Gracefully Insane (22 page)

As at Smith, Plath was a “scholarship girl” at McLean, supported by the well-to-do novelist Olive Higgins Prouty, a forceful and intelligent woman who had suffered her own nervous breakdown a quarter-century before. Talented and ambitious, Plath had a knack for aligning herself with the best brains wherever she was, and McLean was no exception. The psychiatrist with whom she met every day was the aforementioned Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse, a real New York Tiffany and a rare female doctor at McLean. Freudians would call it a transference; whatever the case, Plath fell in love with her doctor. In
The Bell Jar,
Plath invoked her
Mademoiselle
magazine training to describe “Dr. Gordon,” as she called Barnhouse in the book: “She wore a white blouse and a full skirt gathered at the waist by a wide leather belt, and stylish, crescentshaped spectacles. This woman was a cross between Myrna Loy and my mother,” Plath concluded. Who could ask for anything more?

Although Plath did provide vivid descriptions of life at McLean in her letters, she rarely discussed her therapy. In one sense, there was not a great deal to discuss. When Plath first arrived, Barnhouse decided to supplement psychotherapy with insulin shock treatment, which not only failed to address the patient’s acedia but also caused her face to bloat up and bruise, spoiling her natural beauty and compounding her crisis of self-doubt. Like most McLean patients, Plath was dosed up on the antipsychotic drug Thorazine, which contributed to her affectless behavior. Months after arriving, her therapy was blocked. “I got her to draw things first, and then I had gotten her to talk, which was already something,” Barnhouse recalled. “But she had been in there for months, and Mrs. Prouty was paying the bills—this was going on and on. She was totally depressed and she wasn’t getting any better.”

Mrs. Prouty was visiting Sylvia regularly, and she was becoming quite impatient with McLean. In November, she wrote a letter to director Franklin Wood threatening to stop paying for a treatment regime—Prouty felt it was nontreatment—that seemed to be leading nowhere. Prouty herself had spent time at Silver Hill in Connecticut,
a mental hospital with a more structured approach to mobilizing depressed patients, and she could not abide McLean’s laissez-faire attitude. “I usually find Sylvia wandering listlessly up and down the corridor and when I leave she says she will do the same, as there is nothing else for her to do,” Prouty complained in a letter to Wood. Indeed, McLean was notorious for failing to fill “the other 23 hours” of the day, meaning the hours when the patients were not receiving psychotherapy.
¹⁸

Plath’s story was approaching its climax. Barnhouse decided to gamble and proposed electroshock therapy to the young girl. The idea of shock therapy was plenty scary, but it was especially scary to Plath, who had suffered through several painful and impersonal shock sessions at the hands of Dr. Peter Thornton and then Kenneth Tillotson at Valley Head Hospital that summer. She had received no anesthesia for the treatments, and after being semi-electrocuted, she had been wheeled into an empty recovery room to cope with her trauma. “She was not properly protected against the results of the treatment,” Prouty wrote to one of Plath’s doctors, “which were so poorly given that the patient remembers the details with horror.” Prouty was a meddler, but an informed meddler, and she voiced her opinion that the botched electroshock sessions had driven Sylvia to attempt suicide. Plath herself later described the “rather brief and traumatic experience of badly-given shock treatments” at Valley Head to a friend: “Pretty soon, the only doubt in my mind was the precise time and method of committing suicide.” But Barnhouse promised to stay
with Plath during the McLean sessions and managed to convince the young woman that this time the results would be different.

They were. On December 15, Plath received the first of two shock treatments. She regained her personality and composure so rapidly that she was able to spend Christmas at home. Prouty brought her a typewriter, and Plath resumed her erudite and chatty correspondences with friends: feeling better; the company is swell. She rejoiced in the high-minded company: a classmate from Smith, girls from Vassar, Radcliffe, and Cornell, “plus an atomic genius from M.I.T.” The hospital officially discharged her in late January, and by February she was back at Smith. Five years later, Plath mentioned the treatments in her journal: “Why, after the ‘amazingly short’ three or so shock treatments did I rocket uphill? Why did I feel I needed to be punished, to punish myself.” Neither she nor Barnhouse could explain the miraculous turnabout. “I can’t tell you what happened,” Barnhouse said in a 1998 interview.

Most psychiatric hospitals still administer a milder form of shock treatment, more palatably rechristened “electroconvulsive therapy,” to blocked patients. When it works, doctors are still at a loss to explain how.

