The Silent Patient

No, I am not talking about DARK. I am trying to put my rollercoaster ride experience in words after going through The Silent Patient, written by Alex Michaelides.

Primarily it deals with psychoanalysis and finding the root cause of human behaviour. But there is more to it.

Alicia, a talented painter killed her husband with whom she was deeply in love. Alicia got admitted to a secure forensic psychiatry unit. Theo, a psychiatrist believed that she did not kill her husband and went through several processes to make her open up about it.

The book deals with the subject of psychoanalysis and relates the theories with practical life. Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre and Winnicott stated valuable facts about human psychology. But we often do not understand their implications in our practical life. The author makes us understand the reasons behind human behaviour and how human psychology works. He has also shown how human psychology does not follow a definite pattern. Similar experiences can make two different people react differently. T

he way an individual reacts depends on the person’s earlier experiences. “No one is born evil.” Traumatic childhood memories often get buried deep inside a person’s mind. Eventually, that comes out in form of violent activities, if the person confronts a similar experience. Often time the failure of taking action against the intended person is the root cause. The job of a psychiatrist is to help the patients with these repressed emotions so that they can let go of these in a more decent manner. But while being in this process, the psychiatrist often starts to feel the way the patients do.

The story of the book is not written in a linear way to highlight the vacillating nature of human psychology. Past experiences may evoke a certain kind of behaviour from a person but which definite experience leads the person to behave in that particular manner can not be said. The reason can be a particular incident or the result of multiple experiences linked together.

While reading the book, I started analyzing the facts provided and trying to get a clue about the possible suspect or the motive behind this murder with each development of the plot. But the twist, of course, I am not going to spoil it for the readers, made me rethink the incidents from the very beginning. To get a hold of the ‘effect’, the readers have to find out the ‘cause’ and in this book, the ‘cause’ is the ultimate twist.

I highly recommend this book to all those readers who love to read books with the most unexpected plot twist in them and who want to analyze the emotions, feelings, behaviour, past experiences of the characters to understand the complex psychological process going inside their mind.