Doolittle approached her sessions with Freud from a literary perspective, which privileged multiple readings of the psyche, as one would read, interpret, and reinterpret a text. Diverging from the dominant cultural view in this respect, which favored a single, definitive answer produced by modern science, she elaborates upon this literary approach to psychoanalysis in her memoir of her sessions with The Professor, entitled Tribute To Freud, which she published shortly before Helen in Egypt in 1956. In this work, she writes that “My imagination wandered at will; my dreams were revealing and many of them drew on classical or Biblical symbolism…. Fragmentary ideas, apparently unrelated, were often found to be part of a special layer or stratum of thought and memory, therefore to belong together; these were sometimes skillfully pieced together like the exquisite Greek tear-jars…” In other words, she presents the mind as being inseparable from the literary and cultural texts that inhabit it, and, in this sense, becomes a text to be interpreted and reinterpreted in and of itself. Throughout this passage, as in many others in the book, she depicts recurring themes, symbols, and motifs as emerging within the text of the psyche, much like those that would surface in a literary text after careful examination and consideration.

…she presents the mind as being inseparable from the literary and cultural texts that inhabit it, and, in this sense, becomes a text
to be interpreted…

Additionally, throughout Helen in Egypt, as well as early texts like Tribute to Freud, Doolittle uses images to mirror the process of psychoanalysis in a literary way, allowing the reader to experience the challenges of “translating” objective images. Just as her epic poem conveys its claims about symbol and interpretation in psychoanalysis in a stylistic manner, the trajectory of Tribute to Freud progresses through connections between memories and the concrete things that inhabit the narrative. This use of associative logic suggests that, for Doolittle, the literary image remains an effective way to illuminate the text of the psyche. She writes in the memoir that “I wish to recall the impressions, or rather I wish the impressions to recall me. Let the impressions come in their own way, make their own sequence.” As in Helen in Egypt, she suggests an affinity between the written word and the remembered image, in which memories function in much the same way as artistic interpretations. Furthermore, she invokes images to complicate and illuminate other images, a technique that she confines to neither text or psyche.

One observes that in much of Doolittle’s work, reciprocity exists between the remembered or experienced image and the written one. As Claire S. Buck observes in her study H.D. and Freud, “H.D.’s poetic use of the image frequently became a form of self-exploration.” This literary vision of psychoanalysis permeates the text of Helen in Egypt, and allows for a multifaceted definition of both image and interpretation throughout it. The hieroglyph motif that she establishes early in the book encapsulates her complex, constantly shifting idea of what constitutes a symbol and the ways individuals find significance in them. Throughout the work, these definitions grow increasingly complex, just as the hieroglyphs themselves become increasingly fraught with possible interpretations for the reader.