Author's Note: This, the Appendix to my revised edition of Poems in Persons, is reprinted here with the gracious consent of the publisher, Cybereditions.com. I also wish to acknowledge my deep gratitude to Professor Susan Stanford Friedman for access to her forthcoming edition of the letters in which H.D. described her analysis and for her advice and counsel.

H.D.'s Analysis with Freud

Norman Holland

I

    The story of H.D. and Freud begins in 1915, the year H.D.'s first child was stillborn. Hilda Doolittle was herself born in 1886, the daughter of a distinguished astronomer, "who seldom [wrote William Carlos Williams] even at table focused upon anything nearer, literally, than the moon" (67). Her mother seems to have been equally abstracted. H.D. was the one girl among five brothers. One of them, Gilbert, the one just older than she, was not only her mother's admitted favorite but someone with whom H.D. herself identified./1/

    In 1915 she was twenty-nine, her poetry just coming to be recognized. Two years earlier, she had married her fellow-Imagist, Richard Aldington. "From shock and repercussions of war news broken to me in a rather brutal fashion," she lost her first child (40). (Unlabeled page numbers like that refer to the 1974 edition of Tribute.) In 1916, Aldington left to fight in France. Sometime during this period, he began various affairs, and they separated in 1919 (though, interestingly, she does not discuss or even mention this in Tribute to Freud)./2/

    In 1918 her favorite brother was killed in action in France, and her father died a year later from the stroke he suffered at the news. Also in 1918, H.D. met the poet Bryher (pen-name of the wealthy Winifred Ellerman), and they became fast friends, possibly lovers at some time, but certainly lifelong companions in a platonic, lesbian relationship. At the end of 1919, she was sick with double pneumonia and awaiting the birth of her second child. (Cecil Gray, not Aldington, was the father, and this made trouble later.) H.D. was determined that this child would live, and Perdita (so her mother named her) did live. After the pregnancy, she was weak from flu and pneumonia and psychologically overcome by all these events./3/

    Bryher rescued her, taking her first to the Scilly Isles, then to Greece to recover. On the boat to Corfu, H.D. had a rather surreal shipboard romance with one Peter Rodeck that figured importantly in the analysis and her later writings. Even more important was an hallucination or mystical vision of extraordinary intensity that she experienced on Corfu with Byher, the "writing on the wall." As she describes it in the memoir, it was exhausting but not frightening to her, though she felt it as occult and so described it to Freud in the analysis many years later. He, however, singled this vision out as "the most dangerous or the only actually dangerous `symptom'."/4/

    Aldington had quite left H.D. by this time, and H.D. and Bryher and sometimes H.D's mother provided a family for Perdita as they lived and traveled around England, the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East. Bryher married Robert McAlmon in 1921, but H.D.'s sexual relationship with Bryher continued even after the marriage. McAlmon told "of long train trips about the continent with the two women quarreling in the compartment driving him nearly insane." In his autobiography, William Carlos Williams wrote that H.D. had some part in the marriage's final "disastrous outcome" and the McAlmons' separation and divorce (190, 219), and (Norman Holmes Pearson, H.D.'s long-time friend and literary executor, told me) McAlmon "broke with Bill Wms on this."/5/

    In 1926, H.D. met Kenneth Macpherson and fell passionately in love with him. She, Bryher, and Macpherson set up a ménage à trois. To safeguard this arrangement, because H.D. was undivorced from Aldington, Bryher married Macpherson in 1927, and the couple adopted Perdita. Bryher was in love with H.D., and H.D. was in love with Macpherson, and, platonically by this time, with Bryher as well. This trio echoed a much earlier triangle in H.D.'s life, herself, her first lesbian lover, Frances Gregg, and her fiancé, Ezra Pound. With the child Perdita, the three adults lived and worked together--"a composite beast with three faces," H.D. had playfully written to Havelock Ellis in 1928. Macpherson, however, increasingly became involved with drink, café life in Paris, and younger men. He gradually withdrew from the ménage after 1932. This complicated history H.D. brought to the fascinated Freud./6/

II

    When I was first writing about H.D. in 1968, Norman Holmes Pearson described H.D. to me as "passionately heterosexual". Freud, in H.D.'s then published account, the version of Tribute to Freud published in 1956, did not single out anything relating to homosexuality as part of her psychic life, although he had read Palimpsest before meeting H.D. In 1968, these protective accounts were all I knew about her sexuality./7/

    Since then, scholars have uncovered and published many new materials, which are much more explicit. They tell us a great deal more about the analysis, about H.D.'s life, and about her feelings toward Freud. It is these writings that make possible a much more detailed study of her analysis with Freud./8/

    These newer writings, especially H.D.'s account of the analysis in letters to Bryher, clearly establish, among other things, a large number of both homo- and heterosexual relations in her life. They also show that Freud directed a good deal of attention to homosexuality and bisexuality in the analysis. Yet H.D. did not mention these issues in her memoir, nor did Freud, in his letters to H.D. after the analysis. Both Freud and H.D. were quite guarded in public about her sexuality, given the homophobic climate of the time (as evidenced, for example, by the rage directed at Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness when that lesbian novel appeared in 1928). In any case, given Freud's theories in 1933, the loss of self-object boundaries in the mystical vision on Corfu would have seemed and did seem to him of more moment./9/

    These newly published materials reveal that H.D. sought therapy with Freud because she had blocked as a writer. In Tribute she wrote of the wish to free herself of "repetitive thoughts and experiences," to "take stock of my very modest possessions of mind and body," "to sort out, relive and reassemble the singular series of events and dreams that belonged in historical time, to the 1914-1919 period" (13, 91). In 1931, at Bryher's urging, she had had twenty-four sessions with an analyst in London, Mary Chadwick, but they proved unsatisfactory. She then had, during the winter of 1931-32, five sessions with Hanns Sachs in Berlin, but he was fleeing Germany for America. Sachs asked her if she would consider working with "the Professor" if he would take her. She would, he did, and she began work with Freud on March 1, 1933./10/

    Bryher financed the analysis (and a number of other psychoanalytic activities). Freud conducted it in English (as he had often done for English and American patients after World War I). H.D. writes of her own German as "sketchy," while Freud "was speaking English without a perceptible trace of accent." She worked with Freud "between three and four months" (4), actually, from March 1 to June 12, fourteen weeks and three days. They met, with one exception, from five to six in the afternoon. H.D. broke off the analysis on June 12 and left Vienna, not planning to return, because she was frightened by a bomb on the tracks of a tram she was riding (Bryher 263-64)./11/

    H.D. did return, however, at the end of October 1934. Austria's relations with Germany were deteriorating rapidly-- Dollfuss, the Chancellor, had been assassinated by Nazi revolutionaries that July. What brought H.D. back was the news that one of the Professor's other patients, a philosopher-mystic-pilot nicknamed "the Flying Dutchman," had crashed and died in Tanganyika. She had a short but severe breakdown as a result. In this second series of sessions, they met "four days a week from five to six; one day, from twelve to one" (4). This analysis lasted five weeks, from October 31, 1934 to December 2, 1934, when "The war closed on us" (91)./12/

    The relationship between H.D. and Freud differed markedly from the therapeutic or training analysis of today. A modern analyst would want more than five months before calling the work analysis. For Freud, five months would be enough (for training, anyway) if "deep" material was reached, and it is clear that it was. Ernest Jones, in his brief review of her book, says quite directly, "She was analyzed by Freud for some months in the year 1933-34." There may be simply a question of terminology here, for Freud himself could write, "I analyzed Mahler for an afternoon in the year 1912."/13/

    Further, as many scholars have shown, Freud's own analytic style hardly conformed to today's practice or to the rules he set down for his followers. He would, for example, lead H.D. into the adjoining room to show her one of his archaeological figures that made a point. He also talked a good deal of theory with her. And they repeatedly exchanged gifts, lent each other books, and so on. Freud was exceedingly solicitous of her well-being during her stay in Vienna-- "tender" is a word she uses over and over again in the letters./14/

    Most surprisingly, Freud, as other analysands have reported, kept one or both of his chow dogs in the room while the analysis was going on. Indeed, at one point, the dogs got into a fight, as H.D. reported to Bryher:

Terrible time yesterday and it frightened me, Yo-fi flew at Lun. Freud flung himself on the floor between, I thought he would be torn to pieces, and Anna [Freud] tore in screaming in German "papalein belovestest, thou shoudst not have done that." I rushed in half-way and got Lun by the fur and the maid intervened, and there was Freud sitting on the floor with all his money rolling in all directions under the still-blooming orchids. Very funny. And tragic ... shows just how terribly young he is ... a born fighter, so frail ... Anna was so upset. But she finally left me alone with him and Yo-fi was remouved. The pups are very, very pretty, like little bears (5/18/33)./15/

    (In this quotation and those below, indications that are page numbers refer to Tribute and indications that are dates refer to the letters now being edited. Dated letters are to Bryher unless I name another correspondent. In quoting H.D., closely spaced ellipsis points are hers, and she used them much as we might use dashes; the looser ones are mine. Unusual spellings are more likely to be her choice than my typo.)/16/

    In general, the dogs bulked large in the analysis. During the 1933 sessions, Yo-fi became pregnant and gave birth to two pups. During one session, H.D. wrote to Bryher, "A new horror, the pups crawled in and had a LOUD dinner off their mother. What next????????????" (6/1/33). Freud wanted to give one of these pups to Perdita. H.D. and Bryher, knowing that their nomadic living situation made a dog impossible, fretted at length about how to fend Freud off without distressing him./17/

    Part of the informality came about because Freud evidently related to H.D. not only as her training analyst but also as a teacher. "The Professor had said in the beginning that he classed me in the same category as the Flying Dutchman--we were students." "Seekers or 'students' . . . he calls us." "One day he said to me, 'You discovered for yourself what I discovered for the race'" (18, 14). H.D. often felt proud that she was treated as an intellectual equal: "`Of course, you understand' is the offhand way in which he offers me, from time to time, some rare discovery, some priceless finding, or `Perhaps you may feel differently' as if my feelings, my discoveries, were on a par with his own" (86)./18/

    All this sounds as though Freud undertook the analysis of H.D. and the others like her in order to give a group of intellectually special people a "feel" for psychoanalytic ideas and method. Presumably he hoped to spread psychoanalysis as an intellectual discipline. Indeed H.D. had written to Havelock Ellis as negotiations with Freud had opened, "Dr. F.  . . . in fact, says openly, he can not take on people who have nothing to offer in return, any more . . . or words to that effect" (1/17/3). And, after the first analysis, she wrote to Conrad Aiken, "Freud considered me and the Dutchman [J. J. Van der Leeuw], he said, as rather special--not crazy, not professional, but people who would `help.'" (8/26/34)./19/

