Read Online Regeneration by Pat Barker - Free Book Online

‘extreme’. At times a pinprick would cause severe and prolonged pain. Rivers had often felt distress at the amount of pain he was causing, but it would not, in life, have occurred to him to stop the experiment for that reason, any more than it would have occurred to Head. In the dream, however, the wish to stop the experiment had been prominent.
    The latent content was more difficult. Superficially, the dream seemed to support Freud’s contention that all dreams were wish fulfilment. Rivers had wished himself back in Cambridge, doingresearch, and the dream had fulfilled the wish. But that was to ignore the fact that the dream had not been pleasant. The emphasis in the dream had been on the distress he felt at causing pain, and, on waking, the affect had been one of fear and dread. He didn’t believe such a dream could be convincingly explained as wish fulfilment, unless, of course, he wished to torture one of his closest friends. No doubt some of Freud’s more doctrinaire supporters would have little difficulty with that idea, particularly since the torture took the form of pricking him, but Rivers couldn’t accept it. He was more inclined to seek the meaning of the dream in the conflict his dream self had experienced between the duty to continue the experiment and the reluctance to cause further pain.
    Rivers was aware, as a constant background to his work, of a conflict between his belief that the war must be fought to a finish, for the sake of the succeeding generations, and his horror that such events as those which had led to Burns’s breakdown should be allowed to continue. This conflict, though a constant feature of his life, would certainly have been strengthened by his conversations with Sassoon. He’d been thinking about Sassoon immediately before he went to sleep. But, on thinking it over, Rivers couldn’t see that the dream was a likely dramatization of that conflict. The war was hardly an experiment, and it certainly didn’t rest with him to decide whether it continued or not.
    Recently almost all his dreams had centred on conflicts arising from his treatment of particular patients. In advising them to remember the traumatic events that had led to their being sent here, he was, in effect, inflicting pain, and doing so in pursuit of a treatment that he knew to be still largely experimental. Only in Burns’s case had he found it impossible to go on giving this advice, because the suffering involved in Burns’s attempts to remember was so extreme. ‘Extreme’. The word Head had used to describe the pain he’d experienced during the protopathic stage of regeneration. Certainly in Burns’s case, there was a clear conflict between Rivers’s desire to continue using a method of treatment he believed in, but knew to be experimental, and his sense that in this particular instance the pain involved in insisting on the method would be too great.
    The dream had not merely posed a problem, it had suggested a solution. ‘Why don’t you try it?’ Henry had said. Rivers felt he’d got there first, that the dream lagged behind his waking practice: he was already experimenting on himself. In leading his patients to understand that breakdown was nothing to be ashamed of, that horror and fear were inevitable responses to the trauma of war and were better acknowledged than suppressed, that feelings of tenderness for other men were natural and right, that tears were an acceptable and helpful part of grieving, he was setting himself against the whole tenor of their upbringing. They’d been trained to identify emotional repression. as the essence of manliness. Men who broke down, or cried, or admitted to feeling fear, were sissies, weaklings, failures. Not men . And yet he himself was a product of the same system, even perhaps a rather extreme product. Certainly the rigorous repression of emotion and desire had been the constant theme of his adult life. In advising his young patients to abandon the attempt at