Themes emerging from Barker's Regeneration, based on our class conversation about four topics (doctor/patient relationship; parenting; personal relationships, gender roles, and sexual desire; art and the imagination):

• One can never return to a naive state after a traumatic event; the lasting influence of trauma
  
• There is no right approach towards doing the wrong thing: no wrong treatment, given the options of only damaging therapies/results; the paradox of being "medical officer"
  
• Exchange/sharing of opposing roles in Rivers' empathetic approach towards therapy: doctors can take on qualities of patients, patients can take on qualities of doctors
  
• War creates an alteration/transposition of gender roles (masculine identity adding in feminine/maternal qualities)
  
• Parents sacrificing their own children for the good of the parents; selfishness in parents about what their children should do
  
• Parenting not limited to the biological
  
• Optimism about love, even in the face of war and the complications of relationships
• Love as an escape, a safe haven from damage of war/effects of war
  
• Homosexuality as a defining factor in a man's social status
  
• Imagination has the power to destroy and create
  
• Art/poetry as act of creation (in contrast to the destruction of war)
  
• Times of war can prompt the imagination to develop in a dangerous, "evil" direction: context for imagination determines how imagination will be used
  
• War provides opportunities for women and their roles
  
• War reveals both how cultural opportunties have changed for women and how some cultural expectations remain the same
• And many more....