Dr. Dohmler
The old head of Nicole's clinic on the Zürichsee — the one man in the book who can make Nicole's father tell the truth, and who tells Dick Diver to choose.
The truth first, then a workable reality built around it — and the doctor–patient boundary held while that happens.
The book
At a glance
- Head physician and founder of the clinic on the Zürichsee
- Ten years before the flashback — the first modern clinic for mental illness of its kind
- Getting the truth out of Devereux Warren by telephone and patience
- Franz Gregorovius, who brings him the Warren case
- The 1917 Zurich flashback only
- A composite — most often associated with Eugen Bleuler and with Auguste Forel, the elder of the two Forels · Bleuler 1857–1939; Auguste Forel 1848–1931 · Zollikon and Morges, Switzerland
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeProfessor Dohmler founded his clinic ten years before the novel's flashback: three old buildings and a pair of new ones between a slight rise and the shore of the lake, the first modern clinic of its kind. The book draws him as very old and very dry — Warren talks at 'the dried old package of Doctor Dohmler' — with a face beautiful under straight whiskers, like a vine-overgrown veranda of some fine old house, and chink-like eyes. Dick knows individuals with more talent and no one of a class qualitatively superior.
His method is patience. He tells Warren to start at the beginning and tell him everything, and then waits. He notices the tears and, a beat later, the whiskey on the breath, and spends the rest of the interview wondering what the man is lying about, or what falsity is pervading the whole room. When Warren fails to return, Dohmler writes, and then does what was in those days a folly and telephones the Grand Hotel at Vevey. Reminded that the forty Swiss francs will show up on the clinic books, he presses anyway.
How the book draws them
- Authority without charmHe has none of Dick's gifts and needs none of them. He listens, waits, and presses until the account across the desk stops holding together.
- The valetTold that the trouble began with an idea Nicole got about a valet, he nods his venerable head as if, like Sherlock Holmes, he had expected a valet and only a valet to be introduced at exactly that point.
- Money is no objectWarren offers it as reassurance. Dohmler agrees, dryly, that it certainly is not, and goes on with the questions.
- The diagnosisEntered on the card in French with his colleague Franz Gregorovius: an acute and declining phase, the prognosis reserved — and the clinical insistence that her fear of men is a symptom of the illness and not at all constitutional.
- It is a professional situationHis climax, delivered quietly rather than shouted. He raises himself like a legless man mounting a pair of crutches, cries it, then sighs himself back into the chair and waits for the reverberation to die out of the room.
- The choice offeredHe proposes that the transference must be terminated: either Dick goes away, or Miss Warren is sent away. He also asks, laughing on the last syllable, whether Dick has got sentimentally involved himself.
He does not last. The image is set into the scene itself, before the conversation has even finished, so that the reader is told the outcome while the advice is still being given.
The problem he identified becomes the architecture of the whole novel. Dick cannot indefinitely be Nicole's physician, rescuer, husband, and emotional foundation at once, and Dohmler is the only person with the standing to insist on it. With him gone, nobody says it again for fifteen years, and by then it is Kaethe Gregorovius saying it about the drinking.