable than being able to say what you want to say in rational sentences
without the cards. It is rather a legitimate and healthy exercise of imagination.
This process goes on all the time in art. Paint and canvas are objective things
that have powerful and existential influences on the artist in bringing out his or
her ideas and visions. Indeed, the artist is in a dialectical relation not only with
paint and canvas, but with the shapes he or she sees in nature. The poet and the
musician are in a similar relationship with their inherited language and musical
notes. The artist, the poet, and the musician dare to bring forth new forms, new
kinds of vitality and meaning. They are, at least partially, protected from “going
crazy” in this process of radical emergence by the form given by the media—
namely the paints, the marble, the words, the musical notes.
The shrine of Apollo at Delphi thus can most felicitously be seen as a
communal symbol. We can postulate, then, that its insights come by a communal
symbolic process involving both subjective and objective factors in a dialectical
relation with each other. For anyone who authentically uses the oracle, new
forms, new ideal possibilities, new ethical and religious structures may be born
from levels of experience that underlie and transcend the individual’s customary
waking consciousness. We have noted that Plato calls this process the ecstasy of
“prophetic madness.” Ecstasy is a time-honored method of transcending our
ordinary consciousness and a way of helping us arrive at insights we could not
attain otherwise. An element of ecstasy, however slight, is part and parcel of
every genuine symbol and myth; for if we genuinely participate in the symbol or
myth, we are for that moment taken “out of” and “beyond” ourselves.
The psychological approach to symbol and myth is only one of several
possible avenues. In taking this approach I do not wish to “psychologize away”
the myth’s religious meaning. From this religious aspect of myth we get the
insight (revelation) that comes from the dialectical interplay of the subjective
elements in the individual and the objective fact of the oracle. To the genuine
believer, the myth is never purely psychological. It always includes an element
of revelation, whether from the Greek Apollo, or the Hebrew Elohim, or the
Oriental “Being.” If we completely psychologized away this religious element,
we would be unable to appreciate the power with which Aeschylus and
Sophocles wrote their dramas and even unable to understand what they are
talking about. Aeschylus and Sophocles and the other dramatists could write
great tragedies because of the religious dimensions of the myths, which gave a
structural undergirding to their belief in the dignity of the race and the meaning
of its destiny.
SIX
ON THE LIMITS OF CREATIVITY

O N A SATURDAY evening at an Esalen week end in New York recently, a

panel discussion on the human prospect was held. The panel consisted of
such insightful and stimulating persons as Joyce Carol Oates, Gregory Bate-son,
and William Irwin Thompson. The audience was made up of seven or eight
hundred eager individuals, expectantly set for an interesting discussion at the
very least. In his opening remarks, the chairman emphasized the theme that “the
possibilities of the human being are unlimited.”
But strange to say, there seemed, as the meeting went on, to be no problems
to discuss. The vast vacuum filling the room was felt by both the panel and the
audience alike. All the exciting issues that the participants on the panel had
approached so eagerly had mysteriously vanished. As the discussion limped
along to the end of an almost fruitless evening, the common question seemed to
be: What had gone wrong?
I propose that the statement, “human possibilities are unlimited” is de-
energizing. If you take it at face value, there is no real problem anymore. You
can only stand up and sing hallelujah and then go home. Every problem will
sooner or later be overcome by these unlimited possibilities; there remain only
temporary difficulties that will go away of their own accord when the time
comes. Contrary to the chairman’s intention, statements like his actually
terrorize the listener: it is like putting someone into a canoe and pushing him out
into the Atlantic toward England with the cheery comment, “The sky’s the
limit.” The canoer is only too aware of the fact that an inescapably real limit is
also the bottom of the ocean.
In these notes I shall explore the hypothesis that limits are not only
unavoidable in human life, they are also valuable. I shall also discuss the
phenomenon that creativity itself requires limits, for the creative act arises out of
the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.
To begin with, there is the inescapable physical limitation of death. We can
postpone our death slightly, but nevertheless each of us will die and at some
future time unknown to and unpredictable by us. Sickness is another limit. When
we overwork we get ill in one form or another. There are obvious neurological
limits. If the blood stops flowing to the brain for as little as a couple of minutes,
a stroke or some other kind of serious damage occurs. Despite the fact that we
can improve our intelligence to some degree, it remains radically limited by our
physical and emotional environment.
There are also metaphysical limitations which are even more interesting.
Each of us was born into a certain family in a certain country at a certain
historical moment, all with no choice on our part. If we try to deny these facts—
like Jay Gatsby in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby—we blind ourselves to reality
and come to grief. True, we can surpass to some extent the limitations of our
family backgrounds or our historical situation, but such transcendence can occur
only to those who accept the fact of their limitation to begin with.

