Sylvia Plath, melancholy under therapy: A psychoanalytical focus on the effects of the superego

This article offers a psychoanalytic re‐reading of part of Sylvia Plath's work and life trajectory by examining the articulation between her melancholic experience of life, the question of the superego and the effects of psychotherapy. Plath's writings provide an exceptionally acute testimony to the self‐imperatives that governed her psychic life, as well as to the impact of her psychotherapy upon her. Drawing on an analysis of these texts, we advance the hypothesis that Ruth Beuscher's psychotherapy, by encouraging speech in the direction of exploring inhibitions according to a neurotic model, may inadvertently have reinforced the tyrannical dimension of the superego to which Plath was subjected– a dimension that was from the outset a central and particularly complex aspect of her suffering. Invested with authority and transference, the psychiatrist appears gradually to have become, for Plath, a relay of the internal command that, through an exacerbation of the superego, propelled her toward a melancholic impasse. Through this reading, the article highlights the risks of therapeutic interpretations aimed at relieving inhibition in order to produce therapeutic effects. It invites consideration of alternative modes of clinical engagement and treatment that do not reinforce the tyrannical dimension of the superego.