Freud - Complete Works (326 page)

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1847

   We said a little earlier that
Norbert Hanold’s memories of his childhood relations with Zoe
were in a state of ‘repression’; and here we have
called them ‘unconscious’ memories. So we must now pay
a little attention to the relation between these two technical
terms, which, indeed, appear to coincide in their meaning. It is
not difficult to make the matter plain. ‘Unconscious’
is the wider concept; ‘repressed’ is the narrower one.
Everything that is repressed is unconscious; but we cannot assert
that everything unconscious is repressed. If when Hanold saw the
relief he had remembered his Zoe’s gait, what had earlier
been an unconscious memory of his would have become simultaneously
active and conscious, and this would have shown that it had not
earlier been repressed. ‘Unconscious’ is a purely
descriptive term, one that is indefinite in some respects and, as
we might say, static. ‘Repressed’ is a dynamic
expression, which takes account of the interplay of mental forces;
it implies that there is a force present which is seeking to bring
about all kinds of psychical effects, including that of becoming
conscious, but that there is also an opposing force which is able
to obstruct some of these psychical effects, once more including
that of becoming conscious. The mark of something repressed is
precisely that in spite of its intensity it is unable to enter
consciousness. In Hanold’s case, therefore, from the moment
of the appearance of the relief onwards, we are concerned with
something unconscious that is repressed, or, more briefly with
something repressed.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1848

   Norbert Hanold’s memories
of his childhood relations with the girl with the graceful gait
were repressed; but this is not yet the correct view of the
psychological situation. We remain on the surface so long as we are
dealing only with memories and ideas. What is alone of value in
mental life is rather the feelings. No mental forces are
significant unless they possess the characteristic of arousing
feelings. Ideas are only repressed because they are associated with
the release of feelings which ought not to occur. It would be more
correct to say that repression acts upon feelings, but we can only
be aware of these in their association with ideas. So that it was
Norbert Hanold’s erotic feelings that were repressed; and
since his erotism knew and had known no other object than Zoe
Bertgang in his childhood, his memories of her were forgotten. The
ancient relief aroused the slumbering erotism in him, and made his
childhood memories active. On account of a resistance to erotism
that was present in him, these memories could only become operative
as unconscious ones. What now took place in him was a struggle
between the power of erotism and that of the forces that were
repressing it; the manifestation of this struggle was a
delusion.

   Our author has omitted to give
the reasons which led to the repression of the erotic life of his
hero; for of course Hanold’s concern with science was only
the instrument which the repression employed. A doctor would have
to dig deeper here, but perhaps without hitting upon the reason in
this case. But, as we have insisted with admiration, the author has
not failed to show us how the arousing of the repressed erotism
came precisely from the field of the instruments that served to
bring about the repression. It was right that an antique, the
marble sculpture of a woman, should have been what tore our
archaeologist away from his retreat from love and warned him to pay
off the debt to life with which we are burdened from our birth.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1849

   The first manifestations of the
process that had been set going in Hanold by the relief were
phantasies, which played around the figure represented in it. The
figure seemed to him to have something ‘of to-day’
about her, in the best sense of the words, and it was as though the
artist had captured her ‘from the life’ stepping along
the street. He gave the girl in the ancient relief the name of
‘Gradiva’, which he constructed on the model of an
epithet of the war-god striding into battle - ‘Mars
Gradivus’. He endowed her personality with more and more
characteristics. She may have been the daughter of a respected
personage, of a patrician, perhaps, who was connected with the
temple service of a deity. He thought he could trace a Greek origin
in her features; and finally he felt compelled to remove her from
the busy life of a capital and to transport her to the more
peaceful Pompeii, and there he made her step across the lava
stepping-stones which made it possible to cross from one side of
the street to the other. These products of his phantasy seem
arbitrary enough, but at the same time innocently unsuspicious.
And, indeed, even when for the first time they gave rise to an
incitement to action - when the archaeologist, obsessed by the
problem of whether this posture of the feet corresponded to
reality, began to make observations from life in order to examine
the feet of contemporary women and girls - even this action was
screened by conscious scientific motives, as though all his
interest in the sculpture of Gradiva had sprung from the soil of
his professional concern with archaeology. The women and girls in
the street, whom he chose as the subjects of his investigation,
must, of course, have taken another, crudely erotic view of his
behaviour, and we cannot but think them right. We ourselves can be
in no doubt that Hanold was as much in ignorance of the motives of
his researches as he was of the origin of his phantasies about
Gradiva. These, as we learned later, were echoes of his memories of
his youthful love, derivatives of those memories, transformations
and distortions of them, after they had failed to make their way
into his consciousness in an unmodified form. The ostensibly
aesthetic judgement that the sculpture had something ‘of
to-day’ about it took the place of his knowledge that a gait
of that kind belonged to a girl whom he knew and who stepped across
the street
at the present time
. Behind the impression of the
sculpture being ‘from the life’ and the phantasy of its
subject being Greek lay his memory of the name Zoe, which means
‘life’ in Greek. ‘Gradiva’, as we learn
from our hero himself at the end of the story, after he has been
cured of his delusion, is a good translation of the surname
‘Bertgang’ which means something like ‘someone
who steps along brilliantly or splendidly’. The details about
Gradiva’s father originated from Hanold’s knowledge
that Zoe Bertgang was the daughter of a respected teacher at the
University, which can well be translated into classical terms as
‘temple-service’. Finally, his phantasy transported her
to Pompeii, not ‘because her quiet, calm nature seemed to
demand it’, but because no other or better analogy could be
found in his science for his remarkable state, in which he became
aware of his memories of his childhood friendship through obscure
channels of information. Once he had made his own childhood
coincide with the classical past (which it was so easy for him to
do), there was a perfect similarity between the burial of Pompeii -
the disappearance of the past combined with its preservation - and
repression, of which he possessed a knowledge through what might be
described as ‘endopsychic’ perception. In this he was
employing the same symbolism that the author makes the girl use
consciously towards the conclusion of the story: ‘I told
myself I should be able to dig out something interesting here even
by myself. Of course I hadn’t counted on making the find that
I have . . .’ (124.) And at the very end she replied to
Hanold’s plan for their honeymoon with a reference to
‘her childhood friend who had also in a sense been dug out of
the ruins again’. (150.)

