The creative mystique : from red shoes frenzy to love and creativity 9781317795674, 1317795679, 9781317795681, 1317795687, 9781315811482

Table of contents :
Content: 1. Pathology and Health of Creativity: Compulsion and Mystique or Dialectic --
2. "The Love-Creativity Dialectic": A Theory of Psychic Health --
3. The Red Shoes Myth and the Story of Camille Claudel --
4. The Story of Suzanne Farrell and George Ballanchine --
5. Katherine Mansfield: A Theory of Creative Process Reparation and its Mode of Failure --
6. The Genius and Sorrow of Virginia Woolf, Part I --
7. The Genius and Sorrow of Virginia Woolf, Part II: Vision and Art --
8. Diane Arbus and the Demon Lover --
9. Some More Speculations on Anna O.: Demon Lover and Arrested Creativity --
10. Anne Sexton's Treatment, Part I --
11. Anne Sexton's Treatment, Part II, and Addendum on her Demon Lover Complex --
12. The Case of Lois, Part I: Red Shoes Frenzy, Mystique, and Creative Compulsion --
13. The Case of Lois, Part II: Healing and Movement Towards The Love-Creativity Dialectic --
14. The Case of Ms. C.

Citation preview

THE CREATIVE MYSTIQUE From Red Shoes Frenzy to Love and Creativity Susan Kavaler - Adler, Ph. D.

THE C R E A T IV E M Y S T IQ U E

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THE CREATIVE M Y ST IQ U E

From Red Shoes Frenzy to Love and Creativity S U S A N KAVALER-ADL.ER, Ph.D .

Routledge Taylor & Francis G rou p N e w York

London

Routledge is an im print of the Taylor & Francis C rou p, an informa business

Ro u tl e d g e T a y l o r and F r a n c i s Gr ou p 2 7 0 M adison Avenue New Y o rk , N Y 100 1 6

Routledge T a y l o r and F r a n c i s Gr ou p 2 Pa rk S q u ar e M i l to n Pa rk , Ab i n g d o n Oxon 0 X 1 4 4RN

Copyright © 1996 by Routledge

All rights reserved. No part o f this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kavaler-Adler, Susan. The creative mystique: from red shoes frenzy to love and creativity / Susan Kavaler-Adler. p. cm. ISBN 0 -4 1 5 -9 1 4 1 2 -4 (cloth) — ISBN 0 -4 1 5 -9 1 4 1 3 -2 (pbk.) 1. Psychic trauma. 2. Object relations 3. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) — Psychological Aspects. BF175.5.P75K 38 153.3’5 ’082— dc20

I. Title.

1996 96-26074 C1P

CO NTENTS)

Foreword Acknowledgments

Part One 1

IX

XI

THEORY

Pathology and Health of Creativity

3

Compulsion and Mystique or Dialectic 2

“The Love-Creativity Dialectic”

15

A Theory o f Psychic Health Part Two

TALES AND TRAUMAS O F W O M EN A RTISTS

3

The Red Shoes Myth and the Story of Camille Claudel

49

4

The Story of Suzanne Farrell and George Ballanchine

79

Katherine Mansfield

95

5

A Theory o f Creative Process Reparation and its M ode o f Failure 6

The Genius and Sorrow of Virginia Woolf, Part I

1 17

7

The Genius and Sorrow of Virginia Woolf, Part II

141

8

Diane Arbus and the Demon Lover

167

9

Some More Speculations on Anna O.

173

Vision and Art

Demon Lover and Arrested Creativity 10

Anne Sexton’s Treatment, Part I

183

11

Anne Sexton’s Treatment, Part II, and Addendum on her Demon Lover Complex

21 1

Part Three 12

C LIN IC A L CASES

The Case o f Lois, Part I

Red Shoes Frenzy, Mystique, and Creative Compulsion

243

13

The Case of Lois,Part II

269

Healing and Movement Towards The Love-Creativity Dialectic 14

The Case of Ms. C.

