Much of H.D.'s corpus can be appreciated more deeply through a focus on her connection to psychoanalytic theory and psychoanalysis. In 1933, years after first reading Sigmund Freud's work and developing great respect for psychoanalytic practice, H.D. decided to undergo treatment with him in Vienna. At this time, she was grief-stricken about her stillborn child and the loss of her brother in WWI, shaken by her husband's war-torn, traumatized mind, and riddled with anxiety and paranoia about Hitler's rise, and the prospect of another disastrous global conflict. H.D. felt that this internal chaos was preventing her from producing meaningful work, and she longed for a sense of clarity and peace. After several months in treatment, her analysis with Freud came to a halt when Nazi powers entered Vienna.
H.D. eventually returned to treatment and finished her analysis with Freud. Afterward, she felt she had developed a strong grasp of her own psychic patterns through speaking about her memories and dreams. She felt she could finally reconcile and connect her personal narrative with society at large. Norman Holmes Pearson, a literary academic and friend of H.D., once said that Freud illuminated for H.D. “the relationship between the individual dream and the myth as the dream of the tribe.” In H.D.'s later work, the exploration of myth (specifically Greek myth), became a way of engaging with that relationship. After her analysis, H.D. wrote a memoir about the experience, at the same time she wrote Trilogy. The memoir, titled Writing on the Wall, was published in 1944. Advent, an analytical journal, republished the work in 1956 under the title Tribute to Freud. In reading this text, one can see that H.D. had become a true student and disciple of Freud, not just an analysand.
In all of H.D.'s work, the penetrating bareness of her lines, their visceral imagery, and her exploration of hidden correspondence of the material and the mental, have consistently kept her work tied to the concept of the unconscious. The poem "Evening," in particular, pulses with psychoanalytic imagery. Phrases such as "reaching inward," "bluer heart," "shadow seeks shadow," and "grow faint" evoke the elusive but highly determining aspects of the individual's experience represented by the flower(s). Much like H.D.'s sea flower poems, "Evening" suggests that the hepaticas and cornel flowers are symbols of the human condition: a life that is characterized by remembering and forgetting, presence and absence, clarity and oblivion, vibrant exposure and fateful withdrawal.
H.D. scholar Walter Kalaidijian discusses the fruitful intersection of poetry and psychoanalytic thought as a form of cathartic testimony. He writes in the abstract to his paper "'The Pardon of Speech': The Psychoanalysis of Modern American Poetry":
the "psychoanalysis of modern poetry” reads as a double genitive: signifying poetry's paradoxical status both as the literary object of clinical analysis and as a forceful agent of psychic revelation. Unlike analysis, however, poetry offers neither a science of nor cure for the anxieties, neuroses, and psychoses of social modernity. Rather, as an envoi of the unconscious, poetry gives testimony to the latter's mystery and enigma in the linguistic registers of what Jacques Lacan describes as “the pardon of speech."
In other words, poetry allows the poet to say the unsayable, and in doing so, to give space for its reader to reckon with the intolerable.
