"The Blameless Physician": Narrative and Pain, Sassoon and Rivers

Abstract

Early twentieth-century psychoanalytic encounters were typically mediated through the case study, a kind of "sur-narrative"—one constructed from above and temporally beyond the physician-patient encounter — in which the physician fills in what Freud calls "gaps" and "imperfections" of the patient's own repression-addled narrative. However, there are cases in twentieth-century modernism of patients creating their own sur-narratives, not case studies, but homages, which do not so much fill in the gaps as cover them over with layers of idealized memories of the physician-analyst, layers replete with their own imperfections and gaps. This essay examines Siegfried Sassoon's sur-narratives of his encounter with W.H.R. Rivers, autobiographical poetry and fiction that work to transform Rivers from mere physician into a guiding spiritual presence. But fissures of pain disrupt his sur-narratives and reveal the poet-patient unable to escape his past or accept the spiritual future into which he projects his physician, safely beyond the harsh material conditions of the war-torn modern world.