HANDY PAGE REFERENCE GUIDE FOR CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT
PRIOR
41-43 (First session with Rivers)
49-53 (2nd session with Rivers, recovered from mutism)
55-59 (His parents talk with Rivers)
60-62 (Asthma attack)
63-69 (Prior’s asthma attack and how Sassoon is affected by it)
77-79 (He remembers traumatic incident)
86-97 (Prior meets Sarah; discussion on mutism with Rivers)
99-106 (Prior remembers traumatic experience)
126-131 (Second date with Sarah, in rain)
133-135 (Gets scolded by Sassoon for being out)
161-163 (Prior examined by Eaglesham in hospital, meets Sarah there)
206 (Prior at Board interview, contrast between Pugh, Prior and Sassoon)
208-211 (Prior and Rivers after the session)
214-216 (Night with Sarah at her flat)
BURNS
17-19 (Introduction to Burns)
37-40 (Burns goes out to the countryside)
132 (Burns attends Medical Board interview for unconditional discharge)
167-184 (Rivers meets Burns at his family home in Aldeburgh, Suffolk)
SASSOON
3-9 (Introduction to Sassoon’s case, and his journey to Craiglockhart)
10-17 (Interview with Rivers)
20-27 (Sassoon’s social circle)
63 (Woken by Prior’s asthma attack)
69-74 (News report on Sassoon, session with Rivers, psychologists discuss Sassoon; report on Sassoon)
80-85 (Owen and Sassoon)
85-86 (Anderson and Sassoon chat)
113-118 (Sassoon and Rivers at Club )
121-125 (Owen and Sassoon discuss ergotherapy and Owen’s poem “Antaeus”)
140-142 (Sassoon and Owen discuss “Anthem for Doomed Youth”)
142-145 (Dreams of Orme, realises his father issues with Rivers)
156-158 (Sassoon and Owen continue discussion of “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, Owens improving)
187-190 (Sassoon and Rivers; Sassoon has decided to return to the front, his poetry is improving)
196-199 (Sassoon and Graves in conflict)
202-205 (In session with Rivers; contrast between Pugh and Sassoon)
211-213 (Rivers interviews Sassoon after his escape from Board interview)
217-219 (Sassoon and Owen, farewell)
220-221 (Rivers’ visit with Sassoon)
243-244 (Rivers and Sassoon)
244-248 (Rivers and others at pre-Board Meeting, Sassoon interviewed by the Medical Board, Rivers and Sassoon’s last chat)
248-250 (Rivers closes file on Sassoon)
RIVERS
97-98 (Rivers alone on hospital grounds, watches men cut grass)
106-108 (Rivers reflects on war and gender)
139-140 (Rivers is ill and talks with Bryce; passage on neurosis and psychosomatic illness)
149-156 (On leave, Rivers spends time with family and writes a letter to Sassoon)
163-166 (Rivers on leave, meets the Heads)
167-184 (Rivers reflects on ethics of his practice in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, and theme of transformation/regeneration of a person)
185-186 (Rivers back at Craiglockhart)
221-222 (goes to his new workplace, RFC [Royal Flying Corp] Hospital in London)
223-233 (Yealland episode)
234-239 (Rivers has neurotic episode, visualisation, and a nightmare)
240-242 (Rivers with Head--Head diagnoses Rivers, including his guilt over Sassoon, and about how his patients have changed Rivers)
248-250 (Rivers back reflects on Sassoon and closes his file)
ANDERSON
28-32 (Rivers’ analysis of Anderson’s dream)
135-137 (Incident with Featherstone shaving)
243 (Rivers’ analysis of Anderson)
244 (Anderson at board meeting)
WILLARD
111-113 (Session with Rivers, on neurosis and conflict)
119 (Willard and wife)
137 (Complains about Prior, his roommate)
220 (Willard’s recovery)
SARAH
86-94 (Prior meets Sarah)
109-111 (Sarah and her female co-workers chat over tea)
158-160 (Sarah is at a hospital, visiting Madge’s husband)
193-196 (Sarah and mother Ada Lumb show generational differences in gender ideas)
199-202 (Sarah and colleagues in the munitions factory)
FOTHERSGILL
138 (Rivers meets Fothersgill)
187 (Conflict between Fothersgill and Sassoon)
BROADBENT
59-60 (Rivers’ session with Broadbent)
138-139 (Broadbent goes AWOL)
SOME PSYCHOANALYTICAL TERMS AND CONCEPTS
Knowledge of some basic psychological processes will go a long way in helping you understand and explain what happens in Paper 3 texts, especially in Regeneration, which features psychoanalysis, especially talk therapy, as a major theme.
