In Regeneration, Barker suggests that society is more interested in usefulness than healing. Discuss.

Writing with the feminist and post-war hindsight of 1991¹, Pat Barker's historical novel Regeneration investigates the psychiatric treatment of traumatised soldiers during the First World War, scrutinising how the Edwardian establishment conflates psychological recovery with military usefulness. While the narrative acknowledges that physicians attempt² to provide genuine compassion to their patients, it asserts that society is fundamentally more interested in restoring combatants to a state of lethal utility than achieving authentic healing. Barker consequently warns her contemporary audience against³ the destructive nature of industrialised warfare, illustrating that institutional medicine is inescapably corrupted when the restoration of mental health is subordinated to the insatiable demand for able-bodied troops.

Barker exposes the psychiatric institution as fundamentally⁴ compromised, where the ostensible goal of psychological healing is inextricably tied to restoring a soldier's martial usefulness. Seated in his office confronting Siegfried Sassoon, Captain William Rivers embraces the paradoxical nature of his clinical role, marking the officer's file "Discharged to duty⁵" in a bureaucratic gesture where the finality of being discharged confirms the prioritisation of military utility over individual health. Here, Barker develops the motif of the "sausage machine" to expose clinical recovery as a grim transaction, asserting that restoring a rebellious patient "mentally and physically" merely guarantees his redeployment to the trenches. The paternal relationship between the physician and the poet deepens this tension, since Rivers's genuine affection functions to dismantle Sassoon's "anti-war neurosis", coercing the young man to abandon his political protest. Situating this friction within the bureaucratic machinery of the War Office, Barker characterises the doctor's role as inherently conflicted, demonstrating through Rivers's "duty to see" that diagnosing a man as "completely fit" operates as an ethical betrayal. Through this administrative finality, the text insists that institutional therapy remains inescapably futile, as the very success of the healing process is continuously co-opted to feed the war effort. This institutional subordination of authentic health⁶ to battlefield utility extends beyond rebellious officers, pervading the clinical management of combatants whose bodies enact a subconscious refusal to fight. Confined to a wheelchair, Mr Willard vehemently denies his psychological affliction, insisting to Rivers that he suffers "injury to the spine⁷" because accepting an "admission of cowardice" threatens his ingrained masculine usefulness. Introducing the clinical symptom of hysterical paralysis, Barker reveals that the patient's "abnormal flexure" serves as a desperate somatic mechanism to preserve life, highlighting how society's demand for able bodies forces the subconscious to manufacture "flesh wounds" as an escape. The friction between the invalid and the anthropologist deepens the tragedy of this conditioning, since Rivers understands that Willard's frantic desire to prove he is not "malingering" stems from a terror of societal irrelevance. Contextualising this somatic collapse within the rigid expectations of the British Army, Barker adopts a detached medical register to detail the "wasted legs", illustrating how the military establishment views broken men purely as defective machinery. In illustrating the officer's desperate need to walk, the novel asserts that soldiers are conditioned to equate their human worth entirely with their capacity to "do the job" for a warmongering state. Across these varied therapeutic encounters⁸, Barker demonstrates that psychiatric institutions betray their medical mandate, functioning merely as repair stations that prioritise military usefulness over genuine healing.