Desire in Action: A Psychoanalytic Study of Michaelides's The Silent Patient
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21271/zjhs.29.SpC.45Keywords:
psychoanalysis, silence, The Silent Patient, the unconscious, trauma.Abstract
This study aims to elaborate on how Alex Michaelides’s The Silent Patient critiques the therapeutic encounter by exposing how trauma shapes identity, behavior, and narrative authority. The paper presents a psychoanalytic study of the novel, focusing on the two main characters, Alicia Berenson and Theo Faber. The study analyzes the actions of Alicia as the patient after she becomes mute and Theo as the therapist after treating Alicia using Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic frameworks. Alicia's mutism is interpreted as a defense mechanism that conceals her deeply repressed traumatic experience, representing both repression and resistance. Moreover, her paintings and diaries, which serve as a medium of representation to convey her ideas and feelings during her silence, are interpreted as symbolic articulations of unprocessed psychological conflict. Simultaneously, Theo’s role as the therapist is interrogated in relation to transference, countertransference, and his own unresolved childhood trauma, which unconsciously drives his obsession with Alicia’s case. The narrative structure gradually reveals the mirroring between patient and therapist, blurring the boundaries between healer and sufferer.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Erfan Kareem Abullah, Rebwar Zainalddin Mohammed
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