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. A twin or multiple has pretty much the same food supply from the mother as a singleton in the womb. Often there is not enough for two. In other cases the sharing is mishandled by the placenta, with one getting too much and the other too little. Peter Pharaoh has researched this twin to twin transfer, or “blood-shunting” at the University of Liverpool, as well much else in early twin embrology. 8 I have witnessed myself a massive difference in size between two identicals before birth, where both survived. We cannot know for certain the details of Plath’s case. We must work backwards from her life and writing to the biology. For it is my thesis that life before birth and the fundamental influences that happen to us there create a template

7 Steven Gould Axelrod. Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words . The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. (All quotes from first chapter.) 8 Peter Pharaoh. Department of Public Health, University of Liverpool, http://www.tamba.org.uk/html/pdfs/ResearchReviewIssue1.pdf

107 and a conditioned patterning for subsequent life experiences. The behaviourists call it “stimulus generalisation”. Freud called it “compulsion repetition”. 9 Freud has become influential in literary academia. Much more recently Jungian ideas of the collective unconscious have become very influential in film script writing. I want to invite you to take a few steps beyond Freud and Jung to consider the likelihood that the ontology of a single human being in the life of the womb shapes or moulds the possible patterning of later life. Freud was in his seventies when he revised his theory in a small book called “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” 10 He had championed the sexual drive in body and psyche as the dominant influence in human activity for his whole career till then. But he could now see that the compulsion to repeat experiences, even when far from pleasurable, is even more powerful in the psyche than the drive to sexual gratification. Stanislaf Grof has gone on to show that, even in our sexual activity, the need to repeat life-threatening, painful and self- destructive activity as part of sexual encounter has tremendous power in our lives, is very common, and repeats psycho-dramatically the patterns of birth and pre-birth events. 11 Frank Lake, doctor and theologian has been a pioneer researcher of our first trimester of life. 12 While long after Plath’s death doctors and psychiatrists believed that the new-born child was a tabula rasa , with no functioning cerebral cortex, and therefore no human identity, Frank accessed people’s memories of the loss of a twin in the first trimester of life in the womb. His research on single celled organisms demonstrated that even these primitive creatures can learn from experience. A single human stem cell can create a whole new human being. In today’s quantum universe it makes sense to think that we have cellular memory and even cellular consciousness. In medicine there is a whole new field of specialisation called “psycho-neuro- immunology” which is exploring the links between healthy development and very early womb experiences which can traumatically impact that physical and psychological maturation process. Science is beginning to confirm and describe for us this outside story. Poets, especially Hughes and Plath tell us the inside story. Perhaps no one tells of this

9 Sigmund Freud. Beyond the Pleasure principle . London: The Hogarth Press, 1961. 10 Ibid . 11 Stanislav Grof. Beyond the Brain: Birth Death and Transcendence in Psychotherapy . State University of New York, 1985. 12 Frank Lake. The first trimester . Unpublished manuscript.

Plath Profiles 108 struggle more powerfully and descriptively than Plath, though I would argue that Hughes understood the whole process much better and gives us the outside as well as the inside story. Sadly, Plath ultimately lacked the meta-communicator which would have enabled her to survive her self-destructive urges and become a greater poet and writer. It is my intention here to stay with Plath, and not to stray too far into Hughes’ work. But even Axelrod picks up on what he calls Plath’s “doubling relationship” with her husband. Plath had chosen to write her university thesis on Doestoevsky’s “The Double.” in 1955.13 This other self was anything but new to her when she met Hughes. Both of them recognised from the beginning that the self was in the other. It might be sensible to argue that if Hughes and Plath had both lost a twin before birth then it must surely have been a fraternal twin. But here lies one of the great tragedies of the identical womb twin survivor, the search for the beloved lost identical self is transferred from a natural projection onto a same sex other by a genetic drive towards a heterosexual love choice, at least in the case of a naturally heterosexual individual. The intense heterosexual attraction between Hughes and Plath was overlaid by the deep underlying projection of the same sex twin. This transference has the added patterning of a life and death struggle. They both understood this. Hayman, in his biography of Plath quotes Hughes as having said, “It was a fight to the death. One of us had to die.” 14 Plath bit a piece out of Hughes’ cheek on their first encounter, it is said: but the inward-turned destructiveness was always more pronounced in Plath. When she wanted to kill, it was mostly herself she was aiming at. “It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn’t in the skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at,” she wrote in The Bell Jar .15 That deeper more secret more inaccessible place is the twin. While some argue that the split self of Plath shows madness, others argue that there is a careful exploration of the mythical dimension of the immortal double in her work. My contention is that the mythic world is built upon biological and ontological foundations in early human experience. It is a real dead twin who haunts her, who has become both immortal and a deadly rival. I have explored this theme further in a

13 Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Double: A Petersburg Poem . London: Penguin Classics, 1972. 14 Ronald Hayman. The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath . Sutton Publishing, 1991. 15 Sylvia Plath. The Bell Jar . London: Faber and Faber Ltd. 1966.