THE ‘CONSCIOUS’ & ‘UNCONSCIOUS’ MIND
Your verbalized thoughts comprise the conscious part of your mind. New Year resolutions, the way you justify your behavior choices through the use of reason, for example, are CONSCIOUS thought-acts.
But there are LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS. Sometimes you may be aware of some intentions and feelings but haven’t named them in words. INTUITION often arises from perceptions, observations from past experiences that you haven’t yet verbalized. Words on the tip of our tongue are another example. These are located in the PRECONSCIOUS.
But there’s another dimension of the mind that we do not know. The UNCONSCIOUS comprises largely desires and needs that are forbidden (see ‘id’ and ‘superego’).
But don’t think of the three dimensions of the psyche as closed off from each other. There is a CONTINUING TRAFFIC BETWEEN THEM.
The ‘unconscious’ seeks to express itself to us through dreams or Freudian slips (when we accidentally say something and then realise we actually mean that). Unconscious fears and desires can also physically manifest themselves as psychosomatic illnesses or disorders and thereby reveal their existence, though usually the help of a psychologist is required.
Just as frequently, we often push ideas and our own intentions that disturb us or internal conflicts between contradictory desires into our unconscious realm. There are some aspects of our desires and behavior that we just don’t want to deal with.
SO HOW WELL DO WE KNOW OURSELVES? It is often the case that we do certain acts with specific conscious intentions, but which are actually driven by unconscious intentions and desires. In that sense, we often do not know the truth about ourselves, about what motivates us, what drives us.
E.g. Yealland believes that his patients are pretending to be mute and thus justifies his torturing them into speaking. But most observers would say that he is truly driven by an unconscious desire to bully and destroy others.
To what extent do you know the desires and intentions that determine your choices in life?
THE EGO, ‘ID’ & SUPEREGO
Freud viewed the mind as having three dimensions, that of the id, superego and the ego, the first two belonging in the unconscious, and the ego marking our conscious self.
The ‘ID’ comprises our instinctual drives, basic needs and desires, often those that are forbidden or frowned upon in society. These include our sexual and aggressive drives. There is a life drive (survival instinct) and a death drive (the instinct to destroy the external world). Even contradictory desires are found in the ‘id’. The ‘id’, running on the PLEASURE PRINCIPLE, seeks instinctive pleasure, instant gratification and doesn’t care about morals. The ‘id’ belongs to the unconscious part of the psyche—that means that we are never aware of it. It may seek to present itself in our dreams, hallucinations or in other ways, but we usually need someone else to interpret it for us before we understand what it is. It can then enter our conscious mind.
The ‘SUPEREGO’ is the extremely moral and strict part of our mind, where our conscience and guilt reside. This is where we have internalised all the values and norms taught to us by our parents, our teachers, our culture, and our religion. When we do wrong, we feel guilty. Ever noticed how we push guilty thoughts away from our consciousness? The superego and the id are at war with each other. The superego is largely unconscious, and like forbidden desires, unconscious guilt can express itself through dreams or neurotic behavior. Based on the principle of IDEALISM, the superego’s urgings to be ideal can be troublesome to us as it can make us act against our own interests or sicken us.
E.g. Remember how Sassoon hallucinates a dead friend, Orme, and only later becomes conscious that it was due to his feelings of guilt?
