[On Sylvia Plath's Personality].

In this early study, written in 1985, I examined six of the most important personality traits of Sylvia Plath, the poet and writer (1). Sylvia oscillated between positions of dependency and independence; she was characterised by sexual inhibition and promiscuity, writer's block and an explosion of writing, achievement con- straint and liberation from the constraint, emotional dependence and independence. Paradoxically, she committed suicide when far more things (children, productive creative period, publication of her novel) tied her to life than was the case before her first suicide attempt (2). Her life was spent in the perspective of death; death was her main point of reference, and at the same time was a constantly present alternative solution (3). Her neurasthenic, sometimes bipolar mode of existence determined her everyday behaviour: fatigue, irritability, a low ability to tolerate failure, a tendency to somatisation, anxious attitude, low self-esteem (4). She lived between extremes: insensitivity and over-sensitivity, bad and good moods, ego systole and ego diastole, ambivalence towards close family members (father, mother, Ted), relationship fluctuating between adoration and hate (5). Her poetry persona was characterised by object phobia: in her poems objects become hooks, loops, traps (6). She was ambivalent towards both women and men: she hated women, while her effective therapist was a woman; she was jealous of men, she was not capable of a symmetrical partner relationship, she was either subordinate or superior. In Plath's poetry the incompatible dichotomy of soft worm and hard mask refers to the irreconcilable contradiction between the male and female world.