The White Hotel

The White Hotel (1981), a novel by the British poet and novelist D.M. Thomas, imagines the life of Lisa Erdman, an Austrian opera singer being treated by Sigmund Freud for psychosomatic pain. Although Lisa is a fictional character, her treatment is loosely based on some of Freud’s real case studies. Lisa has uncanny foresight, and she gives Freud written accounts of her erotic hallucinations, which have a dreamlike, prophetic quality. The novel ultimately suggests that Lisa’s pain is not, as Freud believes, caused by trauma in her past but by the trauma that awaits her in the future: she will ultimately be killed in the Holocaust.

The novel opens with an exchange of letters between Sigmund Freud and members of his circle, including Sandor Ferenczi and Hanns Sachs. Gradually, these letters focus on a particular patient (Lisa), who has produced two “pornographic writings” during the course of her treatment.

One of these writings, named “Don Giovanni” because it is written on the score for Mozart’s opera of that name, forms the second section of the novel. “Don Giovanni” is a narrative poem about a young woman—Lisa—who meets a soldier on a train. They immediately begin a passionate sexual affair, traveling together to a white hotel, a dreamlike place where the normal laws of nature do not apply. The soldier is revealed as Freud’s son, Martin. While the young couple has sex, they dispassionately watch a series of disasters kill the other guests at the hotel: a flood, a fire, a landslide, and finally a cable-car accident.



Freud is baffled by “Don Giovanni” and asks Lisa to write her own analysis of the poem. Her response forms the next section of the novel. Called “The Gastein Journal,” Lisa’s response is less an analysis than a retelling in prose fiction of “Don Giovanni.”

The novel’s next section is Freud’s analysis of Lisa, modeled on his published case studies. Anonymizing Lisa as “Anna G,” he recounts the facts of her life, starting with her birth in Odessa, Ukraine, as the child of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. When she is still a child, her mother dies in a fire at a hotel, in the company of her uncle, leaving the child with a repressed suspicion that her mother was having an affair. “Anna” becomes increasingly estranged from her father and moves to St. Petersburg, where she attends ballet school and falls in love with a young anarchist named Alexei. He abandons her while she is pregnant with his child, and she miscarries. After a brief spell living with her mentor, Madame Kedrova, “Anna” moves to Vienna to live with her mother’s twin sister, Aunt Magda (whose husband died in the fire with “Anna’s” mother). In Vienna, “Anna” flourishes, becoming an up-and-coming opera singer and marrying a successful lawyer, until her career and her marriage are afflicted by a mysterious illness. “Anna” suffers from psychosomatic pains in her left breast and ovary. She also has dreams about fires and floods, and visions of similar catastrophes while she is having sex.

Freud concludes that “Anna’s” symptoms are the result of repressing the knowledge of her mother’s affair and her own bisexuality. His conclusion seems to be confirmed when “Anna” recalls buried memories of her mother’s affair and her pain begins to subside. However, Freud remains uneasy about Lisa’s visionary writings. He admits that he believes Lisa’s claims to be clairvoyant or psychic: “My experience…has convinced me that telepathy exists. If I had my life to go over again, I should devote it to the study of this factor.”



The next section of the novel is told as a straightforward third-person narrative. Her therapy over, Lisa returns to her career as a singer. In Milan, where she is taking the part of a famous soprano, Vera Serebryakova-Berenstein, who has been injured, Lisa becomes close friends with Vera and her husband, Victor, who is also performing in the opera. However, not long after Lisa’s return to Vienna, Vera dies in childbirth. Shortly after that, Lisa learns that her mentor Madame Kedrova has also died, of cancer. Lisa’s psychosomatic pain returns, as severe as ever.

Freud writes to Lisa asking her permission to publish her writing as part of his case study. They begin a correspondence, in which Lisa admits telling Freud a number of lies about Alexei and her father. Finally, Lisa tells Freud that she disagrees with his analysis, and the correspondence is broken off.

Lisa receives another letter, this time from Victor, in which he asks her to marry him. She moves to Kiev, Ukraine and becomes stepmother to Vera and Victor’s son, Kolya. Lisa is happy.



The penultimate section of the novel takes place ten years later. Lisa and Kolya are living in a slum. Victor has disappeared, after staging an opera which displeased the Soviet authorities. The German army arrives in the city, and signs appear instructing all Jews to assemble at the Jewish cemetery. As Lisa and Kolya follow the crowd from the cemetery, the neighbors speculate about where they are going: to a ghetto, perhaps, or to Palestine. When the Jews are herded into an enclosure, Lisa realizes that something more sinister is happening, but it is too late. The Jews are stripped and beaten. Lisa uses her identification card, which lists her as a Ukrainian rather than a Jew, to free herself and Kolya, but her freedom is short-lived. She and Kolya are taken to Babi Yar and executed by the SS, together with thousands of others.

The novel’s final section returns to the white hotel, which is now a camp for travelers to the Holy Land. There, Lisa meets her mother, Alexei, and Vera. The hotel is crowded—thousands of immigrants are arriving—but Lisa is happy there.

Examining themes of trauma, both personal and historical, The White Hotel was shortlisted for the 1981 Booker Prize, and described as “persistently, demandingly intriguing” by Kirkus Reviews.