Freud - Complete Works (324 page)

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1837

   With the young man, things had
taken a different turn. Archaeology took hold of him and left him
with an interest only in women of marble and bronze. His childhood
friendship, instead of being strengthened into a passion, was
dissolved, and his memories of it passed into such profound
forgetfulness that he did not recognize or notice his early
playmate when he met her in society. It is true that when we look
further we may doubt whether ‘forgetfulness’ is the
correct psychological description of the fate of these memories in
our young archaeologist. There is a kind of forgetting which is
distinguished by the difficulty with which the memory is awakened
even by a powerful external summons, as though some internal
resistance were struggling against its revival. A forgetting of
this kind has been given the name of ‘repression’ in
psychopathology; and the case which our author has put before us
seems to be an example of this repression. Now we do not know in
general whether the forgetting of an impression is linked with the
dissolution of its memory-trace in the mind; but we can assert
quite definitely of ‘repression’ that it does not
coincide with the dissolution or extinction of the memory. What is
repressed cannot, it is true, as a rule make its way into memory
without more ado; but it retains a capacity for effective action,
and, under the influence of some external event, it may one day
bring about psychical consequences which can be regarded as
products of a modification of the forgotten memory and as
derivatives of it and which remain unintelligible unless we take
this view of them. We have already seemed to recognize in Norbert
Hanold’s phantasies about Gradiva derivatives of his
repressed memories of his childhood friendship with Zoe Bertgang. A
return like this of what has been repressed is to be expected with
particular regularity when a person’s erotic feelings are
attached to the repressed impressions - when his erotic life has
been attacked by repression. In such cases the old Latin saying
holds true, though it may have been coined first to apply to
expulsion by external influences and not to internal conflicts:
‘Naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret.’¹
But it does not tell us everything. It only informs us of the
fact
of the return of the piece of nature that has been
repressed; it does not describe the highly remarkable
manner
of that return, which is accomplished by what seems like a piece of
malicious treachery. It is precisely what was chosen as the
instrument of repression - like the ‘
furca
’ of
the Latin saying - that becomes the vehicle for the return: in and
behind the repressing force, what is repressed proves itself victor
in the end. This fact, which has been so little noticed and
deserves so much consideration, is illustrated - more impressively
than it could be by many examples - in a well known etching by
Félicien Rops; and it is illustrated in the typical case of
repression in the life of saints and penitents. An ascetic monk has
fled, no doubt from the temptations of the world, to the image of
the crucified Saviour. And now the cross sinks down like a shadow,
and in its place, radiant, there rises instead the image of a
voluptuous, naked woman, in the same crucified attitude. Other
artists with less psychological insight have, in similar
representations of temptation, shown Sin, insolent and triumphant,
in some position alongside of the Saviour on the cross. Only Rops
has placed Sin in the very place of the Saviour on the cross. He
seems to have known that, when what has been repressed returns, it
emerges from the repressing force itself.

  
¹
[‘You may drive out Nature with a
pitchfork, but she will always return.’]

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1838

   It is worth while pausing in
order to convince oneself from pathological cases how sensitive a
human mind becomes in states of repression to any approach by what
has been repressed, and how even trivial similarities suffice for
the repressed to emerge behind the repressing force and take effect
by means of it. I once had under medical treatment a young man - he
was still almost a boy - who, after he had first unwillingly become
acquainted with the processes of sex, had taken flight from every
sexual desire that arose in him. For that purpose he made use of
various methods of repression-: he intensified his zeal in
learning, exaggerated his dependence on his mother, and in general
assumed a childish character. I will not here enter into the manner
in which his repressed sexuality broke through once more precisely
in his relation to his mother; but I will describe a rarer and
stranger instance of how another of his bulwarks collapsed on an
occasion which could scarcely be regarded as sufficient.
Mathematics enjoys the greatest reputation as a diversion from
sexuality. This had been the very advice to which Jean Jacques
Rousseau was obliged to listen from a lady who was dissatisfied
with him: ‘Lascia le donne e studia la
matematica!’¹ So too our fugitive threw himself with
special eagerness into the mathematics and geometry which he was
taught at school, till suddenly one day his powers of comprehension
were paralysed in the face of some apparently innocent problems. It
was possible to establish two of these problems: ‘Two bodies
come together, one with a speed of . . . etc.’
and ‘On a cylinder, the diameter of whose surface is
m
, describe a cone . . . etc.’ Other
people would certainly not have regarded these as very striking
allusions to sexual events; but he felt that he had been betrayed
by mathematics as well, and took flight from it too.

  
¹
[‘Give up women and study
mathematics!’]

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1839

   If Norbert Hanold were someone in
real life who had in this way banished love and his childhood
friendship with the help of archaeology, it would have been logical
and according to rule that what revived in him the forgotten memory
of the girl he had loved in his childhood should be precisely
antique sculpture. It would have been his well-deserved fate to
fall in love with the marble portrait of Gradiva, behind which,
owing to an unexplained similarity, the living Zoe whom he had
neglected made her influence felt.

   Fräulein Zoe seems herself
to have shared our view of the young archaeologist’s
delusion, for the satisfaction she expressed at the end of her
‘frank, detailed and instructive speech of castigation’
could scarcely have been based on anything but a recognition that
from the very first his interest in Gradiva had related to herself.
It was
this
which she had not expected of him, but which, in
spite of all its delusional disguise, she saw for what it was. The
psychical treatment she had carried out, however, had now
accomplished its beneficent effect on him. He felt free, for his
delusion had now been replaced by the thing of which it could only
have been a distorted and inadequate copy. Nor did he any longer
hesitate to remember her and to recognize her as the kind,
cheerful, clever playmate who in essentials was not in any way
changed. But he found something else very strange-

   ‘You mean’, said the
girl, ‘the fact of someone having to die so as to come alive;
but no doubt that must be so for archaeologists.’ (141.)
Evidently she had not forgiven him yet for the roundabout path by
way of archaeology which he had followed from their childhood
friendship to the new relation that was forming.