Barnhouse and Plath continued to see each other long after their
McLean encounter. When Plath lived in Boston in 1958 and 1959, she saw Barnhouse professionally, as often as once a week. To Plath’s considerable chagrin, she often lacked the money to pay her therapist, who lowered her hourly rate to five dollars to accommodate the struggling young poet. On Plath’s side, the transference held strong. She wrote often about her need to be “worthy” of Barnhouse’s friendship. She idolized the older woman, who seemed to be successfully juggling her psychiatric career with a strong marriage in which she bore responsibility for the raising of three small children. (The marriage later broke up.) By contrast, Plath fretted constantly about her career and worried that having children with her poet husband, Ted Hughes, would impede her literary progress. Although Barnhouse probably would not have admitted it—she soured on both Plath and Hughes at the end of her life—the psychiatrist probably stuck with Sylvia, gratis, because she was flattered by the attentions of the rising literary star. “The paid business is (not silly) but irrelevant,” Barnhouse wrote to Plath in 1962. “If I help you, it is my reward. I would love to have the dedication to RB. [Plath had talked about dedicating a book of poems to Barnhouse.] I have often thought, if I ‘cure’ no one else in my whole career, you are enough. I love you.”

Their therapy sessions worked wonders for Plath. “Better than shock treatment,” Plath wrote in her journal. To Plath’s great satisfaction, Barnhouse gave her “permission” to hate her mother: “‘I hate her, doctor.’ So I feel terrific. In a smarmy matriarchy of togetherness it is hard to get a sanction to hate one’s mother especially a sanction one believes in. I believe in RB’s because she is a clever woman who knows her business and I admire her.” A few months later Plath wrote: “RB has become my mother.”

Plath and her husband moved to London in 1960. The therapy sessions ended, although Plath did telephone her old friend and mentor on rare occasions. In late 1962, Plath’s marriage plunged into crisis; Hughes was having an affair. Sylvia wrote Barnhouse a
despairing letter. To use contemporary jargon, Barnhouse was there for her; her own marriage had ended in divorce, and she offered Plath plenty of emotional support and tough, practical advice for dealing with wayward husbands. “Frankly, I am furious at Ted,” Barnhouse announced in September 1962:

Nine days later, Barnhouse was lecturing Plath on the importance of selecting a first-class nanny (“Get a really, really good one”) to throw into the child-care breach and offering more, concrete suggestions on coping with her rapidly dissolving marriage.

Plath and Hughes formally separated the following month. Four months later, Plath committed suicide at the age of thirty.

In 1968, Anne Sexton got her wish, sort of. Like a bolt from the blue, Sex
ton received an invitation to teach a poetry seminar at McLean:

The librarian’s proposal was well timed. Not only was Sexton still fascinated by McLean, but she had just befriended a young Philadelphia poet named C.K. Williams, who had been teaching poetry in a mental hospital. Williams was ghostwriting books for local psychiatrists and had started up a literary magazine edited by the disturbed patients of the Institute of the Pennsylvania Hospital. “The editorial meetings started becoming group therapy, and we started taking advantage of that,” Williams remembers. The formal term the psychiatrists used to describe the patients’ quasiliterary outpourings was “primary process thought.” “The thing I found amusing was that the people who were most floridly psychotic
would talk like geniuses but write very conservatively,” Williams told me. “The rule seemed to be that the crazier you were the better you talked but the worse you wrote. This was the group I had told Anne about.” Sexton was fascinated by Williams’s experiment and anxious to replicate his work at McLean.

Still, she had her doubts. “Anne was quite agitated one day, and called and said she’d been asked to do a poetry workshop at McLean,” recalls Ames. “She saw this as an enormous responsibility. ‘What if they’re suicidal?’ she asked. ‘What if I say something about a poem that sends them over the edge?’” Furthermore, except for a high school seminar she had arranged with a friend, Sexton had never taught before. The pair decided that Ames, an experienced social worker, would help her teach the seminars at McLean.

The seminar assembled every Tuesday evening in the hospital library. Typically, Sexton would read a few poems written by her contemporaries, such as Diane Wakoski, Frederick Seidel, Robert Bagg, and Aliki Barnstone. Discussion would range from highly agitated to desultory, depending upon the mix of student-patients in the room. Sexton would ask each participant to prepare one or more poems for the following session, which Margaret Ball would collect during the week. Ball then sent the poems to Sexton’s Wellesley home, where she read them and prepared her comments for the next class.