Creative Courage and Imaginative Learning: New Perspectives on How Psychology and Philosophy Intersect in My Work at LCI

May, Rollo
The Courage to Create
New York: W.W. Norton, 1994

“Creativity is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his or her world,” (54). Rollo May holds that creativity’s central importance is it’s bringing something new into being. I like this definition, and finding it in May’s text showed me an example of where May’s musings on “the courage to create” may intersect with my own work as a teaching artist thinking about imaginative teaching and learning at Lincoln Center Institute. However, as an artist reading this book I feel conflicted about some of what May is stating and don’t agree with his generalizations. Ultimately, this book will be less useful to me as a “how to” for viewing and studying my own practice of aesthetic education and will be most useful to me as an interesting study of the possible intersection between May’s approach to psychoanalysis and imagination as we think about it at LCI.

A second intersection between my own work and May’s is in his definition of “creative courage.” He has a rather distinct usage of the word “courage,” and I think understanding his perspective is key to understanding where he was coming from when writing this book. To him, courage includes moral courage (the ability do identify with fellow humans, act empathetically), social courage (willingness for intimacy and a balance between oneself and another), the courage to believe and to admit doubt, and the key to this book: creative courage. He argues that creative courage has to do with discovery and “newness,” which every field or profession requires in some form. Artists require this creative courage and, through art, transform their creativity into an expression of the “collective conscience.” He draws on James Joyce’s conclusion to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where the character “go[es] to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience” (299). May illuminates the link between creativity and the need for courage, extrapolating upon Joyce’s concept, “every creative encounter is a new event; every time requires another assertion of courage” (26). I think what May is referring to has to do with the courage to see things and perceive them, something we hold so central in our work surrounding imaginative teaching and learning at LCI.

May sees this encounter between the world and the artist as the foundation of creativity. He looks specifically at artists and poets but, based on his early statement in the book, we know he thinks of creativity as central in other disciplines. At LCI, we spend a lot of time focused on deep noticing and perception, and a mode of inquiry often encapsulated in the phrase “describe, analyze, and interpret,” which I believe feed into making just the sort of deep encounters that May argues for. He believes in the creative encounter’s ability to change the self-world relationship, and I think we do too.

May’s argument for a balance between form (structure) and imagination makes me think about how teaching artists thoughtfully structure activities with just key parameters, within which there is plenty of room for unhindered imagination. He asks whether imagination is fundamental to human existence, and answers that he thinks it is. In “Passion for Form,” one of the seven essays that comprise the work, he examines dreams and his relationships with his patients as a way to look for how we “form and reform our world” (after Kant’s philosophy), not just intellectually but imaginatively and emotionally.

May was known as a humanist and existential psychologist who wanted to reconcile his work with psychoanalysis and Freud’s work. I think this book shows this distinct lens as well as the work’s time period (it was written in 1975 but portions were first published in 1959). There are parts of this writing that make me uneasy, like May’s core belief that great artists exist under torment or struggle and “battle with the gods,” (28). Much of his discussion focuses on this “divine madness” of artists (93), a term he borrows from the Greeks, and artists’ tormented relationship with their world, and the courage it takes to go beyond this anxiety and create anyway. This may be true for many great artists, but I don’t think it’s true for all of them, and I certainly don’t think it’s what we aspire to teach at LCI.

I’ll need to look elsewhere for insight about how art happens. Not one to view things as absolute, however, I remain open to the affinities between my own explorations of imaginative teaching and learning through LCI and May’s ideas about courageous encounters with creativity and art.

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