IV

    The analysis became a central event in H.D.'s life. She referred to it again and again in letters and in her creative writings./20/

    In 1944, H.D. wrote a memoir of her analysis, Tribute to Freud. She based it on a diary she had kept during the analysis, but she left the diary in Switzerland during World War II and hence did not use it during the actual writing. She wrote her memoir as a series of memories in free association. Details about Freud and his technique as a therapist mingle with the visions and themes of H.D.'s own life. Trying to understand her analysis through Tribute to Freud involves a good many interpretations and inferences, yet the book reveals a great deal if we understand it as associations./21/

    One major feature of Tribute was her description and her interpretation (and Freud's) of an elaborate mystical vision on Corfu while traveling--recuperating, really--with Bryher. The vision embodied an almost unbelievable richness of symbol, association, and theme, consolidating a whole mass of charged materials for H.D. No wonder she felt completely exhausted after the vision. No wonder Freud singled out this vision "as the most dangerous or the only actually dangerous `symptom.'" (41). The deeper and earlier the psychological rift, the more serious the illness./22/

    Indeed, she first published the memoir as "Writing on the Wall" in Life and Letters Today (1945-6), referring to the Corfu vision. Then, in publishing it as a book in 1956, she went along with Norman Holmes Pearson's suggestion of a change and used the Tribute title. Then Tribute was re-published in 1974 (after her death). Interestingly, as Adalaide Morris has pointed out, there is an ambiguity in "tribute." It is a gift, praise given freely, but it is also a tax that must be paid./23/

    While she was being analyzed, however, she persisted (against Freud's admonitions) in writing letters to her lover Bryher, and others, describing the analysis in great detail. Freud regarded such asides as a "leak" in the analysis or, as one would say today, a "split transference" through which valuable material would be siphoned off. As Nora Crow puts it, Bryher functioned as a kind of co-analyst or even counter-analyst./24/

    In these letters, she said explicitly many things only implicit in Tribute or not mentioned at all. She used psychoanalytic terminology, and she wrote about her sexuality, both excluded from Tribute. She wrote freely about fantasies, dreams, masturbation, sexual affairs, including lesbianism and bisexuality, penis envy, the primal scene, and oedipal and pre-oedipal stages of development. She spelled out the link between bisexuality and her writer's block, between her love for women (or certain men) and for her mother, and between her war terrors and her primal scene fears. Further, the letters, assiduously dated, provide a chronology missing from Tribute. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University holds these letters in its H.D. collection. Susan Stanford Friedman is editing them, and I am exceedingly grateful to her for allowing me to read her nearly-completed--and, as an example of editing, outstanding--manuscript. It is, at the time I write, entitled, "H.D. and Freud: Diary of an Analysis in Letters, 1932- 1937" and is to be published by New Directions Press. Where Tribute lets us see the analysis all at once, from a distance, as it were, these letters give us a day-by-day sequential view. The letters constitute a history of her sessions with Freud, while Tribute consists of memories, free associations, really, to the analysis./25/

    She wrote still more about the analysis. In 1948, H.D. "assembled" a text in journal form from notes she kept during the first three weeks of analysis with Freud in 1933 and later destroyed. This text became Advent, added as a third section to the most recent edition of Tribute (1974), the continuation of the memoir "or," wrote H.D., "its prelude."/26/

    During 1941-3, frightened by the bombings of London, she wrote The Gift, a memoir of her early childhood, using those memories to contain her current terror at the war. The memoir carries out a kind of self-analysis of her childhood experiences, prompted by war terrors. It continues her analysis of and explains some of the childhood themes she had opened up with Freud but not written about elsewhere. The Gift was not published at all until 1982 and not completely until 1998./27/

    The most startling of her comments on the analysis comes in a poem she angrily refused to publish during her lifetime, "The Master." It was probably written in 1935, shortly after the analysis, but not discovered and published until twenty years after her death in 1961. Here she wrote about her deep disagreements with Freud with considerable heat, in quite a different tone from the warm positive transference in Tribute and the letters./28/

    Other poetic comments, even more disguised, occur in the dialogue between Kaspar and Mary Magdalene in The Flowering of the Rod, written in 1944, and in the Theseus sequence in Helen in Egypt (1961, pp. 147-92), Kaspar and Theseus standing in for Freud. Further, she refers from time to time in all her writings to a "master" or "sage" who may or may not be Freud./29/

    After leaving Vienna in 1934, H.D. continued her analysis with Walter Schmideberg in London. They met five times a week from October of 1935 to May of 1937 in an analysis ambivalently influenced by Melanie Klein. Her thesis of overwhelming aggression in the early mother-child relationship was already provoking controversy in pre-war London. Again, letters to Bryher have enabled scholars, in particular Susan Edmunds, to study this analysis. Finally, there was a still later analysis during her residence in Switzerland with Erich Heydt (1953-1961), but about these sessions, little has been written./30/

    In tracing the course of her self- discovery, I shall rely at first on two primary sources, Tribute to Freud and the letters she wrote during and about the analysis, later on "The Master" and The Gift./31/

    H.D. wrote Tribute to Freud almost like a psychoanalysis itself, as a series of free associations, letting her thoughts lead her where they would. The associations are not entirely free, however. She omits so as to protect her privacy, saying almost nothing about her contemporary life and very little about her adult life at all. She is completely silent on matters of adult sexuality, substituting a whole series of mythological associations. Only once does she make a straightforward interpretation. Most of the time she relies without explanation on connotations and verbal echoes in her own and, particularly, in Freud's phrasings. We, her readers, are left to make the connections ourselves. By contrast, the letters make what they talk about very clear, using the technical language of psychoanalysis, quoting both herself and Freud verbatim and spelling out H.D.'s feelings./32/

    One way to give these varied materials sequence is to follow out the changing roles in which H.D. cast Freud. One would expect H.D. (or any other analysand) in the transference situation of psychoanalysis to transfer or project onto the analyst her positive and negative feelings toward the key figures of her childhood--her mother, her father, and, in H.D.'s case, the brother who was so especially important to her. Further, it was part of H.D.'s character to read people as avatars of mythological figures or of primary persons in her life. As H.D. wrote many years later, in Helen in Egypt, "There was always another and another and another" (174), each substituting for the next. In seeking, then, the common source in childhood of H.D.'s lifestyle and her literary style, we can use Freud himself, as she assigns him a succession of roles in the transference, for an Ariadne thread./33/

    We can enter the labyrinth of her analysis with H.D. herself, for "Undoubtedly," she noted, "the Professor took an important clue from the first reaction of a new analysand or patient." When first she entered his consulting room, Freud stood waiting for the tall, shy woman of forty-seven to speak. H.D., however, silently took an inventory of the contents of the room, Freud's collection of Greek and Egyptian antiquities. Finally, "waiting and finding that I would not or could not speak, he uttered. What he said--and I thought a little sadly--was, `You are the only person who has ever come into this room and looked at the things in the room before looking at me'" (97-8). The Professor might have taken a clue to H.D.'s tendency to approach someone she desired through an intermediary, particularly a mythological object or symbol./34/

    As an index to the very different style of the letters, compare this report on the same episode that H. D. wrote to Havelock Ellis:

He let me wander about and then remarked rather whimsically and ironically that he saw that I was not really interested in him, nor in humanity, that the FIRST entrance of the analysand was most important, and my first instinct was to look at the Greek and Egyptian collection and not at HIM. So far, so good. He is terribly penetrating of course, but very, very non-frightening and tender. I was very upset for the first few hours (3/13/33).

I staggered down Berg Gasse, having timed it to take about ten slow minutes, or eight fast, this morning. The entrance was lovely with wide steps and a statue in a court-yard before a trellis and gave me time to powder, only a gent with an attaché case emerged and looked at me knowingly, and I thought, "ah--the Professor's last" and found the door still open from his exit, to let enter cat, who was moaned over by a tiny stage-maid who took off the gun-metal rubbers and said I should not wear my coat. I stuck to the coat, was ushered into waiting room, and before I could adjust before joyless-street mirror, a little white ghost emerged at my elbow and I nearly fainted, it said "enter fair madame" and I did and a small but furry chow got up in the other room, and came and stood at my feet. God. I think if the chow hadn't liked me, I would have left, I was so scared by Oedipus. I shook all over, he said I must take off my coat, I said I was cold, he led me around room and I admired bits of Pompeii in red, a bit of Egyptian cloth and some authentic coffin paintings. A sphynx faces the bed. I did not want to go to bed, the white "napkin for the head" was the only professional touch, there were dim lights, like an opium dive. I started to talk about Sachs and Chaddie [Mary Chadwick] and my experience with ps-a. He said he would prefer me to recline. He has a real fur rug, and I started to tell him how turtle [Hanns Sachs] had none, he seemed vaguely shocked, then remarked, "I see you are going to be very difficult. Now although it is against the rules, I will tell you something: YOU WERE DISAPPOINTED, AND YOU ARE DISAPPOINTED IN ME." I then let out a howl, and screamed, "but do you not realize you are everything, you are priest, you are magician." He said, "no. It is you who are poet and magician." I then cried so I could hardly utter and he said that I had looked at the pictures, preferring the mere dead shreds of antiquity to his living presence. I then yelled, "but you see your dog liked me, when your dog came, I knew it was all right, as it would not have liked me if you had not." He said, "ah, an English proverb but reversed, like me and you like my dog." I corrected him, "love me, love my dog" and he growled and purred with delight. He then gave me a long speech on how sad it was for a poet to listen to his bad English. I then howled some more and said he was not a person but a voice, and that in looking at antiquity, I was looking at him. He said I had got to the same place as he, we met, he in the childhood of humanity--antiquity--l in my own childhood. I cried some more and the hour was already more than half gone. it was terrible. I go now at five regularly. I could not tackle him about money but will try to-morrow. He is not there at all, is simply a ghost and I simply shake all over and cry. He kept asking me if I wanted the lights changed. He sat, not at, but on the pillow and hammered with his fist to point his remarks and mine. I am terrified of Oedipus Rex. What am I to do? He finally made me stand beside him and said though I was taller, he was nearly as tall. I had said maybe I was disappointed that he was not a giant, as being taller made me grown up; in my dreams now I was always a child. We compromised... but he seemed to have won. Then I got as far as the door and the professor said "ah" and there, snug under the rug, were my bags (I had taken two small ones instead of a big one). So I did win after all, he saw then that I was not disappointed in him... but it was all too awful, I shall never get over Oedipus and I go tomorrow and on and on. He is terrible, dope and dope and dope [dope=psychoanalytic data or interpretation]. We talked of race and the war, he said I was English from America and that was not difficult, "what am I?' I said, "well, a Jew--" he seemed to want me to make the statement. I then went on to say that that too was a religious bond as Jew was the only member of antiquity that still lived in the world. He said, "in fragments." 0 Lord... you said he would not talk and he talked half the time and he would not let me lie and dream and made me talk; not with T [Turtle=Sachs], and Chaddie, I was never at a loss for a word, but this old Oedipus Rex has got me... I told him so, sobbing, and said I had not cried in the other hours. 0 Lord, write me!" (3/1/33)./35/

