In The White Hotel, the British poet and novelist D. M. Thomas demonstrates his literary virtuosity…. Though Thomas himself stands outside the novel, and scrupulously excludes his own emotions from the story,… [his theme is] self-discovery. But Thomas has a genuinely intellectual imagination, and has had the audacious idea of dramatizing the exigencies of the self not merely in the context of psychoanalysis, but within the history of psychoanalysis. To carry out this scheme with the immediacy a novel must convey, Thomas has boldly appropriated the voice, personality, and therapeutic method of the genius who revolutionized the modem conception of the self—Sigmund Freud. (p. 58)

As we read Freud's account of his successful treatment, in 1919, of Lisa Erdman, a half-Jewish opera singer whose hysteria took the form of debilitating pain, we realize that the seemingly dislocated structure of Thomas's novel closely follows the successive stages of psychoanalytic therapy...