Tribute to Freud -- HD

RE: Tribute to Freud

 

In her Freud-inspired and-directed search, H.D. recovers threads of her life to discover personal and universal patterns: “It was not that he conjured up the past and invoked the future. It was a present that was in the past or a past that was in the future.” She found her own personal pattern to be bound with Freud’s, professing further, “The years went forward, then backward. The shuttle of the years ran a thread that wove my pattern into the Professor’s.”

 

 

“My bat-like thought-wings would beat painfully in that sudden searchlight,” H.D. writes in Tribute to Freud, her moving memoir. Compelled by historical as well as personal crises, H.D. underwent therapy with Freud during 1933–34, as the streets of Vienna were littered with tokens dropped like confetti on the city stating “Hitler gives work,” “Hitler gives bread.” Having endured World War I, she was now gathering her resources to face the cataclysm she knew was approaching. The first part of the book, “Writing on the Wall,” was composed some ten years after H.D.’s stay in Vienna; the second part, “Advent,” is a journal she kept during her analysis. Revealed here in the poet’s crystal shard-like words and in Freud’s own letters (which comprise an appendix) is a remarkably tender and human portrait of the legendary Doctor in the twilight of his life. Time double backs on itself, mingling past, present, and future in a visionary weave of dream, memory, and reflections.

-- Adam Phillips

 

 

 

H.D. enters into psychoanalysis with Freud in 1933 because she wants his help in understanding the strange psychic effects of "a number of severe shocks" connected with her experiences during the First World War, including the death in action of her brother in France. one of these effects is a visionary experience to which she gives the name "Writing on the Wall," consisting of a "series of shadow- or of light-pictures I saw projected on the wall of a hotel bedroom. . . " H.D. sees these pictures on the wall in the course of a trip to Greece with her lover and companion Bryher (Winnifred Ellerman). Convalescing from double pneumonia at the end of the war, H.D. says to Bryher "'If I could only feel that I could walk the sacred way to Delphi, I know I would get well'". They make the trip, but "we were informed. . . that it was absolutely impossible for two ladies alone, at that time, to make the then dangerous trip on the winding road to Delphi." Kept back from Delphi, H.D. makes her own oracle happen in the form of this vision, which becomes invested with all her love of antiquity and with her image of herself as a poet-prophet.

H.D. does not doubt that she has been granted visions; it is about their interpretation that she wants to consult Freud. However, Freud's interpretation of the material H.D. presents to him does not find favor in her eyes. Freud, H.D. tells us, views the experience as a "dangerous 'symptom'", "a suppressed desire for forbidden 'signs and wonders'. . . a suppressed desire to be a Prophetess, to be important anyway, megalomania. . ." Not only does Freud fail to confirm H.D.'s place as a successor to the priestesses of Delphi, but he collapses her highest spiritual aspirations back into the baseness of the body, the female body which, in his system, as H.D. is well aware, is characterized by a basic lack. H.D. presents this clash of Delphic and Freudian interpretations through a scene in which a Greek statue is passed between analyst and analysand. Freud selects from his collection of antiquities a statue of Pallas Athené, Wingless Victory, which he hands to H.D. "'This is my favorite,' he said. . . 'She is perfect,' he said, 'only she has lost her spear'". Such a statement from Freud necessarily resonates with phallic implication. For H.D. the meanings surrounding the statue are linked to those carried by her vision, in which the same goddess appears (in the aspect of Niké). These meanings gain definition in contrast to Freud's interpretations, which she resists.

 

Tribute to Freud has from the beginning attracted readings which raise the question of the text's representations of the phallus and its absence. Is H.D. as a woman necessarily incomplete, castrated, in Freud's view? How does she respond to such an implication, as presented in the scene of the statue? Where do we locate H.D.'s resistance in this passage? Recent critics have shown great interest in H.D.'s reaction to "Freud's all-too-Freudian presentation of the spearless Athene" (Chisolm 1992, 35-6). Curiously, these critics, while vigorously pursuing the question of H... 

--- American Imago 2.2 (2001) 597-621

 

 

“He had dared to say that the dream came from an unexplored depth in man’s consciousness and that this unexplored depth ran like a great stream or ocean underground, and that vast depth of that ocean was the same vast depth that today, as in joseph’s day, overflowing in man’s small consciousness, produced inspiration, madness, creative idea, or the dregs of the dreariest symptoms of mental unrest and disease.”

And HD’s delight in Freud’s understanding of the sciences from the East, the buddhist and yogic traditions of consciousness stamp this knowledge large: we are all one people and we have but to learn to listen to our deep ocean, to dive into the ocean and in the logical extension of such transcendent access, in the words of Theodore Sturgeon in his equally brilliant “To Marry Medusa”:

“Humanity had passed the barriers of language and of individual isolation on its planet. It passed the barriers of species now, and of isolation in its cosmos. The faith of Mbala was available to Guido, and so were the crystal symphonies of the black plants past Orphiuchus . . .. As one man could share the being of another here on Earth, so both, and perhaps a small child with them, could fuse their inner selves with some ancient contemplative mind leeched to the rocks in some roaring methane cataract, or soar with some insubstantial life–forms adrift where they were born in the high layers of atmosphere around some unheard–of planet. 

“So ended mankind, to be born again as hive – humanity, so ended the hive of Earth to become star – man, the immeasurable, the limitless, the growing; maker of music beyond music, poetry beyond words, and full of wonder, full of worship.” 

Can you see how Freud is extrapolated beyond humanity’s collective understanding into a cross-species understanding – the glory of the self within the all-knowing, all-understanding hive mind across the cosmos? Sturgeon, perhaps the greatest undiscovered American writer of this century, has captured the Buddhist reality of the cosmic mind where each of us are motes, aware of the billions beyond billions of motes about us. This, the cosmic mind we find what Freud calls the collective unconscious, is the sea of dreams. 

HD blasts the past into existence with her blitz on Freud’s importance to human consciousness – the art of self-discovery in a form the puritanical, supremacist mind could find reasonable and appreciate the subtle interpretation of ancient knowledge, from another facet, as it were, of consciousness. HD’s 85 petaled lotus flower swims serenely in literature: one is reminded instantly of Paramahansa Yogananda’s ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’ and Soygal Rinpoche’s ‘Book of the Living’. Both are divinely inspired, both, as is ‘Tribute to Freud’, are read with the utmost ease – as if the magnetic attraction on the receptors of language created its frictionless glide.

I am stunned by HD’s recall of Freud’s anger: “ I did not know what enraged him suddenly. I veered round off the couch, my feet on the floor. I do not know exactly what I had said . . .. The Professor himself is uncanonical enough; he is beathing with his hand, with his fist, on the head-piece of the old-fashioned horseheair sofa hat had heard more secrets than the confession box of any popular Roman Catholic father-confessor in his heyday . . .. Consciously, I was not aware of having said anything that might account for the Professor’s outburst. And even as I veered around, facing him, my mind was detached enough to wonder if this was some idea of his for speeding up the analytic content or redirectiong the flow of associated images. The Professor said, ‘The trouble is – I am an old man – you do not think it worth your while to love me.’  This, this reveals more of Freud’s humanity in a few words than everything by Seigmund,