Assembling the Fractured Self: A Jungian Reading of Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted

Hamada, Jaidaa

doi:10.21608/tjhss.2023.177105.1136

Assembling the Fractured Self: A Jungian Reading of Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Jaidaa Hamada

Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts, Alexandria University

10.21608/tjhss.2023.177105.1136

Abstract

This paper seeks to employ some of Carl Jung’s theories to offer a re-reading of the treatment Susanna Kaysen receives as a patient diagnosed with borderline personality disorder in McLean Psychiatric Hospital, from 1967 to 1969; an experience she recounts in her memoir Girl, Interrupted (1993). Kaysen’s self-portrait is reflected in the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer’s work “Girl Interrupted at Her Music”, which depicts a young woman interrupted by an older gentleman while studying/playing music. Kaysen is burdened with a fractured self, and accordingly she feels that the course of her life has been interrupted. A recourse to Jung’s psychotherapeutic model can thus be embraced as an effective approach that helps mitigate the feelings of fragmentation, despair and desolation that afflict her during the course of her treatment. Of all the experiences Kaysen recounts in her memoir, her meetings with the doctor are the ones she denigrates the most. Throughout the narrative, she repeatedly repudiates them, recalling them each time in a derisive tone. It is particularly in this regard that Jungian psychotherapy is employed as a counterforce that helps render her voice audible, and consequently expedite the process of homogenizing her fractured self.

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