Psychoanalytical study of Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” and “Mushrooms”

Psychoanalytical study of Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” and “Mushrooms”

Introduction of Research Scholar Introduction of Supervisor

Name: Maria Hanif Name: Sir M. Amir Ch.

Roll No: 53 Designation: Asst. Professor

Class: M.Phil English Literature Department: English

Session: 2019-2021 Institution: Minhaj university

Lahore

Department of English

Faculty of Languages

MINHAJ UNIVERSITY LAHORE

Hamdard chowk Township Lahore

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Abstract:

This study is devised to apply psychoanalytical theory to Sylvia Plath’s poems “Daddy”
and “Mushrooms”, suggesting that the traumatic loss of paternal figure left Plath with unresolved
issues. The focus will be on the traumatic symptoms, the exploration of her relationship with her
father, its consequences and the way her trauma is represented in the poem. In psychoanalytic
terms, the direct confrontation with trauma or reliving childhood worst fears and memories is
considered to be curative. The investigation of the data was carried out on the discourse,
sentence and word level. This study is significant in so many ways. It gives a new dimension to
the reading of both the poems. It provides a new angle to the reader to trace the causes of the
societal decline.
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Introduction:

The beginning of the twentieth century witnessed a growing interest in the field of
Psychoanalysis due to the effect of Freud’s theories and researches. After the publication of the
Interpretation of Dreams, Freud opened people’s eyes to the importance of dreams and
nightmares in revealing the pains, agonies and dark desires. Analysis of literary genres, in the
light of psychoanalytic theory, is a common phenomenon in today’s research of humanities. This
literary theory is now an established school of literature analysis.
Psychoanalysis is a type of therapy that aims to release pent-up or repressed emotions and
memories in or to lead the client to catharsis, or healing (Saul McLeod, 2014). In other words,
the goal of psychoanalysis is to bring what exists at the unconscious or subconscious level up to
consciousness. This goal is accomplished through talking to another person about the big
questions in life, the things that matter, and diving into the complexities that lie beneath the
simple-seeming surface.
Psychoanalysis helps to study Electra complex in Plath’s poetry. Her poems deals with
her own unresolved Electra complex of which stemmed from the anger and resentment the
author felt for the father who has passed away when she was eight years old. The Electra
complex is a psychoanalytic term used to describe a girl's sense of competition with her mother
for the affections of her father. It originates from the idea that females idealize their fathers
because their fathers are said to be their first and most impressionable link to the opposite sex,
and are equated to all women’s first true loves.Throughout her poetry Plath clearly struggles with
the fact that she never moved on from her unresolved issues and she writes about how she
attempted to cope. It is in fact Plath’s tirade towards her father who had deserted her. It
resembles to a Freudian drama of the repetition-compulsion where the speaker resurrects her
vampiric father just to kill him again, a wrong deed done to delete the real source of her
psychological pain. 
In Plath’s poetry and prose, her father was her symbol of absence. For Plath, the
fact signifies the impossibility of lasting love, of God, or of any real meanings in life. His
death was a shock for Plath from which she never properly recovered (O’Reilly, 2004, pg. 356).
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Research Objectives:

The present study is pursued with the help of the following research objectives.

1. To affirm the importance of using psychoanalytic theory for understanding “Daddy” and
“Mushrooms” by Plath in her biographical context.
2. To explain how an understanding of psychoanalytic approach helps in a more deep reading
of concerned poems by Plath.
3. To explore the impact of Electra complex in Plath’s poetry.

Research Questions:

The present study is pursued with the help of the following research questions.

1. Are the poems “Daddy” and “Mushrooms” represent Sylvia Plath’s psyche ?

2. What techniques of psychoanalysis are employed in the poems ?

3. What are the results and implications of psychoanalytic approach in these poems?

Research Methodology:
The research methodology will be based on qualitative type of study. The qualitative
study will be analyzed with the help of closed study method. The Qualitative paradigm will be
used as general approach style to focus on central conceptual meanings. The Qualitative research
will be used to explore phenomenon by using more flexible way of eliciting responses to
research questions. The qualitative research will be interdisciplinary and descriptive one.
Through Qualitative research the study design will be iterative and research questions will be
adjusted according to what is learned. The poems “Daddy & Mushrooms” are the primary
sources for this research paper. The primary text will be used to analyze concepts, themes, ideas,
symbols and description of things. The goal of this study is to unveil the Psychoanalytic aspects
in ‘Daddy & Mushrooms’ by Sylvia Plath. The research work has taken into consideration the
poems at thematic level and discourse level.
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Psychoanalysis of Plath’s Daddy & Mushrooms

