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W.H.R. Rivers was a distinguished British psychiatrist famous for treating Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen during World War I. Rivers's case studies are crucial intertexts for Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy (1991-5). Barker does not represent the war according to a trauma discourse that is ubiquitous in post-1950s British and American culture. The dominance of poststructuralist trauma theory in literary history eclipses the importance of Rivers's case studies to Barker's trilogy. Her historical fiction relies on Rivers's significant and unique revisions to the Freudian talking cure forced upon him by his personal confrontation with soldiers suffering the psychological effects of the First World War.
Keywords: Pat Barker / W.H.R. Rivers / Sigmund Freud / trauma / psychoanalysis
When discussing her Regeneration trilogy,1 Pat Barker continually invokes contemporary conceptions of trauma, largely stemming from a cultural context in which Freudian psychoanalysis and posttraumatic stress disorder have saturated the popular imagination. Barker's trilogy, of which the third volume, The Ghost Road, won the Booker Prize, is an historical fiction narrating the experiences of World War I soldiers, including the iconic war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, in treatment for shell shock and in battle on the Western Front. Along with representing shell-shocked soldiers, Barker tells the story of their doctor, W.H.R. Rivers, a British psychiatrist who was one of the first to adopt psychoanalytic techniques to treat shell shock during the war at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland where Owen and Sassoon were among Rivers's patients.2 Barker repeatedly cites being raised by her grandparents as the reason for her interest in World War I, despite the Second World War's closer chronological proximity to her generation (Barker was born in 1943). In interviews across her career, she relates an anecdote about the scar from her grandfather's bayonet wound as the genesis for her fascination with the historical period, and particularly as the reason for the shiftto masculinity as a major theme in her work. For example, Barker narrates the following:
My grandfather had a bayonet wound that was something I noticed particularly as a small child, and he didn't talk about the war. So in a sense the bayonet wound was speaking for him. Silence and wounds were therefore linked together in that particular way. And my...