Elizabeth Bishop and Sigmund Freud showed congruent interest in mental processes. Both considered dreams, symbolization, condensation, displacement, and projection; both anchored their conceptions in childhood experience. Bishop read and owned multiple volumes by Freud and Freud’s successors, Melanie Klein and Germaine Guex. Although her letters and notes generally dismiss psychoanalysis, late correspondence reflects more generously on her experience in treatment, which she sought initially as a cure for alcoholism and asthma. Despite her continuing affection and respect for Dr. Ruth Foster, Bishop had concluded that her sessions with Foster (1946–8) were a “fiasco,” although early poems and drafts reveal the impact of psychoanalysis. Our best evidence unfolds in three letters she wrote to Foster during 1947, which detail her history of maternal abandonment, childhood abuse and lesbian sexuality. These extraordinarily candid letters also narrate dreams and deconstruct key poems like “At the Fishhouses” and “The Moose” in psychoanalytic terms.