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1850

   Thus in the very first products
of Hanold’s delusional phantasies and actions we already find
a double set of determinants, a derivation from two different
sources. One of these is the one that was manifest to Hanold
himself, the other is the one which is revealed to us when we
examine his mental processes. One of them, looked at from
Hanold’s point of view, was conscious to him, the other was
completely unconscious to him. One of them was derived wholly from
the circle of ideas of the science of archaeology, the other arose
from the repressed childhood memories that had become active in him
and from the emotional instincts attached to them. One might be
described as lying on the surface and covering the other, which
was, as it were, concealed behind it. The scientific motivation
might be said to serve as a pretext for the unconscious erotic one,
and science had put itself completely at the service of the
delusion. It should not be forgotten, however, that the unconscious
determinants could not effect anything that did not simultaneously
satisfy the conscious, scientific ones. The symptoms of a delusion
- phantasies and actions alike - are in fact the products of
compromise between the two mental currents, and in a compromise
account is taken of the demands of each of the two parties to it;
but each side must also renounce a part of what it wanted to
achieve. Where a compromise comes about it must have been preceded
by a struggle - in this case it was the conflict we have assumed
between suppressed erotism and the forces that were keeping it in
repression. In the formation of a delusion this struggle is in fact
unending. Assault and resistance are renewed after the construction
of each compromise, which is never, so to speak, entirely
satisfying. Our author too is aware of this, and that is why he
makes a peculiar unrest dominate this stage of his hero’s
disorder, as a precursor and guarantee of further developments.

   These significant peculiarities -
the double motivation of phantasies and decisions, and the
construction of conscious pretexts for actions to whose motivation
the repressed has made the major contribution - will meet us often,
and perhaps more clearly, in the further course of the story. And
this is just as it should be, for the author has thus grasped and
represented the unfailing chief characteristic of pathological
mental processes.

   The development of Norbert
Hanold’s delusion proceeded with a dream which, since it was
not occasioned by any new event, seems to have arisen entirely out
of his mind, filled as it was by a conflict. But let us pause
before we enquire whether, in the construction of his dreams, too,
the author meets our expectation that he possesses a deep
understanding. Let us ask first what psychiatric science has to say
to his hypotheses about the origin of a delusion and what attitude
it takes to the part played by repression and the unconscious, to
conflict and to the formation of compromises. In short, let us ask
whether this imaginative representation of the genesis of a
delusion can hold its own before the judgement of science.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1851

   And here we must give what will
perhaps be an unexpected answer. In fact the situation is quite the
reverse: it is science that cannot hold its own before the
achievement of the author. Science allows a gulf to yawn between
the hereditary and constitutional preconditions of a delusion and
its creations, which seem to emerge ready-made - a gulf which we
find that our author has filled. Science does not as yet suspect
the importance of repression, it does not recognize that in order
to explain the world of psychopathological phenomena the
unconscious is absolutely essential, it does not look for the basis
of delusions in a psychical conflict, and it does not regard their
symptoms as compromises. Does our author stand alone, then, in the
face of united science? No, that is not the case (if, that is, I
may count my own works as part of science), since for a number of
years - and, until recently, more or less alone¹ - I myself
have supported all the views that I have here extracted from
Jensen’s
Gradiva
and stated in technical terms. I
indicated, in most detail in connection with the states known as
hysteria and obsessions, that the individual determinant of these
psychical disorders is the suppression of a part of instinctual
life and the repression of the ideas by which the suppressed
instinct is represented, and soon afterwards I repeated the same
views in relation to some forms of delusion.² The question
whether the instincts concerned in this causation are always
components of the sexual instinct or may be of another kind as well
is a problem which may be regarded as a matter of indifference in
the particular case of the analysis of
Gradiva
; for in the
instance chosen by our author what was at issue was quite certainly
nothing other than the suppression of erotic feelings. The validity
of the hypotheses of psychical conflict and of the formation of
symptoms by means of compromises between the two mental currents
struggling against each other has been demonstrated by me in the
case of patients observed and medically treated in real life, just
as I have been able to in the imaginary case of Norbert
Hanold.³ Even before me, Pierre Janet, a pupil of the great
Charcot, and Josef Breuer, in collaboration with me, had traced
back the products of neurotic, and especially of hysterical,
illness to the power of unconscious thoughts.
⁴

   When, from the year 1893 onwards,
I plunged into investigations such as these of the origin of mental
disturbances, it would certainly never have occurred to me to look
for a confirmation of my findings in imaginative writings. I was
thus more than a little surprised to find that the author of
Gradiva
, which was published in 1903, had taken as the basis
of its creation the very thing that I believed myself to have
freshly discovered from the sources of my medical experience. How
was it that the author arrived at the same knowledge as the doctor
- or at least behaved as though he possessed the same
knowledge?