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From 1933 to 1937, New Zealand writer Robin Hyde (Iris Wilkinson, 1906-1939) voluntarily underwent institutional psychiatric treatment, which had a major impact on the content, form, and genre of her literary works. Biographical information uncovered in Auckland Mental Hospital records shows the extent of her agency, and reveals new connections between her treatment and writing. The focus here is on eight of Hyde's archived, unpublished works: the one-act play "Eurydice" (1933); Exercise Book 3 poems (1933-34); her 1934 Autobiography; her 1935 Journal; The Godwits Fly first draft fragments (1935); the novel "The Unbelievers" (1935); the short story "The Cage with the Open Door" (1935); and the 1936 Mental Health Essay. Relationships are graphed between these texts, and pre-treatment and later works, creating a genealogy and identifying central or node texts. Hyde's psychiatric, philosophical, and literary sources are explored, and her writing contextualized within political, social, literary, and mental health history. Her themes and symbolism concerned suicidality, death, grieving, and conceptions of an afterlife, drawing on the links between spiritualism and psychology she read in Jung's Collected Papers in Analytical Psychology (1916). Her mediation of Freud's death wish developed from a pessimistic capitulation to death, to an optimistic resolution to live and write. Hyde formed two important psychiatric relationships. She used her crisis period encounter with Medical Superintendent Henry Buchanan in textual analyses ofinstitutional power structures and of classification of the insane. Her primary psychiatrist Gilbert Tothill commissioned her 1934 Autobiography, one of three written by voluntary patients in early 1934, during treatment linked to psychoanalytical theory. Her autobiography, which concentrated on her lameness, sexual experiences, and drug-taking, launched a series of long prose works, some semi-autobiographical; consequently her oeuvre and biography were psychopathologized. She psychoanalysed herself, deliberately entertaining transferential feelings for Tothill as a necessary step towards health, which reflects on critical analysis of texts in which she imaged Tothill. Her increasing political activism was influenced by Jung's theory that neurotics could achieve wellness by using their psychic energy in the service of humankind. Hyde chose Jung's route out of the mental hospital, which she configured in her texts as "The Cage with the Open Door". |
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