First published in 1956, H.D.’s Tribute to Freud is a poetic account of her psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud. Written intermittently between 1944 –1948, it is a strange little book: part composite biography of the famous psychoanalyst, part diary and part epistolary exchange. Following the London Blitz, H.D. — already an established poet, novelist and translator — was on a quest for ‘new words’ to make sense of a violent, fragmented reality.[1] With its attention to associations, repetitions and minute fluctuations of speech, psychoanalysis seemed to offer H.D. the language she had been searching for. Born in Pennsylvania in 1886, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) was the daughter of Helen Wolle, a Moravian musician, and Charles Doolittle, a Professor of mathematics and astronomy at Lehigh University. In The Gift, a novelistic memoir of her childhood, H.D. writes that her star-gazing father ‘came from another world, another country’ and describes his scientific writing as being of a ‘cold and absolute beauty’.[2] During her analysis, H.D. felt that she was ‘on the fringes or on the penumbra of the light of [her] father’s science [and] mother’s art.’[3]
‘Writing on the Wall’ — the first part of Tribute to Freud — is punctuated with brief fragments of German. Often addressed to Freud himself, these fragments run like a refrain throughout H.D.’s composite biography. Towards the end of the text, the fragments coalesce in a transcription of the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s ‘Mignon’s Song’, which H.D. attempts to translate and reweave into the account of her analysis:
Kennst du den Berg und seinen Wolkensteg?
“Do you know the mountain and its cloud-bridge?” is an awkward enough translation but the idea of the mountain and bridge is so very suitable to this whole translation of the Professor and our work together. Steg really means a plank; foot-bridge is the more accurate rendering. It is not a bridge for a great crowd of people, and it is a bridge flung, as it were, across the abyss, not built and hammered and constructed. [4]
Before they met, Freud and H.D. communicated by letter. By way of introduction, Freud had asked H.D. to send him some of her books so that he might ‘get a glimpse of [her] personality’; in the same letter, early in their correspondence, Freud apologised for his ‘bad English’ but was ‘not sure’ whether H.D. knew German.[5] Although limited to reading and writing in English, German was in fact H.D.’s mother tongue. As members of the Moravian Brethren, Helen Wolle’s family spoke a dialect of German originating in Bohemia, now the Czech Republic. Freud, as a German speaker, therefore brought H.D. closer to her mother tongue. In Tribute, H.D. moves from her mother’s tongue, through the father tongue, and into a new language on the penumbra-edge of the ‘father’s science and mother’s art’.[6] Caught in the messy web of psychoanalytic transference — which produces ‘new editions or facsimiles’ of early psychic experiences — Freud, the father of a science who speaks with the mother’s tongue, becomes a conduit for H.D.’s poetics.[7]
With this intervention into her own discourse, H.D. appropriates the psychoanalytic cut — the technical term for the analyst’s interruption of the analysand’s discourse — and turns it into a caesura. Put simply, a caesura is the pause or break in a line, which is a poem’s basic unit of meaning. In the scansion of Ancient epic poems, a caesura is what mediates between past and present, translating the breath of the orating poet into a typographical pause in paginated space. Writing at the threshold of poetry and psychoanalysis, H.D.’s caesurae momentarily delineate — like a tenuous cloud-bridge ‘flung across an abyss’ — an ‘I’ for the reader, while acknowledging that this is the very abyss that cannot be crossed.[8]
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H.D. also kept a scrapbook, now digitised in Yale’s Beinecke Library.[9] Its pages include clippings from books and magazines, as well as photographs of H.D.’s friends and long-term lover, the novelist Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman).[10] This is a different type of scansion, a series of material cuts that produce their own unconscious associations and repetitions. In one collage, a woman dozes in dappled, afternoon-light, framed by mirrored images of the Athenian Acropolis, which may or may not represent the dreamer’s somnambulant landscape; in another, a nude figure sits next to three stone koroi, one face hidden from the camera, the other two rubbed blank by time. Scrolling through the scrapbook’s pixelated pages, one might think of Aby Warburg’s ambitious attempt to trace the influences of the ancient world on post-Enlightenment thinking, by mapping recurring symbols, icons and gestures across visual cultures. Composed of sixty-three wooden panels covered in black hessian, Warburg’s ‘Bilderatlas Mnemosyne’ presents a modular Denkraum (literally, ‘thinking-space’) to translate thought-patterns into pictorial constellations. Yet the recombinatory nature of the Bilderatlas also indexes its very impossibility: like a Freudian analysis or Walter Benjamin’s citational historiography of nineteenth-century Paris, Warburg’s project is — strictly speaking — interminable.[11] Rather than a static object, what emerges is a method: a dynamic, translative practice.
H.D.’s scrapbook, like her later poetry, thus represents a compositional mode that blurs the distinction between the product of writerly labour and the labour itself — that, as she writes of her analysis, makes thoughts ‘things…to be collected, collated, analyzed, shelved, or resolved’.[12] The word ‘scrapbook’ suggests a collection of waste material: a place for the rags and refuse of creative praxis, the detritus of ‘real’ literature (it is not surprising that the scrapbook is a historically marginalised, and gendered, form). But by writing with the unconscious ‘scraps of thought’, H.D. makes everything — and so, nothing — writing.[13]
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[1] H.D., Tribute to Freud, New Directions, New York, 1984, p. 145.
[2] H.D., The Gift, The University Press of Florida, Florida, 1998, p. 253.
[3] H.D., Tribute to Freud, p. 145.
[4] Ibid., p. 108.
[5] Ibid., p. 192.
[6] Ibid., p. 145.
[7] Sigmund Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria”, translated by James Strachey, The Pelican Freud Library, Penguin Books, London, 1983, p. 157.
[8] Ibid., 108.
[9] H.D., ‘Scrapbook containing photographs of H.D., Kenneth Macpherson, Bryher, and others’, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, n.d., https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/2008034, (accessed 5 June 2025).
[10] In 1927, H.D., Bryher and Kenneth Macpherson founded the literary film magazine Close Up, which introduced the cinematic montages of Sergei Eisenstein to the British public. Known as the Pool Group, the trio also produced four films — another language scored by ‘cutting’.; Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Harvard University Press, Massachusetts, 2002.; H.D., Tribute to Freud, p. 14.
[11] See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project.; Sigmund Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable”, translated by James Strachey, The Standard Edition Volume XXIII (1937-1939), The Hogarth Press, London, 1964.
[12] H.D., Tribute to Freud, p. 14.
[13] Ibid., p. 69.