Katie's Diary

Unlocking the Mystery of a Suicide

David Lester

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415935012
• eBook ISBN: 9781135951733
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Abnormal Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Katie's Diary is a unique analysis of the diary left behind by a young woman who has committed suicide. As compared to suicide notes, which are typically brief, Katie's diary consists of five separate books, an opportunity to look into the mind of a suicide from a source of data that is extraordinarily rare.

Commenting on the diary are professionals in the fields of suicidology, linguistics, women's studies, Jungian analysis and voice therapy, among others.

Suicidal themes that prevail in her writing are discussed, as well as potential treatment methods in the hopes that the study will contribute to suicide prevention.

1 CHAPTER

Introduction: The Study of Personal Documents

David Lester

There is a long history of using written texts in general to illustrate and sometimes test psychological theories (Lester, 1987). For example, theories of suicide have been tested using the content of suicide notes (Leenaars, 1988a). Occasionally, suicides (for example, Sylvia Plath) leave a book or poem describing their behavior, and this kind of material may be of use in exploring the unconscious psychodynamics of the suicidal act. In other fields of psychology, folk tales of primitive societies have been studied, for example, for evidence of the societal needs for achievement and power (McClelland, Davis, Wanner, & Kalin 1966), and literary stimuli have been used in studies of people’s preference for differing degrees of complexity (Kammann, 1966).

Let us first briefly review the ways in which literature has been used to throw light on the individual and society.

Psychology and Literature ¹

Understanding Human Behavior in Historical Times

The psychological study of history has created a new discipline, called psychohistory. Psychohistory seeks to enlarge our understanding of historical events and persons by applying psychological theory and knowledge (Hoffer, 1979). Crosby(1979) defined the field as “the form of history which makes explicit use of the concepts, principles, and theories of psychology in order to enhance our understanding of particular people and events in the past” (p. 6).

This joining of psychology and history had long been advocated (Barnes, 1925, Smith, 1913) but developed in depth only in the 1970s. The major psychological theory applied to history has been psychoanalysis (for example, Erikson’s study of Martin Luther [1962]), but other theories, such as cognitive theory and trait theory, have been utilized. Although psychohistorians can use a variety of materials in order to make inferences about the psychological state of historical individuals and cultures,occasionally literature has been used.

For example, Hoffer (1974) analyzed school textbooks in the first half of the nineteenth century to show how threats to national unity appeared to influence school textbook writers to minimize divisive and unruly episodes in earlier American history, a decision which Hoffer saw as consistent with Festinger’s (1957) theory of cognitive dissonance.

McClelland (1958) illustrated the possibility of incorporating quantitative methods into psychohistory. For example, McClelland scored a variety of Greek writings for the need to achieve and found that this need declined steadily in Greece from 700 B.C. to 250 B.C., which fits with the historical events of that period. Hull, Allen, and Hoffer (1978) used the manuscripts left by loyalists and revolutionaries in Revolutionary New York to identify differences in a variety of traits, including need for order, submissiveness, and conformity, and they related this to the writers’ political affiliation.

Psychological Analyses of Literature

Psychoanalytic theory (and other psychodynamic theories) have been applied in order to understand better the unconscious motivations of the fictional characters. For example, Faber (1970) used psychoanalysis to analyze the suicides in the Greek tragedies written by Sophocles and Euripides.

A frequent task in the psychological study of literature has been the tracing of a significance of a symbol or an idea through its many manifestations, perhaps identifying in the process a Jungian archetype. For example, McClelland (1963) started with the idea that not all people fear death. Indeed, some people, often women, actually seem to look forward to death, with a sense of excitement in addition to fear, as if death could be an unconscious equivalent for the final sexual union with the ideal mate (Bromberg & Schilder, 1933). McClelland’s student, Greenberger (1965), found that dying women were more likely to give stories involv ing illicit sexuality to cards from the Thematic Apperception Test than women who were not dying. Women students in his classes rated “a gay seducer” as more appropriate as a description of death than did the men.²

Stimulated by these findings, McClelland traced the development of the Harlequin theme in literature. In the typical Harlequin story, Harlequin pursues Columbine, his love, despite obstacles placed in his way by her father, guardian, or suitor, Pantaloon. In the dark scenes, Harlequin is definitely connected to underworld figures, and often Columbine dies at the end of the story.³

Psychological Studies of the Author and the Reader

Psychoanalysis (and other psychodynamic theories) have often been applied to fictional works in order to better understand the author. The first example of the use of psychoanalysis to this end was by Freud (Niederland, 1960), who applied his psychoanalytic theory to the novel Die Richterin by the Swiss writer Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (1825–1898). Freud sent an essay to his friend, Wilhelm Fliess, on June 20, 1898, in which he suggested that the novel was an unconscious defense against the writer’s memory of an affair with his sister (Freud, 1954). In the novel, a mother murders her husband and rules in his place until her stepson returns and unmasks his stepmother as the murderer. The stepmother thereupon commits suicide, but, in the course of the novel, the avenging stepson has an affair with his half-sister. Niederland notes that Meyer’s father died when Meyer was fifteen. Meyer’s early efforts to write were thwarted by his mother but encouraged by his sister. After his mother’s suicide, Meyer lived with his sister in a close and personal relationship, until he married in his late forties. She acted as his housekeeper, companion, secretary, and advisor.

