Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle

by H.D.

A landmark book about Sigmund Freud, H.D., modernism, gender, and sexuality.
Freud was old and fragile. H.D. was forty-six and despairing of her writing life, which, for all her success, seemed to have reached a dead end. Her sessions with Freud proved to be the point of transition, the funnel into which she poured her memories of the past and associations in the present and from which she emerged reborn. Breezy, informal, irreverent, vibrant in detail, H.D.'s letters to her companion, the novelist Bryher, revolve around her hours with Freud. This volume includes H.D.'s and Bryher's letters, as well as letters by Freud to H.D. and Bryher, most of them published here for the first time. In addition, the book includes H.D.'s and Bryher's letters to and from Havelock Ellis, Kenneth MacPherson, Robert McAlmon, Ezra Pound, and Anna Freud, among others.

Genres: Nonfiction

640 pages, Paperback

First published November 29, 2002

About the author

An innovative modernist American writer, Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961) wrote under her initials in a career that stretched from 1909 to 1961. H.D., most well known for her lyric and epic poetry, also wrote novels, memoirs, short stories, essays, reviews, a children’s book, and translations. An American woman who lived her adult life abroad, H.D. was engaged in the formalist experimentation that preoccupied much of her generation. A range of thematic concerns resonates through her writing: the role of the poet, the civilian representation of war, material and mythologized ancient cultures, the role of national and colonial identity, lesbian and queer sexuality, and religion and spirituality.

Reviews

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

The only detailed, firsthand epistolary account of an analysand's personal experiences on the couch of Sigmund Freud. An astonishing book, and it's hard to limit my comments on what intrigued me about these letters between H.D., Bryher, Freud, and others. One is moved by H.D.'s intense, painful work in analysis to overcome her blocks and phobias, most of which were caused by her trauamtic experiences during World War I. Her analysis is in two parts, one in 1933 and the other in 1934. In the first part, Freud becomes her mother in the transference, and it seems as though she will never move beyond that fixation to examine her emotions about her father. On her return to Vienna in 1934, however, she is prepared to delve into this realm, and Freud becomes "the father-who-terrifies" in the transference. All the time, as the brilliant editor of the letters comments in the afterward, Freud and H.D. "used psychoanalysis not as a hermetically sealed realm of escape from the gathering storm" of Nazism "but as a means of understanding the foundations of violence and desire in the human psyche." Bryher, of course, is the other central player in the exchange of letters. Bryher's work to rescue refugees from Germany and Austria was an epic, herculean effort. Bryher was herself a brilliant author and patron of intellectuals. The one truly disturbing aspect of the letters, however, sadly, is Bryher's casual racism toward black people--she is the "white liberal" cliche, the white person who means to combat prejudice but is casually, unconsciously cruel. Overall, though, the book allowed me to become intimate with important historical figures whose lives have become faded with time.

[Kit · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reconstructs admirably and movingly a world and a set of unique relationships between geniuses and other talented people.