The ‘talking cure’ and feelings of guilt and duty in Pat Barker's novel Regeneration

In Regeneration Pat Barker offers her readers an introduction to some of the most exciting and challenging themes such as war neurosis, class, gender, emasculation, trauma, role reversals, love, memory, questions about duty, homosexuality and guilt. The themes highlight cultural tensions brought to the surface by the war in many spheres of the British society and in this article I would like to dwell on some of them. The first novel of the trilogy rewrites a familiar British historical narrative about the First World War, it constructs a fictional version of the actual encounter between the eminent ethnographer and psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers and Siegfried Sassoon, the famous war poet. Sassoon is sent to the Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh to be cured by doctor Rivers and the reason is mainly political. Craiglockhart is a former lavish hydrotherapeutic sanatorium, offering its patients, who are mostly officers, a number of golf-courses and ample gardens to stroll in. It is not analogous to other establishments of such kind, as war disorders are treated here with some concepts of psychoanalysis and restful social activities. Dr Rivers is seen by many of his patients as a magician miraculously curing them and a father figure loving and caring. The magazine that the patients edit The Hydra depicts the historical Rivers as a magician with a magical wand in his hand.

The novel opens with Dr Rivers’s reading of a historical document ‘Finished with the War, A Soldier’s Declaration’ penned by Siegfried Sassoon and eventually published in the Times and read out in the House of Commons as a protest against the war. The document was seen by the War Office as potentially damaging and the result of this was a military Board hearing. Robert Graves, Sassoon’s close friend, managed to convince the Board that what had happened was through Sassoon’s severe mental breakdown or shell-shock, a popular

medical term at that time, rather than an act of conscious pacifism. Thus, it was concluded that such a document could have been written only by a man who suffered a nervous breakdown. Graves made every endeavour to help his friend not to be court-martialed as at the beginning of the war shell-shocked soldiers and officers were considered cowards and were often charged with insubordination.

Regeneration is divided into four parts. The action in the first two chapters takes place at Craiglockhart in Scotland while the last two parts alternate between Suffolk, Edinburgh, and London. There are no direct scenes of battles in the novel, Barker probes into psychological damage and moral issues. The novel portrays a large array of characters and various types of its treatment. Barker draws her cases of war neurosis from the writings of W.H.R. Rivers, namely ‘The Repression of War Experience’, and the trauma theory that he developed. The symptoms presented in Regeneration are numerous: different types of phobias, neurasthenia, depression; sleep, eating and speech disorders; battle nightmares, amnesia, hallucinations, mutism, paralysis, tics and twitches. The author invites the reader to witness the cases of trauma and be a companion on the eerie journey of testimony <…> who actually participates in the reliving and re-experiencing of the event [Laub 1995: 62].

Having read some of Sassoon’s poetry Rivers infers that Sassoon is one of those who tries to forget traumatic events that caused the breakdown and this process is not often successful. Even if the traumatic experience is partially repressed, Rivers claims it returns with redoubled force to haunt the nights, giving rise to that most characteristic symptom of war neurosis: the battle nightmare [Barker 1991: 25]. Therefore he encourages his patients to abandon futile attempts to forget and advises them to spend some part of every day remembering [Ibid: 25]. Rivers conducts therapeutic sessions with his patients, firmly believing that his method of treatment or talking cure, operating through the exchange of words between the therapist and the patient, will decrease the frequency of petrifying nightmares in a few weeks.

Many critics believe Siegfried Sassoon to be the main character of the novel, though Barker herself names Dr. W.H.R. Rivers. From the very first pages of the novel it is clear that both personages share a burden of conflicting duties. In the letter to his commanding officer, mentioned above as ‘Soldier’s Declaration’, Sassoon questions the idea of duty: duty to his own country that obviously comes at the expense of the duty to fighting fellow soldiers whom he abandoned and who suffer and die in the trenches. Sassoon claims that he is a soldier who is convinced that he is acting on behalf of soldiers <…> on behalf of those who are suffering now [Barker 1991: 5]. Declaration sets the tone to the whole anti-war trilogy:

… I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. <…> I have seen and endured the suffering of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. <…> I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed [Barker 1991: 5].