1. THE VALUE OF LIMITS

Consciousness itself is born out of the awareness of these limits. Human

consciousness is the distinguishing feature of our existence; without limitations
we would never have developed it. Consciousness is the awareness that emerges
out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations. Infants begin
to be aware of limits when they experience the ball as different from themselves;
mother is a limiting factor for them in that she does not feed them every time
they cry for food. Through a multitude of such limiting experiences they learn to
develop the capacity to differentiate themselves from others and from objects
and to delay gratification. If there had been no limits, there would be no
consciousness.
Our discussion so far may seem, at first glance, to be discouraging, but not
when we probe more deeply. It is not by accident that the Hebrew myth that
marks the beginning of human consciousness, Adam and Eve in the Garden of
Eden, is portrayed in the context of a rebellion. Consciousness is born in the
struggle against a limit, called there a prohibition. Going beyond the limit set by
Yahweh is then punished by the acquiring of other limits which operate inwardly
in the human being—anxiety, the feeling of alienation and guilt. But valuable
qualities also come out of this experience of rebellion—the sense of personal
responsibility and ultimately the possibility, born out of loneliness, of human
love. Confronting limits for the human personality actually turns out to be
expansive. Limiting and expanding thus go together.
Alfred Adler proposed that civilization arose out of our physical limitations,
or what Adler called inferiority. Tooth for tooth and claw for claw, men and
women were inferior to the wild animals. In the struggle against these limitations
for their survival, human beings evolved their intelligence.
Heraclitus said, “Conflict is both king of all and father of all.” 1 He was
referring to the theme I am here stating: conflict presupposes limits, and the
struggle with limits is actually the source of creative productions. The limits are
as necessary as those provided by the banks of a river, without which the water
would be dispersed on the earth and there would be no river—that is, the river is
constituted by the tension between the flowing water and the banks. Art in the
same way requires limits as a necessary factor in its birth.
Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the
latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which
are essential to the work of art or poem. Again listen to Heraclitus: unwise
people “do not understand how that which differs with itself is in agreement:
harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of the bow and the lyre.” 2 In a
discussion of how he composed his music, Duke Ellington explained that since
his trumpet player could reach certain notes beautifully but not other notes, and
the same with his trombonist, he had to write his music within those limits. “It’s
good to have limits,” he remarked.
True, in our age there is occurring a new valuation of spontaneity and a
strong reaction against rigidity. This goes along with a rediscovery of the values
of the childlike capacity to play. In modern art, as we all know, there has
evolved a new interest in children’s painting as well as in peasant and primitive
art, and these kinds of spontaneity often are used as models for adult art work.
This is especially true in psychotherapy. The great majority of patients
experience themselves as stifled and inhibited by the excessive and rigid limits
insisted on by their parents. One of their reasons for coming for therapy in the
first place is this conviction that all of this needs to be thrown overboard. Even if
it is simplistic, this urge toward spontaneity obviously should be valued by the
therapist. 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.
But we must not forget that these stages in therapy, like children’s art, are
interim stages. Children’s art is characterized by an unfinished quality. Despite
the apparent similarity with nonobjective art, it still lacks the tension necessary
for authentic mature art. It is a promise but not yet an achievement. Sooner or
later the growing person’s art must relate itself to the dialectic tension that
comes out of confronting limits and is present in all forms of mature art.
Michelangelo’s writhing slaves; Van Gogh’s fiercely twisting cypress trees;
Cézanne’s lovely yellow-green landscapes of southern France, reminding us of
the freshness of eternal spring—these works have that spontaneity, but they also
have the mature quality that comes from the absorption of tension. This makes
them much more than “interesting”; it makes them great. The controlled and
transcended tension present in the work of art is the result of the artists’
successful struggle with and against limits.

2. FORM AS A LIMITATION IN CREATIVITY

The significance of limits in art is seen most clearly when we consider the
question of form. Form provides the essential boundaries and structure for the
creative act. It is no accident that the art critic Clive Bell, in his books about
Cézanne, cites “significant form” as the key to understanding the great painter’s
work.
Let us say I draw a rabbit on a blackboard. You say, “There’s a rabbit.” In
reality there is nothing at all on the blackboard except the simple line I have
made: no protrusion, nothing three dimensional, no indentation. It is the same
blackboard as it was, and there can be no rabbit “on” it. You see only my chalk
line, which may be infinitesimally narrow. This line limits the content. It says
what space is within the picture and what is outside—it is a pure limiting to that
particular form. The rabbit appears because you have accepted my
communication that this space within the line is that which I wish to demarcate.
There is in this limiting a nonmaterial character, a spiritual character if you
will, that is necessary in all creativity. Hence, form and, similarly, design, plan,
and pattern all refer to a nonmaterial meaning present in the limits.
Our discussion of form demonstrates something else—that the object you see
is a product both of your subjectivity and external reality. The form is born out
of a dialectical relation between my brain (which is subjective, in me) and the
object that I see external to me (which is objective). As Immanuel Kant insisted,
we not only know the world, but the world at the same time conforms to our
ways of knowing. Incidentally, note the word conform— the world forms itself
“with,” it takes on our forms.
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.
Speaking of poetry, Coleridge distinguished between two kinds of form. One
is external to the poet—the mechanical form, let us say, of the sonnet. This
consists of an arbitrary agreement that the sonnet will consist of fourteen lines in
a certain pattern. The other kind of form is organic. This is inner form. It comes
from the poet, and consists of the passion he or she puts into the poem. The
organic aspect of form causes it to grow on its own; it speaks to us down through
the ages revealing new meaning to each generation. Centuries later we may find
meaning in it that even the author did not know was there.
When you write a poem, you discover that the very necessity of fitting your
meaning into such and such a form requires you to search in your imagination
for new meanings. You reject certain ways of saying it; you select others, always
trying to form the poem again. In your forming, you arrive at new and more
profound meanings than you had even dreamed of. Form is not a mere lopping
off of meaning that you don’t have room to put into your poem; it is an aid to
finding new meaning, a stimulus to condensing your meaning, to simplifying
and purifying it, and to discovering on a more universal dimension the essence
you wish to express. How much meaning Shakespeare could put into his plays
because they were written in blank verse rather than prose, or his sonnets
because they were fourteen lines!
In our day the concept of form is often attacked because of its relation to
“formality” and “formalism,” both of which—so we are told—are to be avoided
like the plague. I agree that in transitional times like our own, when honesty of
style is difficult to come by, formalism and formality should be required to
demonstrate their authenticity. But in the attack on these often bastardized kinds
of formalism, it is not form itself that is being accused, but special kinds of form
—generally the conformist, dead kinds, which actually do lack an inner, organic
vitality.
We should remember, moreover, that all spontaneity carries with it its own
form. Anything expressed in language, for example, carries the forms given to it
by that language. How different a poem originally written in English sounds
when translated into the exquisite music of the French language or into the
profound and powerful sentiments of the German language! Another example is
the rebellion in the name of spontaneity against picture frames, as shown in
those paintings that reach out over their frames, dramatically breaking the
latter’s too limiting boundaries. This act borrows its spontaneous power from the
assumption of a frame to start with.
The juxtaposition of spontaneity and form are, of course, present all through
human history. It is the ancient but ever-modern struggle of the Dionysian versus
the Apollonian. In transitional periods this dichotomy comes completely out in
the open since old forms do have to be transcended. I can, therefore, understand
the rebellion in our day against form and limits as expressed in the cry “We have
unlimited potentialities.” But when these movements try to throw form or limits
out entirely, they become self-destructive and noncreative. Never is form itself
superseded so long as creativity endures. If form were to vanish, spontaneity
would vanish with it.

