A new biography draws on a poet's confessions to her psychiatrist

By David Gelman and Farai Chideya

LADY! LADY! LET DOWN YOUR
HAIR. I am becoming a tourist attraction
and there is nothing I can do about it ...

-ANNE SEXTON

In her stormy life and work, no one needed less urging to let it all hang out than poet Anne Sexton. The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, who killed her self by carbon-monoxide poisoning in 1974 after innumerable mental breakdowns, was almost as obsessed with selfrevelation as she was with death. There seemed little that could be added to the images of incest, adultery and madness that she spread across more than a dozen volumes of confessional poetry in her abbreviated career. Even so, there were scandalized gasps of surprise when a story in The New York Times last week publicized that Martin Orne, a psychiatrist who treated Sexton for eight years, had turned over his complete files of the therapy, including more than 300 audiotapes of sessions with Sexton, for a forthcoming biography.

Although the book, to be published by Houghton Mifflin in September, reveals the true extent of Sexton's instability--she heard voices sometimes, and at one point developed a fantasy personality named "Elizabeth"--it was not the main issue. Biographies in general have grown notably uninhibited, from the high--toned dishiness of recent studies of Virginia Woolf to the nosecrets--barred celebrity-bashings penned by the likes of Kitty Kelley. The real dismay was over the breaching of what many regard as the last redoubt of privacy in modern life, the confidences of the couch. "If you were Orne's patient and you had something painful and important to tell him, would you?" asked Erwin Glikes, president of The Free Press, who until recently headed a publishing committee on First Amendment issues. "I certainly wouldn't. I wouldn't give him my forwarding address if I didn't want mail."

'How could I cover it up?'

Beyond the putative transgressions of one psychiatrist, there was a larger question of whether the dead retain any right to privacy. The release of the tapes to biographer Diane Wood Middlebrook, a professor of English at Stanford University, was endorsed by Sexton's daughter and literary executor, Linda Gray Sexton, who had already given the author access to her mother's handwritten notes on the therapy. "My feeling was:'Look, Mom, you wrote about this stuff ... How could I cover it up?"' Sexton explained to the Times. But that almost sounded like settling a score rather than serving the needs of biography. While there was obvious love between Sexton and her daughter, there were also unrulier feelings: in Middlebrook's book, Linda tells of waking one night when she was 15 to find her mother astride her, kissing her on the mouth. "I remember pulling out of bed and throwing up," she told Middlebrook.

Orne himself declined to comment on the record. But in a foreword to the book he says he gave Middlebrook the tapes only "after much soul-searching." He adds: "I also realized that Anne herself would have wanted to share this processmuch as she did in her poetry, so that patients and therapists might learn from it."

It is the assumption of knowing what the deceased would want that many of Orne's colleagues find dubious. The ethics code of the American Psychiatric Association explicitly states that the right of privacy remains inviolable, to be canceled only by the express wish of the patient. Some psychiatrists are adamant on the point. "What has become very evident to me is the necessity of this principle to supersede whatever the public interest in history is," says Dr. Kathleen Mogul, a member of the ethics committee. "The daughter may have approved but that doesn't obligate the psychiatrist to release the material. If I had a case like this I would fight the releaser am the patient's guardian in this. "

Such sentiments were labeled "pietistic" by Sexton's close friend, poet Maxine Kumin, also a Pulitzer winner. Says Kumin: "None of these people would have wanted a patient who acted out as badly as she did, who phoned them at 2 in the morning or passed out in the office. So I feel it's self serving for them to say Orne betrayed her." What it comes down to, says Susan Chee ver, who has written about her father John Cheever's bisexuality and whose brother Ben is editing the novelist's private journals for publication in October, is "what you really believe about the nature of language. Did Anne Sexton own those words? Did Linda have the right to say they could be used? If it's property, who owns it?"

Orne, director of the experimental-psychiatry unit at the University of Pennsylvania, was in fact the sort of caring therapist whom some patients dream of. At his urging Sexton resumed her education and wrote her first poems, ultimately becoming one of the stars of a Boston constellation that included poets Robert Lowell and W. D. Snodgrass as well as Kumin. According to the biography, when Orne began treating her, she was a suicidal 28-year-old who felt "her only talent might be for prostitution: she could help men feel sexually powerful." Over the years, he countenanced endless demands on his time, including sessions where she would slip into trancelike silences and memory lapses.

Wrong hands:

It was the memory problem, Orne says, that prompted him to begin making tapes of the sessions, which he would ask her to review at his offices the following day. But the very existence of the tapes troubles some of his colleagues. Most clinicians, they note, do not tape-record sessions because of the possibility they would fall into the wrong hands. "My question is not why he made the recordings but why he preserved them after Sexton's death," says Dr. Robert Hopkins, head of the ethics committee of the Massachusetts Psychiatric Association. "There was no issue of future treatment at that point."

Nearly forgotten in the furor over the tape disclosure was an even clearer breach of ethics revealed in the biography. After Orne left Boston to head an experimental-psychiatry unit in Philadelphia, Sexton began seeing another psychiatrist, with whom she ended up having sexual relations. The psychiatrist, identified by the Times but not in the book, has refused to discuss the charges, saying he could lose his license under Massachusetts rules for doctor-patient relationships.

No one has imputed illegality in what Orne did. Any action against him would be up to the ethics committee, provided someone brings a complaint. Then, if a review finds a violation, he would face four possible sanctions: admonishment, reprimand, suspension of membership or expulsion from the organization. Middlebrook says though the tapes prompted her to rewrite ,'most of the book" she quoted very little from them, and she professes to be puzzled by the focus on Orne's behavior. "The Sexton case is absolutely unique, in the importance of her therapy to the development of her art," she says. "She's a person whose treatment was constantly the subject of the art itself." Peter Davison, who edited the book, agrees: "If ever there was an author whose right to privacy was voluntarily waived, it's Anne Sexton." But that, again, presumes to speak for a master of words whose tragedy is that she is no longer here to speak for herself.

DAVID GELMAN with FARAI CHIDEYA New York

NEWSWEEK: JULY 29,1991