Rosemarie Rowley

ECT in the LIFE AND WORK OF SYLVIA PLATH

Posted by Rosemarie Rowley on May 23 2008

by Rosemarie Rowley:
ECT in the life and work of Sylvia Plath

This essay is an effort to come to terms with poetry born of deep trauma. In my view, electric shock therapy (also known as ECT, or electro-convulsive therapy) had a fundamental role in Sylvia Plath’s life as it effected her personally, when such material became not only the theme of her work but its very expression. The truth of what happened to her mind, and her response and attitude showed a phenomenal capacity to confront her total devastation which has only been partly understood. Through this barbaric intrusion into her mind and through the strictures and mesh of great art she forced a universal truth.

George Steiner, in Janet Malcolm’s book, writes of Sylvia Plath’s “total communion with those tortured and massacred”, while Seamus Heaney takes the view in relation to her major poem Daddy that (it) “rampages so permissively in the history of other people’s sorrows that it simply overdraws its rights to our sympathy”. George Steiner says that Daddy is “one of the few poems in any language to come near the last horror.”

It is my purpose in this essay to argue that Sylvia Plath, in her life events, earned the right to write about suffering, not in a vicarious way as suggested by Heaney, who after all, happily has no knowledge of how such drastic therapies could affect a person, but that her traumas and calamities were so profound, that on the contrary, by identifying them with a history of public oppression, she achieved the integrity and understanding that true suffering brings.

It is her gift of language and her powers of naming in the face of desolation and indifference that have augmented her reputation:

This is the city where men are mended
I lie on a great anvil
The flat blue sky circle
Flew off like the hat of a doll
When I fell out of the light. I entered
The stomach of indifference, the wordless cupboard

The Birthday (The Stones)

The pity of the poetry is that it reached such a negative polarity in her suicide, but had she lived and recovered, it may have been a rebirth for her spiritually, artistically, and emotionally. However her call for help turned into her real life death by her own hand and such death of the self had already been experienced at the age of 20 when she underwent ECT for the first time. Her love affair with horror had begun

It is no accident that Sylvia Plath has ended up as the voice of dehumanization and suffering. From the beginning, almost, she is like a tourist guide to the inhumane in a landscape that is foreign to her and her readers, yet in some way, echoes their experience. It is the modern landscape but without love or identification.

The history of Sylvia Plath’s art begins as an act of isolation in the larger community, her own situation of being a very bright girl in a land which preferred mediocre and unquestioning minds in its women. The vacuum produced a high degree of social compliance and conventionality without an inner core of spiritual meaning. This isolation was mixed with the callous indifference which was part of the complacency of life in America. Her casual diction and slangy jabs belie her subject matter and increase their import through the effect of irony.

Her background was of importance in that way. Neither of Sylvia’s parents had English as a first language, hence it was natural for her to be, from the beginning, an outsider. In her novel The Bell Jar, from the first sentence we are in the presence of someone with the dispatch and dispassion of a news gatherer who knows what it is to be an alien. At the time the newspapers were full of the story of the Rosenbergs, a husband and wife who had acted as spies for Russia during the Eisenhower era. By setting her own personal story – for the novel is autobiographical – in the scandal and sense of betrayal the American public felt, she encapsulates both the quietism of the times with the shock of a post-bomb cold war culture. . Her use of “electrocuted” in the first sentence which hints at but does not reveal her own experience of electric shock is a kind of trademark of hers – the casual tone with the horrific fact is a kind of Plathism.

There is a clear difference, particularly in the prose, between her early style and the style that followed the electro-shock treatment. If we look at an early story A Day in June – written at the age of seventeen, her diction is clear, there is a lightness of touch without the later heavy deadly parody. In a later poem, written in 1956, two and a half years after her suicide attempt, consequent hospitalization and ECT treatment she writes a savage and threatening parody of adolescence, showing fear and horror in the bloom of youth:

Grim as gargoyles from years spent squatting at seas’ border
To wait amid snarled weed and wrack of wave
To trap this wayward girl at her first move of love
Now with stake and pitchfork they advance, flint eyes fixed on murder.
Dream with Clam Diggers, l956

Sylvia Plath is a classic case of Frost in May. The electro shock therapy arose out of a suicide attempt after she was denied entry to a creative writing class run by the Irish writer Frank O Connor. Her sense of failure was such she took an overdose and crept under the floor of the garage. What is ironic is that later on, having found fulfillment as a poet, wife and mother, she reverted to her original suicidal state because of fear.