Notes References Index

293 319 325 331

DEDICATIONS)

To my husband, Saul Adler, for his love and patience during so many hours when I communed with my computer. To my psychoanalyst, Dr. Mark Grunes. To my friends and students. To my patients. To all o f those who have joined with me in bringing the Object Relations Institute to life, during the times when I was also giving psychic birth to my two books on creativity and object relations theory. I was pregnant with the books, the Institute, and the Institute’s curriculum during the same years. They are all expressions of my “love-creativity dialectic,” but also of my “compulsion to create.”

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FOREW ORD )

It is a pleasure and a privilege to write a forward to this book. It is a book written with passion and a powerful sense of conviction, rare in a profes­ sion that takes special pride in scientific objectivity. Furthermore, the basic idea that animates this book is, to the best of my knowledge, an original one. That every poet owes his creativity to a muse is an idea that goes back to ancient Greek poetry. Hesiod, whose authority was second only to that o f Homer, who was the first to suggest that the poet receives from the muse his scepter, voice, and knowledge. Throughout history, the relation­ ship between poet and muse was a benign one, reversing gender roles. It is the muse, a woman, who makes the poet fruitful, able to give birth to his creation. I know o f only one modern poet, Robert Graves, who, in his book The White Goddess, published in 1947, described his relationship to his muse with a complexity reminiscent of the author’s description o f the relationship between creative women and their demon lovers. Unlike the male poet, whose relationship to his muse was usually a desexualized one, the creative women described in the pages of this book are both inviting and struggling against the intrusion of their demon lover’s. The demon lover, in Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s conceptualization, is “ immune to a loving con tact.” The creative woman yearning for him desires “erotic intensity and bodily com pletion.” This “hard, phallic demon lover enters her as a rapist would.” If the demon lover becomes a dynamic internal object, he will “ haunt the woman in her interpersonal world and within her creative work.” Once this fatal union is established, the creative work becomes for the woman artist an addiction, driven by manic intensity. At times death itself can be experienced as a demon lover leading to suicide. I can well imagine a number o f feminist readers object­ ing to this emphasis on the father and his phallus. However, in the author’s view this demon-lover-father obtains such immense power only because the mother image and her psychic representations are for various biographical reasons too weak to offer a counterforce. In some cases, as in the relationship between the sculptor Rodin and Camille Claudel, and also between the choreographer George Ballanchine and Suzanne Farrell, the demon lover relationships become interpersonal

X)

relationships between an aging master and his particularly gifted young woman disciple. Far from solving the problem, such externalizations of the demon create for the woman artist a new kind of suffering. Dr. Kavaler-Adler is an ardent object relations theorist and a Kleinian. Therefore, the inability to mourn plays a central role in the understanding of these women. All the major Kleinians— Winnicott, Bion, Hannah Segal, and Otto Kemberg— play a significant role in this book. However, the author is not a narrow Kleinian. The work of Ronald Fairbairn, Loewald, and Margaret Mahler are also valued. She has learned much from con­ temporary psychoanalysts such as Ogden, Sheldon Bach, and others. As I already indicated, she is passionate in her beliefs and convinced that had some of the heroines discussed in this book, such as Anne Sexton, been treated by an object relations therapist, their lives might have been saved. In my own experience, new schools o f treatment always tend to idealize their own discovery. However, many o f them in time have to reach the more difficult realization that the new model they espouse can cure some, but remains beyond the reach o f other patients. It is exhilarating to encounter this powerful optimism, but readers like myself, who may not share her belief will also find her book enriching. To my ear, the demon lover has a strong mythological quality. Freudian psychoanalysis attempted to explain mythology by analogy to the dream— making the dream a private myth and the myth a collective dream. By contrast, Jung brought myth back into his psychology. His concepts are closer to the myth itself, as is also the author’s demon lover. It is not meant as a disparagement that the shadow o f C. J. Jung hovers over this interesting book.

