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

by Sigmund Freud; Wilhelm Jensen

With the young man, things have taken a different turn. The science of antiquity overcame him and left to him interest only in the women of bronze and stone. The childhood friendship died, instead of developing into a passion, and the memories of it passed into such absolute forgetfulness that he does not recognize nor pay any attention to the friend of his youth, when he meets her in society. Of course, when we continue our observations, we may doubt if “forgetfulness” is the right psychological term for the fate of these memories of our archæologist. There is a kind of forgetting which distinguishes itself by the difficulty with which the memory is awakened, even by strong objective appeals, as if a subjective resistance struggled against the revival. Such forgetting has received the name “repression” in psychopathology; the case which Jensen has presented to us seems to be an example of repression. Now we do not know, in general, whether, in psychic life, forgetting an impression is connected with the destruction of its memory-trace; about repression we can assert with certainty that it does not coincide with the destruction, the obliteration, of the memory. The repressed material cannot, as a rule, break through, of itself, as a memory, but remains potent and effective. Some day, under external influence, it causes psychic results which one may accept as products of transformation or as remnants of forgotten memories; and if one does not view them as such, they remain incomprehensible. In the fancies of Norbert Hanold about Gradiva, we thought we recognized already the remnants of the repressed memories of his childhood friendship with Zoë Bertgang. Quite legitimately one may expect such a recurrence of the repressed material, if the man’s erotic feelings cling to the repressed ideas, if his erotic life has been involved in the repression. Then there is truth in the old Latin proverb which was perhaps originally aimed at expulsion through external influences, not at inner conflict: “You may drive out natural disposition with a two-pronged fork, but it will always return,” but it does not tell all, announces only the fact of the recurrence of repressed material, and does not describe at all the most remarkable manner of this recurrence, which is accomplished as if by malicious treason; the very thing which has been chosen as a means of repression—like the “two-pronged fork” of the proverb—becomes the carrier of the thing recurring; in and behind the agencies of repression the material repressed finally asserts itself victoriously. A well-known etching by Félicien Rops illustrates this fact, which is generally overlooked and lacks acceptance, more impressively than many explanations could; and he does it in the typical case of the repression in the lives of saints and penitents. From the temptations of the world, an ascetic monk has sought refuge in the image of the crucified Saviour. Then, phantom-like, this cross sinks and, in its stead, there rises shining, the image of a voluptuous, unclad woman, in the same position of the crucifixion. Other painters of less psychological insight have, in such representations of temptation, depicted sin as bold and triumphant, near the Saviour on the cross. Rops, alone, has allowed it to take the place of the Saviour on the cross; he seems to have known that the thing repressed proceeds, at its recurrence, from the agency of repression itself.

If Norbert Hanold were a living person, who had, by means of archæology, driven love and the memory of his childhood friendship out of his life, it would now be legitimate and correct that an antique relief should awaken in him the forgotten memory of the girl beloved in his childhood; it would be his well-deserved fate to have fallen in love with the stone representation of Gradiva, behind which, by virtue of an unexplained resemblance, the living and neglected Zoë becomes effective.

Miss Zoë, herself, seems to share our conception of the delusion of the young archæologist, for the pleasure which she expresses at the end of her “unreserved, detailed and instructive lecture” is hardly based on anything other than her readiness to refer his entire interest in Gradiva to her person. This is exactly what she does not believe him capable of, and what, in spite of all the disguises of the delusion, she recognizes as such. Her psychic treatment of him has a beneficent effect; he feels himself free, as the delusion is now replaced by that of which it can be only a distorted and unsatisfactory copy. He immediately remembers and recognizes her as his good, cheerful, clever comrade who has not changed essentially; but he finds something else most strange—

“That a person must die to become alive again,” says the girl, “but for archæologists that is of course necessary.” (G. p. 102.) She has apparently not yet pardoned him for the détour which he made from the childhood friendship through the science of antiquity to this relation which has recently been established.

“No, I mean your name—Because Bertgang has the same meaning as Gradiva and signifies ‘the one splendid in walking.’” (G. p. 102.)