   ‘No, I mean your
name . . . Because "Bertgang" means the
same as "Gradiva" and describes someone "who steps
along brilliantly".’¹ (142.)

   We ourselves were unprepared for
this. Our hero was beginning to cast off his humility and to play
an active part. Evidently he was completely cured of his delusion
and had risen above it; and he proved this by himself tearing the
last threads of the cobweb of his delusion. This, too, is just how
patients behave when one has loosened the compulsion of their
delusional thoughts by revealing the repressed material lying
behind them. Once they have understood, they themselves bring
forward the solutions of the final and most important riddles of
their strange condition in a number of ideas that suddenly occur to
them. We had already guessed that the Greek origin of the imaginary
Gradiva was an obscure result of the Greek
name ‘Zoe’; but we had not ventured to approach
the name ‘Gradiva’ itself, and had let it pass as the
untrammelled creation of Norbert Hanold’s imagination. But,
to and behold! that very name now turns out to have been a
derivative - indeed a translation - of the repressed surname of the
girl he had loved in the childhood which he was supposed to have
forgotten.

  
¹
[The German root ‘
bert
’
or ‘
brecht
’ is akin to the English
‘bright’; similarly ‘
gang
’ is akin
to ‘go’ (in Scotland ‘gang’).]

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1840

   The tracing back of the delusion
and its resolution were now complete. What the author now adds is
no doubt designed to serve as a harmonious end to his story. We
cannot but feel reassured about the future when we hear that the
young man, who had earlier been obliged to play the pitiable part
of a person in urgent need of treatment, advanced still further on
the road to recovery and succeeded in arousing in her some of the
feelings under which he himself had suffered before. Thus it was
that he made her jealous by mentioning the sympathetic young lady
who had previously interrupted their tête-à-tête
in the House of Meleager, and by confessing that she had been the
first woman for whom he had felt a very great liking. Whereupon Zoe
prepared to take a chilly leave of him, remarking that everything
had now returned to reason - she herself not least; he could look
up Gisa Hartleben (or whatever she was now called) again and give
her some scientific assistance over the purpose of her visit to
Pompeii; she herself, however, must go back to the Albergo del Sole
where her father was expecting her for lunch; perhaps they would
meet again some time at a party in Germany or in the moon. But once
more he was able to make the troublesome fly an excuse for taking
possession first of her cheek and then of her lips, and to set in
motion the aggressiveness which is a man’s inevitable duty in
love making. Once only a shadow seemed to fall on their happiness,
when Zoe declared that now she really must go back to her father or
he will starve at the Sole. ‘Your father? . . . what will
happen? . . .’ (147.) But the clever girl was able swiftly to
quiet his concern. ‘Probably nothing will happen. I’m
not an indispensable part of his zoological collection. If I had
been, perhaps I shouldn’t have been so foolish as to give my
heart to you.’ In the exceptional event, however, of her
father taking a different view from hers, there was a safe
expedient. Hanold need only cross to Capri, catch a
Lacerta
faraglionensis
there (he could practise the technique on her
little finger), set the creature free over here, catch it again
before the zoologist’s eyes, and let him choose between a
faraglionensis
on the mainland and his daughter. The scheme,
it is easy to see, was one in which the mockery was tinged with
bitterness; it was a warning, as it were, to her fiancé not
to keep too closely to the model on which she had chosen him. Here
again Norbert Hanold reassures us, by showing by all sorts of
apparently small signs the great transformation that had taken
place in him. He proposed that he and his Zoe should come for their
honeymoon to Italy and Pompeii, just as though he had never been
indignant with the honeymooning Edwins and Angelinas. He had
completely lost from his memory all his feelings against those
happy pairs, who had so unnecessarily travelled more than a hundred
miles from their German home. The author is certainly right in
bringing forward a loss of memory like this as the most trustworthy
sign of a change of attitude. Zoe’s reply to the plan for the
scene of their honeymoon suggested by ‘her childhood friend
who had also in a sense been dug out of the ruins again’
(150.) was that she did not feel quite alive enough yet to make a
geographical decision of that sort.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1841

   The delusion had now been
conquered by a beautiful reality; but before the two lovers left
Pompeii it was still to be honoured once again. When they reached
the Herculanean Gate, where, at the entrance to the Via Consolare,
the street is crossed by some ancient stepping-stones, Norbert
Hanold paused and asked the girl to go ahead of him. She understood
him ‘and, pulling up her dress a little with her left hand,
Zoe Bertgang, Gradiva
rediviva
, walked past, held in his
eyes, which seemed to gaze as though in a dream; so, with her
quietly tripping gait, she stepped through the sunlight over the
stepping-stones to the other side of the street.’ With the
triumph of love, what was beautiful and precious in the delusion
found recognition as well.

   In his last simile, however, - of
the ‘childhood friend who had been dug out of the
ruins’ - the author has presented us with the key to the
symbolism of which the hero’s delusion made use in disguising
his repressed memory. There is, in fact, no better analogy for
repression, by which something in the mind is at once made
inaccessible and preserved, than burial of the sort to which
Pompeii fell a victim and from which it could emerge once more
through the work of spades. Thus it was that the young
archaeologist was obliged in his phantasy to transport to Pompeii
the original of the relief which reminded him of the object of his
youthful love. The author was well justified, indeed, in lingering
over the valuable similarity which his delicate sense had perceived
between a particular mental process in the individual and an
isolated historical event in the history of mankind.