Sylvia Plath’s ’Daddy’: Identities, Selves and Others: HOW LOVE KILLS US ALL

The Poem ’Daddy’ (her most confessional poem) was written by Sylvia Plath just four months before she committed suicide in her London home in February 1963. She was just 30 years old. It explores Identities, Selves and Others and how they create and destroy one another. In a 1962 BBC interview she describes it as one girl’s confrontation with the unresolved Electra complex manifested in the wake of her fathers untimely death. The term ‘Electra Complex’ is taken from Greek Mythology, where the princess Electra plots the killing of her own mother, the Queen Clytemnestra, who is responsible for the murder of her father, Agamemnon after his return from the Trojan War. In his ’Theory of Psychoanalysis’ Carl Jung proposes the theory of The Electra complex to elucidate the state of affairs when young girls compete for the ownership and affections of their fathers in competition with their mothers - and when this natural development is somehow thwarted. In a young girls psyc