What Rollo May Can Teach Us About Creativity

Creativity can be surprisingly frightening.

We may have an idea for a painting, a piece of writing, a new business, a career change, or simply a different way of living our lives, and then immediately begin questioning it.

Is it good enough?

Will anyone like it?

What if I fail?

What if people think it is strange?

What if I put something meaningful into the world and no one understands it?

Psychologist Rollo May understood that creativity and anxiety are often inseparable. Rather than viewing creativity simply as talent or artistic ability, May saw creativity as an encounter with the unknown. To create something that did not exist before requires us to tolerate uncertainty, expose something of ourselves, and risk discovering that others may not approve.

For May, this was not merely an artistic problem. It was part of what it means to be human.

Rollo May and the Transformation of Psychology

Rollo May was one of the major figures responsible for bringing existential psychology into American psychological thought. In contrast to approaches that primarily emphasized observable behavior, symptoms, drives, or pathology, existential psychology asked broader questions:

Who am I?

What gives my life meaning?

What do I choose to do with the life I have been given?

How do I live knowing that uncertainty, loss, responsibility, and death are unavoidable?

May helped introduce European existential philosophy and phenomenology into American psychology and became one of the primary representatives of existential psychology in the United States following the publication of Existence in 1958 (May et al., 1958). The American Psychological Association describes May as instrumental in bringing existentialism into psychology, particularly its attention to choice and to the more difficult or tragic dimensions of human experience.

This represented an important expansion of psychological thinking.

Psychology could certainly help people reduce symptoms. But May believed that psychological health involved something more. Human beings also wrestle with freedom, responsibility, meaning, identity, isolation, uncertainty, and the question of how they want to live.

These concerns remain central to contemporary existential-humanistic psychotherapy. Modern existential-humanistic approaches continue to emphasize authenticity, meaning, emotional experience, therapeutic presence, freedom, and responsibility.

May helped psychology take those questions seriously.

The Courage to Create

Perhaps nowhere is May's philosophy more accessible than in his 1975 book The Courage to Create.

One of the most important ideas in the book is that creativity is not reserved for painters, writers, musicians, or people who identify themselves as "creative."

Creativity is fundamentally about bringing something new into existence.

That might mean making art.

But it might also mean developing a new idea, raising a family differently than you were raised, beginning a business, changing careers at midlife, developing a new relationship with yourself, conducting research, writing a book, or choosing a life that looks different from the one other people expected you to live.

Modern psychological research similarly defines creativity much more broadly than artistic talent alone. Creativity involves developing something original that can also be meaningfully brought into reality. Importantly, contemporary creativity research also recognizes that pursuing an original idea involves psychological risk: we cannot know beforehand how our work, or we ourselves, will be received.

That uncertainty is precisely where courage enters.

Creativity Requires Anxiety

We often assume that confidence should come before action.

Once I feel confident, I will start painting.

Once I know the idea is good, I will write the book.

Once I stop feeling anxious, I will make the change.

May offers almost the opposite proposition.

The anxiety may be there precisely because something matters.

Existential psychology distinguishes between pathological anxiety and existential anxiety. Existential anxiety can arise from recognizing that we are free to make choices, responsible for those choices, and unable to know with certainty what those choices will bring (APA Dictionary of Psychology, 2018).

Creativity places us directly into this uncertainty.

The blank page does not tell us what to write.

The canvas does not promise that the painting will work.

A creative idea offers no guarantee that anyone else will understand it.

Authentic creativity therefore asks us to move forward without complete reassurance.

This is an important psychological shift: courage does not necessarily mean eliminating anxiety before we act. Courage may mean deciding that something matters enough to do while anxiety is still present.

The Problem With Creating for Approval

There is another obstacle to creativity that feels particularly relevant today: the temptation to create for an audience before we have listened to ourselves.

We may begin asking:

Will people like this?

Will this sell?

Will this get attention?

Will people understand it?

Does this look like what everyone else is doing?

There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting our work to be appreciated. Human beings are relational. We want connection, recognition, and belonging.

The problem occurs when anticipated approval becomes the organizing principle of the creative process.

At that point, we may gradually stop asking:

What do I actually want to say?

