It will be well worth our while to get an understanding of the origin of this augmentation of the delusion, to look up the new unconscious idea for which the new bit of delusion is substituted. The delusion originates under the influence of the proprietor of the “Sun Hotel,” toward whom Hanold conducts himself in so remarkably credulous a manner, as if he has received a suggestion from him. The proprietor shows him a small metal brooch as genuine, and as the possession of that girl who was found in the arms of her lover, buried in the ashes, and Hanold, who could be critical enough to doubt the truth of the story as well as the genuineness of the brooch, is caught, credulous, and buys the more than doubtful antique. It is quite incomprehensible why he should act so, and no hint is given that the personality of the proprietor himself might solve this riddle for us. There is, however, another riddle in this incident, and two riddles sometimes solve each other. On leaving the “albergo,” he catches sight of an asphodel cluster in a glass at a window, and finds in it an attestation of the genuineness of the metal brooch. How can that be? This last stroke is fortunately easy of solution. The white flower is, of course, the one which he presented to Gradiva at noon, and it is quite right that through the sight of it at one of the windows of this hotel, something is corroborated, not the genuineness of the brooch, but something else which has become clear to him at the discovery of this formerly overlooked “albergo.” In the forenoon he has already acted as if he were seeking, in the two hotels of Pompeii, where the person lived who appeared to him as Gradiva. Now, as he stumbles so unexpectedly upon a third, he must say in the unconscious: “So she lives here”; and then, on leaving: “Right there is the asphodel flower I gave her; that is, therefore, her window.” This, then, is the new idea for which the delusion is substituted, and which cannot become conscious because its assumption that Gradiva is living, a person known by him, cannot become conscious.
How then is the substitution of the delusion for the new idea supposed to have occurred? I think thus: that the feeling of conviction which clung to the idea was able to assert itself and persisted, while another ideational content related to it by thought-connection acted as substitute for the idea itself which was incapable of consciousness. Thus the feeling of conviction was connected with a really strange content, and this latter attained, as delusion, a recognition which did not belong to it. Hanold transfers his conviction that Gradiva lives in this house to other impressions which he receives in this house, becomes, in a way, credulous about what the proprietor says, the genuineness of the metal brooch, and the truth of the anecdote about the lovers found in an embrace, but only by this route, that he connects what he has heard in this house with Gradiva. The jealousy which has been lying ready in him gets possession of this material, and even in contradiction to his first dream there appears the delusion that Gradiva was the girl who died in the arms of her lover, and that the brooch which he bought belonged to her.
We notice that the conversation with Gradiva, and her gentle wooing “through the flower,” have already evoked important changes in Hanold. Traits of male desire, components of the libido are awakened in him, which, to be sure, cannot yet dispense with the concealment through conscious pretexts; but the problem of the corporeal nature of Gradiva, which has pursued him this whole day, cannot disavow its derivation from the erotic desire of the young man for possession of the woman, even if it is dragged into the scientific world by conscious stress on Gradiva’s peculiar hovering between life and death. Jealousy is an added mark of Hanold’s awakening activity in love; he expresses this at the opening of the conversation on the next day, and with the aid of a new pretext achieves his object of touching the girl’s body, and of striking her, as in times long past.
Now, however, it is time to ask if the course of delusion-formation which we have inferred from our author’s representation is one otherwise admitted or possible. From my experience as physician, I can answer only that it is surely the right way, perhaps the only one, in which the delusion receives the unswerving recognition due to its clinical character. If the patient believes in his delusion so firmly, it does not happen because of inversion of his powers of judgment, and does not proceed from what is erroneous in the delusion; but in every delusion there lies also a little grain of truth; there is something in it which really deserves belief, and this is the source of the conviction of the patient, who is, to this extent, justified. This true element, however, has been repressed for a long time; if it finally succeeds in pushing into consciousness (this time in disfigured form), the feeling of a conviction clinging to it, as if in compensation, is over-strong and now clings to and protects the disfigurement-substitute of the repressed, true element against every critical impugnment. The conviction at once shifts itself from the unconscious, true element to the conscious, erroneous one connected with it, and remains fixed there as a result of this very displacement. The case of delusion-formation which resulted from Hanold’s first dream is nothing but a similar, if not identical, case of such displacement. Yes, the depicted manner of development of conviction in the delusion is not fundamentally different from the way in which conviction is formed in normal cases, where repression does not enter into play. All our convictions lie in thought-contents in which the true and the false are combined and they stretch over the former and the latter. They differentiate at once between the true and whatever false is associated with it and protect this, even if not so immutably as in the delusion, against merited critique. Associations, protection, likewise, have their own value even for normal psychology.
