Although previous scholarship has addressed efforts within H.D.’s own life to reconcile images with their interpretation, as well as her revisionist approach to Freud and her use of autobiography to convey these criticisms, few authors have focused how Doolittle’s stylistic decisions convey this tension between symbol and interpretation. When approached through close readings of individual poems, H.D.’s explorations of symbol and interpretation Helen in Egypt can still be read as a feminist revision of Freud as well as a re-envisioning of modernist autobiographical conventions, though one also observes that stylistic aspects of Doolittle’s work illuminate the several established scholarly interpretations of this theme within the book. This essay will focus on a single motif within the book-length poem, that of the Egyptian hieroglyph, which continually serves as a metaphor for the conflict between the languages of symbol and interpretation within the text. Although Doolittle conveys this tension descriptively, the strophes of Helen in Egypt also use the imagist style of H.D.’s early career to mirror and complicate Helen’s efforts to negotiate objective with subjective. Style and form, for H.D., encompassed poetic technique as well as the literary traditions from which she drew such strategies, and will be defined in this way throughout this analysis. Such a reading of the hieroglyph motif within Helen in Egypt reveals a constant struggle between symbol and interpretation as being omnipresent within the style, imagery, and plot of the poem sequence. Through these stylistic and thematic decisions, Doolittle continually privileges an unmediated experience of myth, symbol, and the sub-conscious as ends in and of themselves. By doing so, H.D. and her autobiographical counterpart present themselves in the role of both patient and analysand, an egalitarian claim rather than a presumptuous one.

Psychoanalysis as a Cultural Phenomenon

Sigmund Freud, c. 1905
BY Ludwig Grillich

In the years before Doolittle became a patient of Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis remained increasingly popularized in America and Europe, and, as a result, she began engaging with such ideas long before her sessions with The Professor. As Mariano Ben Plotkin argues in her book Freud in the Pampas, psychoanalysis had captured the collective imagination of the 1910s and 1920s, and new publications often presented analysis as an empirical science that could be applied and tailored to the individual psyche. She writes, for instance, that “…psychoanalysis found a place in the popular imagination at the convergence of a more open discourse on sexuality with new ‘scientific’ forms of knowledge. Psychoanalysis could be introduced as one of the new technologies available for the modernization of social mores, a modern version of hypnotism… and at the same time, a new instrument to deal with traditional but highly popular themes, such as the mysteries and interpretation of dreams.” Plotkin suggests that although Freudian theory often appeared in the guise of scientific knowledge, mass culture popularized the act of revising and defining its ideas on one’s own terms. Additionally, many of the intellectuals in H.D.’s circle of friends, namely Frances Gregg and Bryher, read voraciously from these newly popularized texts, allowing her to take part in a dialogue among her peers about the personal significance of psychoanalytic ideas before becoming an analysand. As Susan Stanford Friedman argues in her landmark study Psyche Reborn, these exchanges encouraged Doolittle to continually revise and apply ideas from Freud, Jung, and articles published in such periodicals as The Psychoanalytic Journal, to which Bryher subscribed. Friedman describes these discussions: “By the late twenties, H.D. could hardly have escaped almost daily involvement with psychoanalysis; Bryher’s enthusiasm was leading her to plan a future as an analyst, and the two women were attending many lectures on psychoanalysis in Berlin.” As Stanford suggests, psychoanalytic philosophy became integral to H.D.’s daily life, and, in the process, Doolittle continually considered the significance that such theories held for her.

Doolittle approached her sessions with Sigmund Freud with a conception of psychoanalysis which, in some respects, diverged from the dominant view… she frequently conflated them with the mystical worldviews of the ancient texts with which she also engaged.

While certainly influenced by this cultural idea of psychoanalysis as a science to be applied to the individual psyche, Doolittle approached her sessions with Sigmund Freud with a conception of psychoanalysis which, in some respects, diverged from the dominant view of her time. Although mass culture of the 1910s and 1920s emphasized the scientific innovation inherent in Freud’s theories, she frequently conflated them with the mystical worldviews of the ancient texts with which she also engaged. Described by biographer Barbara Guest as “her various brews of Egyptology, Hellenic studies, tarot, astrology, numerology, and psychoanalysis,” this eclectic personal philosophy remained, in some ways, a product of the relativist approach to psychoanalytic theory that remained popularized in her time. As a result, however, she conceived of much of Freud’s revolutionary philosophy in unconventional ways, and the popular definition of psychoanalysis at the time allowed for such variation.

Although conflated with classical and mystical ideas, Doolittle’s personal vision of psychoanalysis remained inextricable from her background as a poet and novelist. As she herself writes in a letter she sent to Havelock Ellis after being accepted as a pupil of Sigmund Freud, she sought help from The Professor after a series of unfulfilling encounters with less well-known analysts in order to “come to enough balance and greatness and stability” to produce a great work of art. Having suffered a personal breakdown after the trauma of losing several family members and friends to World War I, she found herself unable to produce new literary work that she perceived as significant. She felt that this standstill remained a product of her having been shaken by the tragedies of her generation, a problem that could be solved by regaining her emotional balance. She states, for example, in this 1932 letter that, “I do not so far, consider my work at all… anything. Here and there, yes, a peak, an ice-flower. But if I can manage to straighten this out, to gain strength and power, it will be partly in order to return, in some literary form, the debt I owe the few…” For Doolittle, understanding oneself remained crucial to gaining insight about one’s surroundings and conveying them to readers. Approached within the context of her emotional state, this search for personal strength in order to create art speaks to her perceived loss of voice and agency long after the war’s end. As Jill Scott writes in Electra After Freud, “Like others of her generation, H.D. felt silenced by the breakdown of personal and public values in the wake of World War I and responded to these traumatic events with a quest for a new aestheticism based on the intoxicating beauty of a Greek statue.” For H.D., the personal and the artistic remained inseparable, even more so at the time that she initially began her engagement with psychoanalytic texts.