3. IMAGINATION AND FORM

Imagination is the outreaching of mind. It is the individual’s capacity to accept

the bombardment of the conscious mind with ideas, impulses, images, and every
other sort of psychic phenomena welling up from the preconscious. It is the
capacity to “dream dreams and see visions,” to consider diverse possibilities, and
to endure the tension involved in holding these possibilities before one’s
attention. Imagination is casting off mooring ropes, taking one’s chances that
there will be new mooring posts in the vastness ahead.
In creative endeavors the imagination operates in juxtaposition with form.
When these endeavors are successful, it is because imagination infuses form
with its own vitality. The question is: How far can we let our imagination loose?
Can we give it rein? Dare to think the unthinkable? Dare to conceive of, and
move among, new visions?
At such times we face the danger of losing our orientation, the danger of
complete isolation. Will we lose our accepted language, which makes
communication possible in a shared world? Will we lose the boundaries that
enable us to orient ourselves to what we call reality? This, again, is the problem
of form or, stated differently, the awareness of limits.
Psychologically speaking, this is experienced by many people as psychosis.
Hence some psychotics walk close to the wall in hospitals. They keep oriented to
the edges, always preserving their localization in the external environment.
Having no localization inwardly, they find it especially important to retain
whatever outward localization is available.
As director of a large mental hospital in Germany which received many
brain-injured soldiers during the war, Dr. Kurt Goldstein found that these
patients suffered radical limitation of their capacities for imagination. He
observed that they had to keep their closets in rigid array, shoes always placed in
just this position, shirts hung in just that place. Whenever a closet was upset, the
patient became panicky. He could not orient himself to the new arrangement,
could not imagine a new “form” that would bring order out of the chaos. The
patient was then thrown into what Goldstein called the “catastrophic situation.”
Or when asked to write his name on a sheet of paper, the brain-injured person
would write the name in some corner close to the boundaries. He could not
tolerate the possibility of becoming lost in the open spaces. His capacities for
abstract thought, for transcending the immediate facts in terms of the possible—
what I call, in this context, imagination—were severely curtailed. He felt
powerless to change the environment to make it adequate to his needs.
Such behavior is indicative of what life is when imaginative powers are cut
off. The limits have always to be kept clear and visible. Lacking the ability to
shift forms, these patients found their world radically truncated. Any ‘limitless”
existence was experienced by them as being highly dangerous.
Not brain-injured, you and I nevertheless can experience a similar anxiety in
the reverse situation—that is, in the creative act. The boundaries of our world
shift under our feet and we tremble while waiting to see whether any new form
will take the place of the lost boundary or whether we can create out of this
chaos some new order.
As imagination gives vitality to form, form keeps imagination from driving
us into psychosis. This is the ultimate necessity of limits. 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.
There is a curiously sharp sense of joy—or perhaps better expressed, a sense
of mild ecstasy—that comes when you find the particular form required by your
creation. Let us say you have been puzzling about it for days when suddenly you
get the insight that unlocks the door—you see how to write that line, what
combination of colors is needed in your picture, how to form that theme you
may be writing for a class, or you hit upon the theory to fit your new facts. I
have often wondered about this special sense of joy; it so often seems out of
proportion to what actually has happened.
I may have worked at my desk morning after morning trying to find a way to
express some important idea. When my “insight” suddenly breaks through—
which may happen when I am chopping wood in the afternoon—I experience a
strange lightness in my step as though a great load were taken off my shoulders,
a sense of joy on a deeper level that continues without any relation whatever to
the mundane tasks that I may be performing at the time. It cannot be just that the
problem at hand has been answered—that generally brings only a sense of relief.
What is the source of this curious pleasure?
I propose that it is the experience of this-is-the-way-things-are-meant-to-be.
If only for that moment, we participate in the myth of creation. Order comes out
of disorder, form out of chaos, as it did in the creation of the universe. The sense
of joy comes from our participation, no matter how slight, in being as such. The
paradox is that at that moment we also experience more vividly our own
limitations. We discover the amor fati that Nietzsche writes about—the love of
one’s fate. No wonder it gives a sense of ecstasy!
SEVEN
PASSION FOR FORM

