“This is not Death, it is Something Safer”: a Psychodynamic Approach to Sylvia Plath

Gerisch attempts to show that Plath’s life & work contain aspects that are relevant for a comprehensive understanding of female psychosexual development & female suicidality within the context of a male defined cultural order. Discussion on Plath’s mother-daughter relationship, identity dissociation, duplication/splitting of her female identity, and suicide as a synthesis of the true and false self as represented in Plath’s work follows. (53 refs.)