Agatha Milsom to Olive Farebrother
15, Whittington Terrace, Bayswater 9th September, 1928
My Dear Olive,
Thank you very much for your letter and kind inquiries after my health. I like my new doctor very much indeed. I think he understands me a great deal better than Dr. Coombs, and he has put me on quite a different treatment. He says I am just going through a “difficult phase” at present, and that if only I can hold on and not let things get on top of me for the next year or two I shall come out of it quite all right. But I am not to have a rest-cure! It seems Dr. Coombs was all wrong about that—of course he didn’t exactly say she was wrong, it wouldn’t be professional, but I could see that he thought it! Dr. Trevor says that rest-cures only “turn you in upon yourself,” and that makes things worse. He says I must get right away from myself and my feelings, so as to “sublimate” all these repressed urges and turn them into some other sort of energy. He says it was quite all right to start with to have my dreams and subconscious betrayals analysed, so as to know exactly what was the matter with me, but that now the time has come when I must learn to throw all these bottled-up desires outwards , and give them something to do. He explained it all most clearly. I said, “I suppose it is sex, doctor, isn’t it?” (Of course, one gets quite used to asking things perfectly frankly, and one doesn’t mind it a bit.) And he said, well, largely; and, of course, that was a thing most people suffered from one way and another, and in these days one couldn’t always take the obvious and direct way out of a condition of sex-repression, because it would often be socially and economically inconvenient. I said that with two million extra women in this country it didn’t seem possible, certainly, for everybody to