    From this letter, we can read H.D.'s sheer excitement about the analysis, her emotionality, and how she came to Freud already primed for awe and submission and, perhaps, a little resentment at her submission. Even so, she approached "the Professor," "Oedipus," "papa," not only through the collection and mythology, but also the dog./36/

    Having, so to speak, reached Freud- the-father through these intermediaries, she then approached, through him, her mother. In an unusual move for an analysand, she seems to have plunged immediately to the very deep, maternal level of her infantile unconscious. "The Professor said I had not made the conventional transference from mother to father, as is usual with a girl at adolescence. He said he thought my father was a cold man." (136, 175). Freud apparently explained to her that both girls and boys first fixate on their mothers. Girls then usually "transfer" their desire to their fathers. But she had not done so. Hence her rapid transference to Freud as mother./37/

    Thus, two weeks into the analysis, she wrote Bryher, "I made this peculiar, unexpected dip or drop into earliest layers, with mother-transference, which Freud says is most important" (3/16/33). And even earlier, nine sessions into her analysis, she reported to Bryher:

This is funny. My TRANSFERENCE seems to have taken place and what is it? This--Chiron [Havelock Ellis], big and remote and dumb is father-symbol and papa [Freud] is a sort of old Beaver [her mother, Helen Doolittle]. Isn't that odd? Well, there is the language of course [H.D.'s mother spoke German], and his being small and delicate (woman) and having lots of friends and relatives (family, analysands) and so on. But papa was too sweet, when I told him of my constatation, he beat the pillow and said, "but you are very clever." (Cat [H.D.] tail waving, cat purring its whiskers off.) He said he suspected it, then he said, in the best small-dog [Bryher] manner, "but--to be perfectly frank with YOU--I do not like it-- I feel so very, very very MASCULINE." He says he always feels hurt when his analysands have a maternal transference. I asked if it happened often, he said sadly, "O, very often" (3/10/33)./38/

    Another intermediary in H.D.'s analysis was "the Flying Dutchman," J. J. van der Leeuw, so nicknamed because he flew his own plane. He was a theosophist and educator whom Freud analyzed during the spring of 1933. "His soul fitted his body," wrote H.D. (7), and she surely had not forgotten that when she wrote, later in the book, of her own soul, "Its body did not fit it very well" (106). After the first analysis was over, when H.D. heard that his plane had crashed, she had a nervous breakdown. Recovered, she came back to Vienna to express, she said, her sorrow and sympathy for Freud. "'You have come,'" he bluntly interpreted, "`to take his place'" (6).Indeed, she had said, "We bear the same relation to the couch" (14), and she called van der Leeuw her "brother-in-arms" (85) and "Mercury" (7)./39/

    Her brother was in arms when he was killed in France in 1918, and H.D. herself linked soldier and airman when she had her mystical vision at Corfu or when she numbered her brother among the "poised, disciplined and valiant young winged Mercuries" who fell from the air during the war (101). Freud's remark "that the analysand who preceded me [van der Leeuwl was 'actually considerably taller'" than H.D. led her directly to a statement and a memory, "My brother is considerably taller" (20)./40/

    Although she does not even tell us his name, this older brother (Gilbert) was obviously a key figure in H.D.'s childhood, for he "is admittedly his mother's favorite" (29). H.D. loved and admired him, too, but she also envied him: "I was not, it was very easy to see, quaint and quick and clever like my brother. My brother? Am I my brother's keeper?" (101). Perhaps she did feel like Cain, for that very brother seemed to be the intermediary through whom she could reach her distant mother: "The trouble is, she knows so many people and they come and interrupt. And besides that, she likes my brother better. If I stay with my brother, become part almost of my brother, perhaps I can get nearer to her" (33). They are, she says, mythological twins: "One is sometimes the shadow of the other; often one is lost and the one seeks the other" (29)./41/

    What she sought in her brother was her mother, but another memory of Gilbert suggests another motif: he had taken one of the "sacred objects" from his father's desk, a magnifying glass, and he showed his sister how he could focus the sunlight to burn a piece of paper (25). Possibly, to become one with her brother meant to acquire the special powers that men seemed to have, the power to bring fire from heaven like Prometheus, to understand the mysterious symbols her astronomer-father used or her brother's larger vocabulary./42/

    Thus, her brother became the first of the many mythological lover-heroes in H.D.'s quests: Perseus, Hermes, the Flying Dutchman, various poetic and mystical lovers, and the Professors (her father, Freud). Norman Holmes Pearson phrased them to me, "the one searched for (who himself searches)." If she became her brother, she would be "quaint and clever" instead of "not very advanced." Perhaps most important, she would have arrived first; she would be older, not a foreigner or "`a little stranger'" (26). All these things might be possible with a boy's body instead of a girl's. As she puts it in an enigmatic comment, left to stand by itself after a story about her brother and discoveries under a log, "There were things under things, as well as things inside things" (21)./43/

    H.D. suggests still another goal she sought in her brother, another memory, the wish that she could be a mother: perhaps her brother would be her doll's father, perhaps her own father could be. She would be the virgin mother, "building a dream and the dream is symbolized by the . . . doll in her arms" (38). To Freud, in the transference, she brought all these fantasies and investments of her brother, just as she brought the dreams concretized as the doll./44/

    Freud is St. Michael, who will slay the dragon of her fears, but Michael was also regent of the planet Mercury-- "in Renaissance paintings, we are not surprised to see Saint Michael wearing the winged sandals and sometimes even the winged helmet of the classic messenger of the Gods" (52). Thus, she has whole chains of associations: "Thoth, Hermes, Mercury, and last, Michael, Captain or Centurion of the hosts of heaven" (109). When she compares Freud to the Centurion of heaven, she cannot have forgotten that, a half-dozen pages earlier, she had said that, in his refusal to accept her notions of immortality, his slamming the door on visions of the future, he was standing "like the Roman Centurion before the gate of Pompeii, who did not move from his station before the gateway since he had received no orders to do so, and who stood for later generations to wonder at, embalmed in hardened lava, preserved in the very fire and ashes that had destroyed him" (102). She goes on to quote Freud, when told his books had been burnt: "`At least, they have not burnt me at the stake.'" Earlier, she had been grateful that the Professor had not lived until World War II. Cremated, "he was a handful of ashes" "before the blast and bombing and fires had devastated this city" (4). The wish is kindly meant, but underneath, listened to with the "third ear," it shows the same ambivalence as toward that other Mercury, her brother./45/

    Freud, like Prometheus, like her brother, had stolen fire from heaven, from the sun, for he was not only the victim but the cause of explosions: "Many of his words did, in a sense, explode . . . opening up mines of hidden treasures" (75). More gently, after an especially striking insight, he would say, "'Ah-- now--we must celebrate this' "; he would rise, select, light, and then, "from the niche [where he sat rose] the smoke of burnt incense, the smouldering of his mellow, fragrant cigar" (23). She identified Freud with Asklepios, the "blameless physician" (50) son of Apollo. "He was the son of the sun, Phoebos Apollo, and music and medicine were alike sacred to this source of light." "Here was the master- musician, he, too, a son of Apollo, who would harmonize the whole human spirit" (105-6). He is poet and priest. She identifies herself as a fellow servant of Apollo, the Priestess or Pythoness of Delphi; thus, she suggests that Freud is her peer and brother. But by punning on "son" and "sun," she makes Apollo himself, the father, the "son."/46/

    In short, Freud came to stand for the whole tangle of wishes and relationships associated with the oedipal wishes of a little girl: that she could be her mother and her father's lover; that she could be a mother with her brother as father; that she could, by marrying her father, be her brother's mother; that she could, by marrying her brother, become her father's mother. She seems to recognize these ambiguities when she calls Freud "the Old Man of the Sea," Proteus, the shapeshifter (97), or compares him to two-faced Janus (100), who leads her to Thoth, Hermes, Mercury, and finally, the Flying Dutchman. But Janus is also Captain January, a beloved old lighthouse keeper who takes in a shipwrecked child (100). Freud becomes in the transference not only her brother but also her father. This dual relationship with Freud matches H.D.'s extended identification of herself with Mignon, the boy-girl from Wilhelm Meister, who is both sister but also would-be sexual object to the hero (101ff.), as in the "Piraeus" poem./47/

    In the strangely labile world of a psychoanalysis, Freud can become H.D.'s father, but so can H.D. She herself makes the connection: her father, being an astronomer, often slept on a couch in his study during the day, and she was not to disturb him. "But now it is I who am lying on the couch in the room lined with books" (19). Her father had in his study a white owl under a bell jar; she has the Professor, sitting "there, quietly, like an old owl in a tree" (22). And, one should remember, the owl is an emblem for Athené with whom H.D. identified herself. At the top of the astronomical tables he made up, her father would write something which was neither a letter nor a number: "He will sketch in a hieroglyph; it may stand for one of the Houses or Signs of the Zodiac, or it may be a planet simply: Jupiter or Mars or Venus" (25). Dreams, visions, and all the shapes, lines, and graphs she speaks of are "the hieroglyph of the unconscious." As for herself, "Niké, Victory seemed to be the clue, seemed to be my own special sign or part of my hieroglyph" (56). If one is a hieroglyph, a writing, one is looked at--by Freud, but less consciously spoken, by the aloof father, perhaps even by the distant mother./48/

