Sexton biography commotion continues

By Esther B. Fein

Diane Wood Middlebrook's Anne Sexton: A Biography (Houghton Mifflin) continues to evoke vociferous debates about the propriety of Anne Sexton's psychiatrist releasing tapes of private sessions with his patient to a biographer of the poet.

The book, nominated for a National Book Award, which will be announced tonight, is the subject of articles in many diverse publications, including The New England Journal of Medicine, Mirabella, Mademoiselle and Commonweal.

The book's contents were disclosed in July, provoking a storm over whether Sexton's psychiatrist, Dr. Martin T. Orne, had betrayed his patient or fulfilled wishes she expressed before committing suicide in 1974. Sexton's daughter and literary executor, Linda Gray Sexton, consented to having the tapes revealed.

Peter Davison, who published the book under his imprint and who was a friend of the poet, said he did not expect the debate to go on like this. "The psychiatric community is all caught up in the question of confidentiality," he said, "but we expected considerable outcry about the revelation that she had an affair with her second psychiatrist and the news that he was still practicing in Massachusetts."

Indeed, in introducing its article, the current issue of The New England Journal of Medicine says that "the issue raised by the book that is most important to the medical community" was confidentiality in psychotherapy.

The one article that does dwell on Sexton's having slept with her second therapist was in Mirabella and was written by Anne Roiphe, who presumably thought the controversy had so entered popular discussion that she did not even mention the book by name.