109 paper given to the European Congress on Embryology, Psychology and Society in 2002, “The search for the beloved.” 16 The tragic patterning of the identical twin survivor is to find a very intense and passionate relationship with the other, which all too soon withers and dies. Ronald Hayman, the biographer quotes Plath as writing about Hughes. “She likes his smell and the body that fits with hers “as if they had been made in the same body shop to do just that.”” But this is not a body shop where cars are assembled. This is a womb, where two bodies were curled together. Hayman writes “She is lying like a dead egg on a world she can’t touch. The dead egg suggests miscarriage, while the paradox is another image of circularity, linking death with the non existence that comes before birth.” 17 But he is wrong. There is existence before birth. It is just that our culture is built on the absurd premise that we do only begin to exist at birth rather than conception. People deride the Catholic Church for maintaining that we begin at conception. But we do. Lord Winston and his embryologists want an excuse to experiment with the conceptus as if it were not a human being, arguing that it only becomes an individual after 14 days when it can no longer become a twin. We are no less an individual for having the potential to become two. If that were so then twins are not really human individuals. Plath wrote “ Pursuit ” two days after meeting Hughes. It describes a devouring black panther. She wanted him whole inside her. Some twins are encysted dead and entire within the body of the survivor. But this is rare. How do we translate the implanted patterns of embryonic life into adult relationships and life experience? Hughes explored it in his master work, the prose poem, Gaudete .18 It is ignored misunderstood and neglected. No one, it seems, understands it. He writes about the formation of a double from the self out of a log, the replacement of the self by the double in the world of men, a continuing survival struggle between the self and its double, and the violent destruction of the double, following its exposure to other men in the story. In the epilogue Hughes writes,

16 Once and future relatedness, explored through the embryology of twin loss, in psychotherapy, mythology, poetry, modern culture and psycho-social analysis . Unpublished manuscript, 2002. (Available from this author.) 17 Ronald Hayman. The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath . Sutton Publishing, 1991. 18 Ted Hughes: Gaudete . London: Faber and Faber 1977.

Plath Profiles 110

What will you make of half a man Half a face A ripped edge

His one eyed waking Is the shorn sleep of aftermath

His vigour The bone-deformity of consequences

His talents The deprivations of escape

How will you correct The veteran of negatives And the survivor of cease.

Hughes survived Plath, not by killing her but by leaving, only to repeat his pattern with another partner. My contention is that it is the lost twin, his own twin, lost in the womb, whose survival he writes about. For the more outward facing, more strongly “Alpha” identified Hughes, it was the other, the partner, who had to die, beyond his skin, in the compulsion repetition of later life. For Plath it was her own body that could not keep surviving the repeating dying process within her, the suicide attempts. To put it another way, the compulsion repetition of intense connection with a twin soul mate, who then dies, is re-enacted between Plath and Hughes, with Hughes as the surviving “Alpha” and Plath the doomed “Beta” twin. Replaced by another woman, as her brother replaced her in the world of her mother as a toddler, having survived recent child birth and a miscarriage, the energy to stay with the “Alpha” side of herself poured into the Ariel poetry. It is said that Ariel merely refers to a horse she liked. For me it has to be Prospero’s “Ariel”, the airy spirit, free of matter, yet not free of man, struggling to escape the material

111

Caliban-like existence of embodied life. This is a Gemini story, of the heavenly or dead twin, and the earthy survivor. 19 In her poem “The Other,” we read: White Nike, Streaming between my walls?

Smilingly, blue lightning Assumes, like a meathook, the burden of his parts. 20

Nike is the Greek Goddess of triumph. At first web trawl she is merely the daughter of Pallas (Warrior) 21 and Styx (Hatred) 22 , and the sister of Cratos (Strength) 23 , Bia (Violence) 24 , and Zelus (Rivalry). 25 But a deeper reading shows her so close to Pallas that they are inseparable. Some mistakenly see them as identical. Encyclopaedia Britannica describes her as an aspect of Pallas Athene, calling her “Athena Nike”. 26 But Britannica also differentiates them: “Athena Nike was always wingless; Nike alone was winged.” 27 They are nearly always portrayed together, with Nike as a tiny figure in Pallas’ hand. Nike’s most famous statue has neither head nor feet. In fact, she is another form of Pallas Athene, just as she is “the other”, the tiny form of Plath in this poem. How do we untangle the knitting? It is Hughes who enters, I think. But other references indicate the miscarried baby, or Hughes’ mistress. Yet the telling lines are:

“Cold glass, how you insert yourself Between myself and myself.”

19 Nick Owen: The search for the beloved. Once and future relatedness, explored through the embryology of twin loss, in psychotherapy, mythology, poetry, modern culture and psycho-social analysis . Unpublished manuscript, 2002. (Available from this author.) 20 Sylvia Plath: Ariel: The restored edition . London: Faber and Faber, 2004. 21 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pallas_%28son_of_Crius%29 22 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Styx_%28mythology%29 23 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cratos 24 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bia_%28mythology%29 25 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelus 26 Nike. Encyclopaedia Britannica , online edition: http://www.britannica.com/eb/article- 9055832/Nike . 27 Ibid .

