The Silent Patient Themes

Over and over again in Alex Michaelides’s thriller The Silent Patient, Theo Faber—the book’s first-person narrator and a trainee psychotherapist—insists that the goal of his job is to feel his patients’ pain for them. He recalls his own beloved therapist, Ruth, shedding the tears he himself was unable to as a young boy; later, in his own practice, he takes on his patients’ mystifying rage or thumping headaches. And while he prides…

Much of the plot of Alex Michaelides’s book The Silent Patient revolves around the play “Alcestis,” a Greek tragedy by Euripides. But even as the novel references the plot of that specific play, it also embraces the form of Greek tragedy, in which a talented person falls to their doom through a combination of hubris (over-confidence) and destiny. As a psychotherapist, Theo spends much of his time trying to understand the links between…

Theo Faber, a psychotherapist and the first-person narrator of Alex Michaelides’s book The Silent Patient, believes that pain and rage originate “in the land before memory, in the world of early childhood, with abuse and mistreatment”; thus, to solve the mystery of an adult’s psyche, Theo opines, one must retrace their history. It is unsurprising, then, that when Theo decides to help a troubled painter named Alicia Berenson, the first thing he…

Alicia Berenson, the titular silent patient of Alex Michaelides’s novel The Silent Patient, never speaks; for six years after the murder of her beloved husband Gabriel (which she may or may not have committed), Alicia is entirely mute, communicating only through the occasional painting or act of violence. For a therapist like narrator Theo Faber, Alicia’s lack of communication is an almost impossible challenge to solve—without speech, how can therapy, which Theo…