    Later H.D. will identify herself with Freud by seeing him as victorious, but at the moment we are concerned with Freud's becoming, in the transference, H.D.'s father. For one thing, he seemed able to persist. Her father had died at the shock of learning of her brother's death, while "The Professor had had shock upon shock. But he had not died" (31). Another line of association led to what men have and what doctors do. "My father possessed sacred symbols . . . he, like the Professor, had old, old sacred objects on his study table" (25). In his study, her father had a photograph of Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson, and her father rather liked to identify himself with doctors. Further, "A doctor has a bag with strange things in it, steel and knives and scissors" (34). Doctors, she observes, know secrets. Her father "entrusts" her with his paper-knife to cut the pages of some of his journals. " In this context, she sees psychoanalysis as a special form of Socratic method and Socratic method in turn as fencing. quot;The half-naked man on the table was dead so it did not hurt him when the doctors sliced his arm with a knife or a pair of scissors. Thus, Freud, in the transference, acquired the power to cut and thrust and penetrate. She speaks of the Tree of Knowledge: "His [Freud's] were the great giant roots of that tree, but mine, with hair-like almost invisible feelers . . . the invisible intuitive rootlet . . . the smallest possible sub- soil rootlet" (99), could also solve mysteries./49/

    In his experience, Freud wrote about this time, one of the irreducible difficulties in the analysis of women was the frustration and anger imposed by their strong unconscious wish to recapture a supposedly lost masculine power physically symbolized as the male organ. We should bear in mind his belief that H.D. believed that the analyst--the doctor---will restore what has been, in fantasy, cut off, in considering H.D.'s phrase that Freud's interpretions were "gifts" to her. One memorable day he led her from the couch into his study to show her one of his Greek figurines. "`This is my favourite,' he said, "and he held out a little bronze Pallas Athené. "'She is perfect,' he said, 'only she has lost her spear'" (68-69; italics H.D.'s). She remembered that Athené's winged form was Niké, so that this was a Niké without wings, Niké A-pteros, as, for example, H.D. had seen her in Athens (made so that Victory would never fly away to another city). She meditates on "She is perfect." "The little bronze statue was a perfect symbol, made in man's image (in woman's, as it happened), to be venerated as a projection of abstract thought, Pallas Athené . . . sprung full-armed from the head of her father, our-father" (70)./50/

    Maybe it wasn't a spear she had been holding--"It might have been a rod or staff" (89), and she went on to remember the Professor's giving her a little branch from a box of oranges his son had sent. As I read Freud's interpretive act, he was giving her symbolically what he thought every woman patient wanted. She herself could associate to that golden bough another gift or compliment Freud gave her: "There are very few who understand this [that my discoveries are a basis for a very grave philosophy], there are very few who are capable of understanding this" (18). Freud was, in effect, giving H.D. back the understanding, the brain strength, that leads to victory, the perhaps masculine power represented in sacred objects, the ability to live in her wingless self, all of which, at some level of her being, H.D. felt, her real father had taken away. Or, perhaps, her mother had never given her./51/

    This moment in H.D.'s analysis, this showing of the spearless Athena, has become a cause célèbre. Even now, two-thirds of a century after he formulated it, Freud's claim that women want a penis angers feminists and women in general. In this respect, it is, like so many psychoanalytic ideas, like, for example, men's fear of castration, distressing, incredible, even repellent./52/


V

    Penis envy, however, is not my essential theme. I want to try to understand the relation between, on the one hand, H.D.'s need to write and her need to write in a particular style and, on the other, her unconscious thinking, particularly the thoughts and feelings carried into her adult life from her childhood. So far, we have seen those thoughts by tracing her various transferences toward Freud. We can take another, more schematic path through her associations: tracing her ideas and images through the various developmental stages of childhood. As it happens, the actual course of H.D.'s psychoanalysis seems to have followed these stages from the earliest to the latest. Further, the succession of her writings about the analysis reflects her increasing understanding of herself and her assimilation of the analysis, provided we consider the dates she wrote them rather than the dates of publication: the letters during the analysis (1933- 34); the poem "The Master" (1935); the self-analytical The Gift (1941-43); Tribute to Freud (1944); "Advent" (1948). The last two, though written last, give us the overall view. The others address particular issues. As a result, we can trace three roughly parallel tracks: a chronological account of the successive stages of H.D.'s analysis; the successive stages of her childhood development as they underlay her adult personality; and the succession of writings telling her story and her increasing understanding of that story./53/

    Psychoanalysis has taught us the truth of old proverbs: how, as the twig is bent, so grows the tree, or, less metaphorically, how the child is father to the man. A century of experience has shown us that the bodily experiences of infancy and childhood persist in the style of the adult. To be sure, there is much debate among psychoanalysts whether the forms of those bodily experiences directly result from innate, biological drives or early relationships or both. Experimental psychologists, however, have abundantly confirmed the clustering in adults of certain behaviors that look like the childhood stages of development posited by psychoanalysis. Indeed, this is the one aspect of psychoanalysis most strongly verified by experimental evidence, as detailed in Fisher and Greenberg's 1996 survey of experimental literature on Freudian theory./54/

    In effect, the early experiences of childhood form geological layers on which later experiences accumulate all the way to adulthood. Extreme gaps or faults or prominences at the lower levels appear in (usually) softened form, just as huge rifts and shears and bulges deep in the earth lead to gently sloping hills and valleys on the surface. This layering Freud hypothesized and later psychoanalysts have confirmed in practice. Clinical evidence, however, is shaky. A solider confirmation comes from non-clinicians./55/

    In recent decades, brain physiologists have shown how the brain grows and ungrows during infancy. As described in Chapter One (paragraphs 30-33), the infant's brain begins with only a small part of the neural intercnnections it will later have. During the first half-dozen years of life, the child's brain becomes supercharged with more connections and more energy than it will have as an adult. Then, around age eleven, vast numbers of neurons get pruned away. And all through life, we are capable of growing new circuits in response to new experiences./56/

    It is activity that inflects this growth and ungrowth. Synapses, neural interconnections, that the child uses grow and strengthen. Unused synapses die off. Our brains must grow then in ways that fit the parental, social, and natural environment in which we spend our childhood. The history of our childhood becomes incorporated in our adult personalities. To be sure, specific traits (like being a smoker or a conservative) stem from childhood peers and society, but our deepest, most pervasive traits must come from our earliest childhood in a family that shaped early brain growth. All-pervading adult traits, such as H.D.'s constant need for a supernatural reality or her persistent wish to fuse with others, must come from infantile experiences. Since experiments confirm the adult traits associated with the classic psychoanalytic account of infancy, we can feel some confidence in applying that account to H.D.'s psychoanalysis. Certainly that is what Freud did./57/

    I imagine this psychoanalytic description of psychological development as questions and answers. The environment (mother, father, siblings, society, the physical world) poses questions--demands--to children, and children are to embody answers in their behaviors. Any given society poses to every child more or less the same questions. Each child, however, answers these demands out of its unique, growing identity, the core of its nature that is growing as the child embodies answers to these questions. Further, although the questions may be much the same, each child will experience them differently, as each child begins to have a different identity. I have modeled at length this way of thinking about some classical psychoanalytic ideas in The I (1985)./58/

    During the first, "oral" stage of infancy, a baby is primarily an eater. The question the world asks the infant every day and several times a day is, How will things from outside you get inside? How will you take into your body? How will you get? The answers to these questions form the dyad--the bodily dance--of infant and caregiver in the earliest stage around themes of giving and receiving and dependency. All these questions also involve asking the caregiver (mother and servant, in H.D.'s family), How will you give from your body to your child's? How will you make yourself available to your baby's sight, touch, hearing, and imagination? How will you fail your child?/59/

    An even more profound question, then, dominant throughout the first three or four years of our lives, is, How will you (two) cease to be a unit? How will you (baby or nurturer) become a separate I? How will you be a self?/60/

    As infants, we coped with issues like, How will you get?, or, How will you separate?, by acting the answers out bodily. Our environment responded to those answers with satisfactions or frustrations. A child dreads hunger, dreads cold, dreads being left alone, dreads abandonment, but in earliest infancy, a baby dreads most of all (says psychoanalytic theory) being overwhelmed by a suffering that goes on and on to utter annihilation./61/

    Inevitably, caregivers will fail to some degree. Inevitably, some mismatch will occur between the baby's wordless needs and mother's gratifying them. As a result, the baby will mix frustration and anger in with the love and dependency it also feels. How much the mother or other caretakers energize that anger and fear tones the pleasures and unpleasures the baby feels and becomes part of character. Evidently, H.D.'s mother created in her an unusual sensitivity to gaps and separations./62/

    At first, a baby deals with the intolerable mixture of love and hate caused by these absences by splitting the image of mother into a good mother inside and a bad mother "out there." Gradually, we became able to feel both love and hate toward the one person without shattering our symbolic representation of her. We could hate without feeling that we were destroying, and we could love without feeling that we had to engulf her./63/

    In the earliest phase of babyhood, we were primarily passive. Mother was the active one, feeding and bathing us, taking care of our requirements, and leaving us so as to take care of her own and others' needs. As a baby, our task was to learn to tolerate those absences. We cried, we fretted, we gurgled, or we slept. Gradually, we learned to handle the delay by symbolizing our absent mother, an important step in our separation from her and our growing ability to conceptualize the world around us. Emotionally, our being able to imagine our absent mother (and our mother absent) provided the foundation for our ability to trust in her return, for a more general hopefulness all through life./64/

    As infancy proceeded, we were acting out--feeling out--answers to questions like these: How will you tolerate delay? How will you turn your massive responses of love and hate into a steadier trust? How will you replace your physical and psychological fusion with a symbolic union and boundary? How will you separate from this dyad of mother and baby to become a distinct you? The child acts out answers to these "How's," and these acted-out answers become, I think, the beginnings of a personal style, an identity theme. Formed from day one, it becomes visible to an observer by the age of three and sometimes earlier. It is the answers derived from these first questions that we brought to our next stage of development./65/

    In the first stage, we were primarily taking in from outside. That was our "modality." In the second we gave from inside out. We emitted cries, noises, actions, smells, body products. Of course we had been "expressing" in these ways from the beginning, but now they became a new focus for that dyadic relation between mother and child./66/

    Our experiences became less global, more precise. In the earlier period, we feared utter annihilation. Now that dread became more precise: the loss of love, the failure of that sustaining otherness that made life and feeling possible./67/

    In the earlier stage, we had been receivers. Now we both received and gave. Newly precise muscles allowed us to control more and more of our bodily activities, especially evacuation. In the earlier stage, we began to frame a symbolic boundary that defined what was self and what was not. Body products posed perplexing issues. This excrement, is it a living part of me or something dead, disgusting, to be thrown away? The sound I make--it leaves my mouth and is no longer part of me, yet am I to be held responsible for it? Transitional objects like soft blankets and teddy bears became part of the I, and yet the I knew they were also or primarily part of the "out there," the not-me./68/

