Under Construction @ Keele 2018 Vol. IV (II) | Page 41

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Hate It or Love It: Confessional Writing and the Ego
Elizabeth Trafford
(Independent Scholar)
I will ask why confession may be a narcissistic practice in the Freudian sense of the word. To
assist with this enquiry, I have chosen to stitch together original ‘confessional’ poetry and
prose, whilst briefly examining the concept of narcissism along the way.
Confessional writing (particularly poetry) was active during the 1950s with Sylvia Plath
and Anne Sexton being major proponents of the style. They broke with convention by writing
about their personal concerns as women. Taboo themes such as menstruation, sexuality and
suicide featured in their work, providing rich material for feminists and psychoanalysts to
analyse.
In my creative writing, I explore the noxious need to confess, or, like a criminal or liar,
the need to admit. Here, I will discuss the desire (whether pleasurable or not) to speak to Self
and to the Other, through the barrier of the page, in various fragmented pieces of writing. I
impress the holistic onto the confessional by contemplating relations between Self and Other
(or the narcissistic subject and the object), the stability of the fragile ego, and the
consequences of doing such a thing as confessing.
Keywords: Confession, narcissism, ego, Self, holism, taboo, sexuality, impulse, freedom,
object-relations
Written by the author of this paper, the creative pieces below provide a glimpse into the
confessional. In this paper, I have combined these pieces (Part One) with a critical
examination of narcissism from a Freudian perspective (Part Two). The reason for the analysis
of my poetry, along with other poets’ work, complements the subject of the paper. The
authors/subjects are metaphorically staring into a mirror, yet the authors/subjects do look
outside of themselves, as we will see. I will briefly analyse selected poems by Sylvia Plath and
Anne Sexton from a psychoanalytical stance and will focus on the psychology of the confessor.
As the narrator states in ‘Hidden Pleasures ii’: ‘[t]he haemorrhage was mindful, structured and
timely’. 1 In other words, the confessional mind is not, I argue, chaotic and irrational, in the
defamatory sense, but precise and flowing. The act of writing is like practising Buddhist
meditation or mindfulness. Inner feeling is pondered, but not solely – the external world is also
contemplated, but it is the internalisation of the external world which is discussed in these
poems. I will consider how society impacts on the individual, specifically in regard to sexuality,
1
See below.