444 Fitzgerald, F. scott
sex with his young daughter. Both ignored the incest
immediately following and it never happened again,
but five years later, Nicole’s bizarre symptoms point
to her private mental torture. Once the source of her
mental illness is uncovered, the doctors in Zurich
agree to treat Nicole provided Devereux cuts off his
contact with her.
Though her fear of men is understandable when
viewed through the lens of her disturbing rape by
her father, Nicole is still considered sick because she
cannot control her emotions. Her doctors diagnose
her mental illness as a self-defense against men;
due to her perverted sexual experience, she comes
to view all men as evil, which manifests in extreme
fright toward males. Her cure, the doctors think,
would come when she learns to trust men again,
and, ultimately, when she falls in love. To this end,
the doctors seek to encourage a healthy transference
between Nicole and a psychiatrist; through this
psychological relationship, Nicole would transfer, or
direct, her negative emotions toward men onto her
doctor, and he would simultaneously receive them
and inspire her to trust men again with his com-
forting responses. This transference does occur for
Nicole, not within the walls of the clinic, but within
her letters to Dick. Not until her epistolary commu-
nication with Captain Diver, as she calls him, does
Nicole’s condition show any signs of improvement.
Through the arc of these personal letters, Nicole’s
hatred of men lessens and her symptoms dissipate.
She once again begins to desire life outside the clinic
and away from her past emotions.
After learning of Nicole’s background and recent
improvement, Dick meets her in person in Zurich,
where her transference and improvement continue
though they see each other only sporadically. Soon
he is instructed by the other doctors at the clinic to
break off the transference because they have located
a cure in her recent emotions; Nicole is sufficiently
in love with Dick and ready to be redirected. In
clinical practice, this would be the point in analysis
when the doctor removes support and encourages
the patient to experience real life with these new-
found desires. As both a psychiatrist and love inter-
est, Dick has made Nicole’s transference strong, but
their emotional tie works on him as well. Unable
to maintain the professional and ethical neutrality
necessary for such a practitioner, Dick falls in love
himself. While he knows that continuing the trans-
ference outside the clinic would mean devoting his
personal and professional life to one person, he fails
to end it. He gives in to Nicole and to his romantic
feelings for her, and she replaces her authoritarian
father with him. Unwilling to stave off his own
desire, Dick marries Nicole and concedes to a life
of stagnation: He is the healer, and she is the sick.
Erica D. Galiotolove in Tender Is the Night
Dr. Dick Diver has two relationships in Tender Is
the Night that reflect love in different ways. First, he
experiences a repetitive love with his wife, Nicole,
and second, he experiences a transformative love
with a young woman named Rosemary Hoyt. Before
Nicole becomes Dick’s wife, she is his psychiatric
patient, and due to this prior relationship, their mar-
riage mirrors that arrangement. They claim to love
each other, but their love is one that depends on each
playing a certain role. Despite six years of marriage
and two young children, Dick and Nicole are stuck
in a repetitive pattern: Nicole is the patient and Dick
is the doctor, Nicole breaks down and Dick repairs,
Dick wants to heal and Nicole is sick. In short, Dick
has a savior-complex, and Nicole needs to be saved.
Their love exists only when each plays the
appointed part, and those specific roles insist upon
a denial of other personal characteristics. In their
marriage, Dick and Nicole are not two people
coming together with their unique differences, but
they form a separate entity based on their relation-
ship of dependence. The other vacationers on the
French Riviera notice this coalescence as well and
rarely refer to them individually, but rather as “the
Divers” or even “Dicole.” Both Dick and Nicole
sacrifice individuality to participate in this fusion.
Without individual identities and with only endless
repetition, Dick and Nicole’s love begins to wane.
Nicole constantly feels as if Dick views her as the
ignorant, tormented, weak girl of 16 she once was,
and he knows how to relate to her only through the
methods and practices of the psychiatrist he is. Gov-
erned by her moods and his diagnosis and cure, their
love suffocates them both. In her own right, Nicole
yearns for an emotional privacy she has never had,