The ‘EGO’ is the conscious part of our mind that mediates our ‘id’ and ‘superego’, allowing us to deal with their urgings in a socially acceptable and beneficial manner. The ego is able to find ways to accommodate certain unconscious desire or drive and find ways to satisfy them in accordance with social norms of conduct (though inevitably it requires compromise such as through the delay of gratification). Some parts of the ‘id’ can thus be safely made conscious. The ego works according to the REALITY PRINCIPLE rather than the pleasure principle.
E.g. We all have unconscious desires to defy authority, to be free.
Prior however is able to safely express his aggressiveness against authority by initially being rude to Rivers—he uses words to express his aggressive instincts rather than resort to physical violence as that would land him in jail.
The ‘EGO’ also negotiates with the superego. Obviously we can’t always be morally perfect, as the superego would like us to be. It would not be realistic either. Would a person who was ‘goody two shoes’ get on in life in a competitive workplace, for example? We often do things we know to be wrong, using reason to justify our choices (though we may continue to feel guilt pangs).
E.g. Sassoon uses poetry-writing to consciously acknowledge and deal with his survivor guilt (189).
EGO DEFENSE MECHANISMS
The EGO is in charge of constructing and maintaining our identity. As such, it often has to defend the self from events, thoughts, desires that threaten our idea of who we are. For example, when a man behaves in a cowardly manner that threatens his idea of his own masculinity or when somebody loses a job that contradicts their notion of themselves as successful, how does the person cope? There are various ego defense mechanisms we resort to, and these are unconsciously attempted. These are some main strategies of the ego defending itself:
DENIAL—you deal with it by blocking yourself from the truth. You refuse to see what is obvious to everyone around you.
E.g. Willard refuses to accept that his spinal ‘injury’ was a psychosomatic response to his desire to run away from the war. He had to defend his idea of himself as a brave man against any thoughts of cowardly desires. Hence he insists it’s a real injury and that somehow his recovery was due to surgery.
REPRESSION—you try to repress the event, thought or memory.
E.g.This is seen in Prior forgetting the event that led to his breakdown. He represses his fear that his negligence had possibly led to the killing of his soldiers, driving it into his unconscious.
PROJECTION—if there’s something you’re ashamed about in yourself, you seek to deny it by finding that flaw in somebody else.
E.g.There’s a great deal of projection in the way Prior’s father likes to see his son as overly ambitious, as trying to be what he is not, i.e upper class. Yet the father himself has assiduously risen through the ranks and married a woman his social superior.
DISPLACEMENT—instead of dealing with your unhappiness with yourself, you express your anger against someone else or something else.
E.g. Anderson, angry with himself for being unable to lose graciously in a golf game takes out his anger on Sassoon, almost hitting him with his golf club.
RATIONALIZATION—some people come up with elaborate justifications, including making up ‘facts’, to reason away their problem.
E.g. Anderson is uncomfortable about Britain’s conduct in the war but suppresses such doubts. Sassoon’s public criticism of Britain’s war practices however makes him feel morally inadequate. He resolves this by making up a narrative to himself that Sassoon is arrogant and justifies his inaction by citing his duty “to go on”.
COMPROMISE FORMATIONS
Very often we feel INTERNAL CONFLICT. This could be due to conflicting values/beliefs that we consciously hold.
E.g. Sassoon feels torn between his duty to see his men through the war and his duty to expose the truth about Britain’s dishonourable motives in the war.
Sometimes, the conflict is between a consciously held belief or value and an unconscious desire.
E.g. Willard’s belief that he has to behave courageously in war conflicts with an unconscious primal desire to survive.
HOW DOES OUR MIND DEAL WITH SUCH CONFLICTS?
Compromise formations refer to unconscious means we use to resolve such conflicts. Our mind tries to appease the conflicting desires and needs, conscious or unconscious, that tear us in different directions. Amnesia or memory loss, paralysis, psychosomatic illnesses, obsessive compulsive actions, and phobias are some examples of compromise formations.
E.g. Sassoon feels it his duty to look after the soldiers in his charge. But he also thinks it is wrong to continue taking part in the war that he considers to be immoral. He resolves these conflicting duties by returning to the war front after Craiglockhart. This allows him to fulfill his duty to his soldiers but also provides an opportunity for an early death (and thus a departure from the war).
