The Compulsion to Create: Women Writers and Their Demon Lovers is a fascinating and informative psychological survey of women and the literature they create, especially as reflected by the lives and work of such luminaries as Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Anais Nin, Sylvia Plath, and Edith Sitwell. The reader is treated to such issues as compulsion versus reparation, developmental mourning and creative-process reparation, creative women and the "internal father," and the "demon-lover" theme as literary myth and psychodynamic complex. A highly recommended addition to women's...

The book begins with the integration of Kleinian and Winnicottian theory from their contrasting, but also complementary, dialectical perspectives with some studies of Melanie Klein's psychobiography. In doing so, the book has particularly drawn on the biographical research of Phyllis Grosskurth, who published a major biography of Melanie Klein in 1988, quite a time after the briefer biography of Hanna Segal. The other side of the Klein-Winnicott dialectic has been addressed by drawing on two biographies of D. W. Winnicott, with some minor references to the short biography of Brett Khar and...

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...