Discussion

Why all the fuss? My first reaction after reading precirculated copies of the papers we just heard was that the controversial storm over Martin Orne's releasing of audiotapes of his therapy sessions with Anne Sexton from 1961 to 1964 is being overblown.

Why are Judy Viorst and Joe Weissberg crying foul play? As Joe Onek suggests, it was kosher for the Sexton estate to assign permission for the tapes to be made available to her biographer, Diane Middlebrook. A court of law would have told Orne to give them to Middlebrook. And Linda Sexton—the poet's older daughter and literary executor—states categorically that if Orne didn't do it, she would have taken him to court and made him do it: just as she did with MacLean Hospital.

Moreover, after buying and reading Middlebrook's biography of Sexton, I found myself even more inclined to approach the matter empirically rather than theoretically; more inclined to view the ethical issue of Orne's releasing the tapes from what Paul Chodoff calls “the actual world inhabited by therapists and patients.”

The first question that arises from this real-world-commonsensical approach is: what damage has been done to Anne Sexton's public image as a person and her historical reputation as a writer? None, as far as I can tell.

Middlebrook's book is first rate. It is intelligently written and not in the least bit sensational despite the fact that it discusses a host of juicy subjects that all lend themselves to being rendered in a sensational fashion.

To name a few topics: we have sexual promiscuity, child abuse, alcoholism and drug addiction, suicide and an illicit therapist-patient love affair. That therapist, as you know, was not Dr. Orne but a subsequent therapist whose knavery is squarely but tactfully confronted by Middlebrook for what it was: the cynical and willful abuse of a privileged relationship.