Sublimation as a Psychotherapeutic Impasse—The Mortal Oeuvre of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath wrote with great precision about her deep depression and her vital need to write, before committing suicide shortly after the publication of her only novel, The Bell Jar. Our contribution, distinct from previous studies of her life and work, highlights an aspect that has been little explored until now, but which is crucial to re-examining her suicide and identifying a central risk of psychotherapy. Drawing on her journals, we explain how, in seeking to encourage her creativity, Plath's psychotherapy paradoxically destabilized her. We situate this experience in the post-war American context, marked by the importation of psychoanalysis into psychotherapy and psychiatry, where the sublimation of drives was conceived as an individual and collective requirement for producing a normalized individual. Based on a re-examination of Freud's and then Lacan's conceptions of sublimation, we show how this “push towards sublimation” led Plath to produce, with The Bell Jar, a final work, mortally accomplishing the unconscious aim of her sublimatory process. Finally, we draw attention to the risk of psychotherapies centered on the idea that the patient could find their highest good in sublimation: taken to the extreme, such a dynamic can pave the way for the expression of the self-destructive tendencies of the subject and of civilization.