[The oeuvre, life history and illness of Sylvia Plath]

The roots of confessionalism reach back to the early Middle Ages and to the Confessions of Rousseau. Confessional literature gained a theoretical foundation in the age of Romanticism, then in the 20th century the genre underwent a revival and late modernisation in the works of the "confessional poets" (Lowell, Sexton, Plath etc.). The literary studies and psychobiographical examination of these authors threw light on the psychiatric aspects of confessionalism; most of them suffered from psychiatric or addictive disorders and committed suicide. Confessional poetry takes repetition of the (fragmented) psychological process of the individual life history as its almost sole theme. The poet builds up, demolishes, then again builds up his or her own life history, blurring the boundaries of reality and fiction. Interrupted personality development and the failure to work through traumatic experiences can be observed in the psychological background, to which Vladimir Nabokov also referred in his personal notes. In this collection of Psychiatria Hungarica about Sylvia Plath, titled The Broken-necked Deer the studies in three parts under the headings oeuvre, life history, illness are imbued with considerations of literary psychology and literary psychiatry that expand and enrich both literary studies and the psychiatric field of vision.