Tribute to Freud
by H. D.

Reviewed by Betsy Chunko

“There were things under things, as well as things inside things.” Thus does H.D. — in this reprint of her classic twentieth-century memoir, Tribute to Freud — prove herself in one sweeping statement a true catechumen of the Professor.

By her own account, she was more Freud’s “student” than analysand, or analytic patient. Accordingly, the portrayal of Freud here is an intimate one, tempering the more catholic attention to his methods that lurks in the corners of this book. The first part, “Writing on the Wall,” addressed “to Sigmund Freud, blameless physician,” was written in London in the autumn of 1944, with no reference to the Vienna notebooks of spring 1933. The second, “Advent,” is both a continuation of the first part and its prelude — a gloss.

Freud’s own frustration with the cult around him by this late point in his life becomes an underlying theme. Once, when she asks him to clarify a point of psychoanalytic theory, he replies, “in his curiously casual ironical manner, ‘Do you know, I myself have always wondered. I often wish that I could find someone to explain it to me.’” These fleeting glimpses reveal a Freud more human, more down-to-earth, than we often assume, challenging popular (and enduring) stereotypes of him and his famous couch. She relates that “In our talks together he rarely used any of the now rather overworked technical terms, invented by himself and elaborated on by the growing body of doctors, psychologists, and nerve specialists.” The Freud revealed by fits and stops is no professional drone with a singular focus. He is a philosopher of the mind, an affable and generous man who forges personal relationships with his subjects, delving into their lives in order to reveal to them their emotional hierarchies.

Yet this text, ostensibly about Freud, is also very much not about him. There is much here that is strictly personal: H.D.’s childhood, the breakup of her marriage and the birth of her child, the death of her brother in service in France and the consequent death, from shock, of her father. She also dwells on the breakup of her literary circle in London, most notably her separation from Pound and Lawrence.

Part I is particularly interesting. Told as a series of moments, of remembered impressions and discrete meditations, H.D. takes a ‘thing-based’ approach to her memories here. There is her father’s table in the study of her childhood, there is the Professor’s table in the office in Vienna. The musings seem automatic, compulsory even, but our H.D. is also fully aware. Sometimes we glimpse how very difficult the revelations of analysis can be. In a moment of poignant reflection on her stay in Vienna, she muses: “The Professor’s explanations were too illuminating. My bat-like thought-wings would beat painfully in that sudden searchlight.” The catharsis she feels in writing about this time leads her to “wonder as to the seemliness, or the safety even, of continuing this experience or this experiment [of prolonged self-analysis]. For my head, although it cannot have taken very long in clock time for these pictures to form there, is already warning me that this is an unusual dimension, an unusual way to think, that my brain or mind may not be equal to the occasion.” Perhaps her motivation lies in latent longing to bear out the promise she feels the Professor saw in her. She recalls her impression that Freud “is asking something of me, confiding in me, treating me in his courteous, subtle way as an equal.”

Throughout, she treats a series of broad relationship categories: between people and things, past and present, facts and impressions, imitation and original, student and teacher, analyst and analysand. Beyond these pairings, there are more painful groupings she touches upon with curious lightness: life and death, war and peace. Freud himself dies in the space of years that separates the writing of parts I and II. Of this occasion, H.D. reflects, “I was in Switzerland when soon after the announcement of a World at War the official London news bulletin announced that Dr. Sigmund Freud, who had opened up the field of the knowledge of the unconscious mind, the innovator or founder of the science of psychoanalysis, was dead.” The effect of this news on her is recounted with a gutted detachment: “The war was on us. I did not grieve for the Professor or think of him. He was spared so much.” Indeed, there is more behind this book than Freud’s gargantuan reputation. There is also an embattled world, full of horrors.

Yet, on a perhaps still deeper level, for all of her pretensions to not grieving his death, this book reveals how Freud sits at the heart of her memory, herself. In his introduction to the text, Adam Phillips writes, “Tribute to Freud should be read…not merely for what it tells us about Freud — though it tells us much that is of great interest—but for what it shows us and tells us about what H.D. made of Freud, and was making of herself; and making of herself through what she could make of Freud.” This book is a weaving of her and him, with Freud as totemic figure — at once father, friend, and figure of myth. In the Afterword, written in 1973 by Norman Holmes Pearson and included in this edition, he writes: “Remembering Freud was significant [for H.D.], for remembering him was remembering what she had remembered with him.” As if to highlight this, she writes, “I do not want to become involved in the strictly historical sequence. I wish to recall the impressions, or rather I wish the impressions to recall me. Let the impressions come in their own way, make their own sequence.” In this, she is drawing a comparison between her writing process and a central tenet of psychoanalysis — the notion that the unconscious, that structuring force in the individual’s psychic life, cannot be directly accessed or controlled. It can only be revealed, to ourselves as well as to others, in fleeting glimpses. This deeper self must be coaxed out, teased away from its hiding places.

The earliest version of Tribute to Freud for American audiences quickly developed a reputation as an informal portrait of a great man. Freud’s biographer, Ernest Jones, praised it highly, calling H.D.’s odd memoir a “precious appreciation.” And so it is. But the question of just who the book is written for is not an easy one to answer. Is it for enduring clusters of proper Freudians? Is it for poets and amateur symbologists? Is it for those who fear the places, remote and not directly knowable, within themselves that Freud’s ‘praxis’ proposed to touch? In the end, the book is most aptly described as a book by H.D., for H.D. The art of a text like this is in the way she reveals herself, and through this self-revelation the Professor as well. There is a lack of force. She wants to remember organically, automatically, associatively. This is, in the end, a literary portrait of a woman striving to get out of her own way.