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This book is a demonstration of the application of contemporary object relations theory to distinguished women writers and poets, all of whom, the author contends, suffered from a compulsion to create. The authors, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, and Edith Sitwell, were driven emotionally to express their inner experiences through the creative activity of writing, experiences that were determined by oedipal and pre-oedipal conflicts that effected the themes, and even the very form, of their artistic expression.
In the course of focusing on this material, the author also makes a significant contribution to the understanding of the crucial nature of the father's role in the development of a woman's early feminine identity, pre-oedipal developmental arrests, and the formation of pathological organizations or self-structures associated with what she terms the “Demon Lover Complex.” Frequently discerned in the literary themes in the works of the above authors, the Demon Lover Complex consists of an addictive attachment to a masculine demonlike figure with whom the woman is erotically and narcissistically fused, so as to compensate for her own lack of self-development, with resulting feelings of victimization and tormenting futility in love. This is an inevitable consequence of a split-off, and emotionally sealed-off, developmentally arrested self that cannot gradually mourn phase-appropriate developmental loss through emotional contact with others. Thus, this complex is both a legacy of aborted early mourning and a tenacious pathological defense against it, buttressed by manic compulsive activity, albeit of an admired, creative sort.
In formulating these dynamics Kavaler-Adler exemplifies the current Kleinian focus on the development of pathological intrapsychic organizations of various kinds commonly found in borderline and narcissistic pathology. However, she makes a distinct contribution in tracing the development of such an organization and complex to