According to Barry (2009,pg.92), Psychoanalytic, one of the literary criticisms, uses

some psychoanalysis techniques to interpret a literary work. Psychoanalysis, according to the
Concise Oxford Dictionary, is a therapy to cure mental disorders through investigations in
interactions between conscious and unconscious elements in one’s mind. The theory was
developed by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). The uniqueness of Freud’s explorations lies in his
attributing to the unconscious a decisive role in the lives of human beings.
Attachment disorder takes part of the Psychoanalysis. Brenda McCreight, Ph.D. on
www.theadoptioncounselor.comstatesthat attachment disorder is a long–term psychiatric
condition. It is manifested by some negative behaviors if one can not bond with a stable
caregiver.A child develops an attachment disorder when the attachment order processes
interrupted. The interruptions can be experiences of having multiple caregivers or denied
attachment order processes due to poor quality, chronically inconsistent, or violent parenting.
Thus, the child’s brain concentrates on developing survival skills rather than relationship
skills. It results in a child knowing only how to survive by manipulations, controls, aggressions,
or with drawls. The child spends the childhood feeling abandoned, not understanding at all how
to belong to, or to trust, a parent figures.
O’Reilly (2004, pg. 355) states that Sylvia Plath (1932 – 1963) was born in Boston,
U.S.A., on 27 October 1932. She was the first child of Otto Plath and his second wife, Aurelia
Schober. Otto Plath was a dominant patriarchal presence in the household. It seemed that Plath
inherited her mother’s strong idealism, self-improvement spirit and, probably, an immigrant’s
sense of the precariousness of worldly success, a sense of its having to be continually
renewed and bolstered. The textual analysis is conducted in order to define the Psychoanalytic
elements found in the poetry. In Plath’s poetry and prose, her father was her symbol of absence.
For Plath, the fact signifies the impossibility of lasting love, of God, or of any real meaningful
life. His death was a shock for Plath from which she never properly recovered.(O’Reilly, 2004,
pg. 356).
The poem Daddy is written by Plath in 1962. It is in fact Plath’s tirade towards her father
who had deserted her. Sylvia Plath wrote "Daddy" just four months before her death by suicide
in February 1963. Daddy is a confessional style of poetry, used by the writer as an outlet for
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pent up feelings of the love/hate relationship she had with her father and the guilt she
experienced from it. (Kehoe, John).Daddy is a morbid, dark, disturbing poem seemingly narrated
by an angry child/adolescent girl. She may well have done this intentionally, because there are
things she feels she can get away with saying as a child, which the constraints of adulthood
would not allow her to do. In the beginning of the poem she rages against a father she feels has
betrayed and abandoned her, "Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time-". By
the end, she transfers that rage to her estranged husband, "If I've killed one man, I've killed two".
(Revising Life, pg48).There has been reference made to the black shoe in the first stanza,
"Anymore black shoe in which I have lived like a foot" as representing her fathers amputation of
his leg from complications of diabetes. This represents a symbol of oppression, of being held
down and dominated by her father. She mentions it again in the tenth stanza, "The boot in the
face, the brute, Brute heart of a brute like you". She gives the impression of hating her father, for
not only dying, but also being authoritarian and stern. Note she says, "I see you at the blackboard
in the picture I have of you". Not "you read to me or held me on your knee". She refers to him as
"the black man who bit my pretty red heart in two" symbolizing her pain caused by not being
acknowledged or feeling love from her father. She likens him to Hitler with his "Meinkampf
look" and to herself as a Jew, "I may well be a Jew". The symbolism of oppression and antipathy
could not be more obvious.
The poem resembles to a Freudian drama of the repetition-compulsion where the speaker
resurrects her vampiric father just to kill him again, a wrong deed done to delete the real source
of her psychological pain. The poem involves a speaker who has a monolog concerning her father
who had died when she was ten years old, but he is still in her mind. In this poem, she explains that
she was done with thinking about him. The poem demonstrates a love and hate relationship with both
the father and the husband. The word Daddy is ironic in this poem since he is noted to be a bad
person who is likened to a Vampire, Devil, and a Nazi. The poem has shown hatred that has
developed among the feminists concerning the males.The tone of the poem is brutal, rough, abusive,
and childish. At the end of the poem, she calls her father a bastard, and she is done with him. The
rude tone shows that she has done away with him and seems to enjoy that the father had died both
physically and even in her heart. The speaker is also brutal in the tone in that she is very angry and
cannot even communicate due to the bitterness she has in her heart (Roberts, 2014). She repeats the
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word ‘ich’ severally, which means ‘I.’ The word is repeated severally for more than four times, and it
has the intonation of the gunfire that could have related the Nazi with war.
The childish tone is demonstrated in her use of the word ‘Daddy’ very many times. The word
is related to how innocent children call their fathers. However, in this poem, the child seems to be
very angry concerning the father and having a negative attitude towards him. The speaker shows no
respect and formality concerning the father. The speaker in the poem wants the reader to have a