E.g. Willard’s conflict is between his belief and an unconscious need. He believes that men must be brave in war. But war-time violence frightens him and he unconsciously desires to run from it. Willard’s psyche produces a psychosomatic paralysis that ‘allows’ him to escape the war but without injuring his image of himself as a brave soldier.
MUTISM as a COMPROMISE FORMATION: Rivers explains that, like everyone, soldiers have a basic primitive desire and instinct for power. However, they are in disempowered positions and often either denied voice or punished for speaking up. Thus mutism becomes their unconscious means of protesting, of using their silence ironically to exert power. We see this in the way Prior uses mutism against Rivers, refusing to give him the information he needs. But it’s important to recognize that this is done unconsciously.
NEUROSIS VS PSYCHOSIS
NEUROSES are essentially unconscious behaviours that use compromise formations (see above) to resolve or manage internal conflicts and anxieties. Mutism, psychosomatic blindness, memory loss, phobias, and obsessive compulsive disorder are neuroses. Agoraphobia, for example, is an unconscious means that people use to resolve their fear of being abandoned—as an agoraphobic, they will likely be assigned a companion when going out.
Dreams and nightmares are not considered to be neuroses but they do provide insight into the patient’s unresolved conflicts.
However, NEUROTICS, people with compulsions and anxieties, are NOT INSANE. They still have their grip on reality and can function normally.
PSYCHOSIS, by contrast, involves the crossover into madness/insanity though it may be temporary and is treatable. Those with psychosis are unable to distinguish between reality and fantasy. Hallucinations or delusions take over their mind. In addition, they often lose command of language and speak and write incoherently.
E.g. In the outdoor scene in Regeneration, Burns hallucinates dead animals and surrounds himself within a circle of death. He can be said to be approaching a psychotic breakdown. But he does find help and keeps himself on the neurotic side.
Although Sassoon has hallucinations, he recognises them as fantasy creations. Since his hallucinations do not indicate a loss of grasp of reality, we may consider them to be like dreams, revealing internal conflicts and anxieties. They are not an indication of psychosis.
TALK THERAPY
Talk therapy Is a major thematic concern in the novel Regeneration.
Introduction to talk therapy
Also referred to as psychotherapy, talk therapy is a form of treatment for psychic disorders and emotional issues we face in our lives. Essentially, the patient is encouraged to relax and talk freely to a psychotherapist or psychiatrist about what is bothering him. The therapist could encourage free association from the patient. There could also be analysis of dreams. Different types of talk therapy use different methods and have different aims.
It all started in the 1890s when Sigmund Freud used patient’s talk to discover how repressed unconscious issues resulted in neurotic symptoms such as stuttering, nightmares and psychosomatic or imagined illnesses.
Today, talk therapy is used even for everyday emotional issues, without the occurrence of neurotic symptoms like stuttering, amnesia. Therapists chat with patients to help them recognize problems in their attitudes or feelings and get them to see their issues differently. Positive changes in behavior can be brought about by getting participants to ascribe new, different meanings to their experiences. Talk therapy is used for family therapy, marriage and workplace counselling.
World War 1 and talk therapy in Britain
As a historical novel, Regeneration captures the way the British thought about the mind during World War 1, in particular, about the ways in which the unconscious impacted on our behavior. The medical professionals at Craiglockhart in 1917, when the novel is set, were familiar with European ideas about how a good part of our psyche is locked away from our knowledge and how to unlock this.
Regeneration shows how British clinicians adapted and extended Freud’s peacetime understanding of the mind to analyzing wartime neuroses, something that Freud had not done. For the first time in world history, with the use of mines and bombs in World War 1, soldiers were experiencing “shell shock”, seen in the large scale occurrence of hallucinations, nighttime terrors and other strange illnesses that disabled soldiers. Dr. William Rivers recognized these as not real biological phenomena but as products of the mind. In addition, unlike Freud, Rivers did not see sexual instincts as the prime driver of the unconscious. Rivers saw that in war, other instincts were important too, particularly the way social conditioning about masculinity conflicted with soldiers’ instinctive fear of death and the instinct of flight from danger.
