Freud - Complete Works (320 page)

  
¹
If we are prepared to do a little violence
to the concept of ‘expectation’, we can, following
Lipps, include a very large region of the comic under the comic of
expectation. But what are probably the most basic instances of the
comic, those arising from a comparison between someone else’s
expenditure and one’s own, would be the very ones that fitted
in least easily to this grouping.

  
²
We can accept this formula without
question, since it leads to nothing that would contradict our
earlier discussions. The difference between the two expenditures
must in essence come down to the inhibitory expenditure that is
saved. The lack of this economy in inhibition in the case of the
comic, and the absence of quantitative contrast in the case of
jokes, would determine the distinction between the comic feeling
and the impression of a joke, in spite of their agreeing in the
characteristic of using two kinds of ideational activity for the
same view.

  
³
This peculiarity of the ‘
double
face
’ [in French in the original] has naturally not
escaped the authorities. Mélinand (1895), from whom I have
borrowed this phrase, states the determinants of laughter in the
following formula: ‘Ce qui fait rire c’est ce qui est
à la fois, d’un côté, absurde et de
l’autre, familier.’ [‘What makes one laugh is
what is on the one hand absurd, and on the other familiar.’]
This formula fits jokes better than the comic, but does not
completely cover the former either. - Bergson (1900, 98) defines
the comic situation by the ‘interférence des
séries’: ‘Une situation est toujours comique
quand elle appartient en même temps à deux
séries d’événements absolument
indépendantes, et qu’elle peut
s’interpréter à la fois dans deux sens tout
différents.’ [‘A situation is always comic when
it belongs at the same time to two series of events that are
absolutely independent, and where it can be interpreted
simultaneously in two quite different senses.’] - Lipps
regards the comic as ‘the bigness and smallness of the same
thing’.

Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious

1809

   In the case of humour the
characteristic which we have just brought forward becomes effaced.
It is true that we feel humorous pleasure when an emotion is
avoided which we should have expected because it usually
accompanies the situation, and to that extent humour too comes
under the extended concept of the comic of expectation. But with
humour it is no longer a question of two different methods of
viewing the same subject matter. The fact that the situation is
dominated by the emotion that is to be avoided, which is of an
unpleasurable character, puts an end to the possibility of
comparing it with the characteristics of the comic and of jokes.
Humorous displacement is in fact a case of a liberated expenditure
being used elsewhere - a case which has been shown to be so
perilous to a comic effect.

   We are now at the end of our
task, having reduced the mechanism of humorous pleasure to a
formula analogous to those for comic pleasure and for jokes. The
pleasure in jokes has seemed to us to arise from an economy in
expenditure upon inhibition, the pleasure in the comic from an
economy in expenditure upon ideation (upon cathexis) and the
pleasure in humour from an economy in expenditure upon feeling. In
all three modes of working of our mental apparatus the pleasure is
derived from an economy. All three are agreed in representing
methods of regaining from mental activity a pleasure which has in
fact been lost through the development of that activity. For the
euphoria which we endeavour to reach by these means is nothing
other than the mood of a period of life in which we were accustomed
to deal with our psychical work in general with a small expenditure
of energy - the mood of our childhood, when we were ignorant of the
comic, when we were incapable of jokes and when we had no need of
humour to make us feel happy in our life.

1810

DELUSIONS AND DREAMS IN JENSEN’S
GRADIVA

(1907)

1811

Intentionally left blank

1812

DELUSIONS AND DREAMS IN JENSEN’S
GRADIVA

I

A group of men who regarded it as a settled
fact that the essential riddles of dreaming have been solved by the
efforts of the author of the present work¹ found their
curiosity aroused one day by the question of the class of dreams
that have never been dreamt at all - dreams created by imaginative
writers and ascribed to invented characters in the course of a
story. The notion of submitting this class of dreams to an
investigation might seem a waste of energy and a strange thing to
undertake; but from one point of view it could be considered
justifiable. It is far from being generally believed that dreams
have a meaning and can be interpreted. Science and the majority of
educated people smile if they are set the task of interpreting a
dream. Only the common people, who cling to superstitions and who
on this point are carrying on the convictions of antiquity,
continue to insist that dreams can be interpreted. The author of
The Interpretation of Dreams
has ventured, in the face of
the reproaches of strict science, to become a partisan of antiquity
and superstition. He is, it is true, far from believing that dreams
foretell the future, for the unveiling of which men have vainly
striven from time immemorial by every forbidden means. But even he
has not been able entirely to reject the relation of dreams to the
future. For the dream, when the laborious work of translating it
had been accomplished, revealed itself to him as a wish of the
dreamer’s represented as fulfilled; and who could deny that
wishes are predominantly turned towards the future?

