Delusion and Dream : an Interpretation in the Light of Psychoanalysis of Gradiva

by Sigmund Freud; Wilhelm Jensen

Now he told her that the sight of it had attracted him so that he had been highly pleased to get a plaster-cast of it in Germany, and that for years it had hung in his room. He observed it daily, and the idea had come to him that it must represent a young Pompeiian girl who was walking on the stepping-stones of a street in her native city; and the dream had confirmed it. Now he knew also that he had been impelled by it to travel here again to see whether he could find some trace of her; and as he had stood yesterday noon at the corner of Strada di Mercurio, she, herself, exactly like her image, had suddenly walked before him across the stepping-stones, as if she were about to go over into the house of Apollo. Then farther along she had recrossed the street and disappeared before the house of Meleager.

To this she nodded and said, “Yes, I intended to look up the house of Apollo, but I came here.”

He continued, “On that account the Greek poet, Meleager, came to my mind, and I thought that you were one of his descendants and were returning—in the hour which you are allowed—to your ancestral home. When I spoke to you in Greek, however, you did not understand.”

“Was that Greek? No, I don’t understand it or I’ve probably forgotten it. Yet as you came again just now, I heard you say something that I could understand. You expressed the wish that some one might still be alive here. Only I did not understand whom you meant by that.”

That caused him to reply that, at sight of her, he had believed that it was not really she, but that his imagination was deceptively putting her image before him in the place where he had met her yesterday. At that she smiled and agreed, “It seems that you have reason to be on your guard against an excess of imagination, although, when I have been with you, I never supposed so.” She stopped, however, and added, “What is there peculiar about my way of walking, which you spoke of before?”

It was noteworthy that her aroused interest brought her back to that, and he said, “If I may ask——”

With that he stopped, for he suddenly remembered with fear that yesterday she had suddenly risen and gone away when he had asked her to lie down to sleep again on that step, as on that of the Temple of Apollo, and, associated darkly with this, there came to him the glance which she had directed upon him in departing. Yet now the calm, friendly expression of her eyes remained, and as he spoke no further, she said, “It was nice that your wish that some one might still be alive concerned me. If you wish to ask anything of me on that account, I will gladly respond.”

That overcame his fear, and he replied, “It would make me happy to get a close view of you walking as you do in the bas-relief.”

Willingly, without answering, she stood up and walked along between the wall and the pillars. It was the very buoyantly reposeful gait, with the sole raised almost perpendicularly, that was so firmly imprinted on his mind, but for the first time he saw that she wore, below the raised gown, not sandals, but light, sand-coloured shoes of fine leather. When she came back and sat down again silently, he involuntarily started to talk of the difference in her foot-covering from that of the bas-relief. To that she rejoined, “Time, of course, always changes everything, and for the present sandals are not suitable, so I put on shoes, which are a better protection against rain and dust; but why did you ask me to walk before you? What is there peculiar about it?”

Her repeated wish to learn this proved her not entirely free from feminine curiosity. He now explained that it was a matter of the peculiarly upright position of the rising foot, as she walked, and he added how for weeks he had tried to observe the gait of modern women on the streets in his native city. Yet it seemed that this beautiful way of walking had been completely lost to them, with the exception, perhaps, of a single one who had given him the impression that she walked in that way. To be sure, he had not been able to establish this fact because of the crowd about her, and he had probably experienced an illusion, for it had seemed to him that her features had resembled somewhat those of Gradiva.