At the beginning of the war many young men volunteer to go to the front and fight for their country and Sassoon is one of them. The idea of duty is a mainstay of values of a human being in the 19^th century and returns in full force in 1914. It is a privilege to be chosen and many regard staying at home as an undignified thing to do. There is a prevailing mood of adventure among soldiers in the early days of war and everybody believes that the war will have ended by Christmas, but it never happens until four years have passed. The dilemma for Sassoon is whether to fulfill his duty to the country and return to the front or continue lodging his protest and discharge his duty to himself and his countrymen about the freedom of individual consciousness in wartime [ Barker 1991: 10].

Sassoon is not by any means a coward, or shirker, or scrim-shanker and degenerate as Rivers implicitly defines him at the beginning of the novel [Barker 1991: 6]. We cannot but mention that Sassoon was awarded the Military Cross for his courage and fearlessness, however he threw it into the river not being able to tolerate the atrocities of the war that was meant to be a war of defence and liberation but turned into a war of aggression and conquest [Ibid: 5]. Soldiers called him Mad Jack due to the fact that he was foolhardy and after his friend’s death he used to go out on patrol every night, looking for Germans to kill [Barker 1991: 12].

In the effort to provide a reasonable explanation of Sassoon’s state of mind Rivers draws a conclusion that taking unnecessary risks is one of the first signs of war neurosis and adds that nightmares and hallucinations come later [Barker 1991: 12]. In this he follows Freud and his psychoanalytical theory of guilt. Freud’s view on guilt emphasizes the destructiveness of this emotion as it inflicts punishment and pain on people for their errors and leads to psychopathology. Freud assumed that guilt is at the base of the conflict between the Ego and Super-Ego and its function is to keep the behavior of human beings in line with moral standards. In other words, the emotion of guilt plays an important role helping people identify some of their actions as morally wrong.

Sassoon’s presence in Craiglockhart and his protest against the war and many other cases of shell-shock make Rivers think and trigger his doubts about the whole issue of the validity of war. Rivers being the doctor of the Royal Army Medical Corps faces the conflict as many of his patients do in the novel. On the one hand, his military duty is to cure soldiers suffering from the agonizing war neurosis, but on the other hand, he sends them to meet their death or have another break down once they are cured.

He is aware of how to make Sassoon go back to the front by playing on his dignity and love for his men. During one of the session with Sassoon Rivers says that if Sassoon continues maintaining his protest he can spend the remainder of the war in a state of Complete. Personal. Safety [Barker 1991: 34]. Probing into Sassoon’s motives he asks: You don’t think you might find being safe while other people die rather difficult? [Barker 1991: 12]. Rivers knows too well how much Sassoon loves his comrades and he won’t bear to spend the rest of the time in the mental hospital playing golf, eating steamed pudding, writing poems while his countrymen are fighting and dying on the battlefield. However, Rivers respects Sassoon too much and the integrity of his character precludes him from manipulating Sassoon’s feelings in such a way: He [Sassoon] had to be convinced that going back was the right thing to do [Barker 1991: 107]. By the end of the novel Rivers manages to help Sassoon resolve the tension between the conflicting duties he faces. And Sassoon apprehends that going back to the war is the only right solution under the circumstances.

Bearing in mind the psychoanalytical approach, that describes the emotion of guilt as performing merely a punitive function, we conclude that the feeling of guilt that haunts Sassoon may also acquire positive tone and eventually it loses its negative characteristics. It might still evoke unpleasant awareness of transgression but it also functions as a push to act appropriately, with the benefit of being well-accepted by Bobbies and Tommies – that is the people he is trying to influence according to Graves [Barker 1991: 176].

The place of the novel in the canon of literature about the Great War is marked as unusual and unique. In Regeneration Barker raises the issues of duty, war neurosis and the feeling of guilt discussed in the article as well as some others touched upon in the novel but avoided by many writers (pacifism, class consciousness, manliness, gender). Thus, the novel is an invaluable contribution to contemporary historical fiction.