feeling of oppression in the family relationships. She demonstrates the harsh and disturbing issues
that she was going through in their family. She had been going through a lot of pressure caused by
her father. In the poem, she relates herself to a foot that has lived in a shoe for a very long time; that
is more than thirty years. The demonstration shows that she never had freedom to do whatever she
wished. She has been working so hard to ensure that she is liberating herself from the oppression.
The speaker in the poem demonstrates a negative attitude towards men. The men in the poem are the
father of the speaker and the husband. As a daughter, she has to feel a victim concerning the death of
the father. She believed that the father was a God and thus, she seems that something wrong was
happening between her and the father. She describes the father in an abusive way (Holbrook, 2014).
She also calls the father a devil and she gets rid of her physical appearance. Additionally, she has also
tried to make his escape from her emotions. Sylvia Plath was a poet with a lot of pain caused by
her own biological father, Otto Plath. His severity and ignore addressed to Sylvia finally made
her detest him so much and express her hatred through the Daddy poem.This poem is a very
strong expression of resentment against the male domination of women and also the violence of
all kinds for which man is responsible. In this poem, the poet rebuked both her dead father, but
for most parts her husband and father figure. She uses imageries, metaphors, and themes that
portray her father as an object of repression and desire.
"Daddy" is related to psychoanalysis in literature in so many ways. Electra complex is
one of the main thing in this poem; it is similar to Oedipus complex which is defined the desire
of one child has toward the parent of the opposite sex and rejection of the parent of the opposite
sex. According to Sigmund Freud, the term, "Electra complex is a psychoanalytic term used to
describe a girl's sense competition with her mother for the affection of her father." Electra
complex is seen from line 11-14 when Plath writes: "And a head in the freakish Atlantic, where
it pours bean green over blue, in the waters off beautiful Nauset, I used to pray to recover you.
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Displacement is another thing in this poem; it involves taking out the frustrations, feelings and
impulses on people or objects that are less threatening. Lastly, Manifest and Latent content;
Manifest content is defined as the actual images while the Latent content is the hidden messages
under those images. Plath's desire toward her dead father could easily be seen throughout the
whole poem by the way she describes her father, especially when she says she wants to recover
him.
“Mushrooms” is another poem of Sylvia Plath. It is from her first major published
collection: “The Colossus and Other Poems.” It is a fine example of her work, with the use of
alliteration, assonance, symbolism, internal rhyme and repetition. This obsessive compulsive’s
delight is written with the sharp clean structured precision of a surgeon. At first glance
“Mushrooms” has all the trademarks of the perfect terrorist broadcast al-Qaida would aspire to
have read out by Osama Bin-Laden to cast fear in the hearts of their enemies, with its quietly
menacing slow yet rhythmic flow. Like many poems it can be interpreted in countless different
ways; with ‘Mushrooms’, Plath has merged several ideas (the Cold War, the atom bomb,
depression to name but a few) into a single theme. The main themes being that of the upcoming
rise of Woman’s rights with ‘We are shelves, we are Tables,’ highlighting the view held by men
in society at that time of women as purely domestic objects and it is also laced with echoes of the
birth of her first child. ‘Overnight, very whitely, discretely’ resembles the sensation (or rather
lack thereof) of the moment of conception. The use of the Mushroom metaphor fits perfectly
with the image of a pregnant woman. ‘Nobody sees us, Stops us’ remarks on the two things, the
fact that it is often not until late into the pregnancy that it becomes obvious that one is pregnant
and two, babies have a habit of slipping past us unnoticed. ‘Soft fists’ is surely alluding to the
kicks the mother feels during pregnancy. ‘Earless and eyeless, Perfectly voiceless,’ is another
beautiful reference to the growing foetus. ‘We Diet on water, On crumbs of shadow,’ refers to
the reality that the baby is nourished through what the mother is eating and generally the
mother’s diet changes during pregnancy.
Sylvia Plath was familiar with the concepts of Jungian psychology. Even though her own
therapy was not classically Jungian, Plath followed the writings of Jung. Both brought the
symbolic and the mythic into psychological perspective, recognizing meaning in them. Myths,
when understood metaphorically, are reflections of the human psyche. As Jung says: “The
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images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them,
or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful
fragmentariness on his life” (1963, chapter 6).
“Mushrooms” is a masterfully structured poem, which looks to follow the Octet Rule
with three lines in each stanza and five syllables in each line. The poem is related to female
psyche. The poem as relating to all those, females, who are oppressed and how they will rise up
and declare their rights. It represents an internal rising up against the oppressive and depressive
thoughts and feelings that tell Sylvia to destroy herself. She identifies herself with this poem. .
She describes “Mushrooms” as depicting her feelings about the encroachment of the stuff in the
house, the clouding of her vision, the imprisonment in family rituals and traditions, the
oppression of being a minority and disenfranchised. The family and culture are familiar but they
