The condition of continued avoidance of women gives the personal qualification, as we say, the disposition for the formation of a delusion; the development of psychic disturbance begins at the moment when a chance impression awakens the forgotten childhood experiences which are emphasized in an erotic way that is at least traceable. Awakened is really not the right term, however, when we consider the further results. We must reproduce our author’s correct representation in a mode of expression artistically correct, and psychological. On seeing the relief Norbert Hanold does not remember that he has seen such a foot-position in the friend of his youth; he certainly does not remember and yet every effect of the relief proceeds from such connection with the impression of his childhood. The childhood-impression, stirred, becomes active, so that it begins to show activity, though it does not appear in consciousness, but remains “unconscious,” a term which we now use unavoidably in psychopathology. This term “unconscious” we should now like to see withdrawn from all the conflicts of philosophers and natural philosophers, which have only etymological significance. For psychic processes which are active and yet at the same time do not come through into the consciousness of the person referred to, we have at present no better name and we mean nothing else by “unconsciousness.” If many thinkers wish to dispute as unreasonable the existence of such an unconscious, we think they have never busied themselves with analogous psychic phenomena, and are under the spell of the common idea that everything psychic which is active and intensive becomes, thereby, at the same time, conscious, and they have still to learn what our author knows very well, that there are, of course, psychic processes, which, in spite of the fact that they are intensive and show energetic activities, remain far removed from consciousness.
We said once that the memories of the childhood relations with Zoë are in a state of “repression” with Norbert Hanold; and we have called them “unconscious memories.” Here we must, of course, turn our attention to the relation between the two technical terms which seem to coincide in meaning. It is not hard to clear this up. “Unconscious” is the broader term, “repressed” the narrower. Everything that is repressed is unconscious; but we cannot assert that everything unconscious is repressed. If Hanold, at the sight of the relief, had remembered his Zoë’s manner of walking, then a formerly unconscious memory would have become immediately active and conscious, and thus would have shown that it was not formerly repressed. “Unconscious” is a purely descriptive term, in many respects indefinite and, so to speak, static; “repressed” is a dynamic expression which takes into consideration the play of psychic forces and the fact that there is present an effort to express all psychic activities, among them that of becoming conscious again, but also a counterforce, a resistance, which might hinder a part of these psychic activities, among these, also, getting into consciousness. The mark of the repressed material is that, in spite of its intensity, it cannot break through into consciousness. In Hanold’s case, therefore, it was a matter, at the appearance of the bas-relief on his horizon, of a repressed unconscious, in short of a repression.
The memories of his childhood association with the girl who walks beautifully are repressed in Norbert Hanold, but this is not yet the correct view of the psychological situation. We remain on the surface so long as we treat only of memories and ideas. The only valuable things in psychic life are, rather, the emotions. All psychic powers are significant only through their fitness to awaken emotions. Ideas are repressed only because they are connected with liberations of emotions, which are not to come to light; it would be more correct to say that repression deals with the emotions, but these are comprehensible to us only in connection with ideas. Thus, in Norbert Hanold, the erotic feelings are repressed, and, as his eroticism neither knows nor has known another object than Zoë Bertgang of his youth, the memories of her are forgotten. The antique bas-relief awakens the slumbering eroticism in him and makes the childhood memories active. On account of a resistance in him to the eroticism, these memories can become active only as unconscious. What now happens in him is a struggle between the power of eroticism and the forces that are repressing it; the result of this struggle is a delusion.
Our author has omitted to give the motive whence originates the repression of the erotic life in his hero; the latter’s interest in science is, of course, only the means of which the repression makes use; the physician would have to probe deeper here, perhaps in this case without finding the foundation. Probably, however, the author of Gradiva, as we have admiringly emphasized, has not hesitated to represent to us how the awakening of the repressed eroticism results from the very sphere of the means which are serving the repression. It is rightly an antique, the bas-relief of a woman, through which our archæologist is snatched and admonished out of his alienation from love to pay the debt with which we are charged by our birth.
The first manifestations of the process now stimulated by the bas-relief are fancies which play with the person represented by it. The model appears to him to be something “of the present,” in the best sense, as if the artist had fixed the girl walking on the street from life. The name, Gradiva, which he forms from the epithet of the war-god advancing to battle, Mars Gradivus, he lends to the ancient girl; with more and more definitions he endows her with a personality. She may be the daughter of an esteemed man, perhaps of a patrician, who is associated with the temple service of a divinity; he believes that he reads Greek ancestry in her features, and finally this forces him to transport her far from the confusion of a metropolis to more peaceful Pompeii, where he has her walking over the lava stepping-stones which make possible the crossing of the street. These feats of fancy seem arbitrary enough and yet again harmlessly unsuspicious. Even when from them is produced, for the first time, the impulse to act, when the archæologist, oppressed by the problem whether such foot-position corresponds to reality, begins observations from life, in looking at the feet of contemporary women and girls, this act covers itself by conscious, scientific motives, as if all the interest in the bas-relief of Gradiva had originated in his professional interest in archæology. The women and girls on the street, whom he uses as objects for his investigation, must, of course, assume a different, coarsely erotic conception of his conduct, and we must admit that they are right. For us, there is no doubt that Hanold knows as little about his motives as about the origin of his fancies concerning Gradiva. These latter are, as we shall learn later, echoes of his memories of the beloved of his youth, remnants of these memories, transformations and disfigurements of them, after they have failed to push into consciousness in unchanged form. The so-called æsthetic judgment that the relief represents “something of the present” is substituted for the knowledge that such a gait belongs to a girl known to him and crossing streets in the present; behind the impression “from life” and the fancy about her Greek traits, is hidden the memory of her name, Zoë, which, in Greek, means life; Gradiva is, as the man finally cured of the delusion tells us, a good translation of her family-name, Bertgang, which means splendid or magnificent in walking; the decisions about her father arise from the knowledge that Zoë Bertgang is the daughter of an esteemed university instructor, which is probably translated into the antique as temple service. Finally his imagination transports her to Pompeii not “because her calm, quiet manner seems to require it,” but because, in his science, there is found no other nor better analogy to the remarkable condition in which he has traced out, by vague reconnoitring, his memories of his childhood friendship. If he once covered up what was so close to him, his own childhood, with the classic past, then the burial of Pompeii, this disappearance, with the preservation of the past, offers a striking resemblance to the repression of which he has knowledge by means of so-called “endopsychic” perceptions. The same symbolism, therefore, which the author has the girl use consciously at the end of the tale, is working in him.
