1. Mourning,
Melancholy, and
Sylvia Plath
William Todd Schultz

2. Previous Psychobiographys on
Plath:
• Lester (1998) - attributes Plath’s suicide to the theories of
Schneidman, Murray, and Beck, and believes Plath
suffered from manic-depressive bipolar disorder in the
months leading up to her suicide
• Shulman (1998) - attributes Plath’s suicide to a wish to join
her father, Otto, in death as well as issues of alienation,
perfectionism, self hate, and the realization of the failure
of her marriage

3. (Continued)
• Thompson (1990) attributes Plath’s suicide
to a severe form of PMS
• Runco (1998) attributes Plath’s suicide to a
“psychoeconomic hypothesis” - deals with
time investment theory: Plath felt unwilling
to invest anymore time in her creative
potential so death was the next course of
action

4. Schultz:
• finds fault with these previous psychobiographies
because they do not do Plath and her art justice in
that they do not follow her actually words/writing,
he goes on to note that Plath was very insightful
about her own moods/state of mind, so we, as
psychobiographers should use what she writes in
order to determine theories
• also notes that many of these psychobiographies
used an abundance of “probably(s)” in their
writing, which “gradually lose all qualification”

5. Main Argument:
• correlation between loss and creativity
• loss of father, Otto, was the single most
salient event in Plath’s life and is the basis
for her later suicide
• Plath was heavily influenced by Freud’s
Mourning and Melancholia, wrote that it
described exactly what she was feeling in
her journal

6. Freud’s Mourning and
Melancholia
• both develop out of loss, but while mourning
is not pathological and decreases with time,
melancholia is based in extreme dissatisfaction
with the self
• for Plath, the loss of her father shattered her
love for him, she could emotionally overcome
this event and therefore extreme self hate
developed

7. (Continued)
• this leads to a path of self punishment because
it creates a desire to kill this internal object
(self) that is causing grief
• therefore, suicide is actually an attempt to kill
the inner self and rid itself of melancholia
• in this way, Plath’s suicide was a murder-
suicide, but ultimately still resulted in her own
death

8. (Continued)
• Otto’s death was a salient event for Plath
because she idolized him - when he died, she
claimed “I will never speak to God again”
which could account for both a God and Otto
• Freud attributes this intense fixation as a result
of a “problematic self ” in that (in this case)
Plath has no real separation/boundary between
herself and others

9. Schultz:
• Ultimately, Schultz believes Plath
misunderstood Freud’s true intent in that
she immediately attributed the loss of her
father to all of her psychological problems -
they are definitely a cause, but may not be
the only cause
• Schultz says to fully understand Plath we
must focus on the “why” of her suicide

10. Critiques:
• The previous psychobiographers seemed to “diagnose”
Plath - with bipolar disorder, PMS, etc
• Schultz continually refers to The Bell Jar’s writings as
evidence for Plath’s fixation on her father and hatred of
her mother, yet The Bell Jar is a novel written by Plath
told from the first person perspective of Esther - we
cannot view Esther’s “thoughts” as simply an extension
of Plath’s own, however similar, because Plath was
creating a character, though the character is quite
obviously based on herself, it is still a character

11. (Continued)
• These interpretations made by Schultz do
provide a clarification of behavior and fit
with the general knowledge of Plath
• Though, it did end a bit abruptly in that it
laid out the foundation for the explanation/
theories about behavior, but did not explain
further on how we can evaluate the “why”
of Plath’s suicide