F OR MANY YEARS I have been convinced that something occurs in the creative
working of the imagination that is more fundamental—but more puzzling—
than we have assumed in contemporary psychology. In our day of dedication to
facts and hard-headed objectivity, we have disparaged imagination: it gets us
away from “reality”; it taints our work with “subjectivity”; and, worst of all, it is
said to be unscientific. As a result, art and imagination are often taken as the
“frosting” to life rather than as the solid food. No wonder people think of “art” in
terms of its cognate, “artificial,” or even consider it a luxury that slyly fools us,
“artifice.” Throughout Western history our dilemma has been whether
imagination shall turn out to be artifice or the source of being.
What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of
human experience? What if our logic and science derive from art forms and are
fundamentally dependent on them rather than art being merely a decoration for
our work when science and logic have produced it? These are the hypotheses I
propose here.
This same problem is related to psychotherapy in ways that are much more
profound than merely the play on words. In other words, is psychotherapy an
artifice, a process that is characterized by artificiality, or is it a process that can
give birth to new being?

Pondering these hypotheses, I brought data to my aid from the dreams of persons
in therapy. By dreaming, persons in analysis, I saw, are doing something on a
level quite below that of psychodynamics. They are struggling with their world
—to make sense out of nonsense, meaning out of chaos, coherence out of
conflict. They are doing it by imagination, by constructing new forms and
relationships in their world, and by achieving through proportion and perspective
a world in which they can survive and live with some meaning.
Here is a simple dream. It was related by an intelligent man who seems
younger than his thirty years, coming from a culture where fathers have
considerable authority.
I was in the sea playing with some large porpoises. I like porpoises and wanted
these to be like pets. Then I began to get afraid, thinking that the big porpoises
would hurt me. I went out of the water, on the shore, and now I seem to be a cat
hanging by its tail from a tree. The cat is curled up in a tear-drop form, but its
eyes are big and seductive, one of them winking. A porpoise comes up, and, like
a father cajoling a youngster out of bed with “get up and get going,” it hits the
cat lightly. The cat then becomes afraid with a real panic and bounds off in a
straight line into the higher rocks, away from the sea.
Let us put aside such obvious symbols as the big porpoises being father and
so on—symbols that are almost always confused with symptoms. I ask you to
take the dream as an abstract painting, to look at it as pure form and motion.
We see first a smallish form, namely the boy, playing with the larger forms,
the porpoises. Imagine the former as a small circle, and the latter as large circles.
The playing movement conveys a kind of love in the dream, which we could
express by lines toward each other converging in the play. In the second scene
we see the smaller form (the boy in his fright) moving in a line out of the sea and
away from the larger forms. The third scene shows the smaller form as a cat,
now in an elliptical, tearlike, form, the coyness of the cat’s eyes being seductive.
The big form now coming toward the cat moves into the cajoling act and the
lines here, it seems to me, would be confused. This is a typical neurotic phase
consisting of the dreamer trying to resolve his relationship with his father and
the world. And, of course, it does not work. The fourth and last scene is the
panic in which the smaller form, the cat, moves rapidly out of the scene. It
dashes toward the higher rocks. The motion is in a straight line off the canvas.
The whole dream can be seen as an endeavor through form and motion to
resolve this young man’s relationship, in its love and its fear, to his father and
father figures.
The resolution is a vivid failure. But the “painting” or play, Ionescolike
though it be, shows like many a contemporary drama the vital tension in the
irresolution of conflict. Therapeutically speaking, the patient is certainly facing
his conflicts, albeit he can at the moment do nothing but flee.
We also can see in these scenes a progression of planes: first, the plane of the
sea; second, the higher plane of the land with the tree; and third, the highest
plane of all, namely the rocks on the mountain to which the cat leaps. These may
be conceived as higher levels of consciousness to which the dreamer climbs.
This expansion of consciousness may represent an important gain for the patient
even though in the dream the actual resolution of the problem is a failure.
When we turn such a dream into an abstract painting, we are on a deeper
level than psychodynamics. I do not mean we should leave out the contents of
the dreams of our patients. I mean we should go beyond contents to the ground
forms. We shall then be dealing with basic forms that only later, and
derivatively, become formulations.
From the most obvious viewpoint, the son is trying to work out a better
relationship with his father, to be accepted as a comrade, let us say. But on a
deeper level he is trying to construct a world that makes sense, that has space
and motion and keeps these in some proportion, a world that he can live in. You
can live without a father who accepts you, but you cannot live without a world
that makes some sense to you. Symbol in this sense no longer means symptom.
As I have pointed out elsewhere,1 symbol returns to its original and root meaning
of “drawing together” (sym-ballein). The problem—the neurosis and its elements
—is described by the antonym of symbolic, namely diabolic (dia-ballein),
“pulling apart.”
Dreams are par excellence the realm of symbols and myths. I use the term
myth not in the pejorative sense of “falsehood,” but in the sense of a form of
universal truth revealed in some partial way to the dreamer. These are ways
human consciousness makes sense of the world. Persons in therapy, like all of
us, are trying to make sense out of nonsense, trying to put the world into some
perspective, trying to form out of the chaos they are suffering some order and
harmony.
After having studied a series of dreams of persons in therapy, I am convinced
that there is one quality that is always present, a quality I call passion for form.
The patient constructs in his “unconscious” a drama; it has a beginning,
something happens and is “flashed on the stage,” and then it comes to some kind
of denouement. I have noted the forms in the dreams being repeated, revised,
remolded, and then, like a motif in a symphony, returning triumphantly to be
drawn together to make a meaningful whole of the series.

