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I am going to present some scenes from a drama in which the Goddess Athene and the rest of Freud's antiquities play symbolic roles. The drama depicts a search, transferences, and transformations. In its center is a psychologically vulnerable woman, the American expatriate writer/poet Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961).
The poet comes for analysis with Freud to overcome her writing block. Her writing has slowed to a mere trickle (Friedman, 1981). This is H. D.'s first impression of the setting for her analysis: “I think that if the chow hadn't liked me, I would have left, I was so scared by Oedipus. … A
H. D.'s letters to Bryher and Kenneth Macpherson (published in Guest, 1985; Robinson, 1982; Friedman, 1981, 1986), her Tribute to Freud (1956), and her poetry (in Martz, Untermeyer, Ellman and O'Clair, Guest, Robinson, and Friedman) are the main source for my interpretations of her transferences to Freud. For biographical information and critical assessments I have relied on her biographers Barbara Guest and Janice Robinson and on H. D. scholar Susan Stanford Friedman. Friedman's two lectures in Chicago on H. D.'s analysis with Freud, her letters to Bryher and Macpherson, and the three-way correspondence between Freud, Bryher, and H. D.'s fascinating, funny, poetic letters to my attention. My perspective is primarily clinical. I am neither sufficiently immersed in H. D.'s works nor qualified in literary criticism to assess the claim that she is a “major 20th-century writer, modernist poet” (Friedman, 1981). However, my clinical views differ substantially from Friedman's (where she describes a “collaboration” between Freud and H. D. I describe transferences). In any case, her work opened up the possibility of an “inside” look at H. D.'s analysis with Freud and its role in her recovery as a writer.
sphynx faces the bed. I did not want to go to bed, the white ‘napkin for the head’ was the only professional touch, there were dim lights, like an opium dive …” (H. D., letter to Bryher, March 1, 1933, quoted in Robinson, 1982, p. 278).
The analysis starts when H. D. is 47 years old. She is a brainy mystic, a serious student of the ancient world and its languages, a believer in the spirit world, astrology, and the occult. H. D. “believed that her creative inspiration had slowed to a trickle, leading to labored work that came with painful difficulty and dissatisfied her greatly” (Friedman, 1986, p. 329). It is understood that the purpose of the analysis is to restore her creative drive and direction (Friedman, 1986, p. 329). For ten years she has had “a growing feeling of stagnation, of lethargy. … [she feels] dead to this life” (H. D., 1956, p. 80). She is unable to free her poetry from the “restrictive yoke of imagism” and find her own voice; her intensely autobiographical fiction was rejected by publishers; and she is unable to complete the translations of Greek poetry for which she would become known. For example, she is unable to complete her translation of Euripides' Ion, a work uncannily close to her own life (Ion is about a mortal woman impregnated by Apollo who does not acknowledge his paternity; Athene is called in to resolve the problem. Compare this with the discussion of H. D.'s pregnancy later in this chapter).
A 5′11″ beauty, H. D. is known in her circle of intellectuals and artists for her wit, gaiety, and charm (William Carlos Williams described her as a mixture of butterfly, hummingbird, giraffe, [and] workhorse [Guest, 1985, p. 160]). She is a lost soul—Hermione is her persona, Perdita is her fatherless daughter (Hermione and Perdita are mother and daughter in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale); she is intense and fragile; extremely susceptible to rejections, she suffers serious episodes of fragmentation and/or depletion (for example, she develops what Freud called “dangerous sysptoms” on the island of Corfu where she saw writing on the wall [H. D., 1956, p. 68]); she has at least one major breakdown (after WW II she is hospitalized at Kusnach Klinik in Switzerland for six months).
The time of the drama is March, 1933 (see H. D.'s [1956] account of the analysis in Tribute to Freud, written in 1944; the exact dates of the two-part analysis with Freud are March to May or June, 1933, and October, 1934, to December 1, 1934). Swastikas are chalked on the sidewalk leading to Freud's office at 19 Berggasse (H. D., 1956, p. 88). The Nazis burned his books in Berlin the previous May. H. D. leaves her “Pup” (daughter Perdita) with the members of her ménage à trois in London: the troubled writer Bryher (Winifred Ellerman) and film critic and director Kenneth Macpherson (both have been her lovers). She journeys alone to Vienna. Up to now her lengthy search for “substantiation” has failed.
(She sought strengths she did not possess within herself from magnetic men she dubbed “initiators,” men such as Ezra Pound, her former husband Richard Aldington, and her elusive spiritual “twin” D. H. Lawrence. She sought strengthening and substantiation through sexuality, from many lovers, men as well as women; from motherhood; from sessions with Havelock Ellis [see Grosskurth's (1980) revelations about her relationship with Ellis in her biography, Havelock Ellis]; and from an earlier try at analysis in England with Mary Chadwick in 1931. [She also saw Hans Sachs briefly in preparation for seeing Freud. In her view (Friedman, 1981, p. 18) she could not make the transference with either one.])
Freud is 77, frail from the fight against his recurring malignancy. His lengthy search for insights into women patients for whom psychoanalysis failed has just come to a conclusion (Freud, 1933). His final formulations on the “female castration complex” were published the previous year. Thus, from a theoretical point of view, the poet's arrival for treatment is timely. It can even be a test of the psychology of women that occupied Freud and many of his women colleagues for the past decade. From a political point of view, it would appear that it is hardly a good time for an analysis. However, Freud is merely ironic about the danger. He tells H. D. that progress has been made: although the Nazis burned his books, “at least, they have not burnt me at the stake” (quoted in H. D., 1956, p. 155).1 H. D. moves into the Hotel Regina and goes for her analytic hours at dusk four days a week and at noon one day a week (H. D., 1956, p. 2).