Sylvia Plath: An Example of Forbidden Suffering

You ask me why I spend my life writing?
Do I find entertainment?
Is it worthwhile?
Above all, does it pay?
If not, then, is there a reason?...
I write only because
There is a voice within me
That will not be still.

SYLVIA PLATH

Every life and every childhood is filled with frustrations; we cannot imagine it otherwise, for even the best mother cannot satisfy all her child's wishes and needs. It is not the suffering caused by frustration, however, that leads to emotional illness but rather the fact that the child is forbidden by the parents to experience and articulate this suffering, the pain felt at being wounded; usually the purpose of this prohibition is to protect the parents' defense mechanisms. Adults are free to hurl reproaches at God, at fate, at the authorities, or at society if they are deceived, ignored, punished unjustly, confronted with excessive demands, or lied to. Children are not allowed to reproach their gods--their parents and teachers. By no means are they allowed to express their frustrations. Instead, they must repress or deny their emotional reactions, which build up inside until adulthood, when they are finally discharged, but not on the object that caused them. The forms this discharge may take range from persecuting their own children by the way they bring them up, to all possible degrees of emotional illness, to addiction, criminality, and even suicide.
The most acceptable and profitable form this discharge can take for society is literature, because this does not burden anyone with guilt feelings. In this medium the author is free to make every possible reproach, since here it can be attributed to a fictitious person. An illustration is the life of Sylvia Plath, for in her case, along with her poetry and the fact of her psychotic breakdown as well as her later suicide, there are also the personal statements she makes in her letters and the comments by her mother. The tremendous pressure she felt to achieve and the constant stress she was under are always emphasized when Sylvia's suicide is discussed. Her mother, too, points this out repeatedly, for parents of suicidal people understandably try to restrict themselves to external causes, since their guilt feelings stand in the way of their seeing the situation for what it actually is and of their experiencing grief.

Sylvia Plath's life was no more difficult than that of millions of others. Presumably as a result of her sensitivity, she suffered much more intensely than most people from the frustrations of childhood, but she experienced joy more intensely also. Yet the reason for her despair was not her suffering but the impossibility of communicating her suffering to another person. In all her letters she assures her mother how well she is doing. The suspicion that her mother did not release negative letters for publication overlooks the deep tragedy of Plath's life. This tragedy (and the explanation for her suicide as well) lies in the very fact that she could not have written any other kind of letters, because her mother needed reassurance, or because Sylvia at any rate believed that her mother would not have been able to live without this reassurance. Had Sylvia been able to write aggressive and unhappy letters to her mother, she would not have had to commit suicide. Had her mother been able to experience grief at her inability to comprehend the abyss that was her daughter's life, she never would have published the letters, because the assurances they contained of how well things were going for her daughter would have been too painful to bear. Aurelia Plath is unable to mourn over this because she has guilt feelings, and the letters serve her as proof of her innocence. The following passage from Letters Home provides an example of her rationalization. 

The following poem, written at the age of fourteen, was inspired by the accidental blurring of a pastel still-life Sylvia had just completed and stood up on the porch table to show us. As Warren, Grammy, and I were admiring it, the doorbell rang. Grammy took off her apron, tossed it on the table, and went to answer the call, her apron brushing against the pastel, blurring part of it. Grammy was grieved. Sylvia, however, said lightly, "Don't worry; I can patch it up." That night she wrote her first poem containing tragic undertones.

I THOUGHT THAT I COULD NOT BE HURT
I thought that I could not be hurt;
I thought that I must surely be
impervious to suffering--
immune to mental pain
or agony.
My world was warm with April sun
my thoughts were spangled green and gold;
my soul filled up with joy, yet felt
the sharp, sweet pain that only joy
can hold.
My spirit soared above the gulls
that, swooping breathlessly so high
o'erhead, now seem to brush their whirring
wings against the blue roof of
the sky.
(How frail the human heart must be--
a throbbing pulse, a trembling thing--
a fragile, shining instrument
of crystal, which can either weep,
or sing.)
Then, suddenly my world turned gray,
and darkness wiped aside my joy.
A dull and aching void was left
where careless hands had reached out to
destroy
my silver web of happiness.
The hands then stopped in wonderment,
for, loving me, they wept to see
the tattered ruins of my firma-
ment.
(How frail the human heart must be--
a mirrored pool of thought. So deep
and tremulous an instrument
of glass that it can either sing,
or weep.)

