The Silent Patient

by Alex Michaelides

She used to say we are made up of different parts, some good, some bad; and that a healthy mind can tolerate this ambivalence and juggle both good and bad at the same time. Mental illness is precisely about a lack of this kind of integration – we end up losing contact with the unacceptable parts of ourselves.

Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive, and will come forth later, in uglier ways. Sigmund Freud

I mustn’t put strangeness where there’s nothing. I think that is the danger of keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything, you are on the look-out, and you continually stretch the truth. Jean-Paul Sartre

But we soon discovered that geographical distance counts for little in the world of the psyche. Some things are not so easily left behind.