Tribute to Freud

"H.D. was an American poet who lived largely in Britain, but spent time in Greece as well, and in Vienna for her analysis with Freud. She was a young American, who loved classical antiquity and myths and, in her second year of university, met Ezra Pound. They became engaged and Pound promptly declared what she was doing in her poetry to be imagist and eventually transmuted her name, Hilda Dolittle, into ‘H.D.’ in the same way that he gave Eliot his ‘T.S.’ (Pound was a great cutter, one might say, and it may indeed be the essence of editing). H.D. in London married Richard Aldington in 1911 and was part of the Bohemian scene before and during the First World War, a friend of D. H. Lawrence and Frieda’s. She was highly strung, very beautiful, a modernist who wrote not only poetry but very elliptical prose, had a visionary ability and a spiritual inclination. Her poetry during the First World War pulses with a sense of the over-abundance of death in the external world and in her own more intimate one. The stillbirth of her firstborn is linked for her with the tragic sinking of the Lusitania. Not long after, her brother died, and then her father. The concatenation of historical and personal circumstance made her very, very fragile: she started to hallucinate. There were ups and downs but by 1933, she experienced a serious set of hallucinations, which she understood as real events. She was bisexual and had several lesbian relationships, the most lasting one with a writer called Bryher, who was a very popular novelist and also had family money. Bryher took care of H.D. and her daughter Perdita (by Lawrence’s friend, Cecil Grey). They travelled together. It was Bryher who arranged for her to see Freud. H.D. comes to Freud in 1933 to be analysed and has sessions over 1934/35. Ten years later she writes this tribute, the book I’m recommending. She began it in 1944 after Freud’s death. Most editions contain a second part, which are her notes from her analysis. Freud didn’t want her to take notes. He never wanted people to take notes, because it made that activity more important than the actual therapy. In fact, the notes that she takes are not as interesting as what she finally writes in the main body of this short book. The reason I’ve chosen this one is not only that it gives a woman’s point of view of Freud, at last, but also that she’s somebody who is steeped in literature and in art and has a real aesthetic sense about Freud and a world we most often see from a very different viewpoint. I think what she catches, because she is so good at free association in her own work, is the play (and playfulness) of free association within an analysis, the way Freud’s voice takes on real moment when he makes an intervention, in that what he says is never just assimilable as one thing. It operates on several levels. So, if he says ‘time’ it doesn’t mean just ‘look, it’s time to go now,’ it has all kinds of other associations that go back as far as her childhood. Each of his interventions, each bit of interpretation as she presents it in his voice, takes on weight. So she characterizes Freud, his courtesy, his playfulness with its resonances, very beautifully. We always now think—because of the American example in the 1950s—of the analyst as being completely mute, a blank screen, when they’re being ‘classically’ Freudian. Freud was not like that. Depending on who the patient was, he treated them differently. He called H.D. a student rather than a patient. He was very gentlemanly, serious, but sometimes almost flirtatious in an old man’s way. He takes her into his personal world, partly through the objects in his study which are from the antique world she knows so well. For instance, he says to her, ‘You’re the first person who’s come to me for analysis who has looked at my gods (or goods) before you looked at me.’ They keep punning; both of them pun on all these figurines that he’s got on his desk and around the consulting room, which are both gods and goods. He says to H.D.: ‘Because I’m old, you don’t think of me as a man.’ And this idea that he’s too old to be treated as a ‘man’ becomes a theme of their analysis. All this weaves itself into the way she begins to think about herself. The particular comment about ‘gods and goods’ takes her into her childhood, the family religions, her own spiritual inclinations, as well as into the material world, and the difference between the two. He also says to her something like ‘he doesn’t relish being treated as the mother in analysis’. Yes, and these are things she remembers and become very important to her. I imagine Freud says them, if she’s accurate, as a spur: certainly whatever it is he says has effects on her when she thinks about the self, about sexuality, her hallucination and so on. This is a fantastic text in terms of taking us into the epicentre of the consulting room and its ongoing resonances. She sometimes makes allusions to Shakespeare too, as Freud does. And these became part of the analysis. H.D. incorporates all this into the richness of her text and actually gives you a flavour of analysis in a unique way. Ernest Jones reviewed the book when it first came out and said it was the most extraordinary piece of writing about analysis, because it was not done by a professional, and yet, it gives a complete aura of what it means to be in analysis and with Freud. The crucial thing is she was suicidal but carried on working after the analysis. She was in a moment of crisis when she came to Freud, and in that sense the analysis worked. One of the tropes of their analysis was that she wants to give him something, she tries to send him a birthday present, but she doesn’t find the right flowers: there are no gardenias in Vienna, the flowers she knows he loves most having found them first in Rome. The Nazis are increasingly in control of Vienna; there are swastikas falling from the sky. She describes this as confetti—and each bit of confetti has a message that ‘Hitler will bring you food’, this kind of thing. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Yes. She walks every day from her hotel to Freud’s house, and she daydreams the street or she dreams poetically about the street. And she wants to find the perfect present for Freud’s birthday. But she can’t. When he flees to England, she finally, for his birthday, manages to send him gardenias. But she doesn’t append a note to the gift. She wants only to thank him for everything he’s done. But he knows and he writes her a note to say, ‘This could only be from you.’ The whole aura of intimacy H.D. conveys is so interesting. Yes. She calls it a tribute and I think that’s a good word too. There’s one other tribute to Freud, that’s by Andreas-Salomé. That, too, is quite extraordinary. I think the women who were in analysis with Freud, when they wrote about him, had a different take than the men. They were sensitive to different things. Different things are foregrounded about Freud and about analysis. That makes these writings hugely interesting."