You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Susan Kavaler-Adler, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst who, for over four decades, has contributed to many areas of psychology and psychoanalysis. Along with a successful psychoanalytic career as both writer and practitioner, Dr. Kavaler-Adler is also a Founder—along with Dr. Robert Weinstein—of the Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (ORI) in New York (see link orinyc.org).
Dr. Kavaler-Adler has written extensively about pathological mourning versus successful mourning, in terms of the demon-lover complex and erotic transference, successfully expanding the work of Melanie Klein's understanding of mourning, and James Masterson's five-decades-long work on the abandonment depression (Master-son, 2000). Several of the papers in the volumes of the Selected Papers were first published in the American Journal of Psychoanalysis (AJP) and appear with the permission of the AJP (Kavaler-Adler, 1993, 1995, 2004, 2005, 2006a, 2006b). The current Selected Papers edition serves as the first installment of three volumes contextualizing the prolific writing and contributions of Dr. Kavaler-Adler's developmental model to psychoanalytic theory and technique.
In The Selected Papers, the author's creative voice opens with a poignant theme which is central to Kavaler-Adler's decades of psychoanalytic work on the psychological transformations that occur through mourning – the untimely death of her father at the tender age of 10.
My father died when I was 10. I never truly mourned until I entered psychoanalytic psychotherapy in my mid-20s, after my Ph.D. Opening to the mourning process deepened me and profoundly affected my nascent capacities to love and to create. Nothing affected my clinical work as a psychologist… and a psychotherapist/psychoanalyst more than my own mourning process, as I inhabited the center of myself through inhabiting the wounded core inside of me, where I had been scarred by the