“I said to myself that I should certainly dig up something interesting alone here. Of course, I had not reckoned at all on the find which I made.” (G. p. 92.) At the end (G. p. 108), the girl answers 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.”
Thus we find at the very beginning of the performances of Hanold’s fancies and actions, a twofold determination, a derivation from two different sources. One determination is the one which appears to Hanold, himself; the other, the one which discloses itself to us upon re-examination of his psychic processes. One, the conscious one, is related to the person of Hanold; the other is the one entirely unconscious to him. One originates entirely from the series of associations connected with archæological science; the other, however, proceeds from the repressed memories which have become active in him, and the emotional impulses attached to them. The one seems superficial, and covers up the other, which masks itself behind the former. One might say that the scientific motivation serves the unconscious eroticism as cloak, and that science has placed itself completely at the service of the delusion, but one may not forget, either, that the unconscious determination can effect nothing but what is at the time satisfactory to the scientific conscious. The symptoms of delusion—fancies as well as acts—are results of a compromise between two psychic streams, and in a compromise the demands of each of the two parties are considered; each party has been obliged to forego something that he wished to carry out. Where a compromise has been established, there was a struggle, here the conflict assumed by us between the suppressed eroticism and the forces which keep it alive in the repression. In the formation of a delusion this struggle is never ended.
Attack and resistance are renewed after every compromise-formation, which is, so to speak, never fully satisfactory. This our author also knows and therefore he causes a feeling of discontent, a peculiar restlessness, to dominate his hero in this phase of the disturbance, as preliminary to and guarantee of further developments.
These significant peculiarities of the twofold determination for fancies and decisions, of the formation of conscious pretexts for actions, for the motivation of which the repressed has given the greater contribution, will, in the further progress of the story, occur to us oftener, and perhaps more clearly; and this rightfully, for in this Jensen has grasped and represented the never-failing, chief characteristic of the morbid psychic processes. The development of Norbert Hanold’s delusion progresses in a dream, which, caused by no new event, seems to proceed entirely from his psychic life, which is occupied by a conflict. Yet let us stop before we proceed to test whether the author of Gradiva, in the formation of his dreams, meets our expectation of a deeper understanding. Let us first ask what psychiatry has to say about his ideas of the origin of a delusion, how it stands on the matter of the rôle of repression and the unconscious, of conflict and compromise-formation. Briefly, can our author’s representation of the genesis of a delusion stand before the judgment of science?
And here we must give the perhaps unexpected answer that, unfortunately, matters are here actually just reversed; science does not stand before the accomplishment of our author. Between the essential facts of heredity and constitution, and the seemingly complete creations of delusion, there yawns a breach which we find filled up by the writer of Gradiva. Science does not yet recognize the significance of repression nor the fact that it needs the unconscious for explanation to the world of psychopathological phenomena; it does not seek the basis of delusion in psychic conflict, and does not regard its symptoms as a compromise-formation. Then our author stands alone against all science? No, not that—if the present writer may reckon his own works as science. For he, himself, has for some years interceded—and until recently almost alone[[3]]—for the views which he finds here in Gradiva by W. Jensen, and he has presented them in technical terms. He has pointed out exhaustively, for the conditions known as hysteria and obsession, the suppression of impulses and the repression of the ideas, through which the suppressed impulse is represented, as a characteristic condition of psychic disturbance, and he has repeated the same view soon afterwards for many kinds of delusion.[[4]] Whether the impulses which are, for this reason, considered are always components of the sex-impulse, or might be of a different nature, is a problem of indifference in the analysis of Gradiva, as, in the case chosen by the author, it is a matter only of the suppression of the erotic feeling. The views concerning psychic conflict, and the formation of symptoms by compromises between the two psychic forces which are struggling with each other, the present writer has found valid in cases professionally treated and actually observed, in exactly the same way that he was able to observe it in Norbert Hanold, the invention of our author.[[5]] The tracing back of neurotic, especially of hysterically morbid activities to the influence of unconscious thoughts, P. Janet, the pupil of the great Charcot, had undertaken before the present writer, and in conjunction with Josef Breuer in Vienna.[[6]]