Sylvia Plath

[FemMecha]

More factoids:
from this link

In junior high, she continued to write and would publish her poems and drawings in the school newspaper. In high school she enrolled in the class of a tough English professor who challenged her abilities in the best of ways. In a 1949, Plath and another student from the English class co-authored a published response to an article in The Atlantic Monthly titled A Reasonable Life in a Mad World. The article stated that modern man must rely on the ability to reason to further society. Plath's response argued that, beyond reason, one needed to connect with and embrace inner divinity and spirituality to fully live...

To finish out her high school career, Plath consistently received good grades and earned recognition and publication as a writer, artist and editor.

And we kinda need some poetry links.

Bitter Strawberries
Mad Girl's Love Song
November Graveyard

The actual poetry does not take INFJ off the table imo. Very symbolic and a great deal of paradox. Wow. Bitter Strawberries reads like a microcosm of the war which is discussed in the poem. It shows an oppressive persistence of human dominance and complete lack of awareness of this state of things. The strawberries take on a death like quality. It combines the paradox of innocence and oppression. Mad Girl's Love Song is definitely an expression of inner torment from creating an inner world inconsistent with the external world. That's very NF. November Graveyard also reconciles paradox. The intensity of her emotional expression results from understatement, of expressing the absence of emotion:

The scene stands stubborn: skinflint trees
Hoard last year's leaves, won't mourn, wear sackcloth, or turn
To elegiac dryads, and dour grass
Guards the hard-hearted emerald of its grassiness
However the grandiloquent mind may scorn
Such poverty. No dead men's cries

Flower forget-me-nots between the stones
Paving this grave ground. Here's honest rot
To unpick the heart, pare bone
Free of the fictive vein. When one stark skeleton
Bulks real, all saints' tongues fall quiet:
Flies watch no resurrections in the sun.

At the essential landscape stare, stare
Till your eyes foist a vision dazzling on the wind:
Whatever lost ghosts flare,
Damned, howling in their shrouds across the moor
Rave on the leash of the starving mind
Which peoples the bare room, the blank, untenanted air.

This is the mind of the INFJ seen in these three poems. This doesn't mean she isn't yet another type, but i can't help but notice the intense presence of Ni. Of course i am no poet of much gift, but i will compare one of mine because it shows the principle of paradox, understatement, and exploring the void. Granted mine is crap by comparison, but it still makes a point, i hope. Try to look to principle over skill.

I lost myself in bliss, I lost myself in angst
Each time waking up, engulfed in the same.

With the clarity of dreaming on vacant, anguished face
I become a river that eats away its banks

With gluttonous hunger and empty embrace
I drink in mountain peaks, and with the wind I race.

Blistered with burning ice, cooled by winds of flame.

 

[Tigerlily]

I read "The Bell Jar" when I was 13 and instantly fell in love with her writing. I have always had a fascination with talented, deeply troubled individuals such as Vivienne Haigh-Wood, Edie Sedgewick, Nick Drake and Sylvia Plath to name a few.

As for her type I would guess ISFJ.

 

[the state i am in]

apparently i missed it in the thread- why is she typed as isfj and not infj?

 

[sonata]

I love Sylvia Plath. I had to do a research project on her, where I got into her character and pretended to be her for half an hour on a "radio" show. Being the typology nerd that I am, of course I tried to type her, and I immediately came up with INFJ.

I think she has Fe rather than Fi because she had this enormous desire to fit in and to please others, exemplified by her belonging to a sorority of girls she felt alienated from, and her cheery "Letters Home" to her mother, projecting an entirely different personality. (I'm not saying that Fe always does this by any means, it's a lovely function, this is just one twisted manifestation). However, her Ni realized the inherent shallowness and posturing of this life. Ni is also evident in her poems, as Toonia pointed out.

Also, I've read, probably on this board, that depressed INFPs are more likely to think about / dwell upon suicide, where depressed INFJs are more likely to actually attempt / succeed.

 

[OrangeAppled]

apparently i missed it in the thread- why is she typed as isfj and not infj?

I agree...I see dominant Ni....

 

[Halfjillhalfjack]

probably a bit late, but I have to say I really see her as INFJ as well.... not just because I can relate to her so much, but I definitely see Ni in her poetry, and, as has been stated, Fe in her (reported) behavior (as has been said, need to fit in, in contrast to her husband, e.g.). I also believe her outbursts to be somewhat typical for INFJs, and as far as I can judge that I see a seriousness in her which I find quite typical of INFJs.

 

[SillySapienne]

infx

Though, I'd lean towards INFJ.

 

[Halfjillhalfjack]

I thought you might find this interesting, this is an interview with Plath
by Peter Orr in 1962. I've had never found an recorded interview with her...

YouTube - Sylvia Plath Interview - Part 1

 

[neptunesnet]

She has such a strong voice. It strikes me as a little weird that I've imagined her having a more meek and docile voice. I guess I was projecting there. I really enjoy listening to her and I enjoyed that interview. Thanks.

