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

by H.D., Bryher, Susan Stanford Friedman (Editor)

A landmark book in the studies of Freud, H.D., modernism, gender, and sexuality. The poet H.D. (1886-1961) was in psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud in Vienna during the spring of 1933 and again in the fall of 1934. She visited him daily at his study at 19 Berggasse, while outside Nazi thugs and militia bullied their way through the streets. Freud was old, and fragile. H.D. was forty-six and despairing of her writing life, which seemed to have reached a dead end, for all her success. Her sessions with Freud proved to be the point of transition, the funnel into which were poured her memories of the past and associations in the presentand from which she emerged reborn. H.D. came to Freud at the urging of her companion, the novelist Bryher (1884-1983), the daughter of a wealthy British shipping magnate. Freud welcomed H.D. as a creative spirit whose work he respected, but he did ask her not to prepare for their sessions, write about them in her journal, or talk about them with her friends, especially Bryher, who remained home in England. H.D.'s letters from Vienna filled the gap. Breezy, informal, irreverent, vibrant with detail, they revolve around her hours with Freud, making her correspondence unique in the spectrum of reminiscences, journals, memoirs, and biographies swirling around the legacy of the "Professor" and the movement he founded. The volume includes H.D. and Bryher's letters, as well as letters by Freud to H.D. and Bryher, most of them published for the first time. In addition, the book includes H.D. and Bryher's letters to and from Havelock Ellis, Kenneth MacPherson, Robert McAlmon, Ezra Pound, and Anna Freud, among others. Fully annotated with Index and Photographs

Genres: Nonfiction

615 pages, Hardcover

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.