The Untherapist
Collins Braithwaite is the central figure in the novel, a completely fictional invention of the author. He is a self-professed “untherapist” whose “mission was to bring down the ‘jerry-built edifice’ of psychiatry.” The metaphorical representation of the discipline of psychiatry as a shoddily built framework of theories on mental health is intended to represent the historically accurate anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s. This vanguard had rejected not just Freudian psychoanalysis, but the very core concepts of psychiatric treatment as a cure for behavior.
Rebecca and I
The writer of the notebooks which form the bulk of the narrative is known only by the pseudonym she gives herself, Rebecca. The name is derived from the first Mrs. de Winter, Max’s dead wife and the title character of Rebecca du Maurier’s novel. “Rebecca had always struck me as the most dazzling of names. I liked the way its three short syllables felt in my mouth, ending in that breathy, open-lipped exhalation. My own name offered no such sensual pleasure. It was a single-syllabled brick, fit only for head girls with sensible shoes.” This metaphorical description of the author’s actual name is the only indicator the reader gets. She never discloses her actual name. What makes this an interesting choice is that the narrator of du Maurier’s novel, the second Mrs. de Winter, is also a first-person narrator whose name is never disclosed. The description of the unnamed actual identity here is also an appropriate description of the narrator of Rebecca.
The Unsolvable Murder
Daphne du Maurier is not the only famous British author to be referenced for the sake of metaphor. “Rebecca” observes that “Suicide makes Miss Marples of us all.” This is a metaphorical allusion to Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, the model upon which all subsequent little old ladies who solve murders as amateur detectives in their spare time are based. The metaphor refers to the fact that suicide is inherent in a murder mystery in which everything cannot be easily solved with a simple confession by the murderer. Even when a note is left behind, it rarely answers all questions.
Darkness
Since the twilight of the Victorian Era, darkness began appearing more and more often in metaphorical form in novels. Following the revelations of the horrors conducted by the Nazis, occurrences exploded exponentially. In one of the narrative entries not authored by “Rebecca”, a famous real-life psychiatric case study is discussed in which a patient called Anna O, “complained of the deep darkness inside her head…of having two selves, her real self and a bad one.” This study was actually published by Josef Breuer in 1895, indicating that the intensifying popularity of “darkness” as a metaphor for the vague but sinister mysteries of possible malevolence lying deep within the human may have originated in early psychiatric case histories.
The Vanity of the Bonfire
The narrator who provides historical context for Collins Braithwaite—the one who is not “Rebecca”—has some harsh metaphorical words for his writings. The discussion of Anna O. is broadened to include fictional works about the concept of personalities splitting within a single individual such as Dostoyevsky’s The Double and Poe’s William Wilson. Summing up the comprehensive results of this study into two selves occupying one mind, the narrator concludes that “The whole thing is a kind of bonfire of other people’s ideas.” Braithwaite’s approach to the consideration of ideas and contributions of others comes down to very simple execution. Whatever position they take is rejected wholesale in favor of the exact opposite.
