You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This is a fascinating book of interesting primary documents that are all written with verve. Readers ought not to be put off by the journalistically inflated language of the early pages of the editor's Introduction, an unworthy entrance hall to all the lovingly careful scholarship to be found later in the text. It is beyond my competence to assess just how important a poet Hilda Doolittle, known as “H.D.,” was, but her circle of intimate friends, including Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and D. H. Lawrence, as well as others, does assure her a place within intellectual history. Her closest writing friend seems to have been Winifred Ellerman, an immensely rich Englishwoman who took the name of Bryher. Bryher, in close contact with Havelock Ellis, had come under the sway of the Viennese-born analyst Hanns Sachs, one of the less well-known members of Freud's so-called secret Committee. Bryher intended to become an analyst herself, and financially supported the analyses of a number of people, including H. D. with Freud.
In 1956, the year of Freud's centenary, H. D. published an attractive book called Tribute to Freud that contained a handful of Freud's letters to her. She also indicated that she herself had earlier, before the analysis with Freud, experienced what sounded like visual hallucinations, without any toxic stimulant. Freud seems to have told H. D. it was a “delirium” (p. 115). I can remember one famous New York psychiatrist who, forty years ago, disdainfully wrote H. D. off as a psychotic that Freud had been incapable of diagnosing properly. Whatever the “normal” psychopathology of poets may turn out to be like—and psychiatrists of a DSM orientation are likely to see an appalling number of them as falling into the wastebasket now known as “bipolar”—Freud got on unusually well with H. D.
Both H. D. and Bryher were bisexual, but by the time of these