The Hedgehog

Tribute to Freud, first published in 1956, is comprised of two sections: “Writing on the Wall” and “Advent.” The first section had been previously published in 1945. Equal parts homage to the man she called “the Professor” and memoir of her own childhood, Tribute to Freud explores H.D.’s complex relationship to psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, which took place in the 1930s when she became his patient and pupil as she sought to work through her war terror and liberate the creative powers that had seemingly grown stagnant within her. In the Tribute to Freud passage displayed here, we see references to many of the places and themes that recur throughout the book: Church Street (site of the Doolittle home in Bethlehem), Count Zinzendorf (Moravian founder of Bethlehem), four of her brothers, the sisters who died in infancy, and, of course, the symbolic weight of H.D.’s birth in a town called Bethlehem. As Freud notes, “Bethlehem is the town of Mary,” the mother of Jesus.