SOURCE: “A Freudian Journey,” in New Republic, March 28, 1981, pp. 35-37.

In the following review, Slung offers favorable evaluation of The White Hotel.

“The psyche of an hysteric is like a child who has a secret, which no one must know, but everyone must guess. And so he makes it easier by scattering clues.”

In this beautifully imagined novel by British poet D. M. Thomas, Sigmund Freud is a character and utters the above words during the course of an analysis. The year is 1919, his patient a 29-year-old woman whom he calls, in customary fashion, by a false name in her case history. Thus the cellist “Frau Anna G.” is actually one Elisabeth Erdman, an opera singer who has come to 19 Berggasse because she has been suffering from a variety of debilitating ailments believed by the doctor referring her to Freud to be psychogenic.

At this time the real...