Communicating Trauma: Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy and W.H.R. Rivers’s Psychoanalytic Method

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.