When Scriptotherapy Fails: The Life and Death of Sylvia Plath and Adelheid Duvanel

In the introduction to Shattered Subjects. Trauma and Testimony in Women's Life-Writing (2000), Suzette A. Henke poses the following question:

If one accepts the basic premise of Freud's talking cure – a psychoanalytic working through of repressed memories brought to the surface and abreacted through the use of language and free association – then an intriguing question arises concerning the role of the analyst. Is he or she truly necessary?

(xi)

Henke will prove in the body of her text that the doctor-patient scenario is not the only method for working through trauma. Scriptotherapy, Henke's term for life-writing, can be the means to recover memories long repressed and facilitate the resolution of fears without the presence of a listener. She argues that by writing one can come to understand and live with these memories, supporting her claim by citing an article by Shoshana Felman that argues that "a surrogate transferential process can take place through the scene of writing that allows its author to envisage a sympathetic audience and to imagine a public validation of his or her life testimony" (xii).

This "life testimony" is not an autobiography. It is a fictionalization of aspects of the writer's life that seem to her for a variety of objective reasons to warrant an audience. Whether she writes in the third or first person, she creates an account of, for example, her childhood fear that her mother would abandon her if she cried for any reason. She remains outside the experience as the manipulator of the mise en scène, but in the course of remembering back to childhood and choosing the words that will best convey the child's thought processes to her audience she will be in a position to reexperience the feeling of fear, and from the vantage point of years of maturity she will understand how that childish fear impeded personal and professional relationships. The potential for self-enlightenment always dwells in writing, whether one seeks it or not.

The women in Henke's study are Gabrielle Sidonie Colette (known professionally as simply Colette), Hilda Doolittle (writing as H. D.), Anaïs Nin, Janet Frame, Audre Lorde, and Sylvia Fraser. Each of them, to paraphrase the quotation from Nin's diary that serves as the motto for Henke's last chapter (Henke 141), saw her suffering as a story and was saved. Yet the women whose life-writing is described here were not able to save themselves by means of such activity. The American poet Sylvia Plath (1932–63) is better known than Adelheid Duvanel (1936–96), a Swiss writer of short stories. Both women chose suicide, unable "to implement the kind of healing made possible through the public inscription of personal testimony" (Henke xxii). The exposition that follows is not meant to contradict in any way Henke's study of the "shattered subjects" for whom life-writing was a liberating experience. The two women whose strikingly similar personal life is described below were unable to achieve that level of release from psychic pain, despite the supremacy of life-writing in their literary career as well as psychiatric and pharmacological aid. The theme that underlies the following discussion is not why Sylvia Plath and Adelheid Duvanel, with the impressive verbal artistry each possessed, failed (although that is a topic), but rather the real or perceived parental influence from early childhood that shaped the future for both obviously sensitive children, who early on displayed artistic ability. The issues of parental control and expectation are noteworthy here because of the similarity of these writers' responses to their environment.

Sylvia Plath was the first child of a scientist and university professor of German and biology, who was almost twice as old as his twenty-five-year-old wife, his former student, who taught high school German before her marriage. He died when Sylvia was eight and her brother Warren six. "Me, I never knew the love of a father, the love of a steady blood-related man after the age of eight [...] the only man who'd love me...