A Study Of Anne Sexton’s Poetry From The Perspective Of Freud’s Psychological Theory

Anne Sexton(1928-1974)was the pioneer of modern women’s liberation movement.And she was also one of the most famous female confessional poets in America.Like many of the other confessional poets,Sexton also greatly suffered from severe mental illness for most of her lifetime.With the aid of psychiatric therapy,Sexton has started her career writing confessional poems,which was considered as one of the treatments for her psychiatric disorders.Readers have shown deep sorrow for Sexton’s short life,but she has left a unique sound and thousands of tremendous immortal poems to the realm of American poetry.Sexton published ten volumes of poetry during her lifetime and won several prizes,including a Pulitzer Journalism Prize due to her third book Live or Die(1966).Taking the form of poetry,Sexton revealed the most familiar and miserable details in her personal life.She almost brought everything out in its entirety about herself,her experiences and her mental illness by using the most obvious language.Most of her poems are based on her own personal stories,exploring the traumas of soul and searching for a catharsis of sensibility.Anne Sexton’s various mental disorders are fully embodied in her poetry,on the other hand,these immortal poems are closely related to Sexton’s personal life and emotional experiences.This thesis sets out to explore and analyze Sexton’s deep psychological structure and symptoms of her mental illness when creating poems and then discusses her creative poems’ profound significance and impact on the later generations.This thesis consists of six parts,including introduction,four main chapters and a conclusion.The introduction part gives a brief account of Anne Sexton and her poetry.Then comes a brief introduction to the previous studies of Sexton’s poetry at home and abroad and the thesis statement of this paper.Chapter One introduces the production and development of Sigmund Freud’s psychological theory and the main concepts of unconscious theory,life instinct and death instinct.Freud pointed out that the main cause of mental illness was the wishes or desires under the mechanism of psychological repression,especially the repression of libido,only resulting it to satisfy unconscious desires in the form of distortion.While dealing with instinct impulses and unconscious desires,artists and neurosis are subject to the exact same forces.Freud regarded instinct impulses as the drive of art creation.On the other hand,after hearing and seeing the unholy slaughter and mad destruction during the WWI,Freud presented the “death instinct” theory and combined his early theory self instinct together with sexual instinct as the “life instinct”.Life instinct represents the power of creation and love;death instinct represents the power of destruction and hate.Chapter Two analyzes embodiment of Sexton’s mental disorders in her poetry in three aspects: abnormal relationships,writing of maternal poems and the choices of life and death.It includes strained relation between couple,incest taboo between father and daughter,trauma of uterus,limitation of female recipient,resolution to love and life,fascination with death,salvation for God and so on.Chapter Three aims to analyze the reasons why Sexton put personal life experiences into her poetic creation from the perspective of Freud’s psychological theory.This chapter includes three sections as well: familial nightmare and social guilty,the absence of maternal identity,and death imagination and death experiences,for example,gap between mother and daughter,broken-down relationship between couple,and two painful experiences of suicide.Chapter Four elaborates the personal influences to Anne Sexton and profound poetic values in her bold and thought-provoking poetic creation.The last part is the conclusion.This chapter restates the embodiment of Sexton’s mental disorder together with its reasons in the poetry and Sexton’s profound values and significance of her poetic creation.