Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath

Psychiatric Premises of Mental Illness and the Ariel Poems

When Sylvia Plath took her own life in 1963, her work was left with a mark she would have detested had she been around to see it. Although she has long been recognized as a gifted author, she will probably never be fully appreciated for her writing because her suicide simultaneously overshadows and illuminates it. Her struggle with severe depression and the suggestion that she may have been schizophrenic have been the subject of much speculation and sensationalism. During and following her psychiatric treatments, Plath used writing as an external way to interpret and manage her internal struggles. Her journals and her poetry, particularly her posthumously published collection, Ariel, provide insight into the psychiatric premises of mental illness during the 1950s. Her work can be read more effectively within the context of these perspectives.

In 1953 Plath received her first psychiatric treatment following an unsuccessful suicide attempt. The field of psychiatry had recently experienced a paradigm shift. Previous to World War II most mental illnesses were considered organic in origin, meaning that they stemmed from a physical condition. By the 1950s it was more common to view them in the context of social conditioning (Menninger 429). Plath pondered this perspective in her journal. How much of my brain is willfully my own? How much is not a rubber stamp of what I have read and heard and lived? [...] is that all that differentiates me from another person That I have banged into and assimilated
various things? (Kukil 47). Dr. Andrew E. Skodol summarized the mindset of the day when he wrote that psychopathology results from a single psychosocial process: failure to adapt to ones environment (Menninger 431). The influence of environment was given more weight than any other factor in determining the causes of and treatments for mental illness.

As a result of this framework, therapists and patients had a feeling of power over mental disorders; if the situations that prompted them could be dealt with and overcome, they could be cured. In many cases mental disorders were not seen as illnesses at all, but as difficulties that could be worked through and gotten over with little or no medical intervention. There are many methods of treating depression of spirits [...] the condition has a natural tendency to recover without any treatment whatsoever (Palmer 61). The positive outcome of this was that fewer people were pronounced insane without hope of recovery. If situations and thought processes could be changed, many people could overcome their mental disorders (Menninger 431).

The negative side of this perspective was that those who struggled with mental illnesses tended to blame themselves and usually their families for their condition and their inability to overcome it (rather than their chemical and neurological makeup as is more often the case today). Plath expressed feelings of self-blame when she addressed herself in her journal in 1953, "you should be able to think, accept, affirm and not retreat into a masochistic hell where jealousy and fear make you want to stop eating please yank yourself up [...] please, think snap out of this (Kukil 186-187)." She was also willing to place blame on her family, in particular her parents, and to a lesser degree her husband, Ted Hughes.

Plaths letters, compiled by her mother Aurelia Plath, reveal much about the nature of Sylvias relationship with her mother and the tendency of psychiatrists to point out family members as the root of the problem. In her letters she addressed Aurelia using phrases like "Dearest-Mother-whom-I-love-better-than-anybody" (Plath, A 84), "Dearest Mummy" (45) and other terms of endearment. These expressions of tenderness conflict with statements she made later in her journals, such as in 1958 when she wrote, "How do I express my hate for my mother? In my deepest emotions I think of her as an enemy [...] what a luxury it would be to kill her, to strangle her skinny veined throat which could never be big enough to protect me from the world [...] I'd [like to] kill her, so I killed myself" (Kukil 432). The accusation that her mother was at least partially to blame for Sylvias suicide attempt contradicts Aurelias account of what took place a few days before it occurred. She wrote, "Then she grabbed my hand [...] and cried passionately, Oh, Mother, the world is so rotten! I want to die! Lets die together!" (Plath, A 124) Plath gave no indication of this close relationship when she later wrote, "I could pass her on the street and not say a word, she depresses me so" (Kukil 433).

