[Escape from Personality: The Life, Work, and Illness of John Berryman].

Abstract

The psychobiographical analysis of John Berryman's life story aims to bridge the gap between his life's work and his life story; to shed light on the psychological background of his dream songs and other poems, to make his confession intelligible, and to explore whether his psychiatric-dictatorial illness contributed to the genesis and thematic content of his works. It was also questioned whether his literary activity influenced his illness in any direction. The compulsive recollection of his father's suicide was a significant source of motivation for the creation of many of his poems. He was in conflict with his mother over the death of his father. His attachment phobia was due to the traumatogenic influence of his parents; he was unable to dissolve with his wife in any of his three marriages. Although his poetry became more precise as he grew older, his poetry did not contribute to an effective elaboration of early trauma. Part of the reason for this was that he saw literary creation as an escape from his personality, not as an expression of himself. His personality was characterised by a fatal attraction to self-destruction. The dichotomy of the boisterous and the quiet Berryman runs through his biography, until at the end of his life his boisterousness gradually disappeared. From the life history data, the dynamics of a progressive, increasingly severe alcoholism emerge. Alcohol helped him to escape from his personality and to maintain the proximity to death that drove his creativity. His alcoholism and his poetry grew out of the same roots, drinking and writing dream songs were two manifestations of the same compulsion. Her illness was dominated by the self-destructive triad (trait-aggression, bipolar illness, addiction) observed in Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell and Ann Sexton. At the end of his life, he was converted in AA and came closer to the image of God he had constructed. He only got to the fourth of the twelve steps of AA. His unresolved traumas, alco holism and the lyricism of near death contributed to his suicide. Berryman's literary self-revelations shared with his readers behaviours, fantasies and biographical events that are usually surrounded by a sense of shame. In this sense, many of his poems can be seen as confessional.