Plath Profiles 112

It is both the other and the self that she meets in the mirror. In the anger of the poem she is victory in the mirror, but the real woman is defeated. The coldness is the coldness of death. The abandonment by Hughes draws on and revisits the abandonment by mother in favour of her brother when she was two. But we need to go further and deeper. The miscarriage echoes and re-stimulates the dissolution and death of the other self, the lost twin. It is a classic symptom of womb twin behaviour to gaze into the mirror, trying to regain or re-view the self that is lost and is dying, the twin that might revive, just as the partner is being lost or dead to the self. Does she scratch at Hughes with her nails? As Axelrod says, he has become very much the double, “the other”, for her. 28 But the poem is so full of miscarriage imagery, meathooks, entrails, knitting. The connection is from the belly, where the arrows are sent. The arrows are cuts into the umbilical connection. Frank Lake describes people experiencing the equivalent of nails driven into the umbilical tube. This is not the normal vaginal leaving at birth. This is Plath’s own navel connection. While the pale sick moon is mentioned by Plath as a mother connection in some of her writing, it may be read as the pale and dead twin, the other that depends on the self, the sun, for its brightness as a source of light and life. For Plath the twin needs to bleed real blood when she scratches at it. It needs a living human projection for her. Her scratching is not fatal. He smiles. Yet it is near to death that she is. He will not die. He is the one who will continue as “Alpha”. She will once more identify with the “Beta” self, finally to achieve real, rather than symbolic death. “The wall” so often mentioned in her work is also the womb wall. There are real navel cords on this wall in her memory. The “womb of marble” is both her own body’s womb, which miscarried, and her mother’s womb, which was the original place of her loss. Two babes circle each other in a place where only one can survive. Here is another dreaming poem, from an earlier period. Again, there is a dream of the womb. Again, there is the pearly interior, like marble, like a conch. “Two of us in a place for ten more” suggests an early womb time. Here again we find “the mirror”. But the pattern is different. For now there is a pair of pairs. I think Plath connects herself as “Alpha” with an “Alpha” partner. It is the two lost “Beta” twins who are there in the shadows, in “the cabinet without windows and doors.” These two are caught in an old tragedy. “Seeing her freeze, he turns his face away” is a womb

28 Steven Gould Axelrod. Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words . The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. (All quotes from first chapter.)

113 history. The other has frozen and gone. They cannot connect with each other. They are in purgatory, where they can neither go to rest nor live. They have come to a stiff impasse indeed. They are “moon-blanched”, mere echoes, reflections, without substance. Yet it is not so simple. It is not so clear who is alive and who is dead. Who haunts? Who is haunted? Here again is the Gemini theme, where one twin is on earth and one in heaven. Perhaps this “we” is the dream of heaven for the earthed and unhappy human coupling. The truth is that the dead twin is the beloved always sought in the other. The earthly connection, the discovery of the lost self in the person of the other will soon come to grief, as the primal past is compulsively relived and the heavenly happy dream becomes earthly despair and loss. This is the pattern of “love’s ruinage”. I will add just one more poem here, though I could have used almost any and every poem in Ariel. In “Witch Burning,” we read, “I inhabit the wax image of myself, a doll’s body.” 29 We are on Nike territory again. Sickness did indeed begin there, with the tiny form of the self. The rest of the poem tells an interesting tale which may describe the way the twin was lost. The dartboard for witches is a common enough primal image. Often it is nails driven in through the umbilicus. “A black sharded lady” keeping her in a parrot cage is mother and mother’s womb. What large eyes the dead have. Over and again, clients tell me of a terrible vision of death, even though the eyes have not formed properly.

“I am intimate with a hairy spirit” That is the twin. “Smoke wheels from an empty jar” describes its departure. The womb feels terribly empty without the companion. The inclination to try to lie still as possible not to disturb whatever has the power to invade and destroy is incredibly strong after the other has been destroyed. The third stanza describes the little ones, being cooked in their pot. It is likely that mother had an infection too hot for the twin, but not too hot for Plath to endure. In the fourth stanza

29 Sylvia Plath. Collected Poems . London: Faber and Faber, 2002.

Plath Profiles 114 she identifies with the twin. She is connecting with her suicide attempts, her self annihilating side. She becomes lost, submitting to the burning and the intense light.

“I am lost. I am lost, in the roves of all this light.” Yet she has been the singeless moth who has passed the womb candle mouth intact. “I am ready to construe the days I coupled with dust in the shadow of a stone,” is curious. It suggests her attempt to decompose with the rubbish in the crawl space beneath the house. In the end she did not turn the burners up on the stove, but went via the cold gases of her oven. Finally she surrendered meekly to the toxic womb- room space, leaving behind her both her Ariel , and its not quite identical double, published by Hughes. She sealed up two spaces in her house, one for the children to be safe and survive, and the other where the poison would kill her.