I will now return to the dream and lay stress on a small, but not uninteresting feature which establishes a connection between two occasions of the dream. Gradiva had placed the white asphodel flower in definite contrast to the red rose; the finding of the asphodel flower again in the window of the “Albergo del Sole” becomes a weighty proof for Hanold’s unconscious idea which expresses itself in a new delusion; and to this is added the fact that the red rose in the dress of the congenial young girl helps Hanold again, in the unconscious, to a right estimation of her relation to her companion so that he can have her enter the dream as “woman colleague.”
But where in the manifest dream-content is found the trace and representation of that discovery of Hanold’s for which we find that the new delusion is substituted, the discovery that Gradiva lives with her father in the third hotel of Pompeii, the “Albergo del Sole,” which he has not been acquainted with? Well, it stands in its entirety and not even much disfigured in the dream; but I dread to point it out, for I know that even with the readers whose patience with me has lasted so long, a strong opposition to my attempts at interpretation will be stirred up. Hanold’s discovery is given in full in the dream-content, I repeat, but so cleverly concealed that one must needs overlook it. It is hidden there behind a play on words, an ambiguity. “Somewhere in the sun Gradiva sat”; this we have rightly connected with the locality where Hanold met the zoologist, her father; but can it not also mean in the “Sun,” that is, in the “Albergo del Sole,” in the “Sun Hotel” Gradiva lives? And doesn’t the “somewhere” which has no reference to the meeting with her father sound so hypocritically indefinite for the very reason that it introduces the definite information about the whereabouts of Gradiva? According to previous experience in the interpretation of real dreams, I am quite sure of such a meaning in the ambiguity, but I should really not venture to offer this bit of interpretation to my readers, if our author did not lend me here his powerful assistance. On the next day he puts into the mouth of the girl, when she sees the metal brooch, the same pun which we accept for the interpretation of the dream-content. “Did you find it in the sun, perhaps? It brings to light many such works of art”; and as Hanold does not understand the speech, she explains that she means the “Sun Hotel,” which is called “Sole” here, whence the supposed antique is also familiar to her.
And now may we make the attempt to substitute for Hanold’s “remarkably nonsensical” dream unconscious thoughts hidden behind it and as unlike it as possible? It runs somewhat as follows: “She lives in the ‘Sun’ with her father; why is she playing such a game with me? Does she wish to make fun of me? Or could it be possible that she loves me and wishes me for a husband?” To this latter possibility there now follows in sleep the rejection, “That is the most utter madness,” which is apparently directed against the whole manifest dream.
Critical readers have now the right to inquire about the origin of that interpolation, not formerly established, which refers to being made fun of by Gradiva. To this Traumdeutung gives the answer; if in dream-thoughts, taunts and sneers, or bitter contradictions occur, they are expressed by the nonsensical course of the manifest dream, through the absurdity in the dream. The latter means, therefore, no paralysis of psychic activity, but is one of the means of representation which the dream-work makes use of. As always in especially difficult passages, our author here comes to our assistance. The nonsensical dream has another postlude in which a bird utters a merry call and takes away the lizard in his beak. Such a laughing call Hanold had heard after Gradiva’s disappearance. It really came from Zoë who was shaking off the melancholy seriousness of her lower world rôle; with this laugh Gradiva had really derided him. The dream-picture, however, of the bird carrying away the lizard may recall that other one in a former dream in which Apollo Belvedere carried away the Capitoline Venus.
Perhaps the impression now exists with many readers that the interpretation of the lizard-catching situation by the idea of wooing is not sufficiently justified. Additional support is found here, perhaps in the hint that Zoë, in conversation with her colleague, admits about herself that very thing which Hanold’s thoughts suppose about her, when she tells that she had been sure of “digging up” something interesting for herself here in Pompeii. She thereby delves into the archæological series of associations as he did into the zoological with his allegory of lizard-catching, as if they were opposing each other and each wished to assume properties of the other.
Thus we have finished the interpretation of the second dream. Both have become accessible to our understanding under the presupposition that the dreamer, in his unconscious thought, knows all that he has forgotten in his conscious, has in the former rightly judged everything which, in the latter, he delusively misconstrues. In this connection we have, of course, been obliged to make many assertions which sounded odd to the reader because they were strange to him and probably often awakened the suspicion that we were giving out as our author’s meaning what is only our own meaning. We are ready to do everything to dissipate this suspicion and will therefore gladly consider more exhaustively one of the most knotty points—I mean the use of ambiguous words and speeches as in the example, “Somewhere in the Sun Gradiva sat.”