    The earlier development of symbols acquired a new precision: symbolizing rules. Symbolizing others, taking them in or putting them out imaginatively, acquired the meaning of accepting their rules or having one's own rules--with all the complex shadings of government that those alternatives provide. The child obstinately shouts, "No!" and "Not now!" Some of these rules concerned symbols, now precised as babytalk, with rules for grammar and syntax soon to be added. Some concerned what goes into and out of the body. In the earlier stage our sense of time was a sense of delay, simply waiting and wanting. Next it became something more precise, a sense of timing: When is this or that appropriate? The earlier determination, "I will be me," also acquired a special tone, "I will decide for myself." The first stage's creation of trust in others became a trust in self, the basis for self-reliance and self- respect. Erikson introduces for this stage the term "autonomy," self ruling, as opposed to being ruled by others or by happenstance./69/

    In this second stage, we translated into more specific terms questions like: How shall I let the inside outside? How shall I control that boundary between inside and outside? Who decides? Who rules? Do I do as I wish? Do I live by their rules? Or by my own? Or can I make theirs mine and mine theirs? Body products lead to other questions: What is me and what is not-me? What is animate and inanimate, living and dead? Is this disgusting or precious? Will it be hard or soft? When will you deal with it?/70/

    These concerns about things going in and out of one's body pervade the next, "intrusive" stage. What was simply "out there" became a barrier to be penetrated in a burst of aggressive energy. Our first concern with symbols, transformed into rules and concepts, became a body language and the use of that language and speech to dominate, intrude, and explore our world. Parents recognize the intrusive (or "phallic") stage as a child's bursting into noise, physical attack, constant talking, and endless curiosity--the Why? games. All were ways of pushing ourselves into the world through bodily activity./71/

    Partly we explored our own bodies, curiosity fueled now by new sexual knowledge, for example, about the different ways boys and girls urinate. That difference became part of our sense of personal power or the lack of personal power, for throughout this period our ambitions and projections far outran our actual abilities. We felt not only constant aspiration but also constant frustration. In this stage, "good enough" mothering meant tolerating and even enjoying our bursting activity, not creating a massive sense of frustration or the belief that "I won't ever be able to enter my parents' kind of world" or "I will never be big enough."/72/

    As children we constantly faced the limits of our bodies. We felt, "I can't stand these limits on me, yet I can't escape them either." What reminded us of those limits was the daunting difference between what we could do and what we imagined ourselves or our parents doing, or, perhaps, saw them doing, possibly in a sexual way. All the more intense, then, became our ambition: I want to be big. Any bodily deficiency could mean the end of your or my future as a member of that community of adults. It is in this context that a four-year-old boy or girl interprets the anatomical difference between the sexes. Do they see that difference as a difference or as a lack? Is something missing? Could I lose it?/73/

    Physiology plays an obvious role here. A boy has a visible organ that gets bigger and smaller, playing out the drama that both boy and girl imagine of becoming big. A girl does not, and she may therefore see her difference as a lack. May. What she feels she has instead depends a great deal on her culture and her family. If they use femaleness as a reason for depriving women of avenues to various adult activities, then indeed a little girl is likely to feel that the difference between her and a boy is a plus for him and a zero or a minus for her. One can easily imagine cultures, however, in which women are given equal status with men in the workplace. One can visualize--indeed observe, as Margaret Mead did--societies in which pregnancy and birthing are women's great power, not a hospital procedure run by male doctors. One can observe societies which value mothering equally or beyond other kinds of work. In such contexts a little girl may come to feel that what she has instead of a boy's penis may be less visible, less touchable, but a power and a privilege, both mystery and mastery, not a lack but simply a difference./74/

    This intrusive stage asked us as children, How will you enter the world? And we answered, Through my body, I will be big. But how will you be big? Here there was a great deal of room for individual answering: big at thinking, big at football, big and strong, big and cruel, or big at owning things. At the same time, biology and culture insisted that we find our ways to one of two specific ways of being big: "I will be a man." "I will be a woman." "I will have--be, really--a gender." "I will become a parent." In this context we reinterpreted in gender terms earlier fears about our bodies as either preventing our taking a place in that matrix of parent-child, male- female, or foreclosing one place and forcing another./75/

    "I will become a parent." That answer does not imply that the child will literally become a five-year old parent, although that was often part of your or my imagining. We imagined ourselves in the half-understood situation of one or both of our parents, and we included a child's even more confused idea of sex and where babies come from, for it is babies that define parents as parents./76/

    In the oedipal period we had to work out an answer to the question, How will you situate yourself in a world divided into male and female, parents and children? We had to learn that we could not be both parents, only one. The answer all existing societies want is, "I will have--be, really--one of the genders our society accepts." "I will be like one of the adults in my world." The identification with one of those adults meant acceptance of some of his or her values, building them deeply and firmly into our own character for the duration of the long wait for adulthood. /77/

    That, very briefly, is the way I think about childhood themes. It is my phrasing of ideas Freud would have brought to an analysis in 1933, ideas derived from his own work and that of his 1930s co-workers. These are the issues he and his gifted patient or "student," explored in her psychoanalysis, the results of which she brought to bear on her poetry and her life./78/


VI

    One way that H.D. signalled how important the first stage of mother, infant, taking in, and dependency would be in her analysis was by her rapid mother-transfence. Another way was her use of images of fluids and herself carried by the fluids to describe the psychoanalytic process. She had entered analysis because she felt she was, like other intellectuals, "drifting," that she was "a narrow birch-bark canoe" being swept into the "cataract" of war (12- 13). Her friends provided only "a deluge of brilliant talk," but no "safe harbour" (57). Thus, she sees herself as "a ship-wrecked child" turning to old Captain January (99, 102). "The flow of associated images" (11), the "fountain-head of highest truth" (92), "the current [that] ran too deep" (18)--H.D.'s images of fluids suggest, quite beautifully, the way something which is experienced passively, as an overpowering and terrifying deluge or flood, can, in the microcosm of the analytic relationship, be accepted and mastered. "He would stand guardian, he would turn the whole stream of consciousness back into useful, into irrigation channels" (103)./79/

    Yet, at the same time, this relationship harbors dangers. "If I let go (I, this one drop, this one ego under the microscope-telescope of Sigmund Freud) I fear to be dissolved utterly" (116). So, in the vision on Corfu, H.D. felt as though she were drowning. "I must drown completely and come out on the other side, or rise to the surface after the third time down, not dead to this life but with a new set of values my treasure dredged from the depth. I must be born again or break utterly" (54). Later, she described her terror during the Blitz in these same images of liquids: "I had gone down under the wave and I was still alive, I was breathing. I was not drowning though in a sense, I had drowned; I had gone down, been submerged by the wave of memories and terrors, repressed since the age of ten and long before" (Gift 219). Evidently, the earliest stage of childhood established the language in which H.D. would realize her most overwhelming experiences, and her analysis with Freud was one of them./80/

    She used other images of fluids to show the feeling of "oceanic" unity that is related to that first unity with the mother. She described Freud as naming and discovering "a great stream or ocean underground" that, "overflowing," produces inspiration, madness, creative idea, or mental disease. This ocean transcends all barriers of time and space (71). Thus, for any patient, "His particular stream, his personal life, could run clear of obstruction into the great river of humanity, hence to the sea of superhuman perfection" (84)./81/

    The infant wishes for a source of love and nurture who is always there--for example, an analyst who never dies or goes away: "I looked at the things in his room before I looked at him; for I knew the things in his room were symbols of Eternity and contained him then, as Eternity contains him now" (102). When Freud one day spoke as though his immortality lay only in his grandchildren, "I felt a sudden gap, a severance, a chasm or schism in consciousness" (62). She was echoing what she had said earlier about her mother: "If one could stay near her always, there would be no break in consciousness" (33). Her concern with the Flying Dutchman and Freud's other patients matches her complaint about the many people who "come and interrupt" her relationship with her mother (33)./82/

    From psychoanalytic theory, one would expect the father to inherit the deepest conflicts and feelings associated with the mother, here, the need to avoid gaps or breaks in the relationship. Indeed, H.D. is quite explicit about this: "If one could stay near her always . . . but half a loaf is better than no bread and there are things, not altogether negligible, to be said for him" (34). But, as for her astronomer-father, she wrote Bryher of "a blind fear of space and the distances of the planets and the fixed stars" (4/28/33). /83/

    Gaps, spaces between, somehow these terrified her. In interpreting a dream about a mysterious, beautiful Egyptian princess coming down a flight of steps to find Moses in the bulrushes, she tells us how she dealt with them. The Princess was, of course, Marie Bonaparte, Freud's royal patient and patron, but also H.D.'s mother. H.D. herself, Freud thought, was Miriam watching in the bulrushes or, perhaps, the baby. "Am I," asked H.D., "after all, in my fantasy, the baby? Do I wish myself, in the deepest unconscious or subconscious layers of my being, to be the founder of a new religion?" (37)./84/

    Yes, she did. She had to believe in a religious transcendence, because that would close the gaps. Religious wishes were one of her two points of difference with Freud: "About the greater transcendental issues, we never argued. But there was an argument implicit in our very bones" (13). It was in this context that she cast him as the burnt Centurion in the ruins of Pompeii, a hostile wish no matter how rationalized (102). As for Freud, he was polite about H.D.'s religious claims (123), but he remained, as always, the materialist and atheist./85/

    Further, the wish for an eternal order might come not just from a defensive need to get rid of gaps but from the child's positive wish to become the mother and the positive wish to be mothered. "Before I leave [the session], I fold the silver-grey rug. I have been caterpillar, worm, snug in the chrysalis" (177). And she was surely aware that she was imaging rebirth as well as womb-like security./86/

VII

    In short, H.D. made Freud in the transference her mother or her father as a mother-substitute. She thus shows how her mystical and religious wishes hark back to the early mother-child relationship. In later life, Erikson has shown again and again, political ideologies, personal love, or religious faith can all serve the maternal function, gratifying "the simple and fervent wish for a hallucinatory sense of unity with a maternal matrix." The timeless world of myth became, for H.D., a way of nurturing and being nurtured and of avoiding gaps, breaks, and interruptions between herself and a nurturing other./87/

