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This book examines creativity as experienced by women artists. The author considers a variety of women including novelists, sculptors, a photographer, a fairy tale protagonist, as well as clinical examples from the author's practice. While admired for their talent and creativity, these creative women are described as the victims of complicated childhood circumstances, tormented youth, and tragic adulthood, with their creativity perceived more as a tyrannical inner demon than as a joyful and rewarding muse. Rather than a biography of creative women past and present, the book is a collection of psycho-biographies, focusing on the mental worlds of the women as represented in their creative processes. The women's haunting compulsion to engage in creative work is analyzed from the standpoint of the English school of object relationship theory. The theories applied include those of Fairbrain, Winnicott, Bion, and especially the work of Melanie Klein.
The thesis of the book is that the women artists she describes are possessed by a “demon lover” which haunts both their creative expression and their interpersonal relationships. All the cases in Kavaler-Adler's book are women who experienced childhood trauma, had powerful fathers whom they experienced as erotic demon lovers, and mothers too weak, cold and/or unavailable to counter the impact of the admired father. Frantically compelled to create in order to merge with the lost primal object, creativity for these women is a life long struggle with sexualized pre-oedipal yearnings, with the internalized demon lover, and intense feelings of guilt and depression. The original father demon lover is projected, in later years, onto male partners who enact this role. This theme is illustrated throughout the book along with the concepts narcissistic personality, psychological splitting the good and bad object, guilt, depression, compulsion, self-destructiveness, and inability to mourn.
Presented first as a theoretical introduction to t