I found that one fruitful approach is to take the dream as a series of spatial
forms. I refer now to a thirty-year-old woman in therapy. In one stage in her
dreams, a female character, for example, would move onto the stage of the
dream; then another female would enter; a male would appear; the females
would exit together. This kind of movement in space occurred in the Lesbian
period of this particular person’s analysis. In later dreams she, the patient, would
enter; then the female, who was present, would exit; a man would enter and he
would sit beside her. I began to see a curious geometric communication, a
progression of spatial forms. Perhaps the meaning of her dreams, and the
progress of her analysis, could be better understood by how she constructed
these forms moving in space—of which she was quite unaware—than in what
she verbalized about her dreams.
Then I began to notice the presence of triangles in this person’s dreams.
First, in her dreams referring to her infantile period, it was the triangle of father,
mother, and baby. In what I took to be her adolescent phase, the triangle was
composed of two women and a man, and she, as one of the women, moved in
space toward the man. Then after some months of analysis, in a Lesbian phase,
the triangle consisted of two women and a man with the two women standing
together. In a still later period the triangles turned into rectangles: two men were
in the dream with two women, assumedly her boy friend, herself, her mother,
and her father. Her development then became a process of working through
rectangles to form eventually a new triangle, her man, herself, and a child. These
dreams occurred in the middle and later parts of the analysis.
That the symbol of the triangle is fundamental can be seen by the fact that it
refers to a number of different levels simultaneously. A triangle has three lines;
it has the lowest possible number of straight lines required to make a geometric
form that has content. This is the mathematical, “pure form” level. The triangle
is fundamental in early, neolithic art—vide designs on the vases of this period.
This is the aesthetic level. It is present in science—triangulation is the way the
Egyptians figured their relation to the stars. The triangle is the basic symbol in
medieval philosophy and theology—vide the Trinity. It is fundamental in Gothic
art, a graphic example of which is Mont-Saint-Michel, the triangle of rock rising
from the sea capped by the Gothic triangle of man-built architecture which, in
rurn, ends in a pinnacle pointing toward heaven—a magnificent art form in
which we have the triangle of nature, man, and God. And finally,
psychologically speaking, we have the basic human triangle—man, woman, and
child.
The importance of forms is revealed in the inescapable unity of the body
with the world. The body is always a part of the world. I sit on this chair; the
chair is on a floor in this building; and the building, in turn, rests on the
mountain of stone that is Manhattan Island. Whenever I walk, my body is
interrelated with the world in which and on which I take my steps. This
presupposes some harmony between body and world. We know from physics
that the earth rises infinitesimally to meet my step, as any two bodies attract each
other. The balance essential in walking is one that is not solely in my body; it
can be understood only as a relationship of my body to the ground on which it
stands and walks. The earth is there to meet each foot as it falls, and the rhythm
of my walking depends on my faith that the earth will be there.
Our active need for form is shown in the fact that we automatically construct
it in an infinite number of ways. The mime Marcel Marceau stands upon the
stage impersonating a man taking his dog out for a walk. Marceau’s arm is
outstretched as though holding the dog’s leash. As his arm jerks back and forth,
everyone in the audience “sees” the dog straining at the leash to sniff this or that
in the bushes. Indeed, the dog and the leash are the most “real” parts of the scene
even though there is no dog and no leash on the stage at all. Only part of the
Gestalt is there—the man Marceau and his arm. The rest is entirely supplied by
our imagination as viewers. The incomplete Gestalt is completed in our fantasy.
Another mime, Jean-Louis Barrault, who plays a deaf-mute in the film Les
Enfants du Paradis, goes through the whole account of the man who has had his
pocket picked in the crowd—he makes one movement for the fat stomach of the
victim, another movement for the dour expression of the companion, and so on
until we have a vivid picture of the entire event of the pickpocketing. But not a
word has been spoken. There is only a mime making a few artful motions. All of
the gaps are automatically filled by our imagination.
The human imagination leaps to form the whole, to complete the scene in
order to make sense of it. The instantaneous way this is done shows how we are
driven to construct the remainder of the scene. To fill the gaps is essential if the
scene is to have meaning. That we may do this in misleading ways—at times in
neurotic or paranoid ways—does not gainsay the central point. Our passion for
form expresses our yearning to make the world adequate to our needs and
desires, and, more important, to experience ourselves as having significance.
The phrase “passion for form,” may be interesting, but it is also
problematical. If we used just the word form, it would sound too abstract; but
when it is combined with passion, we see that what is meant is not form in any
intellectual sense, but rather in a wholistic scene. What is occurring in the
person, hidden as it may be by passivity or other neurotic symptoms, is a
conflict-filled passion to make sense out of a crisis-ridden life.
Plato told us long ago how passion, or, as he put it, Eros, moves toward the
creation of form. Eros moves toward the making of meaning and the revealing of
Being. Originally a daimon called love, Eros is the lover of wisdom, and the
force in us that brings to birth both wisdom and beauty. Plato says through
Socrates that “human nature will not easily find a helper better than love
[Eros].”2 “All creation or passage of non-being into being is poetry or making,”
Plato writes, “and the processes of all art are creative; and the masters of arts are
all poets or makers.”3 Through Eros or the passion of love, which is daimonic
and constructive at the same time, Plato looks forward to “at last the vision … of
a single science, which is the science of beauty everywhere.” 4
Thus the mathematicians and physicists talk about the “elegance” of a
theory. Utility is subsumed as part of the character of being beautiful. The
harmony of an internal form, the inner consistency of a theory, the character of
beauty that touches your sensibilities—these are significant factors that
determine why one given insight comes into consciousness rather than another.
As a psychoanalyst, I can only add that my experience in helping people achieve
insights from unconscious dimensions within themselves reveals the same
phenomenon—insights emerge not chiefly because they are “intellectually true”
or even because they are helpful, but because they have a certain form, the form
that is beautiful because it completes what is incomplete in us.
This idea, this new form that suddenly presents itself, comes in order to
complete a hitherto incomplete Gestalt with which we are struggling in
conscious awareness. One can quite accurately speak of this unfinished pattern,
this unformed form, as constituting the “call” to which our preconscious, out of
its maelstrom, gives an answer.

By passion for form I mean a principle of human experience that is analogous to

several of the most important ideas in Western history. Kant proposed that our
understanding is not simply a reflection of the objective world around us, but it
also constitutes this world. It is not that objects simply speak to us; they also
conform to our ways of knowing. The mind thus is an active process of forming
and reforming the world.
Interpreting dreams as dramas of the patient’s relationship to his or her
world, I asked myself whether there is not on a deeper and more inclusive level
in human experience something parallel to what Kant was talking about. That is,
is it not only our intellectual understanding that plays a role in our forming and
reforming the world in the process of knowing it, but do not imagination and
emotions also play a critical role? It must be the totality of ourselves that
understands, not simply reason. And it is the totality of ourselves that fashions
the images to which the world conforms.
Not only does reason form and re-form the world, but the “preconscious,”
with its impulses and needs, does so also and does so on the basis of wish and
intentionality. Human beings not only think but feel and will as they make form
in their world. This is why I use the word passion, the sum of erotic and dynamic
tendencies, in the phrase “passion for form.” Persons in therapy—or anybody for
that matter—are not simply engaged in knowing their world: what they are
engaged in is a passionate reforming of their world by virtue of their
interrelationship with it.
This passion for form is a way of trying to find and constitute meaning in
life. And this is what genuine creativity is. Imagination, broadly defined, seems
to me to be a principle in human life underlying even reason, for the rational
functions, according to our definitions, can lead to understanding—can
participate in the constituting of reality—only as they are creative. Creativity is
thus involved in our every experience as we try to make meaning in our self-
world relationship.
Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead also speaks in effect of this passion for
form. Whitehead has constructed a philosophy based not on reason alone, but
one that includes what he calls “feeling.” By feeling he does not mean simply
affect. As I understand it he means the total capacity of the human organism to
experience his or her world. Whitehead reformulates Descartes’ original
principle as follows:
Descartes was wrong when he said “Cogito, ergo sum”—I think, therefore I am.
It is never bare thought or bare existence that we are aware of. I find myself
rather as essentially a unity of emotions, of enjoyment, of hopes, of fears, of
regrets, valuations of alternatives, decisions—all of these are subjective
reactions to my environment as I am active in my nature. My unity which is
Descartes’ “I am” is my process of shaping this welter of material into a
consistent pattern of feelings.5
What I am calling passion for form is, if I understand Whitehead aright, a
central aspect of what he is describing as the experience of identity.* I am able to
shape feelings, sensibilities, enjoyments, hopes into a pattern that makes me
aware of myself as man or woman. But I cannot shape them into a pattern as a
purely subjective act. I can do it only as I am related to the immediate objective
world in which I live.
Passion can destroy the self. But this is not passion for form; it is passion
gone beserk. Passion obviously can be diabolic as well as symbolic—it can
deform as well as form; it can destroy meaning and produce chaos again. When
sexual powers emerge in puberty, passion often does destroy form temporarily.
But sex also has great creative potentialities precisely because it is passion.
Unless one’s development is radically pathological, there will also occur in the
adolescent a growth toward a new form, in manhood or womanhood, in contrast
to his or her previous state as girl or boy.

