Alex Michaelides is one of the Cyprus writer who started their career inspired by the style and characterizations of Agatha Christie. He produced a best mystery and psychological thriller novel in the year 2019. He is globally celebrated and critically acclaimed for his record-breaking debut novel, The Silent Patient. He was born on 4 September, 1977 in Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, to a Cypriot father and English mother. The novel The Silent Patient was published in 2019.
This novel deals with an artist couple where Alicia Berenson, is a painter, and her husband Gabriel is a photographer. They have been married for almost seven years, but the shock is Gabriel was brutally murdered by his wife. At that time of the incident, she was herself wounded and was also present around the dead body. Alicia gets silent for six years after the sudden horrific shooting of her husband and she never opened her mouth even during her trail. She is punishment of the crime and taken to a forensic mental health unit. Theo Faber is Alicia’s psychotherapist, who tries to uncover the truth and help Alicia to disclose it.
The main ideas of the novel are explained through the characters that suffer from mental illnesses. This has been widely expressed that the characters in this novel are suffering from some mental illness like post traumatic stress disorder as they have never experienced a healthy, safe and contained childhood. Contained childhood initially referred by W. R. Bion that a mother who bears and absorbs her infant's emotional states, transforms them, and interprets' them to her infant or a caregiver. She instructs those emotions to her infant and protects it from harm, upsets, discomfort, and etc. this connection ensures the healthy development of childhood.
Family is the primary source where an infant can get containment. When a child is lack of basic emotional and physical needs in the childhood, the child will bring a development of mixed feeling of hope and fear in the form of defense in the new environment. The child will remains in the fear of disappointment from the container.
Theo Faber’s anxiety disorder was born in his childhood as a result of growing up with an angry dictatorial father who attacked his self-esteem and made him feel worthless. He was deprived of from his father’s love, and this emotional deficit showed up at every point in his life. Alicia’s dad psychologically killed her when she was a child by threatening to her face that he wished she had died instead of her mother. She never recuperated from that statement. That remained a deep wound in her memory.
Alicia and Theo are not only the characters which endure some psychological illnesses. In addition with Alicia narrates about her mother’s physiological illness when she was a child and she fears that this illness will be get affected to her. As a result she suffers from this physiological problem after his father’s death. His death marks the beginning of her unstable psychosis with her husband. The author describes how Alicia receives therapy from Dr. Christian West but refuses to take her medication. Later, she kills her husband when she gets a psychotic elevation.
The condition of Post traumatic disorder may last for months or years, with triggers that can bring back memories of the trauma accompanied by intense emotional and physical reactions. After the loss of Alicia’s mother, made psychological wounds in Alicia’s childhood development which in future became a post traumatic stress disorder. The trauma of this childhood scene is attributed to the death of Gabriel, where she is once again condemned to death by another man so that he could save his own life. Theo gained only fear, anxiety, violence, verbal and physical harassment; such psychological wounds became a post traumatic stress disorder and manifests in his adulthood. Theo’s constant struggle pushed him to hate his father and the house which is almost a prison for him which is run by his father; by the age of eighteen, Theo decides to escape from there to experience a new, beautiful world far away from his father’s control.
Parents need to give the best childhood to their children. Children develop their personalities based on their relationships with their parents. Thus, parents need to be intentional about how they treat their kids, how they act around them, and most importantly, how they treat them. The effect of uncontained childhood can be evident in the lives of Theo Faber and Alicia Berenson. Their personalities are developed with anxiety disorder.
