Analyzing Freud: Letters of H. D. , Bryher and Their Circle - Hardcover

H. D. (Hilda Doolittle); Bryher

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0811214990 ISBN 13: 9780811214995

Publisher: New Directions, 2002

Synopsis

A landmark book in the studies of Freud, H.D., modernism, gender, and sexuality. The poet H.D. (1886-1961) was in psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud in Vienna during the spring of 1933 and again in the fall of 1934. She visited him daily at his study at 19 Berggasse, while outside Nazi thugs and militia bullied their way through the streets. Freud was old, and fragile. H.D. was forty-six and despairing of her writing life, which seemed to have reached a dead end, for all her success. Her sessions with Freud proved to be the point of transition, the funnel into which were poured her memories of the past and associations in the presentand from which she emerged reborn. H.D. came to Freud at the urging of her companion, the novelist Bryher (1884-1983), the daughter of a wealthy British shipping magnate. Freud welcomed H.D. as a creative spirit whose work he respected, but he did ask her not to prepare for their sessions, write about them in her journal, or talk about them with her friends, especially Bryher, who remained home in England. H.D.'s letters from Vienna filled the gap. Breezy, informal, irreverent, vibrant with detail, they revolve around her hours with Freud, making her correspondence unique in the spectrum of reminiscences, journals, memoirs, and biographies swirling around the legacy of the "Professor" and the movement he founded. The volume includes H.D. and Bryher's letters, as well as letters by Freud to H.D. and Bryher, most of them published for the first time. In addition, the book includes H.D. and Bryher's letters to and from Havelock Ellis, Kenneth MacPherson, Robert McAlmon, Ezra Pound, and Anna Freud, among others. Fully annotated with Index and Photographs

About this title

About the Author:

H.D. (1886-1961) (the pen name of Hilda Doolittle) was born in the Moravian community of Bethlehem, PA in 1886. A major twentieth century poet with “an ear more subtle than Pound’s, Moore’s, or Yeats’s” as Marie Ponsot writes, she was the author of several volumes of poetry, fiction, essays, and memoirs. She is perhaps one of the best-known and prolific women poets of the Modernist era. Bryher Ellerman was a novelist and H.D.’s wealthy companion. She financed H.D.’s therapy with Freud.

Susan Stanford Friedman is Virginia Woolf Professor of English and Women's Studies and chair of the English department, the University of Wisconsin―Madison.

Review:

A valuable contribution to the social history of both psychoanalysis and literary modernism. -- Ann L. Ardis, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Fall 2003

Letters written by H.D.... Sigmund Freud...Ezra Pound, and others also capture the mounting tensions with the rise of Hitler. -- American Literature, September 2003

One of the most striking features of this correspondence is its view onto Freud's larger political and historical setting. -- Dianne Chisholm, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Fall 2004

This rich trove forms an illuminating supplement to H.D.'s poems and autobiographical writings ... an important resource for scholars of psychoanalysis. -- The Women's Review of Books, Christine Froula, 1 February 2003

About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0811214990
• ISBN 13: 9780811214995
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 615
• Editor: Sigmund Freud, Susan Stanford Friedman