If we look at her early background, we can see how it formed her. Her parents were both in their youth deviant from their own immediate culture and families, hence the feeling of being an outsider was there from the beginning. They were all strangers in a strange land. Otto Plath, Sylvia’s father, was besieged by doubts when he read Darwin, and left a future ministry, and his family never spoke to him again. Sylvia Plath’s mother, Aurelia Plath, moved from Catholicism to being a Methodist.

From the beginning at home, Sylvia was offered formulae for excellence, based on performance. Her father paid special attention to her accomplishments. It seems at times Sylvia was no more than the sum of her capabilities and accomplishments. It is probable that as a small child she imaged God in her omnipotent father so when he died, shortly after her eighth birthday in 1940, she may have lost any faith she had in a benign divinity or a benign world – the famous “I’11 never speak to God again.”

Furthermore, she was not allowed the natural mourning process. Sylvia Plath’s mother, Aurelia, believed it best not to grieve in front of the children. Sylvia did not see her father’s corpse or coffin, nor attend his funeral, nor did her mother appear to grieve, trying as she was to carry on as normal. Overnight, a god-like figure disappeared from Sylvia’s life; he was rendered absent, invisible, and unimportant, and what’s worse, mistaken. He died as a result of his own misdiagnosis.

Sylvia therefore was an adolescent at risk, who nevertheless continued to explore what was around her. Her habit was to probe matters to the uttermost and at the same time to win from them a superficial cynicism. She became a desperately anxious to please young woman, for all her capabilities. In her early adult life she had sought knowledge from every source, including the Ouija board, and to the end sought communion with the ghosts that inhabited her home, her last residence being once Yeats’ flat in London.

From the original loss of her father she had come to be too reliant on women in her early adulthood. But it is the women in her life who finally let her down, another woman of mid European origin, Assia Weevil, causing her marriage to break up. Her therapist, a woman doctor named Beutscher, prescribed ECT for her and administered ECT without an anesthetic thus permanently damaged her rapport with people, particularly women. The result was that hurt women like Assia Weevil – whose family were refugees from the mid European holocaust – were able to affect Sylvia Plath’s confidence unduly

Her nervous breakdown is an account many of us are familiar with on a reading of The Bell Jar and the time prior to her suicide has been well documented by her biographers. In the story told by Janet Macolm, Plath, on the eve of her self destruction – having gone back to live in London and take up a new life – appeared to change her mind without telling anyone her intentions. On the night before she died, she appealed to a neighbour for the loan of a stamp because she was afraid she was going to die, and she insisted on paying for it, as she did not want to confront God with any debts. It is odd that she should show a belief in or fear of God in a relatively trivial matter. Her neighbour describes her as being in a trance, the import of which would have struck a professional. Obviously she had abandoned immediate reality to another plane of consciousness. There was an almost involuntary aspect to her behaviour, that she was being overwhelmed by dark forces – fear of again experiencing ECT. She had vowed she would rather die than have the treatment again. After losing Ted, the father of her children, her whole future was bleak, and no doubt she re-experienced those emotions again when she had lost her father, and she like her mother would have to struggle as a single mother to survive in a post-bomb post-Holocaust alienating world. But it was actually the fear of herself going out of control in dealing with this grief that caused her greatest anxiety.

As Anne Stevenson wrote in Bitter Fame:

In fact, Electro-shock therapy may have substantially contributed to her core logically-arrived-at decision to do away with herself.

Linda Wagner Martin charts this fear in her biography of Sylvia Plath:

What Sylvia feared most was her loss of self. When mad, she explained, no person possesses a self. With her customary thoroughness, Sylvia read widely in sociology and psychology of identity. Whatever was known about the problem in the 1950s, Sylvia researched. One of the results she seldom talked about, however, probably because it was frightening, was the effect shock treatment
had on her long-term memory. When she did talk about it, it was like being in a dream, she never knew whether she was awake or asleep or dreaming. It was as if she lost events, people, years from her life.

Of the last years, Linda Wagner Martin writes:

Sylvia’s fear of electro-shock treatments made her unwilling to be
hospitalized. She had said repeatedly ten years before she would
not go through such treatment again.