‘Mind and self’ thematics in relation to talk therapy in Regeneration
· how memory is connected to identity
· the features of the traumatized mind
· how the mind responds to situations of horror
· how the self disintegrates/heals/transforms
· revisioning the self through talk
· role of repression in upholding male identity
· how the UNCONSCIOUS speaks—its language
· ego defence mechanism—the lies the ego tells itself, unraveled by talk therapy
· guilt and its expressions/language
· how talk therapy dismantles neurotic behavior such as mutism, nightmares, phobias, stuttering, paralysis
Do make it a point to think about these issues in studying Regeneration.
Talk therapy in the case of Billy Prior
One strategy Rivers uses with Prior in talk therapy is to explain how memory loss, mutism and nightmares are ways that his mind unconsciously handles internal conflict. Though he doesn’t mention the term “neuroses”, Rivers reveals how neurotic symptoms work.
On p 96, Rivers says that “mutism springs from a conflict between wanting to say something and knowing that if you do say it, the consequences will be disastrous. So you resolve it by making it physically impossible for yourself to speak.”
On p 68, Rivers makes Prior realise that his memory loss is selective and that people deal with a “horrible experience by splitting it off from the rest of their consciousness”. In a later session p 80, Rivers suggests to his patient that Prior might think he knows what happened, that he might have a “theory” about why he is repressing the memory. In this manner, he tries to nudge Prior into becoming aware of the unconscious motivation behind his amnesia.
This EXPLANATION OF NEUROTIC SYMPTOMS helps the patient, Prior, to probe himself, to become conscious of his conflict issues, and this process of becoming conscious is part of the HEALING PROCESS in that now he can resolve the issue through the use of reason.
Though Prior’s talk sessions, we realise that talk therapy can be combative. The patient is frightened of facing his fears and conflicts and will resist the psychotherapist, often insulting him, as Prior does Rivers, or refusing to cooperate by withholding information about their nightmares. These are EGO DEFENCE MECHANISMS the patient uses to protect himself. To counter this resistance, the therapist has to say provocative, distasteful things to the patient to make him talk. For eg, Rivers tells Prior that his mutism is a working-class phenomenon and says that the upper-classes have different neurotic symptoms because they have a “more complex mental life”. This implied insult provokes Prior into expressing his internal class conflict-- he has been educated like an upper class person, but comes from a working class background and doesn’t know where he fits in.
But as we see, the psychotherapist also has to win the trust of the patient and Rivers’ kind treatment of Prior during his asthma attacks helps to break down Prior’s resentment.
Another important aspect of talk therapy that we see in Prior’s case is that the psychotherapist talks not only with the patient but also with his family and friends. This is done to help him identify problem areas. From pp 55-62, Rivers talks with Prior and his parents separately. It’s due to this that Rivers grasps Prior’s issues with class and masculinity—his need to prove himself.
The most important aspect of talk therapy seen with Prior is how neurotic symptoms disappear with successful treatment. Although Rivers uses HYPNOTHERAPY to get Prior to remember the incident that led to his nervous breakdown at the frontlines, it is through TALK THERAPY that he helps Prior realise that he had enormous guilt about not having prevented the death of soldiers in his charge. Prior’s fear that he had caused his soldiers’ deaths through negligence of his duty led to his amnesia, nightmares and mutism.
Talk therapy also helped men like Prior negotiate self-destructive norms of masculinity during war time. Prior realizes that he does not let himself down as a man by accepting the offer to do home service—that he does not need to feel guilty that his asthma prevented him from doing dangerous duty at the frontline. Prior’s relationship with Sarah improves as he heals with psychotherapy and becomes more self-assured about his masculinity. But it should be recognized that his romantic relationship with Sarah also contributes to resolving his male identity issues.
