The Inevitability of Anxiety in Creativity: An Existential–Intersectional Rearticulation of Rollo May’s The Courage to Create

Rollo May’s The Courage to Create (1975) frames creativity as an existential act of courage confronting uncertainty, anxiety, and non-being. It positions anxiety as generative rather than pathological. While philosophically rich, May’s individual-focused account under-engages social-structural forces that shape creative agency and recognition, including identity, power, performativity, relational support, and intersectional constraint. This manuscript presents an existential-intersectional rearticulation of May’s framework through a hermeneutic spiral, audited in Table 1 and operationalized in Table 2. It synthesizes May’s core claims dialogically with Kierkegaard, de Beauvoir, Nietzsche, Butler, Crenshaw, and hooks. Iterative interpretive cycles employ a dual-register strategy that articulates ontological abstraction alongside phenomenological-social concretization. This approach reveals creativity as both existential necessity and socially distributed practice. Amid late-modern therapy culture’s pathologization of emotional life, this synthesis reframes creativity as negotiation between freedom and constraint, advancing theoretically integrated insights for authentic expression under inequality.