There are many possible explanations for this discrepancy. Whatever the true reason for the varying accounts of their complicated relationship, it is noteworthy that Plath's most negative expressions about her mother followed her psychotherapy under the direction of Dr. Ruth Beuscher. Like the majority of her colleagues, Dr. Beuscher subscribed to the Freudian view that mental illness grew out of a childs relationship with her mother, and that a lack of motherly love could permanently damage a child in the earliest stages of life. "Early frustrations of the childs fundamental needs hinder the normal development of an ego [...] The most common lack is giving and unconditional love from the mother. It is not surprising that a similar ego structure should be induced in the infant by the latent or manifest depressive character of the mother, who is interjected as a frustrating, albeit necessary, object of love" (Azima 105). It seems as if Plath's views of her mother changed considerably after several years of treatment. She wrote that Dr. Beuscher gave her "permission to hate [her] mother" (Kukil 429).

The influence of family conditioning on mental illness has been frequently applied to Plath's failed marriage to Ted Hughes. After years of silence on the subject, Hughes agreed to a personal interview in 1996. In keeping with the Freudian view, Hughes placed blame on himself for his wife's suicide. When questioned about why he and Plath moved back to England in 1961, an event that many have seen as the beginning of her end, Hughes said, "I was the one who [...] pressured her to leave teaching and devote herself to poetry [...] I sometimes feel that if we had stayed in her country of birth, she would not have committed suicide" (Negev 6). By identifying himself as the cause of her death, Hughes overlooks the fact that his wife's first suicide attempt occurred in her country of birth and had nothing to do with him.

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Sylvia Plath, 1932-1963

Hughes reveals his view of his wifes illness in Birthday Letters, a collection of poems. Regarding family influence he wrote the poem "The Hands":

Two immense hands
Dandled your infancy.
Later the same hands quietly
Positioned you in the crawl space
And fed you the pills,
Gloved so you would not recognize them. (1-6)

These lines are full of connotations of parenthood: the care of "immense hands", being "dandled", "quietly positioned", "fed". In the final two lines he made the connection to her suicide attempt, "the pills" that Plath swallowed in 1953. Strikingly, this is the same connection that Plath made in her famous poem Daddy, where she described the anger she felt toward her father after his death:

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you. (55-63)

She made a correlation between her father's death, the way his passing introduced her to evil in the world, and her attempt to end her life. Plaths psychiatrist would have considered this a valid correlation and probably encouraged these types of ideas in her therapy.

Hughes also wrote that Plath only wrote about, "her Oedipal love for her father, her complex relationship with her mother, the attempt at suicide [...] The power of these
poems is because of her ability to cling to the feelings of an eight-year-old, emotions that simmered for 20 years." (Negev 5). Drawing upon the Freudian view that family influence is the root of mental illness, Hughes saw in Plaths relationship with her father the primary source of her inner conflicts. In "The Table" he wrote about the intrusion of Sylvia's father Otto Plath into their marriage.

I did not
Know I had made and fitted a door
Opening downwards into your Daddys grave
He limped up through it
Into our house. While I slept he snuggled
Shivering between us. Turning to touch me
You recognized him. 'Wait!' I said. 'Wait!' (11-13, 27-30)

In saying that he made and fitted the door that opened his wife to insanity, Hughes expressed his belief in the influence of her fathers death on Plaths mental state, and Hughes' own influence on her.

Psychoanalytic theory in the 1950s and 1960s placed a heavy emphasis on the importance and inherent dangers of the client-therapist relationship. Plaths relationship with Dr. Ruth Beuscher illustrates this. "Manic-depressive patients [...] tend to idealize the analyst, thinking of him as extremely benevolent and omnipotent, but at the slightest frustration the situation can quickly change and the analyst becomes a useless, bad persecuting object and the patient tends to withdraw and to reject him completely" (Azima 73). Plath's experience with therapy follows this model. When she was doing well she idealized Dr. Beuscher and identified her as a mother figure. In 1958 she wrote, "Where do you look for a mother-person who is wise and who can tell you what you ought to know about facts of life like babies and how to produce them? The only person I know and trust for this is RB [Ruth Beuscher]" (Kukil 435.) In 1963, during her final lapse into depression she composed Lady Lazarus.

