Tribute to Freud

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One of H. D.’s last entries in “Advent” — the notebook, reprinted here, that she kept during her analysis with Freud — is about fairy tales. She has been remembering the Greek myths that were read to her when she was seven by a Miss Helen. Those stories, she writes, “are my foundation or background, Pandora, Midas, the Gorgon-head — that particular story of Perseus and the guardian, Athene.” H. D.’s parents were pious Protestants, but like many of her modernist contemporaries she was turning cultures of myth into what Freud had called, in a famous and timely essay, “a family romance.” Disillusioned with the real parents, the child chooses parents she would prefer to have had — typically grander, more impressive ones — and believes they are in fact her parents. The family history is complemented as it were by other histories; genealogies are chosen, inheritances are found and fashioned. Not satisfied imaginatively by the religion of her parents, H. D. found other myths (and indeed wonders several times during her analysis with Freud whether she will be the founder of a new religion). H. D., it seems, from a very young age, was seeking alternative foundations and backgrounds. She was using what she could find to tell her own stories.

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