Such fears are common to many who have undergone electro shock therapy, there are those who would face death rather than go through the treatment again. The total invasion of the mind and self, as if her will and spirit were handed over to brain destruction, are sufficient cause of despair. She has written eloquently of shock therapy in The Hanging Man:

By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me
I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet

The nights snapped out of sight like a lizard’s eyelid
A world of bald white days in a shadeless socket

A vulturous boredom pinned me to this tree
If he were I, he would do what I did.

Electro shock therapy was in vogue in the l950s, even today it has its strong advocates. It is my contention that the treatment augmented her difficulties, and increased her isolation, her fear and her vulnerability. To my mind it is the largest strand in her poetry, the nerve centre of her destructive impulse and her extraordinary courage in the face of that impulse.

Perhaps the saddest moment in The Bell Jar is when Sylvia, in the persona of Esther, puts her trust in her therapist, a woman who has already betrayed her trust. Dr Beutscher had ordered electro shock therapy, and she also sought Plath’s compliance in this destructive act. In a dire way it mimics the competition for accomplishment at home. Sylvia wanted to be perfect at everything, even being the perfect patient. She accepted the treatment with the extraordinarily reverberant words “I wonder what it was I had done”

In the extraordinary story Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, written in 1957. Sylvia Plath writes of the treatment and her betrayal by a woman figure:

At the head of the cot is a table on which sits a metal box covered with dials and gauges…

The white cot is ready. With a terrible gentleness Miss Milleravage takes the watch from my wrist, the rings from my fingers, the hairpins from my hair. She begins to undress me. When I am bare, I am anointed on the temples and robed in sheets virginal as the first snow

The Only Thing to love is Fear itself
Love of Fear is the beginning of wisdom
The only thing to love is fear itself
May Fear and Fear and Fear be everywhere

Writing of the ECT as a ritual should not surprise us. It is a ritual, a modern one. The treatment is both profoundly humiliating, and barbaric, twin elements of torture. In a letter to the author of this essay, myself, Ted Hughes described it as an atrocity. He wrote to me that ECT was the crucial event in her writing

It took Ted’s attraction to the other woman, Assia Weevil, to knock Sylvia back to a state of psychosis which she had first experienced at the age of 20.

In The Bell Jar she details her first breakdown. Failure to be admitted to the writer’s workshop was very threatening to her fragile identity as a person of promise and accomplishment. She retreated to her bedroom, and found herself unable to sleep. After the pattern of insomnia had set in there was little she could do to avoid a breakdown.

Depression, according to Anthony Clare, often results from a single cause. In Sylvia Plath’s case, anxiety was almost a component of her personality, particularly the anxiety to achieve. After the initial loss of sleep, Plath’s anxiety increased until she could see failure staring her straight into the face:

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree

From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, another fig was a famous poet, and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and off-beat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these were other figs which I couldn’t quite make out..

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one, but choosing one meant loosing all the rest.

The Bell Jar

This high price, of losing all if she choose one, has been the central problem for women from time immemorial, and explains why Plath is such an icon. To make an unwanted sacrifice when she had already been sacrificed by a male workshop leader and a famous writer was at the onset of her emotional illness. The novel details her breakdown as her identity as a successful student came under savage attack from herself. The trigger was the dilemma of the fig tree, it called into question her whole being as a woman What followed was the hospital with its gross treatments in the form of bags of tricks like ECT. In the future these horrors would be attendant on any crisis that assailed her fragile sense of identity. As late as 1962 she is wrestling with the same problem as bruised identity. She writes of her fear in the bee poems, hoping the bees will not smell her fear.

They thought death was worth it
But I have a self to recover, a queen

Just when she had found security with Ted Hughes as a wife and mother, she is also engaged in recovery of memory and from trauma, something that she confines mostly to her writing, especially the extract below from Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams.:

The crown of wire, the wafer of forgetfulness on my tongue. The masked priests move to their posts and take hold: one of my left leg, one of my right, one of my right arm, one of my left. One behind my head at the metal box where I can’t see.

I am shaken like a leaf in the teeth of glory. His beard is lightening. Lightening is in his eye. His Word charges and illuminates the
Universe. The air cackles with his blue-tongued lightening-haloed angels.