    "Myth and religion served H.D. this way, but so did psychoanalysis, Freud the man and psychoanalysis the theory. They too, met her need to have faith in something. Thus, Freud interpreted H.D.'s mystical vision on Corfu "as a desire for union with [your] mother," and in the transference he became that mother. "`Why did you think you had to tell me? But you wanted to tell your mother'" (44). The final vision in the mystical experience on Corfu was the least defended against or disguised, the first vision the most so. To the last picture, H.D. associates memories of her father and mother, and to be the chosen woman of the man in the sun-disc would indeed involve an "explosion." H.D. herself, however, suggests another interpretation and association: "The shrine of Helios (Hellas, Helen) had been really the main objective of my journey" (49). "I was physically in Greece, in Hellas (Helen). I had come home to the glory that was Greece," and she identifies the phrase as from "Edgar Allan Poe's much-quoted Helen, and my mother's name was Helen" (44)./88/

    Indeed, H.D.'s whole faith in Freud and psychoanalysis should be interpreted as a wish for a mystical union: "The Professor had said in the very beginning that I had come to Vienna hoping to find my mother" (17), even as she had found her in the vision on Corfu. Thus she insisted on making Freud the "`founder of a new religion.'" "Obviously it was he, who was that light out of Egypt" (119). "Freud," she wrote Macpherson, "is simply Jesus-Christ after the resurrection, he has that wistful ghost look of someone who has been right past the door of the tomb, and such tenderness with such humour, he just IS all that. I am sure he IS the absolute inheritor of all that eastern mystery and majic, just IS, in spite of his monumental work and all that he is the real, the final healer" (3/15/33)./89/

    Freud responded to H.D.'s fervid religiosity characteristically, with politeness and skepticism and referring her beliefs to their origins. "We touched lightly on some of the more abstruse transcendental problems, it is true, but we related them to the familiar family-complex" (12-13). "A Queen or Princess," she notes in connection with a religious dream, "is obvious mother- symbol" (39). Equally obviously, though, her need for a religious level of being does not simply come down to her wish to merge with a "Princess" or "prophetess." Participation in another level of being would make her a mother in a far more powerful sense, for she could then restore her own lost loved ones. She would become the goddess or, more realistically, the founder of a new religion based in psychoanalysis. "The dead were living in so far as they lived in memory or were recalled in dream"(14)./90/

    She wrote rather crudely to Bryher about these early levels of her personality:

F. says mine is the absolutely FIRST layer, I got stuck at the earliest pre-OE [pre-oedipal] stage, and "back to the womb" seems to be my only solution. Hence islands, sea, Greek primitives and so on. Its all too, too wonder-making. Even T. [Turtle=Sachs] said I was deeply attached to my father which I suppose I was and am, but I always felt there was a catch somewhere. My triangle is mother-brother-self. That is, early phallic-mother, baby brother or smaller brother and self. I have worked in and around that, I have HAD the baby with my mother, and been the phallic-baby, hence Moses in the bull-rushes, I have HAD the baby with the brother, hence Cuthbert [Richard Aldington], Cecil Grey [Gray], Kenneth [Macpherson], etc.' I have HAD the "illumination" or the back to womb WITH, the brother, hence you and me in Corfu (island=mother), with [Peter] Rodeck always as a phallic-mother.... well, well, well, I could go on and on and on, demonstrating, but once you get the first idea, all the other, later diverse- looking manifestations fit in somehow. Savvy ?????? Its all too queer and at first, I felt life had been wasted in all this repetition etc., but somehow F. seems to find it amusing, sometimes, and apparently I am of a good "life" vibration as I went on and on, repeating, wanting to give life or save life, never in that sense, to destroy life (except self-rat to get back to the island-womb phase, all most natural) (3/23/33).

And she went on in other letters to identify Bryher as standing for her brother in later life. In this letter, H.D. identifies the male side of her bisexuality with early, hungry wishes for a timeless at- oneness with the mother. She wanted to be a mother and to be mothered by these male lovers (resulting in a stillbirth, a child, and an abortion, respectively). "Evidently," she wrote Bryher, "ALL the gents linked on, in one way or another with beaver [her mother] and with Ida that old nurse we had. Funny. Shows what a mess one can make of choosing "masculine" types" (3/14/33)./91/

    H.D. seemed also to accept Freud's interpretation of the Corfu vision "as a suppressed desire for forbidden 'signs and wonders,' breaking bounds, a suppressed desire to be a Prophetess, to be important anyway, megalomania they call it" (51). And perhaps this megalomanic fantasy is why the people in her vision appeared as a swarm of "small midges."/92/

    The pattern of fusion in the Corfu vision occurred throughout. In the vision, for example, discrete dots appeared but merged to form a Jacob's ladder linking earth to the realm of the gods, like a child's wish to be big and merge into the world of the parents. In yet another pattern of fusion, the vision was not only H.D.'s; it also became Bryher's. The exhausted H.D. left it to Bryher to finish the vision. Transferring further blurred the boundaries between self and nurturing other. H.D. was cheery enough about the fusion, but this was the thing Freud thought most dangerous. To me it suggests a fault at the earliest, deepest level of development./93/

    Longing for closeness, the child H.D. evidently dealt with potential gaps, not by suffering them passively, but by actively closing them herself. In using H.D.'s analysis to trace her development through the stages of childhood, we come to the second stage. Concerned with body products, what is me and not-me, what is precious as opposed to what is to be discarded, what is forced out of one or freely given, this second stage builds on the solutions arrived at in the first stage. Thus, she could understand her poems in these terms:

Yes, the poems are satisfactory but unlike most poets of my acquaintance (and I have known many) I am no longer interested in a poem once it is written, projected, or materialized. There is a feeling that it is only a part of myself there (149).

She has put just a part of herself out into the world, where it is separate, and thus she turns away from the (excreted?) poem and back to her intact self./94/

    To compromise between her need to be totally included and fused and totally excluded and separate, H.D. adapted by taking the active role and establishing the boundaries and edges of things herself. For example, she gave a highly detailed cartography of Freud's consulting room and study, wall by wall and door by door. Her Corfu vision came in units or steps like the cards in fortune-telling, or as Catherine Aldington points out, like the early movies. She saw her dreams and visions as "steps in the . . . mechanism of supernormal, abnormal (or subnormal) states of mind" (42). The word "steps" itself reminds her of the steps the Princess was descending in the Corfu vision or its Jacob's ladder./95/

    This urgent concern for boundaries and discrete units may relate to H.D.'s short, choppy stanza forms, her difficulties with the boundaries of sentences, or the indeterminacy of the verb forms in many of her lyrics. I think it also has something to do with her insistence on treating symbols as having fixed meanings and the dream as "a universal language," despite Freud's cautions to the contrary (71). Perhaps, using symbolism (as her father and brother did) may have meant to H.D. to take their tools, to be masculine. Perhaps that is why, for her, symbols had to have a fixed, rigid meaning./96/

    I suspect that this was a part of her final disagreement with Freud: H.D.'s wish--need, really--to convert the insubstantial into something both substantial and immortal, to make the soft hard, "spiritual realism." Substantiation had become too basic a defensive strategy in H.D.'s character to be changed in a few months; this "was an argument implicit in our very bones" (13). This one defense or adaptation met both sides of the deeper issues of earliest infancy: the wish to fuse with something (father, brother, mother); the related wish to close the gap and restore what was missing (interrupted mother, distant father, dead brother) and make it hard, definitively there. She was dealing with the gaps by the defense of making them into a bounded and defined sign that was itself eternal and uninterrupted./97/

    H.D. makes a more familiar analogy to unconscious materials: Freud unlocks "vaults and caves" in his "unearthing buried treasures." His findings can include "priceless treasures, gems and jewels" or junk: "What he offered as treasure, this revelation that he seemed to value, was poor stuff, trash indeed, ideas that a ragpicker would pass over in disdain" (74-75). The child's object from below was first, her own body products, precious in some contexts, disgusting "trash" in others./98/

    In general, H.D. looks askance at products which are soft like rags (as in that passage). When, for example, Freud refers to an insight as "striking oil" (75), H.D. hardens his discovery into finding "the carved symbol of an idea or a deathless dream" (93) or stresses "the outer rock or shale, the accumulation of hundreds or thousands of years" (82). Oil itself she makes a "concrete definite image." "'I struck oil' suggests business enterprise. We visualize stark uprights and skeleton-like steel cages, like unfinished Eiffel Towers" (83). She concretized or phallicized the oil rejecting the "soft" in the manner of T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound and modernists in general. Having hardened the soft, H.D. attributes to others the fantasy that psychoanalysis is a system for squeezing something precious out of you, "some mechanical construction set up in an arid desert, to trap the unwary, and if there is `oil' to be inferred, the `oil' goes to someone else; there are astute doctors who `squeeze you dry' with their exorbitant fees for prolonged and expensive treatments" (83)./99/

    Down in that cloacal region where the Professor has "tunnelled" are "the chasms or gulfs where the ancient dragon lives." On the one hand, Freud is the St. Michael or Hercules who will slay "the Dragon and its swarm of children, the Hydra- headed monster" (109). On the other hand, H.D. herself had "come to a strange city, to beard him, himself, the dragon, in his very den? Vienna? Venice? My mother had come here on her honeymoon. . . . " (16). H.D. admits the analysis ended before she dealt with her own war fears, "my own personal little Dragon of war-terror.". Nevertheless, she ordered him "back to his subterranean cavern."

There he growled and bit on his chains and was only loosed finally, when the full apocryphal terror of fire and brimstone, of whirlwind and flood and tempest, of the Biblical Day of Judgement and the Last Trump, became no longer abstractions, terrors too dreadful to be thought of, but things that were happening every day, every night, and at one time, at every hour of the day and night, to myself and my friends (73)./100/

    This destructive fantasy and her associations stem from the timing of her composition of Tribute and The Gift, during her wartime terrors. I get a glimpse of an overpowering rage and fear someplace in H.D.'s development that the terrors of wartime meshed with. I sense a rage and fear associated with chasms and gulfs, with fire and flood as destroyers, then at a later stage with the subterranean caves of her body, with terrors in the night, with the abstract and inner becoming concrete, and, I would guess, most deeply with the resentment the little girl must have felt toward the mother who rejected her and preferred her brother. Here, she images Freud as the fiery dragon down below--although throughout, in the letters, she images him as a cat or a dog or "papa." To me, the comparison suggests strong negative feelings underneath the Freudolatry./101/

    The work of art had to be made hard, to show that "Thoughts are things." This way H.D. sought spiritual realism. The longing for hardness occurs throughout her poetry, even for a hardness of sounds and smells as in the early poem, "Sheltered Garden":

O for some sharp swish of a branch--
there is no scent of resin
in this place,
no taste of bark, of coarse weeds,
aromatic, astringent--
only border on border of scented pinks.

