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Susan Kavaler-Adler, a psychoanalyst and founding director of the Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis in New York, employs a rich and detailed theoretical and clinical knowledge of borderline phenomena in this, her second book on creativity. The major part is devoted to psycho-biographical speculations on female artists, followed by clinical illustrations.
She is particularly concerned with a pathological form of creativity which she calls ‘the Red Shoes frenzy’. Her concept grows from the 1948 film The Red Shoes (which is based on the Hans Christian Andersen tale), in which a young ballerina is enslaved by the power of her dance director (in the tale a shoemaker whose shoes she is literally unable to remove). In the film she is unable to give up the stardom offered by the director and thus unable to engage in and sustain a true and loving relationship in her interpersonal life. She is propelled to her death. This is the story of a woman who cannot experience her creativity as coming from within, but feels that it is dependent upon her external attachment to a god-muse. She is unable to separate from this fatherfigure and locate within herself her own split-off inner resources. She remains manically attached to him, impotent to assume a sense of agency, and lacks the sense of dwelling in herself that would enable her to maintain a good and loving relationship with an other (in the film, her husband). A dance to death seems inevitable.
The author sees ‘the Red Shoes frenzy’ as symbolizing a particular pathological constellation in which a part of the self becomes invested in a worship of one's own talents, rather than a participator in vibrant, sexually alive interpersonal relations.
[the] parents… [of] such [children] often have a basic narcissistic disregard for our primary emotional needs and disdain for human faults and vulnerabilities… For many artists… at least one primary parent served as a powerful mirror who reflected their talents,