My title refers to the fact that in D. M. Thomas's remarkable
novel, both art, in the form of literary imagination, and
psychoanalysis seek to comprehend the life of a woman named Lisa
Erdman, and both register certain truths or part truths. The novel
traces Lisa's life from the time she enters analysis with Freud in
Vienna until her death at Babi Yar at the hands of the Nazis. In a
final chapter entitled "the camp" that has troubled many readers we
witness a kind of apotheosis in which Lisa and most of the characters we
have met survive their own deaths. Most readers find The White Hotel
to be a brilliant treatment of human aggression, which it certainly is;
and an equally brilliant portrait of Freud, who is presented in his
role as the man who first unlocked the secrets of hysteria. But the
landscape of hysteria, which is the terrain of the novel, is also the
landscape of imagination, and so there is a basic opposition between
art and psychoanalysis from the outset