So, so Herr Doktor,
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern. (65-72)

Her tone of sarcasm and resentment indicates a shift in the way she viewed her therapy. She now saw her therapist as the one who stood in her way, a Herr Enemy, the one who thwarted her plans to die. It appears that she had made the predicted transition from idealizing her analyst to withdrawal and rejection.

Psychiatric literature in Plaths time emphasized the idea that mental illness, depression in particular, arises from a fixation on an object of desire, a goal that is considered more important than anything else in the world, and the belief that this object is unattainable because the individual is not worthy of it. "The central conflict of the patient when he is deeply depressed is his belief that he has killed and therefore lost through his own fault his loved object, and that all his attempts at restoration are useless so that he gives himself up to complete despair"
(Arieti 74). A theme that arose frequently in Plath's journals is the fear that, despite all her work, she was a failure as a writer. Her object of desire was her ability to write and to receive recognition for it. During one period of depression she wrote that she was "unable to write a thing [...] Anesthetizing myself again, and pretending nothing is there [...] Caught between the hope and promise of my work [...] and the hopeless gap between that promise and the real world" (Kukil 517). To her, this was the most devastating effect of depression. In 1959 she wrote, "I feel outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness [...] My shaping spirit of imagination is far from me" (Kukil 517). She
had hopes of being influential and well respected, and drove herself to exhaustion in the attempt to realize this goal, but she was continually frustrated. "Frustrated? Yes. Why? Because it is impossible for me to be God [...] or anything much [...] I want to express my being as fully as I can because I somewhere picked up the idea that I could justify my being alive that way" (Kukil 45)

The main source of her frustration was the feeling that she could not get outside of herself. In the same journal entry she wrote, "here is your life, your mind: Dont panic. Begin writing. Then think. If you can't think outside yourself, you can't write" (Kukil, 45). She acknowledged that her focus on self was limiting to her writing, but it was the way she had learned to cope with what was happening in her mind. As Hughes later commented, "Every work of art stems from a wound in the soul of the artist [...] Art is a psychological component of the auto-immune system that gives expression to the healing process. That is why great works of art make us feel good" (Negev 5). Although some may not agree that Plaths writing makes people "feel good," it is apparent that for her the writing process was a device for managing pain and healing old wounds.

Although there were many forms of treatment recommended for temporary reactive depression, which precipitated purely by disturbing events, more extreme medical measures were considered appropriate for those who were experiencing "depressive psychosis" or "melancholia" (DSM-I 38). Dr. Harold Palmer commented on this is his resource manual for psychiatrists in 1957. "There is only one specific treatment for melancholia, and that is by artificially induced coma [...] There are two methods, that induced by hypoglycaemia and that induced by epileptiform convulsions" (Palmer, 61). Plath underwent both of these treatments during her stay at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. Electroshock and insulin shock therapy were both experimental at this time, and methods varied in their effectiveness. In The Bell Jar she wrote about the gruesome experience of being treated by a doctor who administered the treatment improperly without anesthesia.

"Something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the worldwith each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant. I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done." (143)

In the poem "The Bee Meeting" Plath wrote of being the subject of an experiment, the betrayal of the doctors whom she trusted, and the ultimate failure of the treatments.

I am exhausted, I am exhausted
Pillar of white in a blackout of knives.
I am the magicians girl who does not flinch.
The villagers are untying their disguises, they are shaking hands.
Whose is that long white box in the grove, what have they accomplished, why am
I cold? (51-55)

The treatments were painful and taxing on the body and mind, and although they succeeded temporarily, for Plath they were ultimately ineffective and did more harm than good. She was left "exhausted", "cold", and finally the "long white box" became a reality.

It is a terrible irony that Sylvia Plath's struggle with depression was the reason her writing was great, and it was the reason she did not become the writer she could have been. She was greatly limited, not only by her inability to overcome mental illness, but also by the premises of her time. Had she overcome depression and transcended these premises, she might have continued writing and developed a mature voice that spoke about many things, a voice that would have stepped outside of itself.