Anne Sexton’s Memory Gaps: Phi Beta Kappa, Pulitzer Prize poet repeatedly had amnesia for what she had said during psychotherapy sessions.

Anne Sexton saw Dr. Martin Orne, a psychiatrist, two to three times a week from 1956 to 1964:

“From the start, it was clear to Orne that Sexton was unable to remember much from one session to the next. From his point of view, Sexton’s ‘memory trouble’ proved the biggest obstacle to her progress. To address this problem, he eventually suggested (at the end of 1960) that they tape her sessions so that she might listen to what they discussed and reflect upon it in between sessions. Orne believed that transcribing the sessions would help Sexton ‘understand what she was doing’ (Middlebrook, 1991). Faithfully transcribing each tape, Sexton arrived at a session prepared to discuss what had transpired in the previous hour. She commented that she often only ‘heard’ his part of the dialogue when she wrote it down” (1, Introduction, p. xvi).

“Some of the tapes feature the long silences of Sexton’s trances, the dissociated states she entered when angry or upset, presumably in an attempt to manage her feelings. We can hear Orne's soothing voice as he attempted to coax her back to consciousness, and the flare of his anger when she refused to do so, even though the appointment had come to an end and another patient was waiting outside” (1, p xx).

“Her father, whose personality changed completely when he was drunk, once beat Anne with a riding crop because she had stolen her sister’s birthday money…Later, Sexton was to speculate about whether she had been sexually abused by…her father, a question which returned in her therapy sessions dozens of times and which is the subject of many of her poems (as well as her Broadway play, Mercy Street)” (1, p. xiv).

Comments

The only psychological condition with recurrent amnesia (search “memory gaps”) or spontaneous trances or complete personality changes (the latter attributed to Sexton’s father) is dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality).

Furthermore, after Sexton listened to the recordings of her psychotherapy sessions, “She commented that she often only ‘heard’ [the psychiatrist’s] part of the dialogue.” That is, she could not “hear” the voices of her alternate personalities, with whom she was not co-conscious. Indeed, it was her lack of co-consciousness with these alternate personalities that had accounted for her host personality’s memory gaps for the parts of sessions in which the alternate personalities had been in control.

As any clinician who is familiar with multiple personality knows, alternate personalities (who have not had their cover blown by diagnosis) typically try to remain incognito (they answer to the persons’s regular name and pass for the host personality). So the clinician has to recognize clues, such as memory gaps, and find out what accounts for these gaps; i.e., meet the alternate personalities who had been in control for these periods of time. 

Sexton’s memory gaps should have prompted an evaluation for multiple personality. But, to be fair to Dr. Orne, those were Freudian days, and since Freud’s theories were antithetical to understanding multiple personality (as I have previously discussed), most clinicians would have missed the diagnosis.

As to Sexton’s father, if it is true that when he drank he had a complete change in personality, then he may have had multiple personality, too. Multiple personality is sometimes multigenerational. Alcohol itself does not completely change the personality, but if a person has multiple personality, alcohol may prompt a switch to an alternate personality who drinks.

1. Dawn M. Skorczewski. An Accident of Hope: The Therapy Tapes of Anne Sexton. New York, Routledge, 2012.