A Case Study of Freud’s Psychoanalysis on Hilda Doolittle

Introduction

Sigmund Freud is known as the father of modern psychology. Freud founded the clinical
method of analyzing psychoanalysis and the treatment of psychopathology (McLeod, 2018). One
of his remarkable discoveries is the stages of psychosexual development. Psychosexual
development constitutes to 5 stages; Oral, Anal, Phallic, Latency, and Genital (Lantz, Ray, 2020).
Each stage is associated with specific stages. The oral stage, 0-1 years old, the source of
interaction occurs primarily through the mouth. At this stage, a child’s passiveness, manipulation,
and gullibility develops. The anal stage, 1-3 years old, focuses on the development of libidal
energy to the anal area. Failure in this stage may result in expulsiveness or retentiveness. The
phallic stage, 3-6 years old, primarily focuses on the genitals as they begin to know the gender
differences and sexual curiosity. The latency stage, 6 to puberty focuses on the development of
sexual urgency. Indisposition at this stage may result in failure to form healthy relationships. The
genital stage, puberty to death, is the development of strong sexual interest with the opposite sex.
(Kelland, 2015). This case study centers on analyzing Freud's psychosexual development theory
on Hilda Doolittle.

Background of the study

Hilda Doolittle, commonly known as her pen name H.D, is an American writer and poet.
Born in 1886, Doolittle’s career spanned in about five decades during the 20th century.
Doolittle’s literature focuses on modernist tradition, particularly with emphasis on a woman's
perspective in public events and private lives after World War I. Doolittle felt that her mother
saw her as a disappointment, she can only get attention from her mother when she was sick. She
was a tall woman, alluring yet mysterious. She is arrogant, narcissist but also shy and frightened.
At the age of 16, Doolittle met Frances Gregg, her first lover. Gregg and Doolittle went together
in England and stayed in Europe for the rest of her life. Throughout her life she was equally
attracted to men and women. She had strong attachments to almost everybody that she came in
contact with who didn't reject her.

Doolittle eventually married a man named Richard Aldington. She lived a life like a
bohemian artist with a male and female lovers until the war came. During her adult life,
Doolittle engaged with multiple partners on both sexes. She became pregnant and had a stillborn
child which resulted in her devastation. Her brother was killed in France, and followed by the
death of her father.

Bryher, a young woman, who fell in love with Doolittle immediately. Bryher is the
illegitimate daughter of the richest man in England at that time. They stayed together forever.
She supported Doolittle, and took care of Perdita, Doolittle's daughter. Bryher got married and
they accused Doolittle ruining her marriage. They were polygamous. Macpherson, Doolittle and
Bryher lived together.

Doolittle’s non-conventional sexual practice of the body, exploring her anticipation of

nature as the indication of female desire. Doolittle refuses the fixed female images and tries to
change the description of sex in conventional male-centered content.

Methods

Hilda Doolittle came to see Freud during the analysis when she wrote letters to her friend,
Bryher and to her companion about what is happening. An intellectual and political setting. She
wrote how she learned from him and how he learned from her. Freud doesn’t consider her as a
patient but a student. “Freud listened, not to the "important details," the "content" of the language,
but to the linguistic surface, the language as such.” (Holland, 2002)

Doolittle seeks therapy with Freud as she suffered with writer’s block. She wrote a wish
to lose herself of "repetitive thoughts and experiences," to "take stock of my very modest
possessions of mind and body," "to sort down, know and put together the singular series of
events and dreams that belonged in historical time, to the 1914-1919 period" (Doolittle, 1956). In
1931, at Bryher's encouragement, she had a twenty-four session with an expert in London,
named Mary Chadwick. She then had, during the winter of 1931 to 1932, five sessions with
Hanns Sachs in Berlin, but he was leaving to America. Sachs asked her if she would consider
working with "the Professor'' if he would take her. She did, and she began work with Freud on
March 1, 1933. Bryher supported the analysis and other activities conducted by Freud. They
worked together for months, they met from five to six in the afternoon. “But Doolittle left the
analysis on June 12 and left Vienna, not planning to return, because she was frightened by a
bomb on the tracks of a tram she was riding.” (Bryher 263-64)
 Doolittle’s memoir is structured by her repeatedly returning to reconstruct and reexamine
specific experiences, thoughts, and dreams. She is obsessed, for example, with memories of her
childhood, particularly her dominating and distant Victorian father. As an astronomer, her father,
like Freud, with whom Doolittle often identifies, uncovered mysteries of the universe. The
kinship between Doolittle and Freud differed markedly from the therapeutic or training analysis
of today. A modern analyst would want more than five months before calling the work analysis.

