KaufmanBaer Women are not at a disadvantage to men when in the literary world. However, while writing seems to be the most prevalent area for great success and recognition also carries the burden of a high rate of mental illness more than men and women as a whole. There seems to be a link between women writers, mostly of fiction and poetry, and mental illness. There have been studies that have shown that women creative writers are more likely to have a mental illness and increased levels of depression. These studies have also shown that of the artistic professions poets are more likely to be bipolar than fiction writers and playwrights. There are any reasons given to explain why it is female poets who are usually the most likely to be mentally ill. The reasons are that poetry is the type of art that mentally unstable are most drawn to, poetry does not alleviate mental illness, and that poets peak at a young age which is when most mental illness strikes. Another possibility is that the linguistic style of poetry may appeal more to the mentally ill than other forms of art or writing. A reason given to explain why females are more likely to suffer from mental illness is because they write about more personal things than men poets. Also women creative writers suffer from more stress than men, which is another cause for mental illness. SP Fusion Victim “Fusion with the victim” is a term to describe people with a regressive vicissitude of identification with the aggressor. The article talks about the life of Sylvia Plath and mentions the death of her father when she was 8. It also mentions a poem written by Matthew Arnold that was read to her by her mother. The poem was the jumpstart of her writing career because she began to write poems shortly after. In college she used her father’s red leather thesaurus to write her poetry in. The writer then tries to use Plath’s works to understand her thinking and her suicide. The writer cites many of her poems to show how she is feeling when she was writing a line or what she was intending to mean when she wrote it. Most examples were of poems talking about her father. He says that she was putting herself and ideas of suicide in her writing to temporarily get it out of her system. SP Emotional Repair Poetry needs a certain criteria to be truly successful. There are four sets of overlapping dualities that explain how the writer used everything from the tone to the poet’s own personal tendencies. One of these is the balance of wanting to write for an audience and wanting to write for your own personal reasons. The second is the balance of destructive and constructive activity the writer is using within and while writing the poem. The third includes the interplay between pretense and fantasy dictating one part and the other part of it is the poet’s acceptance of reality. The fourth and final duality in effect when writing a successful poem is the ability to create a harmonious interplay between primary and secondary process mechanisms. The article then begins to talk about Sylvia Plath by saying her life was a valiant but unsuccessful attempt to make use of literary talent to resolve the powerful, unconscious, emotional conflicts of a severe narcissistic and depressive disturbance. Her father died when she was 8 which she was never able to fully understand or accept. Despite being smart she had a painful adolescence. She made a serious attempt at suicide shortly after receiving a one month guest editorship at Mademoiselle. After returning to school she met Ted Hughes who she later married. Her turning point of her work occurred in 1959 because of a combination of doubt and trouble within her personal life. She had resumed psychotherapy again until she went to England with Ted Hughes that December. In February of 1961 she suffered a miscarriage, which was followed by an appendectomy a month later. Then in January of 1962 she gave birth to her son and after this she began to write many poems. She wrote very little between the end of 1956 to early 1960. In the summer of 1962 her mother comes to visit bringing back bad memories. This combined with Hughes leaving her for another woman in late 1962 seemed to be her breaking point. A few months later she wrote her last poem, 6 days before her suicide.