Selected Poems of Sylvia Plath: an Archetypal Reading

Why a person like Sylvia Plath, who had so much going for her, should have committed suicide is an intriguing question that might never be solved. The human mind is still a largely unexplored frontier. She was known to suffer from bi-polar problems and from the debilitating circumstances of an unsuccessful marriage. Sabina Shah has looked at some of her poems to trace the course of her mentation at different times in her short life. The age of psychoanalysis might be over, but that does not mean that all of its insights should be abandoned. Ms Shah suggests possibilities in the development of a suicidal mind-path leading to the moment of decision when Plath finally gassed herself. This work would best be read by people with some background in the works of Freud and Jung. However, it is not a treatise on psychoanalysis. It is an attempt to apply some of the tools developed by the great psychoanalysts to a great poet's writings in the hope of understanding things better. Ms Shah is acutely aware that a lot has been left unsaid, so she has confined her vision to just one small area of Sylvia Plath's poetic output.