However, their interviews do not get them anywhere from Kitty's standpoint, and she decides to send for Dr. Gilbert Anderson.
“Heaven knows she had no reason for faith in any doctor, for during the past week so many of them sleek as seals with their neatly brushed hair and their frockcoats, had stood around Chris and looked at him with the consequential deliberation of a plumber.”
But Dr. Anderson was different.
“He was a little man with winking blue eyes, a flushed and crumpled forehead, a little grey moustache that gave him the profile of an amiable cat and a lively taste in spotted ties, and he lacked that appetiteless look which is affected by distinguished practitioners.”
REBECCA WEST
Photograph by Yevonde, London.
Dr. Anderson explains to the family that Christopher's amnesia is the manifestation of a suppressed wish and that his unconscious self is refusing to let him resume his relations with his normal life. He forgot his life with his wife because he was discontented, and there was no justification for it for “Kitty was the falsest thing on earth, in tune with every kind of falsity.” The doctor proposes psychoanalysis, but Margaret says she knows a memory so strong that it will recall everything else, in spite of his discontent, the memory of the boy, his only child who had died five years before. Dr. Anderson urges her to take Christopher something the boy had worn, some toy they used to play with. So she takes a jersey and ball and meets Chris in the garden where there is only a column of birds swimming across the lake of green light that lays before the sunset, and as Chris gazes at Margaret mothering them in her arms the scales fall from his eyes and he makes obeisance to convention and bids his creative libido au revoir.
Jenny is witness of the transformation and when Kitty asks “How does he look?” she answers, though her tongue cleaves to the roof of her mouth, “Every inch a soldier.”
When Miss West next essayed fiction in “The Judge” it was the diagnosis of the creative urge that was her theme. It is one of Freud's contentions that the male child, before it hears the voice of conscience and the admonition of convention, has carnal yearnings for the mother, the female child for the father. With the advent of sense, with the development of individuality, with the recognition of obligation to others, and particularly with the acquisition of the sense of morality, these are replaced with what are called normal desires. In some instances the transformation does not take place. The original trend remains, and it is spoken of as an infantile fixation. Its juvenile and adult display is called sin ethically and crime socially.