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. 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 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.
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