Professor Martin Bergmann

Clinical Professor o f Psychology New York University Post-Doctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy

A CK N O W LED GM EN TS )

I would like to thank all those I thanked in my acknowledgments for my first Routledge Book, The Compulsion to Create. All of you have inspired and supported the writing that has led past the Compulsion to Create to The Creative Mystique. In addition, I would particularly like to acknowl­ edge Dr. Althea Horner and Dr. Jeffrey Seinfeld for their commentary on the original manuscript. I wish to thank Sandra Indig for her acquisition o f the Paris biography o f Camille Claudel. I would like to thank Dr. Marvin Hurvich for some pertinent comments on the Anne Sexton man­ uscript. I wish to express gratitude to Marilyn Miller for her incisive and clarifying editing, and to Maureen MacGrogen for her encouragement as senior editor at Routledge. I wish to thank those psychotherapy patients who consented to allow me to use aspects of their treatment process for clarification of critical the­ oretical and clinical issues related to the themes o f this book. My debt of gratitude is greatest to them. I would like to thank M arc Wayne, colleague, friend, and O bject Relations Institute faculty member, for his vivid understanding of the themes that join The Compulsion to Create and The Creative Mystique, ones that touch on profound clinical issues I have benefitted from and enjoyed discussing with him. I would also like to thank my O bject Relations Institute co-director, Dr. Robert Weinstein, for his continuing support of my theoretical and clinical work, and for his enthusiasm about me presenting all my work, particularly that related to my writing, to the Institute faculty; and to the candidates, affiliates, and guests. I would like to thank Louise De C osta, the O RI chairperson of Education (until 1995), faculty, and supervisor at O RI, for her passion­ ate appreciation of the road I am traveling in my studies, which overlaps with her own road of interest in educating those who work with per­ forming artists. In addition, I want to thank Dr. Joseph Reppen, Dr. Joyce Me Dougall, Dr. Desy Sanford-Gerard, Dr. Albert Brok, Dr. Richard Alperin, Dr. Connie Levine-Schneidman, Rosemary Masters, Art Baur, Harriet Wald, Audrey Goldich, and Audrey Ashendorf. I’d like to thank Dr. James Masterson for his inspiring enthusiasm for my first book, The

XI I)

Compulsion to Create. All of these colleagues have encouraged me to con­ tinue to pursue my studies. I wish to thank the members of the private teaching seminars I have conducted, who have inspired me through their response to my theories and readings, among whom are Dr. Anita Katz, Dr. Aracelia PearsonBrok, Dr. Marvin Hurvich, Colleen Konheim, Dr. Robert Weinstein, and Jonathon Block. I thank all my O bject Relations Institute (for Psycho­ therapy and Psychoanalysis) candidate students, as well as my former stu­ dents from the Postgraduate Center for M ental H ealth, the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP), the Brooklyn Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and the Institute of Developmental Psychology for their role in encouraging my thinking. I extend my grati­ tude to all the members of the nine-year weekly writing group, currently including Rollene Saal, Roger Rosen, Valerie Bryant, Bo Niles, Gerry Alpert, and Susan Kornfeld. Although I lead the group and don’t present my own work, I find the courage of all the group members to expose their extremely personal struggles with the creative process to be a source of continuing inspiration for me. My thanks and regards to George and all his staff at the Park East Restaurant, which has been the cafe I most frequent while writing and editing my psychoanalytic and literary work. Thank you for your cap­ puccino. I specifically want to thank Lucy, who has been my long-term friendly waitress. My thanks to all those at the Park Heights Stationers who have pho­ tocopied my work through the years. Thanks also to those at MailBoxes on Flatbush Avenue.

