Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Philosophy, Poetry, And The Self, Siobhain Mcguinness

Puget Sound Undergraduate Philosophy Conference

In this paper, I use Sylvia Plath’s corpus as a case study to demonstrate how the functional application of philosophy, psychology, and language detect and explain the flourishing and diminishing of the self due to the tension between authentic and inauthentic written expression. I demonstrate the interdisciplinary methodology by way of using philosopher Albert Camus’s philosophy of the absurd to explain why Plath’s self flourishes and diminishes to the point of non-existence (i.e. her suicide). I also show that Plath suffered from Dissociative Identity Disorder, and thus had a maladaptive self that caused her to utilize inauthentic written expression in …