Which led Plath to believe she was unaccomplished and on August 24th, 1953, she made her first suicide attempt.ĭr Tillotson prescribed her first course of electroshock therapy (EST) to shake her out of depression but the psychiatrist did not give Sylvia a drug or a shot to anaesthetise her before exposing her to this gear which left Sylvia so traumatised by these EST electrodes that were attached to her temples that she felt as if she were “being electrocuted for some unknown crime” (Wilson). , she was split by being foremost, a woman, and a perfectionist. For a gifted young woman like Plath, who was accepted into Smith College on scholarship, graduating with the highest honours, winning Mademoiselle’s college fiction contest for her short story, Sunday at the Mintons, and etc.

Then she conceives accidentally and gives birth to a child and breaks into a schizophrenic reaction.įor Zilboorg and others, it was natural that a woman who had been pursuing her own career would develop a major illness in response to the conflict between their career and the biological function (bearing children) she is bound by. She usually gives the child to a housekeeper or to a nurse… She doesn’t conceive, sometimes, for a year, 2 years, 5 years and 10 years. She makes relative peace with herself in that she accepts one child, but this is what she does: The child is born.

In his article, The Dynamics of Schizophrenic Reactions Related to Pregnancy and Childbirth, which was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Zilboorg began with a two-page survey of women’s susceptibility to mental illness at the time of childbirth: The woman living unconsciously as a male and wanting to be male, submits to social demands to be a woman and gets married. New York psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg focused on the conflicts between what he identified as women’s role (childbearing) and their work lives. For example, until the late 1960s, homosexuality was pathologized because it deviated from “normal gender development” (Hirshbein). This perspective could be quite problematic (and inaccurate). Arguing, mental illness grew from failure to assign oneself to gender norms.

The bell jar writer