His love is the twenty storey leap, the rope at the throat, the knife at the heart.

He forgets not his own.

The wafer communion is central to Christianity, but this is the very religion which sought to exterminate the Jewish people. The torture here is both symbolic and personal, and has a direct similarity with that carried out in World War II.

So Herr Doktor
So, Herr Enemy

I am your opus
I am your valuable

The pure gold baby
That melts to a shriek

Lady Lazarus
The poles of identity – woman to man, her country to another country, resonates with those in extremis. Therefore at the heart of her work is an effort to recover memory that had been obliterated with ECT, the transposition is an attempt to take on the highest meaning, the suffering of humanity. That ECT was first administered to Sylvia Plath without an anesthetic was a piece of very bad luck indeed. It increased her fear that the universe itself was a deeply hostile place.

The Word itself becomes suspect, as the priests, or nurses, take on the role of torturers, wiping out her knowledge of the Word. As woman, deprived of the Word throughout the centuries, she is now robbed of her personal memory. It remains in the deep layers of her mind for reconstitution of the self. Plath’s self esteem was wounded irrevocably at Hughes’ betrayal. Fear took over, and with it the overwhelming anxiety that had capsized her before. However, it was her dread of ECT that caused her greatest fear, a fear that it would be repeated should she be admitted to hospital.

ECT, electro-convulsive therapy, or electro shock therapy, invented in the 1930s by Cerletti, following work on convulsions by Meduna, has been a controversial treatment from the start. The idea is to procure an epileptic fit in the brain, and reproduce conditions for starting up the psycho-emotional engines that have been slowed or inhibited by depression or mania.

What usually happens is that the patient, gagged or fasting, is given a general anesthetic, then a muscle relaxant (in order not to break the bones in the convulsion that follows) and then a string of high voltage pulses, about 60 or 70 pulses a second. The voltage can be delivered bi-laterally (on both sides of the head) or unilaterally (on one side of the head). Research has shown that bi-lateral ECT produces a stronger and longer, even permanent memory loss than ECT administered to one side of the head only. The shock produces a convulsion in the brain. The euphoria that follows ECT typically follows any kind of brain injury, and does not last. After the short-lived initial reaction of euphoria, depression occurs again and the patient has to face it again, this time with an impaired brain. The resultant fear can lead to a worsening of a mental illness, producing paranoia as well as the original psychosis.

The part of the brain hit by the shocks can be entirely random. Some have compared ECT to fixing an engine or a television set by hitting it with a hammer and hoping for the best.

Dr Peter Breggin whose book Toxic Psychiatry was published in 1991, outlines his objections to ECT, or EST, and describes several cases of brain dysfunction following ECT. While memory loss is the effect most written about, some writers such as J. Graham Beaumont have written of permanent damage caused when repeat seizure activity in the hippocampus leads to chronic changes in its structure which are pathologically unsound. With the number of ECT treatments averaging 60, and 100 or more not being uncommon, it becomes increasingly likely that not only memory but cognitive function is damaged, sometimes irreparably. Up to three years’ memory loss is a common finding, undisputed even by the profession. The time leading up to the treatment is hardly ever recovered.

It could be said that electro shock therapy is a classic case where the cure is worse than the disease. Most psychiatrists agree that it is a closed head wound that therefore cannot heal properly. One psychiatrist has admitted, where there is no brain damage, it is inefficacious. Since most of the research is carried out on in hospital patients who have little to gain by being honest, it is unsurprising that the full picture of ECT is largely unavailable and it remains at best a controversial treatment.

Trust is an important factor in recovery after mental illness. Perhaps it is the absence of trust that most marks ECT. The absence of trust in Sylvia Plath’s relationships is marked and has been noted by those who were in contact with her. Her close relatives admit her difficulty in sustaining good relations. Janet Malcolm refers to Plath’s difficulties with her in-laws. Everyday behaviour has to be re-learnt, but this time with deep suspicion of oneself and of people around one.

As Olwyn Hughes, Ted’s sister, wrote to Janet Malcolm:

The myth… was created by her paranoid mechanism, or whatever was wrong with her, perfected in small ways over the years. Towards the end, her remarks about others were little more than lies, designed to elicit maximum sympathy and approval towards herself.

