Words and Images in H.D.'s Tribute to Freud*

In contrast to Freud's case histories of his hysterical patients, H.D.'s Tribute to Freud is an account of the psychoanalytic process from the point of view of the patient. Published in 1956, Tribute to Freud recounts H.D.'s psychoanalysis with Freud during 1933 and 1934. Because of H.D.'s poetry and her association with the Imagist movement, Tribute to Freud offers a unique opportunity to examine the interplay between words and images in connection with several psychoanalytic concepts. One can draw an analogy, albeit complex, between H.D. and Freud in terms of their respective relationships to images and words: While Freud sought to replace images with words, H.D. as an Imagist poet and writer used words to conjure up images. Freud's hysterics used the spoken word to replace traumatic images, and in doing so, they gained usage of the symbolic, something that they had previously lacked. H.D. used the written word as an art form to bring to mind images that are not traumatic either to her or to the reader. With the interchange of words and images between H.D. and Freud, from H.D.'s point of view in her writing, Tribute to Freud can be seen as a palimpsest: Words written on a page cover the faint erased images of other words. As H.D. (1956) would say, “There were things under things, as well as things inside things” (p. 49).

H.D.'s stream-of-consciousness style is analogous to the psychoanalytic concept of free association. Free association involves the combination