Susan Kavaler-Adler

SUSAN KAVALER-ADLER, PhD, ABPP, DLitt, NCPsyA has been a practicing clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst for over 40 years. She works with individuals, couples, and groups in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, and she supervises psychotherapists individually and in groups. For over 35 years, Dr. Kavaler-Adler also offers consultation to those who are experiencing creative blocks or self-doubts, but who wish to write for personal healing or for writing projects. Many have published in her...See more

SUSAN KAVALER-ADLER, PhD, ABPP, DLitt, NCPsyA has been a practicing clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst for over 40 years. She works with individuals, couples, and groups in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, and she supervises psychotherapists individually and in groups. For over 35 years, Dr. Kavaler-Adler also offers consultation to those who are experiencing creative blocks or self-doubts, but who wish to write for personal healing or for writing projects. Many have published in her writing groups: memoirs, professional articles, etc. She has helped many in her practice to convert anxiety and depression into creative self-expression in love and work.Dr. Kavaler-Adler is the Co-Founder, Executive Director, Senior Faculty, Training Analyst, Senior Supervisor, and President of the Board for the Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She created a unique and original curriculum that integrates theories of the British Object Relations school of psychoanalysis and the American school of Object Relations theory. She teaches about the evolution of Object Relations theory in both Britain and America, and provides clinical illustrations. She teaches courses on the Object Relations perspective on character disorder psychopathology, on psychoanalytic phenomena (and defenses) that we observe in various psychic structures, as well as on the "Analyst as Instrument, experiential role-play" group supervision courses offered through all trimesters of each academic year.Dr. Kavaler-Adler is acknowledged for her extensive work on the Object Relations theories, including the phenomena of love-creativity dialectic, developmental mourning, erotic transference, spirituality, surrender versus submission (in life and in Argentine tango). She has written extensively about pathological mourning in terms of the demon-lover theme and the demon-lover complex. Dr. Kavaler-Adler's theory of developmental mourning expands Melanie Klein's understanding of mourning and its relation to manic depressive states, and James Masterson's abandonment depression. She defines regret as a psychological transformation process within the context of developmental mourning, a transition from Klein's paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position. Dr. Kavaler-Adler's demon-lover complex theory interacts with the Jungian archetypal theory of the demon-lover complex by Marion Woodman. Her theory of psychic health, known as the love-creativity dialectic, was first proposed in one of her earlier books, The Creative Mystique: From Red Shoes Frenzy to Love and Creativity. Some of her psychobiographical work incorporates a concept of a dialectic between the Object Relations theorists Melanie Klein and D. W. Winnicott, utilizing historical facts and psychological interpretations of their lives' events and their work, as in one of her books, The Klein-Winnicott Dialectic: Transformative New Metapsychology and Interactive Clinical Theory. See less