There have been several studies of the psychological state of individual authors. Bellak (1963), for example, treated the short stories of Somerset Maugham as if they were stories written to stimuli such as those in the Thematic Apperception Test, scoring the stories to measure Maugham’s psychological needs. For example, the descriptive theme in “Footprints in the Jungle” is that Bronson brings Cartwright home because he is temporarily in hard circumstances. Bronson’s wife has an affair with Cartwright and persuades Cartwright to murder her husband. Though the police discover the crime, they do not have enough evidence to try the couple, who then live happily ever after. Bellak saw the interpretive theme here as that women can come between men and cause trouble and that sexual passion can motivate murder even in decent people, who may not even suffer remorse. At the diagnostic level, Bellak suggested that Somerset Maugham viewed, perhaps unconsciously, women as sources of trouble for men, separating them and destroying them. There is also an Oedipal theme here in which a man has to kill another man in order to obtain a mate; and, finally, passion can overpower the superego, leading to lack of control over aggression.

In general, after an analysis of ten of Maugham’s ninety-one short stories, Bellak suggested that Maugham had a continuous struggle with his sexual and aggressive impulses. To control them, Maugham sought emotional isolation and detachment, playing the role of an onlooker toward others. His resulting self-image is that of a mildly ineffective person pushed around by external forces. Maugham saw women as domineering and demanding, leading men to feel inadequate, a view which is perhaps a projection of his own strong unconscious aggressive drives. Maugham suffered from a conflict between activity and passivity, conformity and nonconformity, and male and female identification, leading to embarrassment and shame, a feeling of inadequacy and a fear of failure. Bellak noted that his conclusions from his thematic analysis of Maugham’s short stories was consistent with biographies of Maugham’s life.⁴

Studying Suicide by Means of Literature

In addition to studying the suicides that occur in fiction, such as Faber’s studies mentioned above of suicides in Greek tragedies, another approach to understanding suicide through literature is to study the writings of writers who killed themselves. Not all such suicides provide clues to suicide in their writings, but there are several suicidal writers whose fiction appears to be somewhat autobiographical and, therefore, provides us with some insights into their unconscious psychodynamics, which increases our understanding of them, authors such as Ernest Hemingway and Cesare Pavese. However, Sylvia Plath (1981, pp. 183–184) wrote a poem (“Daddy”) four months prior to her suicide which provides a startling insight into the unconscious psychodynamics of her suicide.

In “Daddy” Plath casts herself as a Jew in a concentration camp versus her father as a Panzer man and as a devil who bit her heart in two. She says that she has always been scared of him, and she calls him a bastard. Yet she says that her suicide attempt at age twenty was an attempt to be reunited with him. She then made a model of her father and married him, but she calls this person a vampire who drank her blood for seven years. Indeed, her marriage to the British poet, Ted Hughes, lasted about seven years. At the end of her poem, she tells her father that he can lie back now, perhaps because, as she says a few lines earlier, she is finally through.

The Oedipal theme in the poem is clear. The motivation for her first suicide attempt was to be reunited with the father who died when she was eight (though the poem says ten). And, in case he is jealous of her marriage to Ted Hughes (why else is Daddy sitting up in his grave?), she is now finally through and, presumably, going to be reunited with Daddy this time (and so he can lie back down to await her).

In addition, though, there are other elements in the poem. The ambivalence toward her father is evident throughout the poem, but most exquisitely expressed in the final line where she writes, “Daddy, daddy, you bastard…,” a juxtaposition of affection (daddy) and anger (you bastard). Plath also says, “If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two.” Who are these two? Daddy and her husband? Plath’s father died of natural causes when she was eight, but perhaps Sylvia had wished for his death when she was angry at him and believes, magically, that her death wish for him contributed to his death, a common belief in children. Or perhaps she feels guilty over other behaviors? But then, how did she kill her husband? Perhaps psychologically as her stature as a poet grew to equal, and perhaps surpass, the stature of Ted Hughes?

There is an interesting feature to this poem in that Plath uses the word “black” six times, a frequency much higher than in her first book of poems (Lester,1989b). According to Piotrowski’s (1974) method for interpreting the Rorschach ink-blot test, the use of dark shading predicts a tendency to act out, rather than quieten down, when anxious or under stress.⁵

The Use of Personal Documents (Rather Than Literature)

The study of personal documents in psychology also has a long history, but it received strong support from Gordon Allport, who urged such study in general (Allport, 1942) and who provided many illustrations. For example, Allport (1965) reprinted a series of letters from a woman, whom he named Jenny, to a friend in order to see whether they could “explain” Jenny.

Why does an intelligent lady behave so persistently in a self-defeating manner? When and how might she have averted the tragedy of her life?… Was the root of her trouble some wholly unconscious mechanism? (Allport, 1965, p. viii)

In the book, Allport used the letters to provide psychodynamic, existential, learning, and trait descriptions of Jenny.

The use of personal documents in the study of suicide has played a prominent role because there are so few data available on suicides. Most suicides leave no clinical records, and when they do, perhaps as a result of being in psychotherapy or being hospitalized in a psychiatric facility, the records are not standardized. As a result, it is difficult to collect comparable data or psychological test scores from a sample of such suicides.

However, a good proportion of suicides, perhaps as many as 40 percent, do leave suicide notes. In the 1950s, Edwin Shneidman and Norman Farberow (1957) publ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• The Series in Death, Dying, and Bereavement
• Katie’s Diary
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Introduction: The Study of Personal Documents David Lester
• Katie
• Commentaries
• Conclusions
• Author Index
• Subject Index