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Gifts, Goods and Gods: H. D., Freud and Trauma

Do not think me unaware, I who have snatched at you as the street child clutched at the seed pearls you spilt that hot day When your necklace snapped. (1) H.D.'s ENCOUNTER WITH FREUD is literature's encounter with psychoanalysis, an encounter which left neither unchanged. It is the encounter of a woman, surrounded and excluded by male modernists, who found her own voice in her analytic sessions and borrowed the tools of psychoanalysis--condensation, repetition, displacement--to articulate her own message. Dianne Chisholm argues that H.D.'s relationship to Freud's work is that of a translator, a translator who revises as she repeats (2). H.D.'s Tribute to Freud is not simply a translation but is also an elegy, and as such only possible in his absence. (2) A gift to Freud, it also traces the flowering of her own poetic gift, and is as much a self-tribute as a tribute to another. Most crucially, it charts a substitution, where H.D. takes Freud's place, and in doing so, assumes her own. Hilda Doolittle was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1866 and moved to Philadelphia when she was nine, where her father was director of the Flower Astronomical Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. (3) She attended Bryn Mawr briefly before moving to Europe in 1911, where she was to spend the rest of her life. H.D. was engaged to Ezra Pound in her youth, and was later jilted by him. Pound remained a crucial poetic influence in her life. In 1912 he renamed her "H.D. Imagiste" and was the first to publicize her poems. Once H.D. was established as a poet, with the help of Pound's mediation, she served as artistic vanguard, token woman and resident muse for a group of mostly male modernist writers. H.D. claims that her treatment with Freud was intended to explore the traumatic effects of the First World War, during which she lost a brother and miscarried a child. (4) Yet the war itself is barely addressed in the treatment: it becomes a notable absence. H.D.'s silence about the First World War comes from her fear of the proximity of another conflict and her associated fear for Freud's own safety. H.D. began her treatment with Freud in 1933, though he was not her first or last analyst and though her interest in psychoanalysis preceded her treatment. (5) Critical attention to H.D. has disproportionately focused on H.D.'s account of her analysis in Tribute to Freud, which lasted from March 1, 1933 to mid-June of the same year and resumed for five weeks in 1934. Harold Bloom ungenerously calls Tribute to Freud "a rather overpraised book" and "a kind of hagiography," seeing the book itself as symptom not of H.D.'s artistic block or recovery but of "a new faith in the Freud era" (2). Yet recent critics have focused less on the book as tribute or hagiography and more on the book as encounter between H.D. and Freud, or more abstractly, between literature and psychoanalysis, or more strategically, between Freud and what is read as H.D.'s emergent feminism. H.D.'s account has become a nodal point for the continuing agon between Freudianism and feminism and H.D.'s recent feminist critics have, as Claire Buck points out, "embarked on the project of demonstrating how H.D. could have the apple without the maggot" (98). This project has taken the form of seeing H.D.'s Tribute not only as supplement to Freud but as corrective. (6) Dianne Chisholm's thesis can be taken as paradigmatic in this respect. Chisholm writes: "In some dramatic way, H.D. becomes Freud, curing herself of the blocks and gaps that infect the telling of her life story, and, at the same time, healing Freud of discursive foreclosures in scientific skepticism, Schopenhauerian pessimism, and metapsychological misogyny" (4). In Chisholm's account, the agency belongs entirely to H.D. H.D. is not cured by Freud, but cures herself. She steps into the position of healer or physician that she ascribes to Freud and extends the treatment to Freud, and by implication, to psychoanalysis. …