April 3, 2026
Thanks to Barbara Drobot, a 2026 Fellow in Ideas, for today’s post.
As someone who works both in the classroom as a teacher and in the studio as an artist, I often return to a fundamental question: is creativity an exceptional gift reserved for a talented few, or a human capacity that can be cultivated? In The Courage to Create (1975), Rollo May approaches this question through an existential perspective and argues that creativity emerges from the courage to confront uncertainty. While May’s vision of creative courage remains compelling and influential, the book gives limited attention to psychological dimensions of creative practice such as trauma, identity, and inner conflict.
Published in 1975 in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, during a period marked by political unrest, Cold War tensions, and cultural anxiety in the United States, May’s reflections emerge from a historical atmosphere charged with fear and instability. For him, to create is to confront doubt and risk without retreating. Creativity requires a willingness to commit to a path whose outcome cannot be guaranteed. In this sense, courage lies in continuing even when nothing feels certain.
This remains one of the book’s most compelling insights. Serious creative work unfolds in tension. Without commitment, nothing meaningful can emerge. May’s understanding of courage captures something deeply accurate about artistic labor: it requires vulnerability, persistence, and an acceptance of uncertainty.
In my teaching practice, this tension becomes particularly visible when students begin a drawing without a predetermined result. Many of them initially experience uncertainty. However, the absence of a fixed outcome allows students to engage more attentively with what they see and discover.
Nevertheless, certain elements of May’s argument deserve closer examination. In distancing creativity from psychoanalytic interpretations that emphasize internal conflict, he attempts to protect artistic creation from reductive psychological explanations. Yet within contemporary artistic practice, much powerful work grows out of lived tensions such as personal trauma, collective memory, and identity struggles. Artists such as Tracey Emin and Kara Walker demonstrate how autobiographical experience and historical memory can become central sources of artistic creation.
From today’s perspective, May’s approach to psychoanalytic interpretations of creativity seems limited. His argument responds to earlier theories associated with Sigmund Freud (1908) and later psychoanalytic thinkers such as Ernst Kris (1952), who often described artistic creation as a form of sublimation or symbolic resolution of inner tensions. May instead interprets creativity as an existential act arising from a person’s willingness to confront uncertainty and engage with the unknown. In contemporary artistic discourse, vulnerability, memory, and personal history often play a central role in shaping artistic practice. Courage and internal transformation do not need to stand in opposition; they can coexist as interdependent forces.
At its core, The Courage to Create remains an important work. Its value lies in placing risk, responsibility, and the willingness to remain with uncertainty at the center of the creative process. In a time increasingly focused on efficiency and measurable results, May’s idea remains especially relevant: creativity requires patience, and doubt is part of the process.
What May ultimately offers is a vision of creativity as courage in its most ordinary form. To create is to continue working even when the path feels uncertain, to remain with difficulty, and to stay committed when the outcome is unclear. If there is something universal in creativity, it may be precisely this capacity: to stay inside the question long enough for something new to become possible.
Photo credits: Barbara Drobot
