Susan Kolodny, the author of The Captive Muse: On Creativity and its Inhibition, is a psychotherapist in practice in Oakland, California who holds a Doctorate in Mental Health from the University of California at San Francisco, and an MFA in poetry from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She has published a volume of poetry, Shoreline, and her work has appeared in the New England Review and River Styx as well as several anthologies. I begin by mentioning her credentials because in The Captive Muse she draws on her own experiences both as therapist and as writer. The book had its origin some fifteen years ago, the author explains, in a conversation in which she heard herself introducing herself to a woman she met at a Fourth of July party as ‘a psychotherapist