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H. D., the noted writer Hilda Doolittle, wrote three differing accounts of her first analytic session with Freud, held on March 1, 1933. The first account was written on the same day as her session in a letter to her friend Bryher; it indicates that Freud did not meet H. D.’s preformed transference expectation. Although H. D. focused on her fear of Freud’s rejection, her deeper concern was her disappointment in Freud and her fear of loving a person who might die soon. In 1944, five years after Freud’s death, H. D. wrote a second account of the session in “Tribute to Freud” in which she attempted to recall an idealized memory of Freud. To do this her description split the session into a part in which she projected her anger onto Freud and a part in which she reconciled with Freud in a mystical, wordless communication by means of her relation to his dog, Yofi. Her third account, “Advent,” was written in 1948, following a period of psychosis. At that time H. D. was able to acknowledge that she had been frightened of loving a man who was vulnerable to death and to restore Freud’s presence by identifying with his analytic ability.
Clinical assistant professor at the Psychoanalytic Institute at New York University School of Medicine; attending psychiatrist at Maimonides Medical Center, Brooklyn, New York.
A shorter version of this paper was presented at the spring meeting of the Division of Psychoanalysis of the American Psychological Association, April 12, 1991, and at the 37th International Psychoanalytical Congress, July 29, 1991.
The author thanks the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University for permission to quote from their collection of Hilda Doolittle manuscripts. Excerpts from Tribute to Freud by H. D., Copyright © 1974 by Norman Holmes Pearson, and Helen in Egypt by H. D., Copyright © 1961 by Norman Holmes Pearson, are reprinted by permission of New Directions Publication Corporation.
The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 50, ed. Albert J. Solnit, Peter B. Neubauer, Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling (Yale University Press, copyright © 1995 by Albert J. Solnit, Peter B. Neubauer, Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling).