Rewriting Psychoanalysis: H.D.'s Tribute to Freud

Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2014

Central Europe , 2015

Freud and his Discontents; an aetiology of psychoanalysis, 2021

The book, ‘Freud and his Discontents; an aetiology of psychoanalysis’ (ISBN 978-87-4303-717-0) is published, available in Denmark and Germany, and will be promoted in Britain, America, and Canada. A synopsis of the book is contained in the pdf along with text samples from the book. The book runs from the records of the Freud family in Pribor, the Jewish Enlightenment from a center not too far of in Tysmenitz which, influenced Freud’s parents and his early years. His first three years were actually spent with a Catholic nanny which left him relatively positive to the Catholic faith but his family's beliefs in Judaism were strongly rejected. This, plus his reports of some sexualization in Freud records, leaves him with early sexual attachments to his mother and anger against his father - his response to his family was therefore rooted in Oedipal dynamics. Sexual theories of the time, including Havelock Ellis, von Krafft-Ebbing, and Albert Moll also play a part in his theory of libido. He also seems to hold to such templates where two mothers are present and with birth confusion, he records two possible fathers. Freud’s Oedipal theory established at age three, occur simultaneously when Freud significantly lost his nanny and returned to his mother. These factors become evident in his works up to and including his last work, Moses and Monotheism. A significant amount of Freud’s works are discussed including, the psychosexual stages, Leonardo da Vinci, Totem and taboo, and the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. In this last section, there are brief entries describing the main ideas of those who met with Freud in Vienna on Wednesdays. These are the ‘discontents’ where despite stormy meetings, some remained as Freudians, and some, like CG Jung and Alfred Adler, go their own way. We then have a ‘diaspora’ of psychologists which, gives rise to the modern world of psychology and its disciplines as we find it.

What are the stakes of writing and publishing, of moving from intimate writing to the public sphere? Examining this question in the case of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, read here as an autobiographical text, this paper explores the intricate nexus of ambition, death and writing. Freud is possessed by the possibility of becoming famous, a public persona, immortal. His route to achieving this is the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams. He aspires to greatness, and yet the very project that is supposed to secure it is fragile and insecure; the very project entails a risk. The same text that could secure one’s immortality becomes the locus of one’s absence. Publishing renders the most intimate text public and at a distance from oneself. The wish for glory cannot be assuaged through a published text, which is a public affair. One cannot make a name for oneself.

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.

The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2020

This paper assesses the history of psychoanalysis in the United States in order to inform a "professional memoir" of the author's experience of analytic training in the 21 st Century. The mix of historical and personal landscapes supports a contention that there is something missing or lost in American psychoanalysis, that psychoanalysis has lost sight of the radical and subversive nature of unconscious processes. I argue that only by returning to a study of rigorous and comprehensive theory, seated in Freud's work, can this absence be addressed.

Psychotherapy and Counselling Journal of Australia

Psychoanalysis has had a long gestation, during the course of which it has experienced multiple rebirths, leading some current authors to complain that there has been such a proliferation of theories of psychoanalysis over the past 115 years that the field has become theoretically fragmented and is in disarray (Fonagy & Target, 2003; Rangell, 2006). In this paper, Kenny surveys the past and present landscapes of psychoanalytic theorizing and clinical practice to trace the evolution of Freud’s original insights and psychoanalytic techniques to current theory and practice. First, the article sketches the evolutionary chronology of psychoanalytic theory; second, it discusses the key psychoanalytic techniques derived from clinical practice, with which psychoanalysis is most strongly identified; third, it interrogates whether Freud’s original theoretical conceptualizations and clinical practices are still recognizable in current psychoanalytic theory and practice, using four key exemplar...

American Imago , 2022

This paper suggests a reading of H.D.'s Tribute to Freud as the daughter's quest for the maternal language. This distinctive memoir has commonly been read either through the daughter's Vatersehnsucht, desire for her father, or through the feminist lens of the woman poet confronting the authoritarian Freud. Here I offer the quest of the daughter for the maternal as an obscure dimension of the text, yet one that is crucial in the formation of the feminine voice. It is created through allusions to Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795) and, most distinctly, to the enigmatic figure of Mignon in that novel and to the maternal absence that formed her distinct character and poetic voice. H.D. offers her translation of the maternal as a language of echoes, curly structures, and spiral-like meandering. The maternal dimension of the feminine voice is presented as an impossible yet inevitable work of translation that embodies a continuous struggle of becoming.

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.