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In 1933, at the age of 47, the accomplished imagist poet known to the literary world as H.D. and to her friends as Hilda Doolittle arrived in Vienna to begin psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud. Because of her intimate relationship with Winifred Ellerman (who changed her name to Bryher), an analysand of Hanns Sachs and an aspiring analytic candidate, as well as her extensive analytic reading,
H.D. was savvy in the ways of the couch and eager to share her experiences with her analytic circle. So Freud's first task was to seal the leak of H.D.'s analysis by exhorting her not to discuss it, not to write about it to others, or even to keep notes about it in her journal. Fortunately for posterity, H.D. did not completely comply with the master's prohibition. She wrote volumes of letters daily during her stay in Vienna, many of which directly portray the analysis in process, others of which offer more tangential views of the life of an analysand. Susan Stanford Friedman has gathered these letters into the massive collection Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher and Their Circle.
This thrilling book offers many rewards. For those who are eager to learn more about Freud the man, H.D.'s depiction adds additional hues and shadows to his portrait. The person she presents is not radically different from the character we have come to recognize, but the new details are piquant and idiosyncratic. H.D.'s letter describing Herr Professor flinging himself between two sparring Chows while she grabs one pup by the fur, and Anna shrieks from the sidelines, for example, transfers our mental image of Freud from a posed photograph to an active piece of film, giving us a side of Freud different from the one we usually encounter.
Clinicians who believe that Freud can still guide practice and offer technical advice will be fascinated by the letters in which H.D. describes her sessions. These include long complex dreams and their interpretations, as well as all the issues that arise in establ