Softness, by contrast, implied fusion, as in her extended image of Freud unraveling the threads of her unconscious mind or her statement: "The shuttle of the years ran a thread that wove my pattern into the Professor's." She "painfully unravelled a dingy, carelessly woven strip of tapestry," something sordid in her life. When Freud spoke, however, it was

as if he had dipped the grey web of conventionally woven thought and with it, conventionally spoken thought, into a vat of his own brewing--or held a trip of that thought, ripped from the monotonous faded and outworn texture of the language itself, into the bubbling cauldron of his own mind in order to draw it forth dyed blue or scarlet, a new colour to the old grey mesh, a scrap of thought, even a cast-off rag, that would become hereafter a pennant, a standard, a sign again, to indicate a direction or, fluttering aloft on a pole, to lead an army (69)./102/

    H.D. wanted to be like Freud and turn something soft like a rag into something brightly colored, thrust phallicly in the air, emblem of military hardness and force. Hardness had another meaning for H.D. beyond separateness./103/

    By contrast, "We all know that almost invisible thread-line on the cherished glass butter-dish that predicts it will `come apart in me 'ands' sooner or later--sooner, more likely." Breaking is often her image for collapsing or dying as in the 1917 poem "Adonis." Death is being "cracked and bent." Birth is being burnt into hard, incorruptible, and precious gold:

Each of us like you
has died once,
each of us like you
has passed through drift of wood-leaves,
cracked and bent
and tortured and unbent
in the winter frost,
then burnt into gold points,
lighted afresh,
crisp amber, scales of gold-leaf,
gold turned and re-welded
in the sun-heat.

    *    *    *
each of us like you
stands apart, like you
fit to be worshipped./104/

    In a way, being separate means one is strong and true. The opposite of closeness, though, in H.D.'s psyche can also mean being isolated, left out, a foreigner who exists, as it were, in the third person. "It was a girl between two boys; but, ironically, it was wispy and mousey, while the boys were glowing and gold" (like Adonis in this 1917 poem)./105/

    Being "apart," she is painful on the subject of the two's in her family--"There were 2 of everybody (except myself)" (32). In her memories in Tribute to Freud (mother with brother on the curbstone; father with brother and the magnifying-glass), in her dreams (the Princess and the baby), or in her visions (the serpent and the thistle; Helios and the Niké-angel), H.D. finds herself in triangular situations, watching the other two. Similarly, she lives an exile in England or Switzerland as though acting out over and over again her own separateness. By coming for her analytic hour on a day when rifles were stacked on the street corners and no other patients dared show up, she acted out once again her sense of her difference: "I am here because no one else has come. As if again, symbolically, I must be different." Or separated./106/

    We come to another of H.D.'s poetic themes: being splendidly isolated or being dangerously entangled, as in the ending of the early poem "Hermes of the Ways" (1916):

Hermes, Hermes
the great sea foamed,
gnashed its teeth about me;
but you have waited,
where sea-grass tangles with
shore-grass.

To join Hermes--whom other poems identify with writing and insight--is to escape from a chaos that threatens to engulf you. You find him at the boundary between the sea-mouth and the security of land, where things are tactile and hairlike, no longer foam. I think one begins to see the function of writing in H.D.'s psyche: a way of being both close to and safe from a being with many powers, safe from being engulfed or overwhelmed by the gaps./107/

    One could read the grass genitally, as a symbol for genital hairs, mingling the genitals of both sexes. One could also read the tripod in the Corfu vision genitally. It is the "base" for the spirit-lamp, but it is also what the Pythoness of Delphi sat on. It may also represent a feminine concern with inner or enclosed spaces. H.D. calls it a homely, familiar object. Certainly her description of it stresses the emptiness of its circles. Yet it is this stand that Freud associated with megalomania--again, we seem to be coming to the theme of overcompensating for what she feels is another gap or interruption or emptiness. What the prophetess sits on is at once "homely" but "all the more an object to be venerated" (46). Interestingly, "utmost veneration" is the last English phrase addressed to Freud in the first published version of Tribute/108/

    The figure of André in her charming children's book, The Hedgehog, suggests by a similar symbolism the kind of firm knowledge or bristly possessions one might get from a brother. The story works out H.D.'s recurring pattern: replacing something needed and missing by a magical word (the meaning of which this little heroine does not know). What is an hérisson? "Little girls shouldn't ask," but André has one. Why should she ask the moon for things André can get? The hérisson is something someone gives you, "big as a mountain," associated with the fur of her mother's coat, with having babies, and with frightening snakes away. Although the book was written in 1925, the figure of Dr. Berne Blum, who reassures the heroine about these matters, markedly foreshadows Freud. We can guess why H.D. had such a strong positive transference in 1933, her "veneration." Freud fitted into a matrix (originally maternal) of pre-existing fantasies and expectations toward fatherly doctors, professors, and perhaps men in general./109/

    Yet, as we have seen, in Tribute, she compared Freud both to a dragon and to the dragon-killer. Much later, in Tribute to the Angels, she wrote:

        Hermes Trismegistus

spears, with Saint Michael,
the darkness of ignorance,

casts the Old Dragon
into the abyss.

Here she speaks of the dragon allegorically as ignorance, Hermes as the one who destroys ignorance. In Tribute, she identified Freud both with the dragon and with Michael-Hermes-Thoth who in turn stood for the writer--H.D. herself. Both Tribute and the poem unite H.D. with dragon and dragon-killer, and the differing values given to Freud identify him with all those others she ambivalently loved./110/

    A dragon breathes destructive fire. A dragon also has wings, and we have already seen how wings were associated in H.D.'s mind with the powers of the tall Flying Dutchman, Mercury, Niké, her brother, or, generally, with all potency, both good and bad, "the black wing of man's growing power of destruction and threat of racial separateness" (82). Flying may have been meant to her, "reaching for the stars"--for her father./111/

    The Flying Dutchman "flew too high and flew too quickly" (6, 85), an idiom she applied to her own quest for an absolute. It is not just whimsy to say that one of Freud's great achievements in the analysis was to get his patient to accept herself as wingless. Wings, she learned, symbolized flight, not power, really, but just the opposite: "Perhaps my trip to Greece, that spring, might have been interpreted as a flight from reality. Perhaps my experiences there [among them, the vision] might be translated as another flight--from a flight" (44). "We must forgo a flight from reality" (84). Flying had killed van der Leeuw, and Freud singled out H.D.'s "writing-on-the-wall" as the most dangerous symptom, "a suppressed desire for . . . breaking bounds . . . megalomania" (37), in which people appeared as midges--as they would from an airplane./112/

    In flying, H.D. was largely identifying with men, Van der Leeuw, her brother, and others. This identification, too, we can understand as part of a development in infancy, the third stage, now, associated with the question, How shall I be big? How shall I make my way into the adult world around me? Fixation at this stage leads to a certain character type. You see it among astronauts, professional soldiers, professional athletes of all kinds and genders, dancers and actors, surgeons, and, in this context, airplane pilots. I think of this kind of person as acting out a theme, I will make my way into the world with my body./113/

    Freud and H.D. called it a "phallic" character, closely related to hysteric types. Psychiatrists now call it "histrionic. "Papa seems to imply," she wrote Bryher, "that I wanted all along in uc-n to be an actress, and that is one reason I am never satisfied with writing. Its made me feel like hell. But it is apparently the artistic out-let for people like us, my dance and song turn in Corfu, was final and complete indication of what I wanted" (3/25/33). The next day she continued the theme: "Yesterday we were supposed to have turned a corner, going back FROM the Greek trip and picking up strands of acting, in way of charades, school shows, dressings up and so on and so on. He evidently considers this an important thing and a clue to a lot of my inhibitions about my writing" (3/26/33)./114/

    H.D. accepted this interpretation some three and a half weeks into the analysis. Her wish to be bodily in her art as an actress or dancer did indeed have a lot to do with her writing and particularly with her writer's block. It was connected with another wish, to identify with a man. Much later, in the Advent memoir, she wrote: "I was rather annoyed with the Professor in one of his volumes. He said (as I remember) that women did not creatively amount to anything or amount to much, unless they had a male counterpart or a male companion from whom they drew their inspiration." But, she added, "Perhaps he is right," and supported the interpretation with a dream and the influence of Aldington and D. H. Lawrence on her own writing. "Isis is incomplete without Osiris, Judy is meaningless without Punch" (149-50)./115/

    In short, one way H.D. chose to close the gaps--among others, to be sure--was to identify with men. Such an identification was also a theme much in Freud's thinking at this stage. Today, of course, it is a troublesome issue for those who would see H.D. as developing an exclusively feminine aesthetic, but actually the "phallic" type includes both men and women./116/

    During her first sessions with Freud, she wrote a letter to Bryher trying out this hypothesis more hesitantly: "I keep dreaming of literary men, Shaw, Cunninghame Grahame, now Noel Coward and Lawrence himself, over and over. It is important as book means penis evidently and as a `writer,' only, am I equal in uc-n [unconscious], in the right way with men. Most odd" (5/15/33). "My dream of `salting' my typewriter with the tell-tale transference symbol is further proof of his [Freud's] infallibility" (149). Similarly, after her second analysis with Freud, she referred to her translation of Euripides' Ion (which marked the end of her writers' block) as "a sort of fancy dress edition of my phallic phantasy" (Crow 102)./117/

    I can now read in this new context, "If I stay with my brother, become part almost of my brother, perhaps I can get nearer to her" (33). Fusion with a man meant both fusion with and escape from the mother, a cure by way of substitution for the gaps and interruptions H.D. associated with her./118/

    The concern with gaps and breaks in consciousness reminds me not only of her thoughts about a bodily gap but the deeper wish, "If one could stay near her always, there would be no break in consciousness" (33). Thus her quest for timelessness and immortality, her wish to close the spaces, and her ambivalent wish to fuse with a man or men all stem from a deeper wish to avoid the interruptions she perceived as marring her earliest relation with her mother. As she wrote Bryher, "ALL the gents" linked on to her mother or an old nurse, showing what a mess she had made in choosing "masculine" types (3/14/33)./119/

