Freud - Complete Works (327 page)

  
¹
See Bleuler’s important work,
Affektivität, Suggestibilität, Paranoia
and C. G.
Jung’s
Diagnostische Assoziationsstudien
, both
published in Zurich in 1906. - [
Added
1912:] To-day, in
1912, I am able to retract what is said above as being no longer
true. Since it was written, the ‘psycho-analytic
movement’ started by me has become widely extended, and it is
constantly growing.

  
²
See the author’s
Sammlung Kleiner
Schriften zur Neurosenlehre
, 1906.

  
³
Cf. ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a
Case of Hysteria’ (1905
e
).

  
⁴
Cf.
Studies on Hysteria
(Freud, 1895
d
, with
Breuer).

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1852

   Norbert Hanold’s delusion,
as I was saying, was carried a step further by a dream which
occurred in the middle of his efforts to discover a gait like
Gradiva’s in the streets of the town where he lived. It is
easy to give the content of this dream in brief. The dreamer found
himself in Pompeii on the day on which that unhappy city was
destroyed, and experienced its horrors without being in danger
himself; he suddenly saw Gradiva stepping along there, and
understood all at once, as though it was something quite natural,
that since she was a Pompeian, she was living in her native town,
and ‘without his having suspected it, living as his
contemporary’. He was seized with fear on her account and
gave a warning cry, whereupon she turned her face towards him for a
moment. But she proceeded on her way without paying any attention
to him, lay down on the steps of the Temple of Apollo, and was
buried in the rain of ashes after her face had lost its colour, as
though it were turning into white marble, until it had become just
like a piece of sculpture. As he was waking up, he interpreted the
noises of a big city penetrating into his bedroom as the cries for
help of the despairing inhabitants of Pompeii and the thunder of
the wildly agitated sea. The feeling that what he had dreamt had
really happened to him would not leave him for some time after he
had awoken, and a conviction that Gradiva had lived in Pompeii and
had perished there on the fatal day was left over with him by the
dream as a fresh starting-point for his delusion.

   It is not so easy for us to say
what the author intended with this dream and what caused him to
link the development of the delusion precisely to a dream. Zealous
investigators, it is true, have collected plenty of examples of the
way in which mental disturbances are linked to dreams and arise out
of dreams.¹ It appears, too, that in the lives of a few
eminent men impulses to important actions and decisions have
originated from dreams. But these analogies are not of much help to
our understanding; so let us keep to our present case, our
author’s imaginary case of Norbert Hanold the archaeologist.
By which end are we to take hold of a dream like this so as to fit
it into the whole context, if it is not to remain no more than an
unnecessary decoration of the story?

  
¹
Sante de Sanctis (1899).

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1853

   I can well imagine that at this
point a reader may exclaim: ‘The dream is quite easily
explained - it is a simple anxiety dream, occasioned by the noises
of the city, which were misinterpreted into the destruction of
Pompeii by the archaeologist, whose mind was occupied with his
Pompeian girl.’ In view of the low opinion generally
prevailing of the performances of dreams, all that is usually asked
from an explanation of one is that some external stimulus shall be
found that more or less coincides with a piece of the dream’s
content. This external stimulus to dreaming would be supplied by
the noise which woke the sleeper; and with this, interest in the
dream would be exhausted. If only we had some reason for supposing
that the town was noisier than usual that morning! If only, for
instance, the author had not omitted to tell us that Hanold,
against his usual practice, had slept that night with his windows
open! What a pity the author did not take the trouble to do that!
And if only anxiety-dreams were as simple as that! But no, interest
in the dream is not so easily exhausted.

   There is nothing essential for
the construction of a dream in a link with an external sensory
stimulus. A sleeper can disregard a stimulus of this kind from the
external world, or he can allow himself to be awakened by it
without constructing a dream, or, as happened here, he can weave it
into his dream if that suits him for some other reason; and there
are numerous dreams of which it is impossible to show that their
content was determined in this way by a stimulus impinging on the
sleeper’s senses. No, we must try another path.

   We may perhaps find a
starting-point in the after-effects left by the dream in
Hanold’s waking life. Up to then he had had a phantasy that
Gradiva had been a Pompeian. This hypothesis now became a certainty
for him, and a second certainty followed - that she was buried
along with the rest in the year 79 A.D.¹ Melancholy feelings
accompanied this extension of the delusional structure, like an
echo of the anxiety which had filled the dream. This fresh pain
about Gradiva does not seem very intelligible to us; Gradiva would
have been dead for many centuries even if she had been saved from
destruction in the year 79 A.D. Or ought we not to argue in this
kind of way either with Norbert Hanold or with the author himself?
Here again there seems no path to an understanding. Nevertheless it
is worth remarking that the increment which the delusion acquired
from this dream was accompanied by a feeling with a highly painful
colouring.

  
¹
See the text of
Gradiva
(15).

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1854

   Apart from that, however, we are
as much at a loss as before. This dream is not self-explanatory,
and we must resolve to borrow from my
Interpretation of
Dreams
and apply to the present example a few of the rules to
be found in it for the solution of dreams.

   One of these rules is to the
effect that a dream is invariably related to the events of the day
before the dream. Our author seems to be wishing to show that he
has followed this rule, for he attaches the dream immediately to
Hanold’s ‘pedestrian researches’. Now these had
no meaning other than a search for Gradiva, whose characteristic
gait he was trying to recognize. So the dream ought to have
contained an indication of where Gradiva was to be found. And it
does so, by showing her in Pompeii; but that is no novelty to
us.

