Dr. May's gentle rebuke to American psychology will be equally
unwelcome to behaviorists and orthodox psychoanalysts whose
timidity has made the creative process a subject to be avoided as
"unscientific, mysterious, disturbing, and too corruptive of the
scientific training of graduate students." In fact, May owes more
to Paul Tillich, Mondrian and James Joyce than he does to Adler or
even Freud whose implication that "talent is a disease and
creativity a neurosis" he emphatically rejects as both reductive
and invidious. Nor will he please those ostentatiously Dionysian
poets and painters who sit back and wait for inspiration to strike
like a divine lightning bolt. May's stress on arduous work and the
intensity and authenticity of the encounter between the artist and
his world makes the creative process similar to what the patient
undergoes in psychotherapy as new insights erupt from the
unconscious. Disappointed with the mechanistic bias of science, May
places an awesome responsibility on artists: he argues with Stephen
Dedalus that they are the forgers of "the uncreated conscience of
the race," always and necessarily a threat to society as the
harbingers of new symbols, forms and patterns on which the future
will be built. Art and imagination according to this valuation are
not irrational but suprarational; the moment of creation a sudden,
luminous apprehension which at once assumes "a kind of immutable,
eternal quality." Based on a group of lectures delivered over some
fifteen years, this is an important though preliminary exploration
of a subject traditionally evaded by contemporary pundits. For all
his lack of dogmatism and modesty, May is out on a slender limb and
his impressionistic observation of the "eternally insurgent spirit"
of the artist is vulnerable on many counts - but then by his own
criteria, it would have to be. (Kirkus Reviews)
"A lucid and highly concentrated analysis of the creative process. . . . [May] describes the requisites for the creative encounter and the moment of the 'breakthrough.'" —Saturday Review What if imagination and art are not, as many of us might think, the frosting on life, but the fountainhead of human experience? What if our logic and science derive from art forms, rather than the other way around? In this trenchant volume, Rollo May helps all of us find those creative impulses that, once liberated, offer new possibilities for achievement.
A renowned therapist and inspiring guide, Dr. May draws on his experience to show how we can break out of old patterns in our lives. His insightful book offers us a way through our fears into a fully realized self.
"A signal tesitmonial to the creative spirit. . . . A brilliantly incisive exploration of the creative 'encounter'—the coming to grips of the healthily committed creative artist or thinker with his sociocultural background and with his own dangerously promethean impulses." —Publishers Weekly
"Another in Dr. May's extraordinary, wise, and hopeful . . . series of nearly poetic meditations on the future of mankind." —Boston Globe
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