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Susan Kavaler-Adler is interested in certain syndromes of pathological creativity and their transformation into healthy creativity through the successful development of a “love-creativity dialectic.” The Creative Mystique is a sequel to her previous book, The
Compulsion to Create. In this later work she continues her analysis of compulsive creative states with an elaboration of the “creative mystique,” a narcissistic addiction to admiration and fame (connected to a particular internal object relationship, the “demon lover”) that drives an artist to create with a destructive, manic intensity. The frenzy of this syndrome is illustrated in the fairy tale of The Red Shoes, the underlying leitmotif of this study.
Kavaler-Adler has written a rich, dense work, passionately invested by her dedication to object relations theory and practice. The first two chapters are theoretical; she elaborates the elements of the “creative mystique” and her theory of psychic health, which she views as that balance between access to internal and external reality in which creativity and healthy interpersonal relationships become mutually enriching (the “love-creativity dialectic”). She follows with several psychobiographical studies of women artists (in particular Camille Claudel, Suzanne Farrell, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and Anne Sexton) whose lives, in one way or another, illustrate the Red Shoes myth. The book ends with case studies of two patients with problems in the development of their “love-creativity dialectic” who were successfully treated in object relations psychoanalysis, one by Kavaler-Adler and the other by one of her supervisees.
Kavaler-Adler views creativity problems as developmental. Owing to trauma or loss in the preoedipal relationship with the mother, the daughter fails to internalize a good primal object. Healthy autonomy and the capacity to relate to oneself and others as whole, integrated objects are not achieved. Some women attempt to repair this deficit