   Another rule tells as that, if a
belief in the reality of the dream-images persists unusually long,
so that one cannot tear oneself out of the dream, this is not a
mistaken judgement provoked by the vividness of the dream-images,
but is a psychical act on its own: it is an assurance, relating to
the content of the dream, that something in it is really as one has
dreamt it; and it is right to have faith in this assurance. If we
keep to these two rules, we must conclude that the dream gave some
information as to the whereabouts of the Gradiva he was in search
of, and that that information tallied with the real state of
things. We know Hanold’s dream: does the application of these
two rules to it yield any reasonable sense?

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1855

   Strange to say, it does. The
sense is merely disguised in a particular way so that it is not
immediately recognizable. Hanold learned in the dream that the girl
he was looking for was living in a town and contemporaneously with
him. Now this was true of Zoe Bertgang; only in the dream the town
was not the German university town but Pompeii, and the time was
not the present but the year 79 A.D. It is, as it were, a
distortion by displacement: what we have is not Gradiva in the
present but the dreamer transported into the past. Nevertheless, in
this manner, the essential and new fact is stated:
he is in the
same place and time as the girl he is looking for
. But whence
come this displacement and disguise which were bound to deceive
both us and the dreamer over the true meaning and content of the
dream? Well, we already have the means at our disposal for giving a
satisfactory answer to that question.

   Let us recall all that we have
heard about the nature and origin of the phantasies which are the
precursors of delusions. They are substitutes for and derivatives
of repressed memories which a resistance will not allow to enter
consciousness unaltered, but which can purchase the possibility of
becoming conscious by taking account, by means of changes and
distortions, of the resistance’s censorship. When this
compromise has been accomplished, the memories have turned into the
phantasies, which can easily be misunderstood by the conscious
personality - that is, understood so as to fit in with the dominant
psychical current. Now let us suppose that dream-images are what
might be described as the creations of people’s physiological
delusions - the products of the compromise in the struggle between
what is repressed and what is dominant which is probably present in
every human being, including those who in the day-time are
perfectly sound in mind. We shall then understand that dream-images
have to be regarded as something distorted, behind which something
else must be looked for, something
not
distorted, but in
some sense objectionable, like Hanold’s repressed memories
behind his phantasies. We can give expression to the contrast which
we have thus recognized, by distinguishing what the dreamer
remembers when he wakes up as the
manifest content of the
dream
from what constituted the basis of the dream before the
distortion imposed by the censorship - namely, the
latent
dream-thoughts
. Thus, interpreting a dream consists in
translating the manifest content of the dream into the latent
dream-thoughts, in undoing the distortion which the dream-thoughts
have had to submit to from the censorship of the resistance. If we
apply these notions to the dream we are concerned with, we shall
find that its latent dream-thoughts can only have been: ‘the
girl you are looking for with the graceful gait is really living in
this town with you.’ But in that form the thought could not
become conscious. It was obstructed by the fact that a phantasy had
laid it down, as the result of an earlier compromise, that Gradiva
was a Pompeian; consequently, if the real fact that she was living
in the same place and at the same time was to be affirmed, there
was no choice but to adopt the distortion: ‘You are living at
Pompeii at the time of Gradiva.’ This then was the idea which
was realized by the manifest content of the dream, and was
represented as a present event actually being experienced.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1856

   It is only rarely that a dream
represents, or, as we might say, ‘stages’, a single
thought: there are usually a number of them, a tissue of thoughts.
Another component of the content of Hanold’s dream can be
detached, the distortion of which can easily be got rid of, so that
the latent idea represented by it can be detected. This is a piece
of the dream to which once again it is possible to extend the
assurance of reality with which the dream ended. In the dream
Gradiva as she steps along is transformed into a marble sculpture.
This is no more than an ingenious and poetical representation of
the real event. Hanold had in fact transferred his interest from
the living girl to the sculpture: the girl he loved had been
transformed for him into a marble relief. The latent
dream-thoughts, which were bound to remain unconscious, sought to
change the sculpture back into the living girl; what they were
saying to him accordingly was something like: ‘After all,
you’re only interested in the statue of Gradiva because it
reminds you of Zoe, who is living here and now.’ But if this
discovery could have become conscious, it would have meant the end
of the delusion.

   Are we perhaps under an
obligation to replace in this way each separate piece of the
manifest content of the dream by unconscious thoughts? Strictly
speaking, yes; if we were interpreting a dream that had really been
dreamt, we could not avoid that duty. But in that case, too, the
dreamer would have to give us the most copious explanations.
Clearly, we cannot carry out this requirement in the case of the
author’s creation; nevertheless, we shall not overlook the
fact that we have not yet submitted the main content of the dream
to the process of interpretation or translation.

   For Hanold’s dream was an
anxiety-dream. Its content was frightening, the dreamer felt
anxiety while he slept and he was left with painful feelings
afterwards. Now this is far from convenient for our attempt at an
explanation; and we must once again borrow heavily from the theory
of dream-interpretation. We are warned by that theory not to fall
into the error of tracing the anxiety that may be felt in a dream
to the content of the dream, and not to treat the content of the
dream as though it were the content of an idea occurring in waking
life. It points out to us how often we dream the most ghastly
things without feeling a trace of anxiety. The true situation, we
learn, is quite a different one, which cannot be easily guessed,
but which can be proved with certainty. The anxiety in
anxiety-dreams, like neurotic anxiety in general, corresponds to a
sexual affect, a libidinal feeling, and arises out of libido by the
process of repression.¹  When we interpret a dream,
therefore, we must replace anxiety by sexual excitement. The
anxiety that originates in this way has - not invariably, but
frequently - a selective influence on the content of the dream and
introduces into it ideational elements which seem, when the dream
is looked at from a conscious and mistaken point of view, to be
appropriate to the affect of anxiety. As I have said, this is not
invariably so, for there are plenty of anxiety-dreams in which the
content is not in the least frightening and where it is therefore
impossible to give an explanation on conscious lines of the anxiety
that is felt.