   I have just said that dreams are
fulfilled wishes. Anyone who is not afraid of making his way
through an abstruse book, and who does not insist on a complicated
problem being represented to him as easy and simple in order to
save him trouble and at the cost of honesty and truth, may find the
detailed proof of this thesis in the work I have mentioned.
Meanwhile, he may set on one side the objections which will
undoubtedly occur to him against equating dreams and
wish-fulfilments.

  
¹
See Freud,
The Interpretation of
Dreams
(1900
a
).

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1813

   But we have gone a long way
ahead. It is not a question yet of establishing whether the meaning
of a dream can always be rendered by a fulfilled wish, or whether
it may not just as often stand for an anxious expectation, an
intention, a reflection, and so on. On the contrary, the question
that first arises is whether dreams have a meaning at all, whether
they ought to be assessed as mental events. Science answers
‘no’: it explains dreaming as a purely physiological
process, behind which, accordingly, there is no need to look for
sense, meaning or purpose. Somatic stimuli, so it says, play upon
the mental instrument during sleep and thus bring to consciousness
now one idea and now another, robbed of all mental content: dreams
are comparable only to twitchings, not to expressive movements, of
the mind.

   Now in this dispute as to the
estimation in which dreams should be held, imaginative writers seem
to be on the same side as the ancients, as the superstitious public
and as the author of
The Interpretation of Dreams
. For when
an author makes the characters constructed by his imagination
dream, he follows the everyday experience that people’s
thoughts and feelings are continued in sleep and he aims at nothing
else than to depict his heroes’ states of mind by their
dreams. But creative writers are valuable allies and their evidence
is to be prized highly, for they are apt to know a whole host of
things between heaven and earth of which our philosophy has not yet
let us dream. In their knowledge of the mind they are far in
advance of us everyday people, for they draw upon sources which we
have not yet opened up for science. If only this support given by
writers in favour of dreams having a meaning were less ambiguous! A
strictly critical eye might object that writers take their stand
neither for nor against particular dreams having a psychical
meaning; they are content to show how the sleeping mind twitches
under the excitations which have remained active in it as
off-shoots of waking life.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1814

   But even this sobering thought
does not damp our interest in the fashion in which writers make use
of dreams. Even if thus enquiry should teach us nothing new about
the nature of dreams, it may perhaps enable us from this angle to
gain some small insight into the nature of creative writing. Real
dreams were already regarded as unrestrained and unregulated
structures - and now we are confronted by unfettered imitations of
these dreams! There is far less freedom and arbitrariness in mental
life, however, than we are inclined to assume - there may even be
none at all. What we call chance in the world outside can, as is
well known, be resolved into laws. So, too, what we call
arbitrariness in the mind rests upon laws, which we are only now
beginning dimly to suspect. Let us, then, see what we find!

   There are two methods that we
might adopt for this inquiry. One would be to enter deeply into a
particular case, into the dream-creations of one author in one of
his works. The other would be to bring together and contrast all
the examples that could be found of the use of dreams in the works
of different authors. The second method would seem to be far the
more effective and perhaps the only justifiable one, for it frees
us at once from the difficulties involved in adopting the
artificial concept of ‘writers’ as a class. On
investigation this class falls apart into individual writers of the
most various worth - among them some whom we are accustomed to
honour as the deepest observers of the human mind. In spite of
this, however, these pages will be devoted to an enquiry of the
first sort. It happened that in the group of men among whom the
notion first arose there was one who recalled that in the work of
fiction that had last caught his fancy there were several dreams
which had, as it were, looked at him with familiar faces and
invited him to attempt to apply to them the method of
The
Interpretation of Dreams
. He confessed that the subject-matter
of the little work and the scene in which it was laid may no doubt
have played the chief part in creating his enjoyment. For the story
was set in the frame of Pompeii and dealt with a young
archaeologist who had surrendered his interest in life in exchange
for an interest in the remains of classical antiquity and who was
now brought back to real life by a roundabout path which was
strange but perfectly logical. During the treatment of this
genuinely poetic material the reader had been stirred by all kinds
of thoughts akin to it and in harmony with it. The work was a short
tale by Wilhelm Jensen -
Gradiva
- which its author himself
described as a ‘Pompeian phantasy’.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1815

   And now I ought properly to ask
all my readers to put aside this little essay and instead to spend
some time in acquainting themselves with
Gradiva
(which
first appeared in the bookshops in 1903), so that what I refer to
in the following pages may be familiar to them. But for the benefit
of those who have already read
Gradiva
I will recall the
substance of the story in a brief summary; and I shall count upon
their memory to restore to it all the charm of which this treatment
will deprive it.