    Fusion with a man could also stave off deficiencies: thus H.D. found it easy to project into and identify with Freud. One could read H.D.'s longing to create, then fuse with hard objects as purely defensive or pathological: the attempt to re-create a lost masculinity or a "hard" ungiving mother. But it is perfectly clear that this symptom or character trait had adaptive virtues as well. To it, we owe H.D.'s interest in and ability to bring out her unconscious life in enduring artistic forms, which she knew would transcend the cataclysms of war./120/

    There is yet another complication. Fusion with a man also makes the man into a mother (the role Freud complained about to H.D.). H.D. associated the Berggasse, the street the Freuds lived on, with Athens, which she had already associated to her mother and her childhood home. In still a third variant, fusion with a male meant that H.D. could assume the mother-role herself, as when she wished to give, like Alcestis, her own life to stave off Freud's death, or, in her last words about Freud: "0, let's go away together, pleads the soul," then retreating to "the simple affirmation . . . of uttermost veneration"--that important last word (111)./121/

VIII

    With H.D.'s belief at this time that "book means penis," we have come round again to the little bronze Pallas Athené and "`She is perfect,' he said, `only she has lost her spear'". One key word in Freud's interpretation is "perfect." Nora Crow points out how this word had a special resonance for H.D. She shows how many key statements in her life revolved around her being "perfect," how profound her need was to be "perfect," how so many of her beliefs, her poems, and her relationships were efforts to achieve "perfection" (Jaffe 100- 101)./122/

    From a clinical point of view, it is an error to isolate "penis envy" as if it were something all by itself. Attitudes toward the physical dissimilarities between the sexes come relatively late in a child's development. In the earliest stages, the infant does not ordinarily pay much attention to genital differences. It sees its parents through non-genderal issues like feeding or dependency or dominance. Development then continues these early issues into later ones. The later oedipal rivalry derives from and embodies these earlier experiences of dependency, nurture, body products, control, frustration, fear, waiting, and the rest, in the manner of geological layering. Penis envy and its male correlative, castration anxiety, continue and build on these earlier themes, as does the oedipal rivalry as a whole. All take their particular forms from the individual's prior history./123/

    What we know of H.D.'s history begins with some evidently desperate need to close the gap between herself and her mother and her mother's avatars, the father and brother. Her views on Freud's idea of penis envy continue her earlier strategies of dealing with that gap. Thus, curiously, she seems first to have seized enthusiastically on Freud's idea that women were imperfect:

Papa has a complete new theory but he says he does not dare write it, because he does not want to make enemies of women. Apparently, we have all stirred him up frightfully. His idea is that all women are deeply rooted in penis-envy, not only the bi-sexual or homo-sexual woman. The advanced or intellectual woman is more frank about it. That is all. But that the whole cult and development of normal-womanhood is based on the same fact; the envy of the woman for the penis. Now this strikes me as being a clue to everything. The reason women are FAITHFUL, when men are not, the reason a Dorothy R. or a Cole will stick like grim-death to some freak like Alan or Gerald, the reason mama [Bryher's mother] or my mother went insane at the oddest things, the reason for this, the reason for that. I was awake all last night and up this morning just after 7...as this seemed to convince me more than anything. What got me, was his saying that the homo woman is simply frank and truthful, but that the whole of domestic womanhood, is exactly the same, but has built up its cult on deception. Well, he did not say that [crossed out] deception: He just flung out the idea. I screamed at him "but the supreme compliment to WOMAN would be to trust women with this great secret." [marginal emphasis with brackets and two exclamation marks]. I said Br. [Bryher], the princess [Marie Bonaparte] and myself would appreciate it and keep it going. Or something like that. Anyhow, do you see what I mean??? We have evidently done some fish tail stirring [stirring up unconscious material], and if Papa bursts out like the Phoenix with his greatest contribution NOW, I feel you and I will be in some way responsible. This is a thing, for instance that Chaddie [Mary Chadwick, her London analyst] fought against, and tried to make out that the monthly is interesting and that men envy women. Well men do. But the whole thing must be `built on a rock' anyhow, and I feel S.F. is that rock and that perhaps you and I (as I did say half in joke) ARE to be instrumental in some way in feeding the light.

She digresses to the much-debated question of the gift of a puppy but concludes that, if Bryher writes Freud about the little dog, "you might, if you feel like it say H.D. wrote you privately of some new work, but did not mention what ... and that he must put out all his ideas at any cost. Something of that sort. I feel that, and I feel, in that, you and I are literally feeding the light" (5/3/33)./124/

    A fascinating commentary, this. H.D. has cast herself, as she so often did, as the priestess or prophetess of a new idea--but what a strange idea to choose! The image of "feeding the light" suggests how the priestess-role served her need to be an enlightening mother, while light itself is one of her images for the eternal. Also, it is a measure of her positive transference to Freud that she so enthusiastically accepted an idea many women have angrily rejected. As we have seen, she could speak of Freud's "infallibility."/125/

    Moreover, the chronology is puzzling here. It was on the second day of the analysis that H.D. reported to Bryher that "He . . . dug out a Pallas, about six inches high that he said was his favorite. O lovely, lovely little old papa. I am so calm, so peaceful" (3/2/33). In Tribute, she reported the incident this way with no date given: "`This is my favourite,' he said, "and he held out a little bronze Pallas Athené. "`She is perfect,' he said, 'only she has lost her spear'" (69; italics H.D.'s). /126/

    So far as chronology is concerned, was that showing of the Athené on the second day (!) the same showing that led to the comment, "only she has lost her spear," referred to in Tribute? That's hard to say, for it was nearly nine weeks later, on May 3, that H.D. made this, her most extensive and most enthusiastic comment on the theme of penis envy in the letters to Bryher./127/

    She seemed to have accepted the idea, but, at least unconsciously, she must have been ambivalent about it. Tribute was written in 1944 like a series of free associations. Immediately after her account in Tribute of Freud's showing her the little statue with the missing spear, she imaged his discoveries in the symbolism we have seen of turning an old grey rag into a flag on a pole. Freud himself has phallic power. Then she added this:

     `She is perfect,' he said and he meant that the image was of the accepted classic period, Periclean or just pre-Periclean; he meant that there was no scratch or flaw, no dent in the surface . . . . He was speaking in a double sense, it is true, but he was speaking of value, the actual intrinsic value of the piece; like a Jew, he was assessing its worth; the blood of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob ran in his veins. He knew his material pound, his pound of flesh, if you will, but this pound of flesh was a pound of spirit between us, something tangible, to be weighed and measured, to be weighed in the balance and pray God - not to be found wanting! (70).

A page later, she sums up her idea: the "precise Jewish instinct for the particular in the general, for the personal in the impersonal or universal, for the material in the abstract." I think she is being faintly anti-semitic here, in order to express her resentment of Freud's penis envy interpretation. Yet Freud could kid her in their later letters about his materialism. Should his collection of antiquities be called "the Gods" or "the goods" (11)? She comes back to this pun again and again in friendly recollection (63, 88, 93, 108). It was evidently something they had played or worked with in the analysis. In particular, she mentions it just before Freud showed her the Athené without the spear (68)./128/

    In connection with H.D.'s possible resentment, Nora Crow points to another phrasing in Tribute to Freud. H. D. is describing Freud's style in conducting an analysis:

Or he will, always making an `occasion' of it, get up and say, `Ah--now--we must celebrate this,' and proceed to the elaborate ritual--selecting, lighting--until finally he seats himself again, while from the niche rises the smoke of burnt incense, the smoldering of his mellow, fragrant cigar.

Length, breadth, thickness, the shape, the scent, the feel of things (22-23).

And H.D. proceeds to detail the configuration of Freud's consulting rooms. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, quips Nora Crow. It does seem just possible that H.D., who does not usually joke in Tribute, was joking here about her differences with Freud on the subject of the cigar with its length, breadth, and thickness so like that of a penis./129/

    At these two moments, the Athené figure and the cigar, the issue is Freud's steadfast materialism. In the cigar joke, if joke it be, and in the Shylock comment ("pound of flesh"), H.D. links Freud's materialism to the cigar- penis-spear. I think, at some deep level in H.D.'s psyche, her two disagreements with Freud, materialism against spiritualism and missing penis against being perfect, were related. She wrote of the analysis as a whole, "We had come together in order to substantiate something. I did not know what" (13)./130/

    "Substantiate" is important. The analysis itself was, for her, a search for a missing object and an attempt almost concretely to remake it. This quest, "to substantiate something", resonated among several stages of her psychosocial development. In the analysis, she felt, "Thoughts were things, to be collected, collated, analysed, shelved or resolved. Fragmentary ideas . . . were sometimes skilfully pieced together;" (14), like the jars and bowls and vases Freud's study displayed. Her special "memories, visions, dreams, reveries . . . are real. They are as real in their dimension of length, breadth, thickness, as any of the bronze or marble or pottery or clay objects that fill the cases around the walls." Such a wish for a rigid reality carries inevitably with it a fear: "There are dreams or sequences of dreams that follow a line . . . like a crack on a bowl that shows the bowl or vase may at any moment fall in pieces." The gaps would recur, in the breakdowns she suffered after the analysis. Neither insight nor mysticism can overcome the deepest faults in development./131/

    Both her disagreements with Freud concern what is physically there, substantial, or not there. The ideological disagreement concerned the "spiritual realism" that was so important to H.D. Are the things of the spirit "there" or not there? Were they "there" at some time? What happened to them? Then, the penis: Is it "there" or not there? Was it "there"? What happened to it? Is its lack an imperfection? And, of course, the status of H.D.'s hallucinations was another major issue in the analysis. Were they just neurotic or psychotic or were they visions of something beyond ordinary reality?/132/

    Further, as so many people who have written about H.D. have pointed out, her need for "spiritual realism" undoubtedly used her upbringing in an atmosphere of physically embodied--substantiated--Christian mysticism. Freud, however, was Jewish, and this difference came up in their first visit. In discussing nationalities, "`What am I' [asked Freud.] I said, `Well, a Jew.'" She could have said, "Viennese" or "psychoanalyst," but she said, "Jew." Perhaps her sensitivity to Freud's Jewishness is why she uses a faintly anti-semitic comment to express her disagreement with Freud about the Athené figure. That, at any rate, is the point made by Friedman and DuPlessis when they published "The Master." I see an even larger disagreement: What is there and what is not there? Her Christianity enabled her to see the spiritual beyond the material, his atheistic Jewishness did not, and this became "an argument implicit in our very bones." She wrote of it a