Findings

Hilda Dolittle's gender theory (Psychosexual Development), Doolittle is not the type of
person who is normally associated with Freud's patients and he treated her entirely differently
perhaps he treated any other patient. What was really fascinating is the absolute weakest part of
Freud's work which is theories of femininity; Penis Envy, psychosexual development. Doolittle
ended up being deeply empowered. Both Freud and Doolittle touched each other deeply for a
powerful analytic contact.

Doolittle had this experience while in Greece, seeing a vision that she and Freud spent a
lot of time. Jellyfish experience as where Doolittle describes as she is enclosed in a bell jar, and
later experiences of actual psychosis.

She decided to seek help, she wanted to free herself of her positive thoughts and helped
her with her experiences that happened after the first World War. She said "after her session with
the professor was barely underway before there were preliminary signs and symbols of the
approaching ordeal and the effect of war on my neurotic breakdown, and all of that was driven
deeper during the analysis with Freud in 1933." (Tribute to Freud, H.D., 1956)

First session: She walks in, looks around and she is absolutely enthralled by all of Freud's
artifacts, Greek and Egyptian artifacts. Doolittle was a Greek lover. She translates Greek, she
loves everything about Greek. Freud looked at her and said that she was the first person who
ever walked in and looked at his office instead of looking at him. Freud already thought that she
would be going to be very difficult, and he said to her that she preferred looking at pictures,
preferring the dead shreds of antiquity to his living presence.
Second session: She called Freud as "Papa''. Doolittle now is more comfortable than the first
session. He showed her a little bronze of Athena, helmet, clothes head to foot in a carved robe
and told her that it's his favorite though her sphere is missing. Freud did an interpretation
throughout with the symbolic communications. Freud told her that "a woman can be perfect only
if she has lost something" and she can relate because she lost the ability to write.

At some point of the analysis, Doolittle wrote that the professor is uncanonical. The
professor said that the trouble is she has an old man, and does not think it is worth your while to
love him. (Tribute to Freud, H.D., 1956) There's a tension between them that her, wanted to be
loved by him and her by him. There this one time where Nazis are all over the place and no
patients came by to see him except Doolittle. He asked why she came and she answered, because
she loves him. In between the analysis they're talking about the Nazis.

Freud told her that her transference was a mother fixation, she was back to the earliest
level of mother fixation before there was any difference between the sexes. She wasn't
recognized as a girl and he wasn't read as a boy, he called it the Phallic mother and that was the
connection, and she agreed with the idea. She has a combined sexual identity, she was attached
to a statue of hermaphrodite earlier on which she discussed everything to Freud. She said that she
didn't want to be the mother of the transference and she felt more masculine. Freud and Doolittle
have this intense transference, countertransference relationship, on the other hand they're talking
about as cooperative adults friends.

Ten weeks after the analysis Freud explained the theory of Penis Envy to Doolittle. And
she doesn't object, as what she wrote to Bryher. Doolittle told Freud that the supreme
compliment, woman would be to trust woman/women with this great secret of Penis Envy and
not to keep it a secret. The theory is hard to understand and out in the open.

Dream at the end of the first part of the analysis; She was angry with one of her friends for
being involved with making a fool out of herself with a man. Doolittle wrote these things to
Bryher, she saw a moon bigger than the sun and it was rainbow colored and like a pool of
rainbow in the sky. As she looked it was a dim figure of a woman in the moon she was clothed
santé mystic wonderful draped and flowing rainbow colored robes seated like Madonna and the
curved frame, but she was not Madonna in that sense, she was greek, she was Artemis and she
was pregnant. Freud tells her that it is an almost perfect mythological state. They were band of
sisters, she was taking a step into the pure homo lair not lesbian but just that. She slept for two
hours and she felt different all over. The band of sisters cannot contemplate the father is
fertilizing element in the state of pure homosexuality, weak as a pen.

Second part of the session: Freud said that the problem is that she will have to hide as a boy and
hide as a girl. Doolittle realized in her writings that she needed to commit herself to being male
or female, but Freud said that it will be sorted out.

Several years later Doolittle wrote to Freud and he wrote back. Freud stated that Doolittle
doesn't give him praise but affection, and he doesn't need to be ashamed of the satisfaction. The
length of his age is not easy, the strength spring is beautiful and so is Love. (Geltner, 2018)

Conclusion

By the time when psychoanalysis grew into an organized discipline of research, Sigmund
Freud's conducted analysis on Hilda Doolittle and specified it as the Penis Envy theory, Freud
considered it as a necessary part of development of female gender identity. When a young girl is
exposed to the body of a naked male they feel deprived and wish for a penis of their own.
Doolittle's acceptance of her analysis of Freud helped her to understand what her sexual identity
was. Her unconscious thinking and feelings carried to her adult life from her childhood. She
accepted her need to be perfect and her bisexuality, and she would cope with both through
creativity and gave her the metaphors for her works that helped her to write the rest of her life.
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