Theme Five:  Death

O Sylvia, Sylvia,
with a dead box of stones and spoons,
with two children, two meteors
wandering loose in a tiny playroom,
with your mouth into the sheet,
into the roofbeam, into the dumb prayer....

Thief --
how did you crawl into,
crawl down alone
into the death I wanted so badly and for so long,
the death we said we both outgrew,
the one we wore on our skinny breasts,
the one we talked of so often each time
we downed three extra dry martinis in Boston,
the death that talked of analysts and cures,
the death that talked like brides with plots,
the death we drank to,
the motives and the quiet deed?
--Anne Sexton, from “Sylvia’s Death”

As should be clear by now, there were myriad contributing factors tied to Anne Sexton’s suicidal tendencies.  There was the feeling of entrapment that came to the fore after her marriage to Alfred Sexton, and increased after the birth of her children.  There was also a constant preoccupation with her own madness. She often wondered if she would wind up like her Aunt Nana, whose dementia led her to spend her final years institutionalized.  As Sexton iterated during a taped session:

Sexton:  Well, I said to Kayo, ‘Please don’t let them give me an shock treatments.’--Because she just got better, then she got sicker; they didn’t do her any good--Maybe I’m like Nana; she really just wanted Mother.  I think that something very [unintelligible] was hard for me, you know, because she had been my mother in many ways--She got sick and just wanted to be my mother’s child; she kept saying my mother’s name under her breath, ‘Mary, Mary Gray,’ every single minute.  Every time she said it, it meant ‘You’re not my child, I’m your mother’s child.’   And actually, as you said, I got sick when my mother went away.--When Nana died, I was pregnant with Joy;  after that, when Joy was six months old, Mother went away--it was a combination of things--probably I am like Nana.

Orne:  But you are not Nana.

Sexton:  Why would I try to become Nana?  That doesn’t make any sense:  I try to become Nana in order to kill her?

Orne:  In order not to lose her.  It’s what we do when we can’t let people die.

Sexton:  I become the Nana I didn’t want, which I suppose I thought was better than nothing, after she died.--Maybe I come from a morbid--just inherited this.  My father was really rather depressed, even though he didn’t seem it, he was depressed.--And Nana, who was so active and intelligent and warm, that’s what happened to her....

While Sexton's preoccupation with death became apparent during adolescence, Dr. Orne saw it, in a weird way, as healthy.  As he wrote for Dr. Middlebrook:

Anne also had a remarkable fascination with death, and it seemed likely that she used some of the trance episodes to play the role of dying, which perhaps helped her not to suicide.

As expressed in “Cigarettes and Whiskey and Wild, Wild Women,” Sexton often saw herself as a rat, her metaphor for own sense of worthlessness.  Also, as the poem would suggest, her self-destructive tendencies in part originated from the self-loathing that had become a part of her.  It also suggests that she saw death as a panic button, of sorts.  If she found that she could no longer bear the weight, responsibility and stigma of being the spokes poet for the mentally ill, she could end it all whenever she chose.  In this respect, Sexton might have seen controlling her death as an important part of controlling her life. 


Theme Six:  Memory lapses

One of the most difficult things Dr. Martin Orne initially had to deal with, according to him, was Anne Sexton’s “severe difficulty of memory.”   He said that she couldn’t remember things that they had discussed “from one session to the next.”  This led him to conclude that she suffered from “…a condition that traditionally was known as hysteria.”

Hysteria?

Mind you, Dr. Orne wrote this in the foreword of Dr. Diane Middlebrook’s 1991 biography, Anne Sexton.  So, we have to wonder why he gave us such a quaint nineteenth-century diagnosis.  Traditionally, doctors believed that women had certain mental illnesses because of troubles with their reproductive organs.  Okay, she’s in the loony bin for post-partum depression.  But did he actually believe that Sexton's uterus turned her suicidal?

Hysteria had always been a vague diagnosis, with an exhaustive list of symptoms that could apply to just about any sane or healthy organism regardless of gender.  Subsequently, over the past 100 years or so, psychiatrists and other mental health researchers have broken down some of the more common and pathological manifestations of this malady into a number of different diseases, as defined by DSM-IV.*  Most of these fall under the general rubric of dissociation, but several seem more directly applicable to Sexton:  depersonalization disorder, dissociative identity disorder, and dissociative amnesia.

My guess is that Dr. Orne was referring to that last illness when talking about Sexton's poor memory.  Still, if Sexton were that prone to memory loss, especially on a persistent basis, one might guess that it would have been an issue both in and out of therapy for all of her life.  That would mean that she would have difficulty learning new things.  Certainly this would be a tremendous handicap if in a college course or workshop where the moderator or professor cannot simply go back over all the material covered in the previous lecture.  Other than Orne, no one seemed to have characterized this as a condition that dominated their relationship with her.**

Dr. Orne explained that while in psychoanlysis, Sexton would spontaneously lapse into trance states, where one part of her would interact with him and continue to maintain progress, while her conscious mind had wondered off to who-knows-where.  He became exasperated with:

...her tendency to become uncommunicative in a self-induced trance, which could last minutes, hours, or, in a few rare circumstances, even days.  Typically, the trance episode could easily be ended by a therapist familiar with the symptom.  But in therapy and out, the problem persisted:  when Anne was extremely angry, she was given to entering a trance and becoming unresponsive….

In order to maintain some consistency from one session to the next, Dr. Orne tried several things to help her remember what went on during their previous meeting.  First, he had her take notes.  But that disrupted the normal rhythms of therapy.  Next he tried tape recording the sessions.  Yet her review the tapes yielded the same results as before:  no memory of what happened during psychoanalysis.  He then hit upon a combination of tape recording and note taking that seemed to do the trick:

First we would audiotape the therapy session, and afterward Anne was asked to make extensive notes about everything she could remember from the session.  The next day she would come to the office, and my secretary would put the tape on the recorder and leave her alone to listen to the session.  She was asked to note particularly the discrepancies between her memories, her notes from the previous day, and what actually happened on the tape.  In the beginning, it was necessary for Anne to listen to the audiotape twice before she was able to recall on her own what we had dealt with during the session.  This tedious approach demanded a great deal of Anne, but its consequences were profound.  For the first time in her life, she was able to recall why she had been angry at me, without knowing the reason.  In other words, Anne could really remember and learn about her feelings, whereas in the past she had been unable to recall more than fragments of what occurred--many of which she recalled incorrectly.

Curiously, Dr. Orne admitted that once Sexton got the hang of this process, she began to correct his memory lapses during therapy.  He subsequently realized she was right when he played the tapes back for himself.

 ________________________
*This would have also been true for DSM-IIIR, the edition Orne would have used as reference in 1991. 

**Her friends and family would, however, speak openly about what they perceived as Sexton's tendency toward memory distortion, which is another issue.  I'll discuss that later.