Even we are not prepared for that. Our hero begins to rise from his humility and to play an active rôle. He is, apparently, entirely cured of his delusion, lifted far above it, and proves this by tearing asunder the last threads of the web of delusion. Patients, also, who have been freed from the compulsion of their delusion, by the disclosure of the repression behind it, always act in just that way. When they have once understood, they themselves offer the solutions for the last and most significant riddles of their strange condition in suddenly emerging ideas. We had already believed, of course, that the Greek ancestry of the mythical Gradiva was an after-effect of the Greek name, Zoë, but with the name, Gradiva, we had ventured nothing; we had supposed it the free creation of Norbert Hanold’s imagination, and behold! this very name now shows itself to be a remnant, really a translation of the repressed family-name of the supposedly forgotten beloved of his youth.

The derivation and solution of the delusion are now completed. What follows may well serve as a harmonious conclusion of the tale. In regard to the future, it can have only a pleasant effect on us, if the rehabilitation of the man, who formerly had to play the lamentable rôle of one needing to be cured, progresses, and he succeeds in awakening in the girl some of the emotions which he formerly experienced. Thus it happens that he makes her jealous by mentioning the congenial young lady, who disturbed them in Meleager’s house, and by the acknowledgment that the latter was the first girl who had impressed him much. When Zoë is then about to take a cool departure, with the remark that now everything is reasonable again, she herself not least of all, that he might look up Gisa Hartleben, or whatever her name might now be, and be of scientific assistance to her about the purpose of her stay in Pompeii, but she has to go now to the “Albergo del Sole” where her father is already waiting for her at lunch, perhaps they may see each other again some time at a party in Germany or on the moon, he seizes upon the troublesome fly as a means of taking possession of her cheek, first, and then of her lips, and assumes the aggressive, which is the duty of a man in the game of love. Only once more does a shadow seem to fall on their happiness, when Zoë reminds him that now she must really go to her father, who will otherwise starve in the “Sole.” “Your father—what will he——?” (G. p. 106.)

But the clever girl knows how to silence the apprehension quickly. “Probably he will do nothing; I am not an indispensable piece in his zoological collection; if I were, my heart would probably not have clung to you so unwisely.” Should the father, however, by way of exception, in this case, have an opinion different from hers, there is a sure method. Hanold needs only to go over to Capri, there catch a lacerta faraglionensis, for which purpose he may practise the technique on her little finger, then set the animal free again here, catch it before the eyes of the zoologist and give him the choice of the faraglionensis on the mainland or his daughter, a proposal in which mockery, as one may easily note, is combined with bitterness, an admonition to the betrothed, also, not to follow too closely the model after which his beloved has chosen him. Norbert Hanold sets us at rest on this matter, as he expresses, by all sorts of apparently trivial symptoms, the great transformation which has come over him. He voices the intention of taking a wedding trip with his Zoë to Italy and Pompeii, as if he had never been indignant at the newly married travellers, Augustus and Gretchen. His feelings towards this happy couple, who so unnecessarily travelled more than one hundred miles from their German home, have entirely disappeared from his memory. Certainly the author is right when he cites such weakening of memory as the most valuable mark of a mental change. Zoë replies to the announced desire about the destination of their journey, “by her childhood friend who had, in a way, also been excavated from the ashes,” (G. p. 108), that she does not yet feel quite alive enough for such geographical decision.

Beautiful reality has now triumphed over the delusion. Yet an honour still awaits the latter before the two leave Pompeii. When they have arrived at the Hercules Gate, where, at the beginning of the Strada Consolare, old stepping-stones cross the street, Norbert Hanold stops and asks the girl to go ahead. She understands him and, “raising her dress slightly with her left hand, Gradiva rediviva Zoë Bertgang, viewed by him with dreamily observing eyes, crossed with her calmly buoyant walk, through the sunlight, over the stepping-stones.” With the triumph of eroticism, what was beautiful and valuable in the delusion is now acknowledged.

With the last comparison of “the childhood friend excavated from the ashes,” the author of the story has, however, put into our hand the key of the symbolism which the delusion of the hero made use of in the disguise of the repressed memory. There is no better analogy for repression, which at the same time makes inaccessible and conserves something psychic, than the burial which was the fate of Pompeii, and from which the city was able to arise again through work with the spade. Therefore in his imagination the young archæologist had to transport to Pompeii the original figure of the relief which reminded him of the forgotten beloved of his youth. Jensen, however, had a good right to linger over the significant resemblance which his fine sense traced out between a bit of psychic occurrence in the individual and a single historical event in the history of man.