The urgent need in everyone to give form to his or her life can be illustrated by
the case of a young man who consulted with me when I was writing this chapter.
He was the only son in a professional family where his mother and father had
quarreled and had fought almost continuously, according to his memory, since
he was born. He had never been able to concentrate or apply himself to his
studies in school. As a boy when he was supposed to be studying in his room, he
would hear his father coming up the stairs and immediately open a schoolbook
to cover over the magazine on mechanics he had been looking at. He recalled
that his father, a successful but apparently very cold man, had often promised to
take him on various trips as a reward if he successfully got through his
schoolwork. But none of those trips ever materialized.
His mother had made him her confidante, covertly supporting him in his
conflicts with his father. He and his mother used to sit out in the backyard
summer evenings talking until late at night—they were “partners,” they
“grooved together,” as he put it. His father exercised pull to get him accepted
into college in another part of the country; but the young man spent three months
there never going out of his room until his father came to fetch him home.
Living at home he worked as a carpenter, and later as a construction worker
in the Peace Corps. He then came to New York where he supported himself as a
plumber, doing sculpture on the side, until by a kind of lucky accident he got a
job as instructor in crafts at a university an hour outside the city. But in his job
he was unable to assert himself or to talk clearly and directly to either students or
faculty. He was overawed by the young Ivy League graduates on the faculty who
monopolized faculty meetings with their chatter which he felt was pompous and
artificial. In this dazed and ineffectual state, he first began work with me. I found
him an unusually sensitive person, generous, talented (he gave me a wire
sculptured figure he had made in my waiting room which I found delightful). He
was seriously withdrawn and apparently accomplishing practically nothing in his
job or life.
We worked together a couple of times a week for most of a year, in which
time he made unusually commendable progress in his interpersonal
relationships. He now worked effectually and had entirely overcome his neurotic
awe of fellow faculty members. He and I agreed that since he was now
functioning actively and well we would stop our work for the time being. We
were both aware, however, that we had never been able to explore adequately his
relationship with his mother.
He came back a year later. He had married in the meantime, but this did not
seem to present any special problems. What cued off the present impasse was a
visit he and his wife had made the previous month to his mother, who by that
time was in a mental hospital. They found her sitting by the nurses’ desk in the
corridor “waiting for her cigarette.” She went into her room to talk with them,
but soon came out again to continue waiting out the hour until the time for her
rationed cigarette.
Coming back on the train, the young man was very depressed. He had known
theoretically about his mother’s increasingly senile condition, but was unable to
make emotional sense of it. His withdrawn, apathetic state was similar to but
also different from his condition the first time he had come. He was now able to
communicate with me directly and openly. His problem was localized, specific,
in contrast to the generalized daze he had been suffering from the first time he
came. His relationship to his mother was in chaos. In that segment of his life he
felt no form at all, only a gnawing confusion.
After our first session the daze he was under lifted, but the problem
remained. This is often the function of communication in the therapeutic hour: 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.
In this second hour we reviewed at length his mother’s attachment to him
and the understandable upset he would feel at her present condition, even though
he had known it had been coming on for years. She had privately made him the
“crown prince.” I pointed out that she had been a powerful woman in these
fights with his father, that she had wooed him away from his father and had
exploited him in her endeavors to defeat his father. In contrast to his illusion that
they had been partners or that they had “grooved,” he actually had been a
hostage, a little person used in much bigger battles. When he mentioned his
surprise at seeing these things, he brought to my mind a story, which I told him.
A man was selling hamburgers allegedly made of rabbit meat at an amazingly
low price. When people asked him how he did it, he admitted that he was using
some horse meat. But when this did not suffice as an explanation, he confessed it
was 50 per cent horse meat and 50 per cent rabbit meat. When they continued to
ask him what he meant, he stated, “One rabbit to one horse.”
The graphic image of the rabbit and horse gave him a powerful “aha”
experience, much greater than any he would have gotten from an intellectual
explanation. He continued to marvel at his being the rabbit not in any derogatory
sense, but with the felt realization of how helpless he must have been in his
childhood. A heavy load of guilt and previously unexpressible hostility was
lifted off his back. The image gave him a way of getting at long last to his
negative feelings toward his mother. Many details of his background now fell
into place, and he seemed to be able to cut the psychological umbilical cord
which he previously did not know existed.
Curiously, persons in such situations give the impression of having had all
along the necessary strength at hand to make these changes; it was just a matter
of waiting for the “sun of order” to melt away “the fog of confusion” (to change
the metaphor into Delphic-oracle terms). The “passion” in his example is shown
by the alacrity with which he grasped this insight and by the immediacy with
which he reformed his psychological world. He gave the impression—which
again is typical for the experience—of having stored up the strength at previous
stages until it was finally possible, on getting the right piece of the jigsaw
puzzle, to suddenly seize that strength and exercise it.
In our third and last session he told me of his newly-made decision to resign
his post at the university, and to find a studio in which he could devote himself
entirely to his sculpture.
The communication with me in the first session may be seen as the
preliminary step in this creative process. Then came the “aha” experience as the
needed insight, preferably as an image, is born in the individual’s consciousness.
The third step is the making of the decisions, which the young man did between
the second and third sessions, as a result of the newly achieved form. The
therapist cannot predict the exact nature of such decisions; they are a living out
of the new form.
The creative process is the expression of this passion for form. It is the
struggle against disintegration, the struggle to bring into existence new kinds of
being that give harmony and integration.
Plato has for our summation some charming advice:
For he who would proceed aright in this manner should begin in youth to visit
beautiful forms; and first, if he be guided by his instructor aright, to love one
such form only—out of that he should create fair thoughts; and soon he will of
himself perceive that the beauty of one form is akin to the beauty of another, and
that beauty in every form is one and the same.6

