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Dear Sir
This letter is an attempt to understand a dilemma. My dilemma is simple, it is that another psychotherapist and myself come to very different conclusions on some material to which we have the same access and appear to apply the same theory. This is a traditional criticism of analytic theory, that it seems either untestable or incoherent when tested.
The material in question is Sylvia Plath's poem The arrival of the bee box. I read Melanie Hart's article on the poem (Hart 1989) and was filled with admiration for her analytic skills; both she and Philip Larkin are disturbed by the poem, she says why using analytic decryption, he just says so with poetic clarity.
Ms Hart finds in the poem a series of splits, part objects and pathological processes, particularly processes of denial, evacuation and sadistically omnipotent magical thinking. Ms Hart concludes by linking the final line ‘The box is only temporary’ with Sylvia Plath's suicide four months later (dates based on Ted Hughes' edited collection of Plath's poems). She cites with approval Larkin's question ‘whether Plath is wilfully hyping up this ordinary event to make a poem, or whether this is really how she saw it, in which case Plath and the reader are about to part company’.
Having been impressed by the skilled analysis I reread and reread the poem which I had felt I knew well and I still found it deeply positive, a brilliant expression of human creativity, humour and perception. I read Ms Hart again and still found myself disquieted that she and I appear to share so much theoretical perspective yet disagree so much in our reactions to the poem. Struggling with this I think I have come to one possible explanation which has implications for the application of analytic theory to