Analyzing Freud: Letters of HD, Bryher and Their Circle

Trivium: Estudos Interdisciplinares

This article tries to address the ambivalent nature of H.D.'s Tribute to Freud with respect to her literary career. The author's contention is that the American poet in this seminal and hybrid text pursues both a poetic and a personal agenda. Tribute to Freud reads as a book of mourning as well as a book of rebellion, a book of commitment to psychoanalysis as well as of a book of resistance to it.

American Imago, 2004

The life and work of Sigmund Freud continue to fascinate general and professional readers alike. Joel Whitebook here presents the first major biography of Freud since the last century, taking into account recent developments in psychoanalytic theory and practice, gender studies, philosophy, cultural theory, and more. Offering a radically new portrait of the creator of psychoanalysis, this book explores the man in all his complexity alongside an interpretation of his theories that cuts through the stereotypes that surround him. The development of Freud's thinking is addressed not only in the context of his personal life, but also in that of society and culture at large, while the impact of his thinking on subsequent issues of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and social theory is fully examined. Whitebook demonstrates that declarations of Freud's obsolescence are premature, and, with his clear and engaging style, brings this vivid figure to life in compelling and readable fashion.

Modernism/modernity 30: 2, 2023

Who would still be so naïve as to see Freud as the conventional Viennese bourgeois who so astonished André Breton by not manifesting any obsession with the Bacchanalian? Now that we have nothing but his works, will we not recognize in them a river of fire?-Jacques Lacan 1 In "Der Dichter und das Phantasieren" (Creative Writers and DayDreaming , 1907), one of the few talks Sigmund Freud ever gave to a literary audience, the psychoanalyst explored the nature of literary imagination and aesthetic pleasure. 2 It took Freud only about twenty minutes to get his message across to the ninety or so listeners present, in terms the local press the day after reported to have been "subtle and at times clairvoyant": the poet resembling a selfish fantasist and creative writing analogous to the act of daydreaming, literature's power lies above all in its ability to allow adult readers an orderly, yet shameless and pleasurable, experience of otherwise repressed wishes and memories of childhood play. 3 Freud had begun developing this thesis earlier and would remain interested in it well after his 1907 talk, for his assessment of the function of literature formed part of his more general conviction that modern culture is the product of a renunciation of deep-seated psychological drives. 4 This assertion and the heuristic tools psychoanalysis offered to unearth such drives attracted a wide variety of modernist authors and artists to Freud. This in turn has prompted some scholars to read modernism with Freud and has brought others to interpret Freud and modernism alongside one another, as different manifestations of the same "battle between the self and culture" that defined the modernist moment more generally. 5 The influence of Freud on modernism can for these reasons hardly be understated. Freud himself made no secret of wanting to exert such influence. In a letter to Carl Gustav Jung the day after his talk, he notes somewhat derogatorily: "It went without incidents, which suffices; for the numerous poets and their ladies present, it must have been heavy food. Yet it was just an entrée to create an appetite." 6 And an appetite for more was certainly what his work would create within late Hapsburg Vienna and well beyond. Yet is it possible to turn things round and ask instead to what extent Freud himself considered the potential of modernism for his own thought or practices, to what degree he in turn might have been tributary to modernism? Of course, we know that Arthur Schnitzler's circle convened around the corner, that Karl Kraus was a sometime interlocutor, and that Thomas Mann, Arnold and Stefan Zweig, and others posed as friends and correspondents. 7 Yet while there were also those, like H.D. and Samuel Beckett, who were in psychoanalysis (or those who, like Rainer Maria Rilke and Virginia Woolf, refused it), and while we are aware of certain (missed) encounters between Freud and still other writers, most notably, perhaps, André Breton, scholars have often cited Freud's debt to pre-modernist literature and his creative but not experimental style as evidence that traffic between psychoanalysis and modernism was largely one-way. 8 In this context, "Der Dichter und das Phantasieren," as a public lecture to "poets and their ladies," seems no exception. Freud, so his letter to Jung shows, delivered his talk to leave a mark on these poets and increase their appetite for psychoanalysis, not to enter into dialogue. On closer inspection, however, much more was going on. In fact, his lecture opens onto a whole textual and print cultural network rarely noted in accounts of the interactions between modernism and psychoanalysis.

International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2021

This paper presents H. D.'s dialogue with Freud on the theme of time and timelessness. Freud presented a conception of time that varied in accordance with the various levels of consciousness. But while linear time is presented in Freud’s writing as an essential part of development and mourning, timelessness has not been fully developed as such. A discussion of Freud’s conception of time is followed by a reading of H. D.’s memoir Tribute to Freud (1974). H. D. offers a series of reminiscences of different periods in her life, with an emphasis on her analysis and on Freud. The reading of the memoir presents an intense and stimulating narrative of the encounter with Freud at the time of analysis and in après-coup. This translation revolves around timelessness as a path into a realm of imagination and fantasy, not sufficiently acknowledged by Freud as such, yet crucial to H. D.’s quest for an innovative poetic voice. The significance and elusiveness of timelessness is discussed using ideas from André Green and Walter Benjamin.

Sigmund Freud's impact on how we think, and how we think about how we think, has been enormous. Freud's psychoanalytical theory suggested new ways of understanding-amongst other things-love, hate, childhood, family relations, civilisation, religion, sexuality, fantasy and the conflicting emotions that make up our daily lives.Today we live in the shadow of Freud's innovative and controversial concepts. This short introduction to Freud's theories, contexts, influences and cultural effects is the ideal guide for readers interested in this thinker's continuing impact on contemporary culture and critical theory. The perfect companion to Freud's own work, this volume examines key ideas and key texts alongside the contexts from which they emerged. As well as offering a critical reading of Freud, the author highlights Freud's genius as a critical reader-of dreams, symptoms, slips of the tongue, myth, desire and culture. What emerges from this approach is a lucid examination of Freud's influence on contemporary literary and cultural theory.

Classica - Revista Brasileira de Estudos Clássicos, 2009