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The White Hotel
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The White Hotel (edit title/settings)

by D. M. Thomas (Author) (edit contributors)

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It is a dream of electrifying eroticism and inexplicable violence, recounted by a young woman to her analyst, Sigmund Freud. It is a horrifying yet restrained narrative of the Holocaust. It is a searing vision of the wounds of our century, and an attempt to heal them. Interweaving poetry and... read more

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Opera singer Lisa Erdman suffers from hallucinations along with psychosomatic pains in her left breast and left ovary. She is sent to Sigmund Freud for analysis after biological causes of her illness are ruled out.

During her analysis, she recounts to Freud an extended fantasy she had.... read more (warning: may contain spoilers)

Opera singer Lisa Erdman suffers from hallucinations along with psychosomatic pains in her left breast and left ovary. She is sent to Sigmund Freud for analysis after biological causes of her illness are ruled out.

During her analysis, she recounts to Freud an extended fantasy she had. In this fantasy, which she records both as poetic verses and as a travel journal, she meets Freud's son on a train and travels with him to a white hotel, where the two engage in a prolonged an extremely elicit love affair. At the same time, the white hotel is afflicted with a series of tragedies, including a fire, a landslide, and a flood.

Freud conducts an extended case study on Erdman, naming her "Frau Anna G." Through analysis of the dream and of her life history, he determines that she her issues are very tied up with her childhood discovery of her mother's affair with Lisa's uncle, and her mother's subsequent early death.

After completing her analysis, mostly healed of her ailments but not entirely convinced of the accuracy of Freud's conclusions, Lisa returns to her professional life. In the process of this, she marries again (for she is a divorcee), and becomes mother to a little Jewish boy in Russia, in the years immediately preceding World War II.

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  • “Driven by her desire to prove to herself that she was capable of a normal relationship, she found a husband.”

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  1. D. M. Thomas (Author)

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