Analyzing Freud

de Sigmund Freud, Susan Stanford Friedman

"The poet H. D. (1886-1961) underwent psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud in Vienna during the spring of 1933 and again in the fall of 1934. She visited his famed study at 19 Berggasse daily, while outside Nazi thugs bullied their way through the streets - an early foretaste of the catastrophe of coming war. Freud was old, fragile, and often ill. H. D. was forty-six and despairing of her writing life, which, for all her success, seemed to her to have reached a dead end. Her sessions with Freud proved to be the point of transition, the funnel into which she poured her memories of the past and associations in the present, and from which she emerged reborn." "H. D. came to Freud at the urging of her companion, the novelist Bryher (1894-1983), the daughter of a wealthy British shipping magnate and long a supporter of the internationl psychoanalytical movement.". "Although H. D.'s letters to Bryher are at the core of Analyzing Freud, the volume includes a generous selection of Bryher's side of the exchange, as well as sixteen letters by Freud to H. D. and a dozen more to Bryher, most of them published for the first time. In addition, reflecting a larger literary and personal web of associations, the book includes H. D.'s and Bryher's letters to and from Havelock Ellis, Kenneth MacPherson, Robert McAlmon, Ezra Pound, and Anna Freud, among others. Taken together, the 306 letters in Analyzing Freud, introduced and fully annotated by Susan Stanford Friedman, comprise a compelling portrait of a psychoanalysis that amplifies and expands upon H. D.'s formal Tribute to Freud (1974)."--BOOK JACKET.