also strangle. She is oppressed with thoughts of how she should be rather than how she is. She
feels ridiculed and cannot follow the cultural tradition of ‘machismo’ or ‘obeisance to parental
figures’, which seem empty. She is not like the other mushrooms in the box. Hidden inside are
feelings of being squashed and repressed. The symbolism of the mushroom is also that it grows
in and under the ground, or the earth of one’s being. The process of growth is natural, healthy
and precious, but at times mushrooms are poisonous and have to be handled with care. Likewise,
the information in the unconscious can be both healing and difficult to process.
Plath and her depictions of inner conflicts relate to many in therapy today. Jung says that
poetry “is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up the forms in which the
age is most lacking… The unsatisfied yearning of the artist reaches back to the primordial image
in the unconscious which is best fitted to compensate” (1976 Para. 130). The feelings Plath
describes are beyond culture or gender – they are part of the human condition. Plath wrote about
the cultural restrictions of women raised to be housewives, not poets. The warring elements
within her battled in feeling excluded from being taken seriously, having a harder time being
published, and to have her work accepted. Sylvia Plath touches those attempting to create, renew,
expand their horizons, and defy the odds. Oppression can create inner loneliness and separation
from healthy connection with others while yearning to define life and self in ways other than
what the general culture lays down. In Jungian psychology the persona, or outer face turned to
the world, can be either a true reflection of the personality or an adaptation at the sacrifice of the
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real person. In therapy one tries to find the disparate elements and also reinforce the essential
truths of the person. This is not just to fit in with others but also to fit with oneself. As Jung says:
“ The persona is a complicated systemof relations between individual consciousness and society,
fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon
others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual” (1966-305).
Plath’s search for self-knowledge resonates because many can identify with her anguish.
In her writings she describes a split due to the intense conflicts that are both inner and outer. She
details an archetypal journey, one we all partake of in various ways in the search for self. From
her need to express she reveals the age-old attempts at wholeness, the path that we go on to find
parts of us that were lost, undeveloped, repressed and reclaim them. Sylvia Plath described a
crushing maternal feeling and impulses to self-annihilation combined with a guilt-inducing
refusal of autonomy through the medusa or mother images in her poetry. Her poetry reveals a
disturbing netherworld of psychological oppression and need for release from its mutilations.
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Conclusion:
Sylvia Plath’s separation from her husband and her father’s death early in her life as
unmanageable losses dealt with through self-destruction. Sylvia Plath was a woman of masks
who lived behind a persona layered with masks of disguise. The veiled selves she wrote about
succeeded in forestalling anyone from knowing who she really was, despite her lifelong quest to
discover the answer herself. Plath poignantly wrote in her journals, expressing the problem of
forging a coherent self from the warring fragments of her psyche: “Putting up pretty artificial
statues. I can’t get outside myself”. Sylvia Plath’s writing shows her wrapped in a tenacious self-
absorption with internal material that was emotionally and psychologically disturbing. The
psychological constellation of trauma and dissociations indicated the void at the center. This can
manifest in various forms of self-attack, despair, and narcissistic hatred. It feeds an internalized
cycle of oppression, parental neglect, abandonment and emotional rigidity, making it difficult to
love or care for oneself. In effect, there is a paralysis of being. For Sylvia Plath, forays into the
past imposed themselves on the present as her poetry painfully targets back to the original
wounds. Sylvia Plath’s talents manifest her ability to flay and expose the anguish of her soul, to
portray the depths that needled beneath the exterior facade and touched the heart on such a
profound level. For those who also search and are on their own quest, her words echo from the
unconscious haunting the soul.
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References:
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https://www.simplypsychology.org/whatispsychology.html

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Literature, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. , (3) 355– 362.

3. Barry, P. (2009). Beginning theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. United

Kingdom: Manchester University Press.

4. McCreight, B. (2011). Attachment Disorder and The Adoptive Family. Retrieved May, 2013,

from www.theadoptioncounselor.com

5. Holbrook, D. (2014). Sylvia Plath: poetry and existence. A&C Black.

6. Roberts, N. (2014). Narrative and Voice in Postwar Poetry. London: Routledge.

7. Plath, S. (1962). Daddy. Retrieved May,

2013,from http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15291

8. Dyne, R. S. (1993) Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems, Univ. of North Carolina Press.

9. Plath, S. and Michael, M. (1960). “Mushrooms”, Poetry, Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s. (4)

10. Jung, C. (1963) Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Pantheon Books. Print.

11. Schwartz, Murray & Bollas, C. (1976) “The Absence at the Center: Sylvia Plath and

Suicide.”Criticism. 18(2).147-172.

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