   A young archaeologist, Norbert
Hanold, had discovered in a museum of antiquities in Rome a relief
which had so immensely attracted him that he was greatly pleased at
obtaining an excellent plaster cast of it which he could hang in
his study in a German university town and gaze at with interest.
The sculpture represented a fully-grown girl stepping along, with
her flowing dress a little pulled up so as to reveal her sandalled
feet. One foot rested squarely on the ground; the other, lifted
from the ground in the act of following after, touched it only with
the tips of the toes, while the sole and heel rose almost
perpendicularly. It was probably the unusual and peculiarly
charming gait thus presented that attracted the sculptor’s
notice and that still, after so many centuries, riveted the eyes of
its archaeological admirer.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1816

   The interest taken by the hero of
the story in this relief is the basic psychological fact in the
narrative. It was not immediately explicable. ‘Dr. Norbert
Hanold, Lecturer in Archaeology, did not in fact find in the relief
anything calling for special notice from the point of view of his
branch of science.’ (3.)¹ ‘He could not explain to
himself what there was in it that had provoked his attention. He
only knew that he had been attracted by something and that the
effect had continued unchanged ever since.’ But his
imagination was occupied with the sculpture without ceasing. He
found something ‘of to-day’ about it, as though the
artist had had a glimpse in the street and captured it ‘from
the life’. He gave the girl thus pictured as she stepped
along the name of ‘Gradiva’ - ‘the girl who steps
along’. He made up a story that she was no doubt the daughter
of an aristocratic family, perhaps ‘of a patrician aedile,
who carried out his office in the service of Ceres’, and that
she was on her way to the goddess’s temple. Then he found it
hard to fit her quiet, calm nature into the busy life of a capital
city. He convinced himself, rather, that she must be transported to
Pompeii, and that somewhere there she was stepping across the
curious stepping-stones which have been dug up and which made it
possible to cross dry-foot from one side of the street to the other
in rainy weather, though allowing carriage-wheels to pass between
them as well. Her features struck him as having a
Greek
look
and he had no doubt that she was of Hellenic origin. Little by
little he brought the whole of his archaeological learning into the
service of these and other phantasies relating to the original who
had been the model for the relief.

  
¹
[Plain numbers in brackets are page
references to Jensen,
Gradiva
, 1903.]

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1817

   But now he found himself
confronted by an ostensibly scientific problem which called for a
solution. It was a question of his arriving at a critical judgement
as to ‘whether Gradiva’s gait as she stepped along had
been reproduced by the sculptor in a life-like manner’. He
found that he himself was not capable of imitating it, and in his
quest for the ‘reality’ of this gait he was led
‘to make observations of his own from the life in order to
clear the matter up’. (9.) This, however, forced him into a
course of behaviour that was quite foreign to him. ‘Hitherto,
the female sex had been to him no more than the concept of
something made of marble or bronze, and he had never paid the
slightest attention to its contemporary representatives.’
Social duties had always seemed to him an unavoidable nuisance; he
saw and heard young ladies whom he came across in society so little
that when he next met them he would pass them by without a sign;
and this, of course, made no favourable impression on them. Now,
however, the scientific task which he had taken on compelled him,
in dry, but more especially in wet, weather, to look eagerly in the
street at women’s and girls’ feet as they came into
view - an activity which brought him some angry, and some
encouraging, glances from those who came under his observation;
‘but he was aware of neither the one nor the other.’
(10.) As an outcome of these careful studies he was forced to the
conclusion that Gradiva’s gait was not discoverable in
reality; and this filled him with regret and vexation.

   Soon afterwards he had a
terrifying dream, in which he found himself in ancient Pompeii on
the day of the eruption of Vesuvius and witnessed the city’s
destruction. ‘As he was standing at the edge of the forum
beside the Temple of Jupiter, he suddenly saw Gradiva at no great
distance from him. Till then he had had no thought of her presence,
but now it occurred to him all at once and as though it was
something natural that, since she was a Pompeian, she was living in
her native town, and,
without his having suspected it, living as
his contemporary
.’ (12.) Fear of the fate that lay before
her provoked him to utter a warning cry, whereupon the figure, as
she calmly stepped along, turned her face towards him. But she then
proceeded on her way untroubled, till she reached the portico of
the temple; there she took her seat on one of the steps and slowly
laid her head down on it, while her face grew paler and paler, as
though it were turning into marble. When he hurried after her, he
found her stretched out on the broad step with a peaceful
expression, like someone asleep, till the rain of ashes buried her
form.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1818

   When he awoke, the confused
shouts of the inhabitants of Pompeii calling for help still seemed
to echo in his ears, and the dull muttering of the breakers in the
agitated sea. But even after his returning reflection recognized
the sounds as the awakening signs of noisy life in a great city, he
retained his belief for a long time in the reality of what he had
dreamt. When at length he had freed himself of the notion that he
himself had been present at the destruction of Pompeii almost two
thousand years earlier, he was nevertheless left with what seemed a
true conviction that Gradiva had lived in Pompeii and been buried
there with the others in the year 79 A.D. The dream had as its
result that now for the first time in his phantasies about Gradiva
he mourned for her as someone who was lost.