* A friend of mine, on reading this chapter in manuscript, sent me the following original poem, which I

quote with permission:

I am, therefore I love

the total sensibility
that looked at me
out of your undefended face
immediately.
I love, therefore I am.
Notes

TWO The Nature of Creativity, pp. 36–54

1. Ludwig Binswanger, in Existence: A New Dimension in Psychology and

Psychiatry, eds. Rollo May, Ernest Angel, and Henri F. Ellenberger (New York,
1958), p. 11.

THREE Creativity and the Unconscious, pp. 55–76

1. This was in the mid-1940s, when being pregnant and unwed was
considerably more traumatic than now.
2. Henri Poincaré, “Mathematical Creation,” from The Foundation of
Science, trans. George Bruce Halsted, in The Creative Process, ed. Brewster
Ghiselin (New York, 1952), p. 36.
3. Ibid., p. 37.
4. Ibid., p. 38.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., p. 40.
8. Werner Heisenberg, “The Representation of Nature in Contemporary
Physics,” in Symbolism in Religion and Literature, ed. Rollo May (New York,
1960), p. 225.
9. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, The Poetry of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 1953–1965,
trans. George Reavey (New York, 1965), pp. x–xi. Emphasis mine.
10. Ibid., p. vii.
11. Ibid., p. viii–ix.
FOUR Creativity and Encounter, pp. 77–94

1. Archibald MacLeish, Poetry and Experience (Boston, 1961), pp. 8–9.

2. Ibid.
3. James Lord, A Giacometti Portrait (New York, 1964), p. 26.
4. Ibid., p. 22.
5. Ibid., p. 23.
6. Ibid., p. 18.
7. Ibid., p. 24.
8. Ibid., p. 41 (italics mine).
9. Ibid., p. 38 (italics mine).
10. MacLeish, pp. 8–9.
11. Frank Barron, “Creation and Encounter,” Scientific American
(September, 1958), 1–9.

FIVE The Delphic Oracle as Therapist, pp. 95–111

1. E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley, 1964), p.75.

2. The word tyrannos refers simply to an absolute ruler, of the type normally
spawned in eras of political ferment and change. Some of these “tyrants,” like
Pisistratus, the “tyrant of Athens” of the late sixth century, are regarded as
benefactors by historians as well as by modern Greeks. I well recall my surprise
when I first heard the boys of the school in Greece in which I taught speak of
Pisistratus with the same quality of admiration, if not the same quantity, as
people in this country speak of George Washington.
3. Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. M. D. Herter
Norton (New York, 1938), p. 181.
4. Robert Flacelière, Greek Oracles, trans. Douglas Garman (New York,
1965), p. 49.
5. Dodds, p. 73.
6. Ibid.
7. Flacelière, p. 37.
8. Flacelière, p. 52.
9. Herodotus, The Histories, Book VII, 140–144.
SIX On the Limits of Creativity, pp. 112–123

1. Heraclitus, p. 28, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers, A complete

translation of the Fragments in Diels, by Kathleen Freeman, Harvard U. Press,
Cambridge, Mass., 1970.
2. Ibid., p. 28.

SEVEN Passion for Form, pp. 124–140

1. Rollo May, “The Meaning of Symbols,” in Symbolism in Religion and

Literature, ed. Rollo May (New York, 1960), pp. 11–50.
2. Plato, Symposium, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in The Portable Greek Reader,
ed. W. H. Auden (New York, 1948), p. 499.
3. Ibid., p. 497.
4. Elsewhere in this book I have noted that the mathematician Poincaré
echoes a similar emphasis on Eros as bringing forth both beauty and truth at
once. (See pp. 67–68.) 5. Alfred North Whitehead: His Reflections on Man and
Nature, selected by Ruth Nanda Anshen (New York, 1961), p. 28. Emphasis
mine.
6. Plato, p. 496.
Copyright © 1975 by Rollo May. All rights reserved.

First published as a Norton paperback 1994

“The Nature of Creativity” was first published in Creativity and Its Cultivation, Harold H.
Anderson, ed. (New York, 1959).
“Creativity and the Unconscious” was first published in Voices: The Journal of the American
Academy of Psychotherapists.
“Creativity and Encounter” was first published in The American Journal of Psychoanalysis
XXIV/1.
“The Delphic Oracle as Therapist” was first published in The Reach of Mind: Essays in Memory of
Kurt Goldstein, Marianne L. Simmel, ed. (New York, 1968).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data May, Rollo.

The courage to create / Rollo May.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-393-34695-4 (e-book)

1. Creative ability. 2. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) I. Title BF408.M33 1994 153.3’5
—dc20 93-43718 CIP

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