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H.D. has become an icon of feminist literary criticism, studied carefully by women wanting to define the role of women in the arts. She interests psychoanalysts because she was analyzed briefly by Sigmund Freud and wrote extensively about that experience. Freud became a character in her poetic writing, in her fiction, and in her memoirs. His influence on her enabled her not only to write, but to communicate her experience through her writing. Her analysis allowed her to enjoy opera, to be able to sit still for longer periods of time than she had managed before, and to enjoy her daily life. Dianne Chisholm uses H.D.'s writing after her encounter with Freud to understand an aspect of Freud not to be found in his own writings, the effect of his clinical practice from the patient's point of view. H.D., according to Chisholm, knew Freud as the “blameless physician,” mystical healer, romantic reader and quoter of poetry, and visionary thinker. Chisholm shows how H. D. extended and revised Freud's ideas to attribute to the mother, rather than the father, the ultimate power: the source of creativity.
This book is neither a piece of applied analysis nor the reminiscence of a clinical psychoanalysis. It is, rather, an account of how H.D. transformed her memories of Freud's words into a basis for her own feminine and feminist rereading of both European and non-Western mysticism. Using Goethe's poetry as a common language, H.D. and Freud managed to communicate even though they did not share native language, religious background, or philosophical allegiances. Freud gave H.D. access to the universal myths through her dreams, thus enabling her to tap her own creativity and to use it in her writing.
In addition, the form of H.D.'s writing was affected by the experience of her analysis. The pattern that H.D. would use again and