This connects directly with the psychological concept of authenticity. Research by Wood and colleagues (2008) conceptualized authenticity partly in terms of authentic living, self-alienation, and the degree to which individuals are governed by external influence. Their research found that authenticity was strongly associated with self-esteem and both subjective and psychological well-being (Wood et al., 2008).

May anticipated something important here.

Creating authentically requires the ability to hear one's own experience even while surrounded by other people's opinions.

Authenticity Does Not Mean Being Completely Original

Authenticity is sometimes misunderstood as having to create something that no one has ever seen before.

That is nearly impossible.

Every artist has influences. Every writer has read other writers. Every therapist has teachers. Every researcher builds upon previous research. We create within cultures, histories, relationships, and communities.

Authenticity is not the absence of influence.

It is the ability to encounter those influences without losing ourselves within them.

We can admire someone else's work without having to become them.

We can learn technique without surrendering our own voice.

We can accept feedback without allowing every criticism to determine the direction we take.

We can belong without disappearing.

This is one reason creative work can become psychologically meaningful. The question gradually shifts from:

"Is this good?"

to:

"Is this mine?"

That is a very different question.

The Creative Process Can Become a Practice of Self-Acceptance

Creative work also gives us an unusual opportunity to observe how we relate to ourselves.

Consider what happens when something we are making does not go according to plan.

A watercolor bleeds.

A sentence sounds awkward.

Clay collapses.

A drawing does not look the way we imagined.

An idea that seemed brilliant yesterday seems questionable today.

Notice what happens internally.

Do we become curious?

Or immediately critical?

Do we adapt?

Or abandon the work?

Do we say, This isn't working yet?

Or do we conclude, I'm terrible at this?

The creative process can expose our relationship with imperfection very quickly.

For people who struggle with anxiety, perfectionism, or harsh self-judgment, this can make creativity uncomfortable—but also potentially valuable.

The artwork becomes an opportunity to practice something larger:

Can I remain present when the outcome is uncertain?

Can I tolerate something unfinished?

Can I make a mistake without turning the mistake into a judgment about myself?

Can I allow something to emerge rather than controlling every part of it?

These are creative questions.

They are also psychological ones.

You Do Not Have to Be an Artist to Create

One of the most limiting beliefs people carry is the statement:

"I'm not creative."

Usually what people actually mean is:

"I don't believe I am particularly good at making art."

Those are not the same thing.

Creativity exists whenever we imagine possibilities and bring something into being.

We create relationships.

We create homes.

We create rituals.

We create research.

We create solutions.

We create businesses.

We create ways of understanding our experiences.

And, throughout our lives, we continually participate in the creation of ourselves.

Contemporary psychology similarly rejects the idea that creativity belongs only to a special category of artistic people. Creativity appears in ordinary problem-solving, professional life, learning, relationships, and adaptation—not simply in traditionally artistic activities.

A Different Question About Creative Work

Perhaps the question is not:

"Am I talented enough?"

Perhaps it is:

"Am I willing to discover what happens if I begin?"

You do not need to know exactly where the process will take you.

You do not need universal approval.

You do not need to eliminate anxiety.

And you do not need to create something extraordinary.

You need enough courage to stay in relationship with what is trying to emerge.

That may be one of Rollo May's most enduring contributions to psychology. He reminds us that psychological health is not simply the absence of discomfort. A meaningful life requires participation.

Creativity is one form of that participation.

Every time we risk making something that reflects our actual experience—rather than simply reproducing what we believe others expect of us—we practice authenticity.

The painting may not be perfect.

The writing may need revision.

The idea may change.

Someone may dislike it.

But perhaps the goal of creativity was never to produce something that everyone would approve of.

Perhaps part of the purpose is discovering who we are willing to become while creating it.

References

American Psychological Association. (2018). Existential anxiety. APA Dictionary of Psychology.

American Psychological Association. (2026). APA handbook of humanistic and existential psychology. American Psychological Association.

May, R. (1975). The courage to create. W. W. Norton & Company.

May, R., Angel, E., & Ellenberger, H. F. (Eds.). (1958). Existence: A new dimension in psychiatry and psychology. Basic Books.

Wood, A. M., Linley, P. A., Maltby, J., Baliousis, M., & Joseph, S. (2008). The authentic personality: A theoretical and empirical conceptualization and the development of the Authenticity Scale. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 55(3), 385–399. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0167.55.3.385