PART O N E )

Theory

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1) PA TH O LO G Y AND HEALTH OF CREATIVITY

Compulsion and Mystique or Dialectic

T H E C O M P U L S I O N TO C R E A T E

Artists express the vitality and meaning o f their lives through creative work and the creative process. 1 would propose that this is not all. At some psychic level, I believe artists also seek emotional healing through their creative w ork. Perhaps this is one reason why creativity and the process that gives birth to it has often been idealized (see Kavaler-Adler, 1993a, on Kohut’s idealization o f creativity). Indeed, the creative process has been seen as totally positive for psychological growth and well-being, while its pathological aspects have been virtually overlooked. In an earlier book, The C om pulsion to C reate (Routledge, 1 9 9 3 ), I showed how the creative process can become the captive o f pathological forces. This occurs when early trauma lives psychologically within the individual and disrupts the development o f the internal psychic structure necessary for critical mourning and reparation to be processed within the artist’s creative work. With early trauma, a closed internal system is cre­ ated (see Fairbairn, 1952) that perpetuates the repetition o f the trauma in the theme and process of the work and perpetuates an unconscious fan­ tasy marriage to a demon lover figure— the demon lover can be experi­ enced as an omnipotent homicidal intruder and rapist. Both the content and process o f the work, then, manifest as an unresolvable demon lover theme. The demon lover figure leads the alter-ego characters o f a number of

m ajo r female artists to their death. In each extensive study in the Compulsion to Create and in T he Creative Mystique, I describe how the demon lover becom es death itself, with death taking on an erotic and (3

4)

SUSAN KAVALER-ADLER

seductive form. At this point symbolic self-fragmentation occurs, with human part-object forms regressing, often into insects and rodent forms, thereby becoming object fragments that cannot be empathized with. As the demon lover theme of self-disintegration and fatal despair with­ in the creative work of the artist becomes increasingly evident, the artist’s life dissipates. With such developments, creative work fails to be the scene of successful mourning and self-integration. This combines with a striving to heal and mourn that compels the artist, who is trapped in an internal closed system, to be obsessed with modes of pathological mourning, symptomatically symbolized by the demon lover theme. The desire for repairing the inner world and for creating whole and good love objects not only fails, but is continually frustrated. Creative productivity is idealized into a magic radiance, and muse figures who personify that radiance are sought through the creative work. Artists may thus become hopelessly caught up in a cycle o f aborted mourning, with death and self-deterioration as possible denouements. The female artist in such a predicament is drawn deeper and deeper into a psychic marriage with demonic figures within her work. Therefore she moves further away from interpersonal relations in daily life. The originally impaired interpersonal capacities then show a fatal decline, simultaneous with a fatal decline of self-integrative capacities in the work. When there is no nurturance for the work from interpersonal love and intimacy, and no nurturancc for interpersonal life from affectively alive resolutions of internal world rela­ tions within the creative work, both psychic spheres oppose and obviate, rather than nurture one another. This self-destructive process is enforced by the closed-off system of the scaled and traumatized inchoate self under the pressure of demonic themes. As the creative work dissipates, and its symbolized characters fragment, the artist (writer) moves away from the interpersonal world rather than towards it. The artist, in response, either resorts to seclusion or suicide. In The Compulsion to Create , I demonstrated how Emily Dickinson, Emily Bronte, and ultimately Edith Sitwell withdrew into seclusion and into psychophysical regressions, whereas Sylvia Plath committed suicide. In The Creative Mystique we will study the suicides o f Virginia Woolf, Diane Arbus, Anne Sexton, Katherine Mansfield, and the seclusion and literal imprisonment o f Camille Claudel. All are led away from life by their pathological compulsions to seek a rescuing merger with an omnipo­ tent muse through the medium of their creative work, and by the obstruc­ tion of any healthy psychic need to realistically heal the self through mourning. Seeking to psychically marry a muse, these artists end up wed to the demon lover. Self-fragmentation, rather than generative children,

PATHOLOGY AND HEALTH OF CREATIVITY