LANGUAGE, SYMBOLS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
When you read Anderson’s account of his dream to Rivers, did you find yourself interpreting it (28-32)? For instance, the image of ladies sitting at tea and Anderson appearing naked before them—did that tell you immediately that Anderson had sexual issues, that he felt shame, given the way his nakedness assaulted the women in their chaste white dresses? Did the image of the father-in-law, accompanied by orderlies, chasing Anderson with a stick that had a snake coiled around it make you think that Anderson had fears that something about his male sexuality would evoke social rejection? The snake is a well-known phallic symbol and the orderlies chasing him suggests enforced treatment in a mental asylum.
Fears or guilt that we feel is often something we try to repress and force into the unconscious. However THE REPRESSED ALWAYS RETURNS to us, most usually in dreams and nightmares and other neurotic symptoms like obsessive compulsive actions and psychosomatic illnesses. Our unconscious communicates with us through symbols, visual or verbal, i.e. the things in life to which we have given symbolic meanings, such as white dresses and snakes. Sometimes, conversations form part of the dream too.
Trying to make sense of a dream is a little like reading a poem, isn’t it? We try to decode the symbolism of the dream just as we try to read behind the lines of a poem, trying to link together different words and symbols and working out their connotations.
Dreams and our neurotic symptoms thus communicate with us through language since they often rely on the meanings of symbols that are attributed by our language. Hence, you shouldn’t expect that a snake in a native Tamil speaker’s dream means the same as a snake in a native English speaker’s dream or that a stone in a Christian person’s dream has the same meaning as in a Muslim person’s dream. Your cultural heritage and language thus shape the way your unconscious communicates with you.
But the unconscious doesn’t talk to you in a complete way. Because, after all, you are trying not to hear it, right? You have banished your undesirable fears and guilts into the unconscious and would rather it be silent. Hence the unconscious has to send you its messages wrapped up in deceptive symbolism so that you often get the disguised, more acceptable messages that you can tolerate. It usually needs a dream therapist or psychoanalyst to work out the real repressed meanings that horrify you.
The meaning of Anderson’s dream
We see this at work in the Anderson dream (28-32). Notice that he misinterprets the dream as being about sex. He can tolerate this meaning because he actually doesn’t appear to have any sexual dysfunction. But then Rivers points out to him that snakes aren’t always a sexual symbol, and refers to the “caduceus badge” of the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) that Anderson wears as an army doctor. The word “caduceus” refers to the image of a staff with two snakes and two wings at the top that forms the insignia of the RAMC. Hence Rivers gets Anderson to consider the repressed meaning, that Anderson is fearful that his blood phobia may prematurely end his career as a doctor and thus threaten his masculine role as provider for his wife and family.
The level of meaning that is acceptable to us is referred to as the MANIFEST CONTENT (236) of a dream whereas the buried, authentic meaning is the LATENT CONTENT of the dream, that Rivers tries to decode.
Rivers and the use of dream analysis for self-understanding
So how does the unconscious disguise its meaning? Largely through the use of metaphor and metonymy. For example, consider the final dream in Regeneration, Rivers’ own dream (235-239).
Rivers is actually anxious that he has betrayed Sassoon as his therapist. Unable to consciously admit this, his dream substitutes Prior as the stand-in or metaphor for Sassoon.
Dream deception can also be achieved by the use of complex or condensed metaphors. Initially, Rivers is puzzled that the electrode that Yealland uses to make the patient speak suddenly changes in his dream into a horse’s bit. But as he probes possible symbolic meanings, he realizes how a psychoanalyst may appear on the surface to be enabling a patient to speak but also actually controls the patient the way a horse’s bit is used to control a horse. The horse’s bit is a metonym not just for control, but also for the silencing of people—Rivers remembers that women and slaves were silenced with it. It is by teasing out these multiple and disguised meanings that Rivers finally realizes that he had been trying to escape the realization that he had ‘cured’ Sassoon only so as to allow him to commit suicide by returning to the front.
Our dreams are “Compromise Formations” where the unconscious conveys the truth to us but in a disguised manner. For Rivers, dream analysis helps him in his quest for identity—he finds out who he truly is.