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November 30, 2004

SYLVIA AND RUTH

Salon runs a fascinating piece by Karen Maroda, a psychologist, who interviewed Dr. Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse - therapist to Sylvia Plath - and comes to the disturbing conclusion that the personal may have tinged the therapeutic relationship.

Ruth Barnhouse had been Sylvia Plath’s psychiatrist since her hospitalization at McLean in 1953, a period in her life immortalized in her semi-autobiographical novel, "The Bell Jar." But what most Plath observers don’t realize is just how close Barnhouse remained with Plath after she left McLean, and even after she left the country for her final ill-fated move to England with husband Ted Hughes. Plath biographer Paul Alexander is one exception. In an article for The Nation he wrote, “As I’d expected, she (Ruth Barnhouse) was a singular figure in Plath’s life….From September 1953 until February 1963 Barnhouse and Plath stayed in more or less constant contact either by mail or by telephone. During those years Plath wrote Barnhouse long, revealing letters.”

Fascinated by "The Bell Jar" as an adolescent, I was part of a generation of women who felt that Sylvia Plath spoke to our desire to balance our personal ambition with close relationships, and the intense internal conflicts that produced. And as a psychoanalytic psychologist, I've written a great deal about the relationship between therapist and patient. So after having been left unsatisfied by all of the Plath biographies, I wanted to know more about what happened, and didn't happen, in Sylvia's treatment. I was primarily interested in why she did not remain in the treatment she so badly needed, yet could not give up her relationship with her psychiatrist. Had Ruth Barnhouse tried to keep Sylvia Plath in therapy, but was unable to?

Posted at 12:11 AM |

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Comments

angela

I'm curious about her relationship as well. Thanks for the tip on the article.

Posted by: angela | November 30, 2004 at 01:52 PM

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

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    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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