The Origins of Creativity and Destructiveness in the Life and Work of Sylvia Plath Nick Owen, [email protected]

103 The Origins of Creativity and Destructiveness in the Life and Work of Sylvia Plath Nick Owen, [email protected] Plath may ultimately be remembered, not only for her poetry, and her role in the history of feminism, where she was more a tool and a victim than a protagonist, but for her pioneering exploration of the phenomenology of life and loss before birth. My contention is that the poet rides ahead of the scientist in exploring and bringing knowledge of hidden things, whose significance is only accepted in a culture like ours, when the objective tools of medical and scientific observation have developed enough to verify what the poet unearths through profound intuition, amplified memory, and creative insight. I hope to show through analysis of chosen poetry and through looking closely at the facts of her life and early death that she lost a twin before birth, and that this loss affected her so deeply and negatively that her poetic exploration of it led her to self-destruction rather than healing. I bring to bear on this theme my thirty years experience as a teacher of counselling and psychotherapy, my research as director of the Oxford Pre-natal and Peri-natal Education Research and Awareness Trust, and my work as a poet. I am now working with wombtwin.com,1 to communicate about the recently established facts about the loss of a twin before birth, that as many as one person in eight on this planet undergoes, and how it is possible to find a healing path out of the deep and buried suffering that is exemplified most clearly and dramatically in the life and death of Sylvia Plath. I will begin with what I call psycho-history, connecting post-natal events in someone’s life with what has occurred, or is likely to have occurred before birth. While psychoanalysis has only recently begun to consider the possibility that experience before birth actually affects later life, other psychologists and therapists have commented from as far back as the 1930’s on how very early events, as far back as the first trimester in pregnancy, are not only remembered, but play a major role in framing subsequent experiences. 3D ultrasound was undreamed of when Sylvia Plath was conceived. Routine scanning, which reveals the very regular occurrence of what 1 Althea Hayton: Editor. The Untwinned: Perspectives on the death of a twin before birth . Wren Publications, 2007. Plath Profiles 104 is called “vanishing twin syndrome”, where two embryos are seen early on, but only one as the pregnancy advances, was not available to the Plath family. As far as I have been able to determine, there is no physical evidence that a twin existed. However, unless doctors were looking carefully for such evidence it is very unlikely that they would have found it. In 1990 Dr Charles Boklage, Ph.D., Professor of Genetics and Pediatrics, Adjunct Professor of Biology, East Carolina University, School of Medicine, carried out some statistical research on the probable number of sole survivors of twin or multiple pregnancies. 2 He came to the conclusion that more than 12% of all natural conceptions are multiple. Of those, 76% are lost completely, while about 2% are born alive in a twin pair, and about 12% are womb-twin survivors. After more thought and research, he came to the breathtaking conclusion that for every twin conception resulting in the live birth of a twin pair there are ten womb-twin survivors. His report was published as a chapter in "Multiple Pregnancy, Epidemiology, Gestation and Perinatal Outcome." 3 Boklage comments that a very high number of conceptions in humans fail to reach birth, and there is no reason why this should not happen among twin conceptions as well. Indeed twin conception is a high risk factor in obstetrics and gynaecology. There are many ways in which a twin can vanish. But when a twin is lost within the first three months of gestation, the lost embryo is usually absorbed back in to the mother, and no evidence remains. Scientific evidence for twin loss is so well founded that it has reached the mainstream of society through a recent long and detailed television documentary, “In the womb,” created by The National Geographic Channel. 4 I have not been able to find any data on the details of Plath’s conception, gestation or birth. Axelrod has explored Plath’s journals to review her formative experiences. He tells us that she felt abandoned by her mother when her brother was born. After two and a half years at the centre of mother’s world suddenly she felt “the 2 Boklage C.E. In Multiple Pregnancy: Epidemiology Gestation and Perinatal Outcome (http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t737864966~db=all ), Gestation and Perinatal Outcome Editors: Isaac Blickstein; Louis Keith. ISBN: 978-1-84214-239-4 (hardback) 978-0-203- 01775-3 (electronic). Reprinted January 2005. Publisher: Informa Healthcare, USA 3 Ibid . 4 In The Womb . The National Geographic Channel. For screenings see http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/inthewomb/ 105 axis wrench and a polar chill immobilise my bones.”5 It was a negative epiphany. She wrote “As from a star I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin. I am I. The stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with things of this world was over.” For most people, birth itself is both psychologically premature and traumatic. It is denied. The baby attempts to live as if it is still part of the mother. To develop psychologically it must start to differentiate. Two and a half is quite late to be emerging into a self-identity. But for a womb twin the arrival of a sibling who pushes them out of the nest of immediate closeness to mother, it is like the switch from being the “Alpha” twin, the survivor, to being the “Beta”, the one aborted, lost and destroyed. The most remarkable and difficult thing about surviving the death of a twin is that the twin is not lost, psychologically speaking. It persists as a double in the psyche of the survivor. A womb twin can oscillate from the “Alpha” state of feeling powerful, strong and successful, to be the “Beta”, in a state of decay, dying or even existentially dead and lifeless. Researching “the human experience from conception to birth” in 2000, I was confronted by this strange and disturbing phenomenological reality by members of a training and research group I led. I had supposed that my work as a therapist would be to help the group members accept the loss of their twin. Reviewing the video data from the research group I was forced to realise that the twin carries on its existence into the world as an element within the psyche of the surviving baby. There is a physical death, but not a separation and grieving process. There is no proper ego formed to accomplish such a task. For the fraternal twin, the loss often slowly crystallizes into a sense of abandonment and betrayal: the identical feels both dead and alive, and struggles to have any confidence in a right to exist. Plath wrote about “the awful birthday of otherness” at two. 6 But she could never quite achieve otherness. Otherness was never bearable to her. Axelrod writes about her words and behaviour in the language of the “oral stage” of psychoanalysis. He describes her identification with “hollowed orange and grapefruit halves” and empty shells shaped like ice cream cones. This is the language of the womb, the language of two shells, two halves, where one goes away. Axelrod 5 Steven Gould Axelrod. Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words . The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. (All quotes from first chapter.) 6 Ibid . Plath Profiles 106 comments on her relationship with star fish collected on the beach. Plath had been keeping damaged ones in jars and watching their limbs re-grow. After the birth of her brother she “flung the starfish against a stone. Let it perish,” she wrote. 7 The womb twin survivor so often has a great drive to try to repair the damaged other. Many become therapists today. After experiencing the disintegration of the body of the other while in the womb, how wonderful it will have felt to be able to watch the restoration of limbs in the womb-jar on the table. But on being replaced as the chosen one by her brother, Plath turns on her own projected starfish self. This is the beta self, experiencing life as deathly, or broken and dying. The attitude to the self becomes destructive. The aggression turns on the other self. Let it die. Axelrod comments that “Plath seems to have conceived of writing and living as thefts from the powerful and the dead.” The alpha so often feels responsible for the death of the other, the twin, “the double”, their own survival becomes a cheat, an unjustified escape. The womb/mother may be seen as the murderer, the powerful one, but more often it is the self which is seen as the killer. Thus the survivor has not the right to continue to live. Axelrod writes that “Her existence struck her as marginal and doubtful, like that of a concentration camp victim: she felt herself menaced by effacement and erasure at every moment: she needed to purloin her signifier if she was to live.” How accurate he is, however unconsciously, in his choice of words. Effacement and erasure are words to describe the womb reality. Her other self was effaced and erased.

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