Meeting of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York

January 28, 1991. "LAZARUS STAND FORTH"—H.D. ENCOUNTERS FREUD. William D. Jeffrey, M.D.

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), well known in literary circles as a member of the Imagist School, wrote three different accounts of her first analytic session with Freud, which took place on March 1, 1933. Her impressions were captured in a letter, a diary, and articles written between 1933 and 1948. She originally began psychoanalytic treatment in 1931 with her friend, the analyst Mary Chadwick. Shortly afterward she consulted Hanns Sachs and was referred to Freud. She came to Freud for help in dealing with a series of losses, including a miscarriage, the deaths of her brother and father, and her divorce. She was in treatment with Freud from March through June 1933 and in November 1934. Using H.D.'s accounts of her first session, Dr. William Jeffrey has examined the patient's underlying conflicts and her treatment experience with Freud. He has done so with an awareness of the distortions to be expected in a subjective account of a therapeutic encounter.

Immediately after meeting Freud for the first time, H.D. wrote to her friend and lover, Winifred Ellerman ("Bryher"). (The letter is part of a complete unpublished set contained in the Beinecke Library at Yale University.) Her first impressions of Freud were as a seducer: she must take off her coat, she is led around the room in order to admire antiquities, there are "dim lights, like an opium den," and she is asked to lie on the couch. Her description of Freud as a "little white ghost" reveals her ambivalence and her concerns about death. As Dr. Jeffrey noted, "A ghost has succumbed to death; a ghost has overcome death." Freud was old, small, and handicapped by a jaw prosthesis at the time H.D. met him. She recalled Freud's making the following statement: "Now although it is against the rules, I will tell you something: you are disappointed in me." According to Dr. Jeffrey, Freud correctly interpreted H.D.'s intense pre