the trauma of meter 159
expression in general due to their education, but also understood that their
upbringing formed part of a culture of repression in British society that re-
quired men to “move on” from difficult memories without confronting or ex-
pressing them, especially officers who were expected to repress fear in order to
lead a regiment confidently into battle. This culture of repression, for Rivers,
was the root cause of many nervous disorders—repression that had “germi-
nated in the nursery and [been] perfected in the English public school.”^28
Though Rivers criticizes this tendency in English society, it is this very ability
to express traumatic memories in well-crafted English narratives that attracted
him to the highly educated officer-patients at Craiglockhart.
Before transferring to Craiglockhart, Rivers worked closely with Dr. Wil-
liam Brown at Maghull, where both doctors developed their therapeutic
methods. Brown’s idea, autognosis, largely adapted from Freud, was based on
the new belief that anxiety neuroses were based in pathogenic associations be-
tween past and recent events and the resulting confusions over meaning. In
“W.H. R. Rivers and the War Neuroses,” Allan Young explains that the job of
therapy was to expose these links and clarify these misunderstandings (369).
Brown emphasized “long talks between the physician and the patient.” The
physician’s task, among others, was to help the patient sort out any temporal
dislocation between past and current events through redirecting the patient’s
attention toward “a neglected aspect of his experience,”^29 in an attempt to
transform traumatic memories into tolerable, and even pleasant, images. Riv-
ers gives the example of a patient who witnessed the violent death of his friend;
a shell had blown apart the man’s body. The doctor points out that quick death
of his patient’s friend, though gruesome, was painless, and that this friend is
now free from harm, thus allowing the patient to “dwell upon his painful
memories” by casting them in a new (albeit grimly positive) light. Dr. Rivers’s
patient, Sassoon, published four poems in the hospital literary magazine The
Hydra in 1917.^30 “Repression of War Experience” (the title of a 1917 lecture
and 1918 Lancet article by Rivers) was not among the poems Sassoon pub-
lished at Craiglockhart, perhaps to protect Dr. Rivers from thinking his nerves
were out of order. The poem illustrates what Sassoon thought of Rivers’s meth-
ods and of the process of therapy in general:
it’s bad to think of war,
when thoughts you’ve gagged all day come back to scare you;
and it’s been proved that soldiers don’t go mad
Unless they lose control of ugly thoughts
That drive them out to jabber among the trees. 5
Now light your pipe; look, what a steady hand.
Draw a deep breath; stop thinking, count fifteen,
And you’re as right as rain...^31