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In Arrival and Departure, Arthur Koestler, whose Darkness at Noon was a psychological novel of extraordinary strength, has written a book of particular interest to the psychoanalyst. Its central theme is the attempt of a young European revolutionary, with the help of psychoanalysis, to solve the questions which the defeat of the revolution and his consequent despair have evoked in him.
In the spring of 1941, Peter Slavek, twenty-two years of age, battered and shaken by his experiences, escapes to Neutralia from an unnamed country ruled by the Fascists. It is his intention to join the British Army. Waiting for the necessary papers in the tense atmosphere of this last free outpost of Europe, his determination to go on fighting becomes shaken. Everyone's only thought is to escape from the nightmare that is Europe by means of a visa for the United States. The visa represents life, as opposed to struggle and death. But to him, this life means the betrayal of all the heroes and victims of the revolutionary struggle. In this conflict, Peter develops a paralysis of the right leg. A friend of the family, Dr. Sonja Bogart, a psychoanalyst who is also waiting for her passage to the United States, offers to treat him.
Koestler gives us a colorful and convincing presentation of analytic material that unfolds in Peter's mind. We are led through the history of Peter's last years, his heroic fight for the radical movement, his imprisonment, his torture by the police, his desperate struggle not to betray his fellow-fighters and his extraordinary scene with the legendary old Chief of the Political Department who once had known his father. Here he relives early guilt and punishment: past and present merge into a traumatic experience often repeated in his dreams. Although Peter has remained loyal in spite of unbearable tortures, he cannot rid himself of a feeling of guilt, of a sense that he has betrayed his friends. The analysis leads to the roots of this guilt feeling in e