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Dear Sir:
I would like to respond to Katherine Dalsimer's review of my book The Compulsion to Create: A Psychoanalytic Study of Women Artists (Routledge), in Volume 75, 1994, 856-859. This review did not bring into focus the main contributions of the book, in relation to the integration of the most important British and American object relations theories as they bear on critical distinctions between successful and unsuccessful mourning in relation to the creative process. The latter group of cases of failed mourning and failed self integration are symptomatically seen in object relations terms as an unresolved demon lover theme.
Dr Dalsimer's review misunderstands these themes. Also, the Dalsimer review leaves the impression that the book employs a Kleinian theoretical orientation exclusively, not recognising those formulations influenced by Fairbairn, Balint, Winnicott, Masterson, Guntrip etc. Dalsimer also overlooks the significant emphasis on oedipal dynamics in the book, which appear chiefly in a chapter on the novel Villette, as they relate to successful depressive position mourning. She comments on the chapter on Jane Eyre, not recognising how this chapter is posed as a contrast to the chapter on Charlotte Brontë's Villette, and her comments are not responsive to the thesis that is based on the comparison of the two novels.
Ronald Fairbairn, Harry Guntrip, James Masterson, Otto Kernberg, Michael Balint, and most particularly Thomas Ogden are just a few of those who have vividly described the one note monotone, and the tragic inevitability in the cycle of pathological mourning that I describe in The Compulsion to Create as the demon lover complex, as it is seen in clinical work. Dalsimer makes an out-of-context comment about clinical work that denies the interaction of psychic structure and clinical treatment.
Another point not understood by Dalsimer is that it is the internal life of the woman artist that is exposed in a genuine developmental mourning process, no