The Silent Patient

by Alex Michaelides

As human beings, our earliest years reside in a land before memory. We like to think of ourselves as emerging from this primordial fog with our characters fully formed, like Aphrodite rising perfect from the sea foam. But thanks to increasing research into the development of the brain, we know this is not the case. We are born with a brain half-formed – more like a muddy lump of clay than a divine Olympian. As the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott put it: ‘There is no such thing as a baby.’ The development of our personalities doesn’t take place in isolation, but in relationship with another – we are shaped and completed by unseen, unremembered forces; namely our parents. This is frightening, for obvious reasons – who knows what indignities we suffered, what torments and abuses, in this land before memory? Our character was formed without us even knowing it.