The Creative Mystique: From Red Shoe Frenzy to Love and Creativity
by Susan Kavaler-Adler
Foreword by Bergmann, Martin S.
ISBN: 9780984870011 (soft)
Through the life stories of women such as Camille Claudel, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Anne Sexton, Suzanne Farrell and others, and through clinical case studies, Susan Kavaler-Adler offers penetrating insights into the nature of the creative process. Kavaler-Adler contrasts unsuccessful psychological treatments with object-relations therapy that is able to resolve the pathological narcissism of creative addiction and allow the emergence of healthy modes of self-expression. This book will be of interest to anyone interested in the creative process and its psychological and psychoanalytic underpinnings.
Editorial Reviews
The Creative Mystique maintains the fascination and profundity of the author’s earlier work. Dr. Kavaler-Adler has uniquely integrated the “Otherness” of the creative process with the chimerical male figure in the female artist’s internal mental world to create the concept of the “demon lover.” The author spans the horizon of the Kleinian, Object Relations, and Developmental literature, on one hand, and the artistic/literary biographical literature on the other. The effect is compelling and riveting.
— James S. Grotstein, MD
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.
