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Part 3, Chapter 1
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Silent Patient, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Empathy, Identification, and Boundaries
Tragedy and Destiny
Honesty vs. Deception
Childhood Trauma
Silence vs. “The Talking Cure”
Summary
Analysis
Part 4 begins with a quote from Alice Miller: “the aim of therapy is not to correct the past, but to enable the patient to confront his own history, and grieve over it." In his office, while rain pours down around him, Theo reflects on what he has read in Alicia’s diary.
Theo’s obsession with childhood—much like Alicia’s interest in Greek tragedy—is all about the relationship between the past (one’s “history”) and the future. And along the same lines, Alicia’s decision to give Theo her diary can be seen as a step towards doing what Alice Miller suggests: acknowledging what came before in the hope that what comes next can be better.
Themes
Theo wonders about who the man is, and whether or not Alicia ever discovered his identity. He also decides to find out more about the mysterious Dr. West—who had never been mentioned in the press, nor had he testified at Alicia’s trial. Theo walks down the hall and sees the sign on Christian’s door: Dr. C. West. Putting the dots together, Theo enters Christian’s office.
As Dr. West, Christian was seeing Alicia before he came to the Grove, a fact that automatically makes Theo suspicious; could he be the mysterious man outside the window? Christian’s desire to medicate Alicia also now becomes more sinister. Maybe he was trying to dull her consciousness so she wouldn’t recognize him, or maybe he was nefariously drugging her both before and after she came to the Grove.
Themes
