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Editorial Reviews

The Compulsion to Create is a superb account of distinguished female writers [Plath, Nin, the Brontæs, Dickinson, and Sitwell] from a psychoanalytic object relations perspective. The artists discussed often suffered tragic fates including suicide, fatal illness, lifelong withdrawal from people, or alienation from the world. At this current time in the American psychoanalytic dialogue, there is a tendency to idealize the creative process and to discuss it only in terms of ‘healthy narcissism.’ While presenting a sympathetic and respectful attitude toward the creative process, Kavaler-Adler nevertheless does not idealize it and is forthright in discussing the problems the artist may encounter.

— Jeffrey Seinfeld, Ph.D

This book can be highly recommended as an introduction to the clinical applications of current object relations theory from the perspective of both its dynamic and developmental viewpoints, as well as its application to the analysis of fine, enduring literature of female authors, and the unconscious mechanisms that underlie it. It is a rich and often moving account of how the capacity for attempts at self-repair find their expression in artistic endeavors that provide the artist with a personal medium for creative psychic survival, while contributing to the general enrichment of culture by means of such aesthetic experiences.

— Mark Wayne, C.S.W., B.C.D., American Journal of Psychoanalysis

Why “The Compulsion to Create” and “The Creative Mystique” are the books for today’s world and today’s theory?

by Inna Rozentsvit, Editor-in-Chief of the ORI Academic Press

… For centuries artists and writers have been plagued by the fallacious shibboleths they believed as axioms, i.e. that you have to be crazy to be an artist, and that if so, then you can’t go into psychotherapeutic treatment because it will threaten to “resolve” the craziness of the artist. Is this true and does it have to be so?

These questions lead to an in-depth exploration in Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler’s two books on brilliant (and tortured) female artists and writers – The Compulsion to Create: Women Writers and Their Demon Lovers and The Creative Mystique: From Red Shoes Frenzy to Love and Creativity. Psycho-biographies of Suzanne Farrell, Charlotte Bronte, as well as Anais Nin, are seen to contrast with those of Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Edith Sitwell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Virginia Woolf, Camille Claudel, Diane Arbus, and Katherine Mansfield, along these dimensions. Originally published by Routledge in 1993 and 1996 respectively, both newly edited and illustrated books are being re-published by the ORI Academic Press in the 3rd quarter of 2013.

Both books illustrate how those artists who fail to achieve psychic dialectic, love-creativity dialectic, and intersubjectivity are mired in the fall out of developmental disruption and derailment. Such developmental arrest changes a potentially healthy life-long connection to a pathological and frozen state, in which “developmental mourning” is not possible. In this “pathological mourning” state, early traumatic disruptions are repeated perpetually as sadomasochistic enactments that constitute a “demon- lover complex.” In the “demon-lover complex,” aggressive reactions to maternal failings are both split off and projected into masculine figures due to oedipal eroticization in pre-oedipal psychic structures, compounding the failings of mothering with the failures and losses related to fathering.

Focusing on the father-child relationship rather than limiting herself to the mother’s influence, was one of the major contributions of Dr. Kavaler-Adler to psychoanalytic thought, as it was pointed out by Dr. Seinfeld in his early review of The Compulsion to Create.