ABSTRACT
The use of psychiatric material in the biographies of Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzgerald pales in comparison with Martin Orne’s collaboration with Middlebrook. To understand the psychiatric controversy, one must appreciate the ways in which Anne Sexton’s poetry and therapy were inextricably related. Sexton was known famously and infamously as a ‘confessional’ poet, writing openly and graphically about depression, abortion, incest, masturbation, drug and alcohol addiction, and suicide. Sexton’s poems so obviously come out of deep, painful sections of the author’s life that one’s literary opinions scarcely seem to matter; one feels tempted to drop them furtively into the nearest ashcan, rather than be caught with them in the presence of so much naked suffering. The Viennese-born Martin Orne was only a year older than Anne Sexton when she entered into treatment with him, just beginning what turned out to be a noteworthy career as both a clinician and researcher.
