Prompted by tribute to Pulitzer Prize poet Anne Sexton (post 4) in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review: How did Sexton understand herself?
The following are three past posts. The third one quotes Sexton herself.
April 23, 2017
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).
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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.
Anne Sexton (post 3): Her psychiatrist tells her “Elizabeth” alternate personality to get lost, and her host personality says “Elizabeth” was a lie.
“Early in Sexton’s therapy [1957], the Elizabeth persona began making appearances while Sexton was in a trance by scrawling messages in childlike handwriting…By September, she was typing letters which she left unsigned, though ‘Elizabeth’ appeared in the return address on the envelopes. Somewhat comically, the writer claimed that she had to type her introductory letter in the dark so Anne wouldn’t read it” (1, p. 55).
Note: Although the biographer thought that the above was comical, readers of this blog know better, since they recall the recent post on Shirley Jackson in which she describes her alternate personalities as leaving notes when her host personality was not looking.
Sexton’s psychiatrist, Dr. Orne, considered “Elizabeth” to be a dangerous symptom for a patient he had diagnosed as having hysteria. He feared that “Sexton was perilously close to developing multiple personality disorder” (1, p. 60), so he ignored “Elizabeth” and she no longer appeared. Moreover, Anne denounced “Elizabeth” as having been a lie (1, p. 63).
Dr. Orne had also expressed concern that Sexton was such a suggestible hysteric that if he had left her hospitalized on a ward with patients who had schizophrenia, she might falsely adopt their psychotic symptoms. But since Sexton had not been exposed to any patients with multiple personality (completely different from schizophrenia), from where did he think she was coming up with the idea of an alternate personality? And his belief that a person can develop multiple personality for the first time in adulthood is wrong; it has a childhood onset.
Moreover, Orne seems to equate having multiple personality with the overtness of an alternate personality. He does not know that that is not how multiple personality ordinarily looks (before it is diagnosed). In the typical case, the alternate personalities are incognito (answering to the regular name and pretending to be the host personality).
You typically discover the alternate personalities in the process of accounting for the person’s memory gaps. And Orne had never understood why Sexton had memory gaps for their therapy sessions (see previous post).
In multiple personality, undiagnosed alternate personalities typically become overt only in some sort of crisis. “Elizabeth” became overt, because she felt that Dr. Orne did not understand his patient (1, p. 55). But when Dr. Orne intentionally ignored her, she reverted to her usual life behind the scenes. Meanwhile, Anne, the host personality, was only too glad to call “Elizabeth” a lie, in compliance with Dr. Orne’s opinion about it.
As quoted in the previous post, from an interview years later, Sexton knew that she was “many people.”
1. Diane Wood Middlebrook. Anne Sexton: A Biography. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1991.
Anne Sexton (post 2): “It’s a little mad, but I believe I am many people…I become someone else…even in moments when I’m not writing the poem”
“It’s a little mad, but I believe I am many people. When I am writing a poem, I feel I am the person who should have written it. Many times I assume these guises; I attack it the way a novelist might. Sometimes I become someone else, and when I do, I believe, even in moments when I’m not writing the poem, that I am that person. When I wrote about the farmer’s wife, I lived in my mind in Illinois; when I had the illegitimate child, I nursed it—in my mind—and gave it back and traded life. When I gave my lover back to his wife, in my mind, I grieved and saw how ethereal and unnecessary I had been. When I was Christ, I felt like Christ. My arms hurt, I desperately wanted to pull them in off the Cross. When I was taken down off the Cross and buried alive, I sought solutions; I hoped they were Christian solutions.”
from Anne Sexton interview with Barbara Kevles in 1968, published in The Paris Review, 1971.
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