The tell-tale phrase, “perfected in small ways over the years” would be resonant with a great many of the relatives of those who have had ECT. Sylvia was dealing with memory loss and was not understood by those who could not stand in her shoes.

That she was able to leave her children without a mother speaks volumes of her intrinsic inability to value herself as a mother, person, or any of the craved-for roles she first envisaged on the fig tree. From the beginning of the “Ariel” poems, “Morning Song” it is clear she had already distanced herself from motherhood. She writes:

I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand

The wind stands for those major forces which had threatened her stability. She had valued her relationship as wife and mother until Ted Hughes abandoned her because of his infatuation with Assia Weevil. However much he should have been aware of her vulnerability, he cannot be held responsible for her suicide.

Writing to me of ECT later, Hughes said “she was suddenly exposed to the inner world, her family mythos, the primal internal things.” He described my essay as one of the most important essays he had read on Plath, as, in his view, this essay had dealt with the core problem. He also sent me the text of a poem he had written called The Tender Place which he subsequently published in Birthday Letters. Sylvia Plath had constant pain in her temples, where she had received the electric shocks.

Hughes’s poem begins:

Your temples, where the hair crowded in,
Were the tender place. Once to check
I dropped a file across the electrodes
Of a twelve-volt battery – it exploded
Like a grenade. Somebody wired you up.
Somebody pushed the lever. They crashed
The thunderbolt into your skull.
In their bleached coats, with blenched faces
They hovered again
To see how you were, in your straps.

Ted Hughes believed ECT was the nerve centre of her poems, the catastrophe which led to the extraordinary last poems. By using the words “your straps” instead of what might be reasonably called “their straps” he emphasizes the innate victim-hood of Plath, how she made even the most alien and inhuman condition her own.

From the beginning, when she lost her father, she created a world and universe without love or redemptive values. Later, she had been inspired to articulate the laboratory culture so resonant of modern life. She was drawn by smell to memory, and to her the laboratory was the template of modern life, with its smells and strange configurations speaking of normality. In Two Views of a Cadaver Room she writes of the snail nosed babies in their jars and the vinegary fumes of the death vats. – the smell of the oil preparations applied to her temples where the electric shocks would be received into the brain. Once Ted Hughes was gone, the cadaver room and the ECT room took a hold of her imagination, what they have in common is that the human being’s status there is for experimental purposes and all humane considerations are completely wiped out. These dark forces won over any of the positive love she had in her marriage and for her children. When Sylvia Plath was abandoned, the inner and outer worlds were reawakened to her original traumas. To lose all her craved-for choices when losing her husband put her back into the same situation when as a college girl she had viewed her mutually exclusive choices on the fig tree. Having had those choices, and seemingly solved the dilemma of being wife, poet and mother, she was, it seemed, to lose them all over again, and furthermore with the added dilemma of being a parent who would have to bring up her children alone in a world frequently hostile to women. There was also a new fear, fear of ECT, the thought of which, as her sanity slipped, seemed to rob her of everything, hence she was able to choose death by her own hand as being preferable.

Every morning she rose at 5 or 6, in extremis, to write the poems that made her reputation, and they were subsequently appeared in her second volume, Ariel, published posthumously later on that year. Electroshock therapy had made her see the world as a survivor and how strange and alienating it could be. Even family relationships held the terror of the Third Reich. Her authority came from the fact that she had been there, on the inside.

Suicide implies a spiritual will – in this case, to put an end to fear. She could not face ECT alone, especially without Ted. Recently there have been reports that Assia Weevil was pregnant, and this may have increased her sense of abandonment and fear.

In The Eye Mote she writes of how the small grain distorted her vision. However, the whole corpus of her later poetry shows a self that has been reduced to a feeling of being a cinder, with its ash and burning, again reminiscent of the horrors of World War II. This poem is both an illustration and an eloquent plea that she be understood – her vulnerability before the universe, and her reduction to a process she had undergone, yet which she mocked with her last vestige of freedom, are deserving of our profoundest respect

What I want back is what I was
Before the bed, before the knife
Before the brooch pin and the salve
Fixed me in this parenthesis
Horses fluent in the wind
A place, a time, gone out of mind

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

Please click on the link to see full license, but in essence it is

You are free:

* to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work

Under the following conditions:

Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.
* For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link to this web page.
* Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
* Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author’s moral rights.

Share This