Father/Daughter Archetypal Construction in Selected Poems of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Forough Farrokhzad: Jungian Approach

Archetype is essential for psychological development. In Jungian psychology, archetypes are highly developed elements of the collective unconscious: a set of shared memories and ideas that all can identify with regardless of the culture that one was born into or the period in which one lives. Within the collective unconscious there exist several archetypes among which the father figure is of considerable importance and attention in this study. One way to communicate this particular archetype is through literature. The present article tries to examine and sketch how psychological principles and doctrines and psychic stimulants and tensions influence the creation of literary works particularly poetry through the poems as well as the poet’s biography. It attempts to plot connections between the tensions that existed in the poems and their creators. In this paper, Carl Jung’s theory of daughter/father archetypal construction in the psyche is applied as a critical tool to analyze the relationship between the father and daughter within the poems of the selected poets. The poems that will be discussed include Sylvia Plath’s Full Fathom Five, Anne Sexton’s One for my Dame, and Forough Farrokhzad’s I Feel Sympathy for the Garden. Moreover, this paper investigates the description of fathers and the poets’ ambivalent feelings toward their fathers. It is argued that these poets, through their creations, reconstruct the fact (the memory) of their traumatic past, their fathers’ images, and themselves in particular.

Keywords:

poetry , archetype , Daughter/father relationship , Sylvia Plath , Anne Sexton , Forough Farrokhzad