Psyche Reborn by Friedman Susan Stanford

Author:Friedman, Susan Stanford. [Friedman, Susan Stanford.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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of her interactions with men as well as women. The prose and poetry written after the resurgence of creativity during World War II reveal an artist who believed that her search to unite the fragments of female identity was inextricably interwoven with her desire to understand the patterns of malefemale relationship. Freud's theory that the child's early erotic desires in the intense world of the nuclear family determine the nature of adult relationships had a profound impact on H.D. Parallel to her attachment to her mother, her relationship with her father served as a paradigm for later involvements with men. Adapting Freud's ideas to her own life, H.D. regarded her father, mother, brothers, and even the sister who died as personal prototypes for the men and women for whom she cared most deeply during her adult life. She fused Freud's theory of the family with her own notion of palimpsest, the "superposition" of the present on the past. She accepted, without any moral hesitation, the incestuous base of erotic passion implicit in Freud's theory of adult sexual love. In Helen in Egypt, the myth of Isis and Osiris most particularly embodies the erotic interconnections between generations of family members: as archetypes of love, they are simultaneously husband and wife, father and mother, brother and sister. 33

As a consequence of this personal palimpsest, H.D. believed that she could discover the patterns of love and betrayal in her relationships with such men as Pound and Aldington through psychoanalysis of her early feelings about her father and her more recent dreams centering on fathersymbols.

Her search for the personal father in her adult life led her to reverse Freud's analysis of the transference in their sessions together. She wrote in Compassionate Friendship that Freud was the "perfect father image," and her dream records and associations continuously link Professor Freud with Professor Doolittle, not with Helen Wolle. 34 As an extension of this personal search, poems like the Trilogy, Helen in Egypt, Vale Ave, and Sagesse develop the poet's quest in two opposing directions variously portrayed as father and mother, fathersymbol and mothersymbol, God and Goddess. Thus, "The Dream / deftly stagemanaged" a stark male image of the "worldfather" whose "amber shining" eyes pierced the dark in the Trilogy ( T. , pp. 25–34). The Trilogy's "AllFather" reappears as "Amen, Allfather" in Helen in Egypt, the creator whose presence and will dominate Book One of the "Pallinode" ( H.E. , pp. 1–17). And in Vale Ave, lightbearing and falsely defiled Lucifer pairs with Lilith as the archetypal

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