 

[EnflamedHeartofSand]

There is an exerpt in one of Plath's biographies, quoting her longtime psychiatrist, who stated after her infamous mental collapse and suicide attempt, that Sylvia Plath was overusing her "T" - thinking function, which caused a major strain to her psyche. According to the Jungian tests her psychiatrist gave her, she determined that Sylvia was definitively an "intuitive (N), feeling (F) type.

 

[Tiltyred]

I think a lot of her S ness comes from her culture. She was well brought up and wanted desperately to fulfill what she was told were her roles, but she kept being thwarted one way or another from being a happy wife and mother, sorority sister, pretty girl without a care in the world/let the men do the heavy lifting, etc. It's why she always shows up on the feminist poet list. I don't think she was all that mentally ill. I think she was extremely bright and perceptive and could see what she was not supposed to see -- and developed a habit of examining what she was not supposed to look at -- and that made her unadaptive. I feel like it's possible if she were young now, she wouldn't be considered crazy.

P.S. I think she's a T. Very intellectually competitive. And between hers and Annwn's poems, above, I prefer Annwn's. Sylvia's is so contrived. There's so much device going on. You can see the work.

 

[EnflamedHeartofSand]

Well her psychotherapist concluded she was definitely an NF, overusing her T, making her able to be competetitive and intellectual. In one of Sylvia Plath's last interviews she stated that she believed that most of her poems came directly from her sensuous and emotional experiences, and then went on to say that she can't sympathize with the cries of the heart from individuals who have these experiences but cannot articulate them intelligently.

This to me, indicates someone who felt the need to, and seemingly in her case, a very strong need to be able to relate her inner experiences to others, and the only way she felt that she could do that without it sounding like an incoherent "cry of the heart" was by forcing herself to deconstruct those intense experiences she felt by developing a precise method by which she could make those experiences somewhat coherent. Though it came across as contrived, ultimately the desire to make her work so precise came from an overwhelming desire to be honest.

 

[Tiltyred]

I think it came from an overwhelming desire to be a famous poetess, too.

 

[EnflamedHeartofSand]

Yeah, but that's not really saying much, the desire for fame is never an end in itself.

 

[Ratsimoan]

She's an infj 4w5 sp/sx or sx/sp.

 

[Tiltyred]

Yeah, but that's not really saying much, the desire for fame is never an end in itself.

Good point.

 

[EnflamedHeartofSand]

INFJ makes sense to me, but it's hard to imagine an infj having so many people involved in your personal life as Sylvia Plath did. She is known to have been very adept at introducing herself to neighbors, becoming well acquainted with them, and establishing regular contact with them, in each of the neighborhoods she lived in England. That doesn't seem like a very infj quality to me, but more like an enfx. Also, before an after her suicide attempt, she was definitely a very outgoing person who had a large group of friends or at least acquaintances. That doesn't seem very infj either....but more enfx..

I still want to believe infj though because it seems to make the most sense, when taking her whole life into account. A very deep, intelligent person who had profound insights into humanity.

 

[Colombe Gris]

To me, there is a big difference between a natural inclination to socialize and establish a large circle of acquaintances (ENXP) and having this inner force driving you to make "these sorts" of friends and connections in order to achieve your ideal vision of yourself. The latter sort of behavior, from my own experiences, is very Ni (and even more true if you consider the Fe). It involves a lot of behind the scenes orchestrating and planning, but can appear very organic.

 

[Tiltyred]

Not to be Johnny One Note, but again, it's the times ... you were expected to visit new neighbors and they were expected to visit you ... it was not unusual to take over a cake or cookies ... and I bet Sylvia hated the whole thing, which is another kind of reason for her self-hate, like, "Why can't I get with it? Why don't I really want what everybody else really wants, what everybody says I should want and what would be 'good for me'."

 

[EnflamedHeartofSand]

Maybe she did think along those lines, but necessity always prevented her from completely indulging those self-hating, envious thoughts. She, up until the very end, sought out people to help her care for her children, and possibly just spend time with. It seems that she somehow knew that on her own, she would be in trouble....which also would explain her need to write letters to others, especially her mother, all the time. This kind of behavior tells me that she was the type that gained energy in the company of others. It was only when she moved in to her last home, with her only neighbor being someone who at first was antagonistic towards her, and seemingly unsympathetic towards her on the whole, that she finally gave in to those destructive thoughts.

[of course that's not the only reason: the circumstances before her death, are those of a woman who has been almost completely cut off from the relationships she had with others, and I would argue that this was not a voluntary action on her part, but maybe an idea penetrated her thoughts which perhaps could have made her believe that the world would be better off without her.]

In one of her last correspondences with her mom, she admitted that as long as someone could tell her that things would be okay, she was willing to believe them and continue to fight off the depression. Therefore, despite the fact that she may have hated herself for not being able to be like others, beyond that, she must have intuitively felt the immense importance of establishing relationships with others.