Duncan, Bloom, HD, and Psychoanalysis

Ok, I know that I said psychoanalysis was a bullshit field. Here I am going to take a slightly different perspective. From the historical vantage-point, Freud's ideas were very influential, and you cannot look at the modernist and late modernist periods without knowing something about him. It would be embarrassing not to know something of the intellectual history of these literary movements.

H.D. was the only major modernist poet who was also analyzed by Freud, and she even wrote a book about him. Duncan deals with H.D's Freudianism, also, in the H.D. Book. Bloom's theory of poetic anxiety is also rooted in Freudian concepts like repression. The Freudian concept of the "narcissism of small differences" might explain the way in which people like Duncan and Bloom, or Bloom and Rothenberg, could not talk to one another. H.D could be analyzed by Freud, but Pound, the subject of another H.D. book, dismissed Freud completely, as he did Marx. Two Jewish thinkers uncongenial to Pound's antisemitic sensibility.

Duncan connects HD's Freudianism to the idea of the occult, the hidden, and hence to gnosticism. It is not an orthodox reading of Freud, by any means, but how interesting would that have been? Duncan's view of the differences among major modernist poets and thinkers, Pound, Williams, Yeats, H.D., Freud, is very nuanced.

If I could connect Freud to Lorca, I would be doing very well. I don't mean doing a Freudian reading of Lorca, but connecting the two from the perspective of intellectual history.