The Creative Encounter

“Creativity,” Rollo May wrote, “is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his or her world.” The encounter is not a technique, a cognitive strategy, or a state that can be induced by the right environment. It is an event: the collision between a conscious being and a reality that exceeds the person’s habitual way of understanding, that demands a reorganization of thought, that might change the person who survives it. May spent four decades distinguishing this event from the merely productive—from the efficient execution of well-understood plans, from the skilled rearrangement of what is already known, from the generation of novel combinations performed without the anxiety of not knowing whether the combination will hold. His exclusion is radical and clinically specific: the encounter requires the anxiety of not knowing, the willingness to be changed by what is found, the courage to remain in the territory of the unknown long enough for something genuinely new to