Her English teacher, Mr. Crockett, showed this to a colleague, who said, "Incredible that one so young could have experienced anything so devastating." When I repeated Mr. Crockett's account of this conversation to me, Sylvia smiled impishly, saying, "Once a poem is made available to the public, the right of interpretation belongs to the reader."

If a sensitive child like Sylvia Plath intuits that it is essential for her mother to interpret the daughter's pain only as the consequence of a picture being damaged and not as a consequence of the destruction of her daughter's self and its expression--symbolized in the fate of the pastel--the child will do her utmost to hide her authentic feelings from the mother. The letters are testimony of the false self she constructed (whereas her true self is speaking in The Bell Jar). With the publication of the letters, her mother erects an imposing monument to her daughter's false self.

We can learn from this example what suicide really is: the only possible way to express the true self--at the expense of life itself. Many parents are like Sylvia's mother. They desperately try to behave correctly toward their child, and in their child's behavior they seek reassurance that they are good parents. The attempt to be an ideal parent, that is, to behave correctly toward the child, to raise her correctly, not to give too little or too much, is in essence an attempt to be the ideal child -- well behaved and dutiful -- of one's own parents. But as a result of these efforts the needs of the child go unnoticed. I cannot listen to my child with empathy if I am inwardly preoccupied with being a good mother; I cannot be open to what she is telling me. This can be observed in various parental attitudes.
Frequently, parents will not be aware of their child's narcissistic wounds; they do not notice them because they learned, from the time they were little, not to take them seriously in themselves. It may be the case that they are aware of them but believe it is better for the child not to become aware. They will try to talk her out of many of her early perceptions and make her forget her earliest experiences, all in the belief that this is for the child's own good, for they think that she could not bear to know the truth and would fall ill as a result. That it is just the other way around, that the child suffers precisely because the truth is concealed, they do not see. This was strikingly illustrated in the case of a little baby with a severe birth defect who, from the time she was born, had to be tied down at feeding time and fed in a manner that resembled torture. The mother later tried to keep this "secret" from her grown daughter, in order to "spare" her from something that had already happened. She was therefore unable to help her acknowledge to herself this early experience, which was expressing itself through various symptoms.
Whereas the first attitude is based entirely on the repression of one's own childhood experiences, the second one also includes the absurd hope that the past can be corrected by remaining silent about it.
In the first case we encounter the principle, "What must not be cannot be," and in the second, "If we don't talk about what happened, then it didn't happen."

The malleability of a sensitive child is nearly boundless, permitting all these parental demands to be absorbed by the psyche. The child can adapt perfectly to them, and yet something remains, which we might call body knowledge, that allows the truth to manifest itself in physical illnesses or sensations, and sometimes also in dreams. If a psychosis or neurosis develops, this is yet another way of letting the soul speak, albeit in a form that no one can understand and that becomes as much of a burden, to the affected person--and to society--as his or her childhood reactions to the traumata suffered had been to the parents.
As I have repeatedly stressed, it is not the trauma itself that is the source of illness but the unconscious, repressed, hopeless despair over not being allowed to give expression to what one has suffered and the fact that one is not allowed to show and is unable to experience feelings of rage, anger, humiliation, despair, helplessness, and sadness. This causes many people to commit suicide because life no longer seems worth living if they are totally unable to live out all these strong feelings that are part of their true self. Naturally, we cannot require parents to face something they are unable to face, but we can keep confronting them with the knowledge that it was not suffering per se that made their child ill but its repression, which was essential for the sake of the parents. I have found that this knowledge often provides parents with an "aha!" experience that opens up for them the possibility of mourning, thus helping to reduce their guilt feelings.
Pain over the frustration one has suffered is nothing to be ashamed of, nor is it harmful. It is a natural, human reaction. However, if it is verbally or nonverbally forbidden or even stamped out by force and by beatings, as it is in "poisonous pedagogy," then natural development is impeded and the conditions for pathological development are created. Hitler proudly reported that one day, without a tear or a cry, he managed to count the blows his father gave him. Hitler imagined that his father never beat him again thereafter. I take this to be a figment of his imagination because it is unlikely that Alois's reasons for beating his son disappeared from one day to the next, for his motives were not related to the child's behavior but to his own unresolved childhood humiliation. The son's imaginings tell us, however, that he could not remember the beatings his father gave him from that time on because having to fight down his psychic pain by identifying with the aggressor also meant that the memory of the later beatings was repressed. This phenomenon can often be observed in patients who, as a result of regaining access to their feelings, now remember events they previously emphatically denied had taken place.
Taken from the book "For Own Good: Hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the roots of violence" by Alice Miller (Page 254)
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