Now mental psychiatrist called Dr. W.H.R Rivers who specializes in mental patients who used to be soldiers of combat in the British War. Dr. Rivers begins treating a patient named Sassoon who wrote a declaration against war and was sent to him as “shell-shocked” and send him back to combat. Along the way, other patients begin to appear throughout the story describing their experiences during war combat and how they ended up the way they did: Prior, who suffers from mutism and asthma, Burns, who has not been able to eat since a bomb threw him inside the stomach of another soldier’s corpse, Own, who has been defined as a homosexual, and Anderson who through time can’t stand the sight of blood. All of these characters, throughout the novel, especially Sassoon, come to have a powerful effect on Dr. Rivers, enabling him to change many of his ways of thinking towards war.
We can generally define the concept of Change according to the Sanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as “simply difference or nonidentity”. Many factors can trigger our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs to change: society, media, family, friends, co-workers, time, images, and the list can continue on. These factors can trigger these changes to such an extent that it dramatically changes the views we once held over a certain aspect of life, especially the factor of Trauma.
Trauma is an intense experience we go through that makes us suffer physical injuries and mental and/or psychological disorders and disturbances. Experiences such as this one can include car or fatal accidents, death of loved ones, visual images, crime, or as it is in the case of Regeneration, the experience of war combat. Trauma during war combat is very common for many of the soldiers battling and risking their lives on the battlefield. Some of them are successful and are able to be released from combat without any injuries or extreme traumatic experiences, but for many others, their luck is not the same. These are the examples of the majority of the patients treated by Dr. Rivers. For example, Burns was a man who became unable to eat anything after the traumatic experience of being thrown by a bomb into a dead soldier’s open stomach, swallowing his flesh. One night, Burns escapes from the hospital and attempts to kill himself by hiding inside a tunnel that tends to flood completely. He begins to have flashbacks about times where he served in trench warfare back in France. Dr. Rivers manages to save him from his suicide attempt and after this traumatic flashback Burns is capable of opening up for the first time to Dr. Rivers of the horror he felt participating in such combat wishing to be injured and be sent home.
Even though Trauma does have the capacity to completely and dramatically alter a person’s view, feelings, belies and thoughts towards a subject, the shape of that change in the person’s psyche or personality cannot be predicted. Every person is different and the extents, shapes or ways in which a person is changed after a battlefield combat can vary in many forms. The beginning of this change according to the National Institute for Clinical Excellence in the United Kingdom is the PSTD or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. According to NICE “some symptoms of PTSD are flashbacks; sleep problems, difficulty in concentrating, and emotional instability…depression, suicidal tendencies, addiction, medically unexplained physical symptoms, or dissociative disorders”.
Besides a personality trait change in a human, another type of change occurs as well collectively called social change. Social change is “any event or action that affects a group of individuals that have shared values or characteristics” (www.wikipedia.org). The act of a social change can range from many diverse situations from an international revolution to a small town government change. We can see the concept of social change stemming from all of the characters in Regeneration. All of the characters traumatic experiences began to form an “anti-war” thought that disabled them from wanting to continue their participation in the battlefield, resulting in the moral changes of war in Dr. Rivers. Dr. Rivers had a duty to heal the injured patients and send them back to combat, but after spending time with them and slowly attaching himself to each of his patients, their experiences and ultimately their lives, linked him to the social change of rejecting the continuation of war.
These individual social changes tend to consequently lead to social constructions of identity of more ample groups all the way to a single generation. Simultaneously, these social constructions can be challenged by a number of aspects: religion, government, media, death and crime, or as it is in Regeneration once again, combat in war. The majority of the people during the British War were in favor of the continuation of war and of the “benefits” that it might produce. Four of the minds and identities that were included in this thought, which are Dr. Rivers’ patients were severely challenged when they began to experience the traumatic events they endured during battle. This goes to demonstrate that experiences, especially traumatic one can shape the identities of a social group all the way to reshaping the identities and minds of a single generation.
Now to do this, it is not as easy as I just explained. To be able to challenge and ultimately change the identity of a single generation, the events being held, such as these traumatic experiences due to a war have to be of such magnitude, of such impact and controversy that one person decides to go against what is happening a propose a change such as Sassoon’s declaration against war and Dr. Rivers consequent change due to his patient’s experiences.
Just as the a person is capable of changing after a traumatic war experience, the future of that particular society can be able to change and be determined by that specific war experience. For example, in the case of the extermination of the Jews or better known as the Holocaust during WWII in Germany, the future of this particular society can be predicted in terms of other society’s views towards this society but it cannot be predicted in terms of the society within. In other words, the future views of the German society could have been predicted as one of hate toward it by the Jew population and other societies and countries who found the German treatment abusive, inhuman and even evil against the Jews.
The society’s internal future cannot be predicted such as easily due a number of factors, starting with the fact that every society is different and manage themselves in different manners. For example certain war programs might increase or decrease a society’s economy for instance. Other instances might include health and sickness. Many of these programs and events brought with them many sicknesses and diseases both to the leaders of these programs and victims of these programs that later on could have the chance to spread them even after these programs and events came to an end. “Reconstruction efforts have to see with changing identities and group boundaries, the difficulties of communicating across boundaries, justice and ‘reconciliation’, the distribution of property, land and wealth, the writing of history, the rebuilding of trust and the capacities for new political systems”.( Pouligny, Civil Society and Post-Conflict Peace Building). Because of these factors it is somewhat difficult to predict how certain war programs might shape the future of a particular society.
Up until now, we have seen the general changes a human and society can go through during and after a particular experience, in this case a war combat and in Regeneration. If we had to see the changes of a particular character that went through this change in this story as I said before it would be Dr. Rivers.
Dr. Rivers since the beginning of the story begins to develop an internal conflict of his duty to resend his patients to combat after their injures with the sympathy he began to feel for them after knowing each of the specific experiences that put his patients in the state that they were. Dr. Rivers began rethink several of his beliefs regarding war and his actions of healing the patients sent to him and resending back to the field and eventually be killed. He considers this ironic and starts to think it is not right because although he heals them, they will eventually be hurt and killed again.
Another aspect of Dr. Rivers that challenges his identity is the comparison he makes of himself to Dr. Yealland in London while watching him perform an electro-shock on one of his patients. He thinks that similarly to Dr. Yealland’s method of therapy and simultaneously physically harming them, he feels he his harming his patients as well by sending them back to their eventual death. In the end he feels that the event of a war is not a justification for the possible death of the entire generation that fights and battle inside of it.
Works Cited
Pouligny, Beatrice. Civil Society and Post-Conflict Peace Building: Ambiguities of International Programs Aimed at Building New Societies www.ceri-sciencespo.com Nov.11, 2004
http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:etCTAaj5rXUJ:www.ceri-sciencespo.com/cherlist/pouligny/111004.pdf+changes+of+societies+due+to+war+programs&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=13&gl=us
New guidelines for dealing with post traumatic stress disorder 2005
http://www.bio-medicine.org/medicine-news/—0D-0ANew-guidelines-for-dealing-with-post-traumatic-stress-disorder-3554-1/
Mortensen, Chris. Change Dec. 19, 2006. www.stanford.edu
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/change/
