‘Do not touch me’, Frau Emmy von N. warns Sigmund Freud in 1889.1 ‘Do not touch her’, Freud echoes in 1933. This time, embarking on the psychoanalysis of H.D., Freud is referring to his pet chow, Yofi. After first remarking, ‘you are the only person who has ever come into this room and looked at the things in the room before looking at me’, he warns H.D., ‘Do not touch her – she snaps – she is very difficult with strangers’ (p. 98). H.D., however, challenges Freud's word of caution: ‘unintimidated but distressed by the Professor's somewhat forbidding manner, I not only continue my gesture toward the little chow, but crouch on the floor so that she can snap better if she wants to’ (p. 98). In this chapter, I argue that Freud's prohibition of touch and H.D.'s challenge to it play out the multiple senses of ‘Noli me tangere’ – the scene in which Jesus says to Mary Magdalene, ‘Touch me not.’ Examining the taboo on touching in light of work by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, I chart the spacing and withdrawal that interrupt touch. Reading Tribute to Freud (1956) alongside the letters to Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman) published in Analyzing Freud, edited by Susan Stanford Friedman, I suggest that H.D.'s writing attempts to make contact in new and sometimes subversive ways.

Touch and taboo

Do Not Touch, we are warned in museums; Breakages Will Be Paid For; Beware – Wet Paint; and Keep Off the Grass. Do Not Touch Your Father–Mother–Sister–Brother (Not Like That); Do Not Even Think Of Touching Yourself. ‘Of all the senses’, Jean-Luc Nancy notes, ‘touch is the one that is subject to the most taboo.’ He stresses the importance of this taboo in our own culture: ‘we know exactly where it is allowed to touch, be it only the hand of someone else, not to mention the rest of his body, and up to what point it is acceptable to kiss on the cheek, to hug, to caress’. Touch, it seems, is inhabited by a ‘law of tact’, as Jacques Derrida calls it, a law that pervades our everyday professional, social and familial exchanges.