Freud - Complete Works (328 page)

  
¹
Cf. my first paper on the anxiety neurosis
(1895
b
) and
The Interpretation of Dreams
.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1857

   I am aware that this explanation
of anxiety in dreams sounds very strange and is not easy to credit;
but I can only advise the reader to come to terms with it. Moreover
it would be a very remarkable thing if Norbert Hanold’s dream
could be reconciled with this view of anxiety and could be
explained in that way. On that basis, we should say that the
dreamer’s erotic longings were stirred up during the night
and made a powerful effort to make conscious his memory of the girl
he loved and so to tear him out of his delusion, but that those
longings met with a fresh repudiation and were transformed into
anxiety, which in its turn introduced into the content of the dream
the terrifying pictures from the memories of his schooldays. In
this manner the true unconscious content of the dream, his
passionate longing for the Zoe he had once known, became
transformed into its manifest content of the destruction of Pompeii
and the loss of Gradiva.

   So far, I think, it sounds
plausible. But it might justly be insisted that, if erotic wishes
constitute the undistorted content of the dream, it ought also to
be possible to point at least to some recognizable residue of those
wishes concealed somewhere in the transformed dream. Well, even
that may be possible, with the help of a hint from a later part of
the story. When Hanold had his first meeting with the supposed
Gradiva, he recollected the dream and begged the apparition to lie
down again as he had seen her do then.¹ Thereupon, however,
the young lady rose indignantly and left her strange companion, for
she had detected the improper erotic wish behind what he had said
under the domination of his delusion. We must, I think, accept
Gradiva’s interpretation; even in a real dream we cannot
always expect to find a more definite expression of an erotic
wish.

  
¹
‘No, I didn’t hear you speak.
But I called to you when you lay down to sleep, and I stood beside
you then - your face was as peaceful and beautiful as marble. May I
beg of you - lie down once more on the step as you did then.’
(70.)

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1858

   The application of a few of the
rules of dream-interpretation to Hanold’s first dream has
thus resulted in making it intelligible to us in its main features
and in inserting it into the nexus of the story. Surely, then, the
author must have observed these rules in creating it? We might ask
another question, too: why did the author introduce a dream at all
to bring about the further development of the delusion? In my
opinion it was an ingenious notion and once again true to reality.
We have already heard that in real illnesses a delusion very often
arises in connection with a dream, and, after what we have learnt
about the nature of dreams, there is no need to see a fresh riddle
in this fact. Dreams and delusions arise from the same source -
from what is repressed. Dreams are, as one might say, the
physiological delusions of normal people. Before what is repressed
has become strong enough to break through into waking life as a
delusion, it may easily have achieved a first success, under the
more favourable conditions of the state of sleep, in the form of a
dream with persisting effects. For during sleep, along with a
general lowering of mental activity, there is a relaxation in the
strength of the resistance with which the dominant psychical forces
oppose what is repressed. It is this relaxation that makes the
formation of dreams possible, and that is why dreams give us our
best access to a knowledge of the unconscious part of the mind -
except that, as a rule, with the re-establishment of the psychical
cathexes of waking life, the dream once more takes to flight and
the ground that had been won by the unconscious is evacuated once
again.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1859

III

In the further course of the story there is
yet another dream, which may perhaps tempt us even more than the
first to try to translate it and insert it into the train of events
in the hero’s mind. But we should save very little by
diverging from the author’s account and hurrying on
immediately to this second dream; for no one who wishes to analyse
some one else’s dream can avoid turning his attention in the
greatest detail to all the dreamer’s experiences, both
external and internal. It will probably be best, therefore, to keep
close to the thread of the story and to intersperse it with our
glosses as we proceed.

   The construction of the fresh
delusion about Gradiva’s death during the destruction of
Pompeii in the year 79 A.D. was not the only result of the first
dream, which we have already analysed. Immediately after it Hanold
decided on his journey to Italy, which eventually brought him to
Pompeii. But, before that, something else happened to him. As he
was leaning out of the window, he thought he saw a figure in the
street with the bearing and gait of his Gradiva. In spite of being
insufficiently dressed, he hurried after her, but failed to
overtake her, and was driven back into the house by the jeers of
the passers-by. When he was in his room once more, the song of a
canary from its cage in the window of a house opposite stirred up
in him a mood in which he too seemed to be a prisoner longing for
freedom; and his spring-time journey was no sooner decided on than
it was carried out.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1860

   The author has thrown a
particularly clear light on this journey of Hanold’s and has
allotted him to have a partial insight into his own internal
processes. Hanold of course found himself a scientific pretext for
his journey, but this did not last long. After all, he was in fact
aware that ‘the impulse to make this journey had arisen from
a feeling he could not name’. A strange restlessness made him
dissatisfied with everything he came across, and drove him from
Rome to Naples and from there to Pompeii; but even at this last
halting-place he was still uneasy in his mood. He was annoyed at
the folly of the honeymooners, and enraged at the impertinence of
the house-flies which inhabit Pompeii’s hotels. But at last
he could no longer disguise from himself ‘that his
dissatisfaction could not be caused solely by what was around him
but that there was something that sprang from himself as
well’. He thought he was over-excited, felt ‘that he
was discontented because he lacked something, but he had no idea
what. And this ill-humour followed him about everywhere.’ In
this frame of mind he was even furious with his mistress - with
Science. When in the heat of the mid-day sun he wandered for the
first time through Pompeii, ‘the whole of his science had not
merely abandoned him, but had left him without the slightest desire
to find her again. He remembered her only as something in the far
distance, and he felt that she had been an old, dried-up, tedious
aunt, the dullest and most unwanted creature in the world.’
(55.)

   And then, while he was in this
disagreeable and confused state of feeling, one of the problems
attaching to his journey was solved for him - at the moment when he
first saw Gradiva stepping through Pompeii. Something ‘came
into his consciousness for the first time: without being aware
himself of the impulse within him, he had come to Italy and had
travelled on to Pompeii, without stopping in Rome or Naples, in
order to see whether he could find any traces of her. And
"traces" literally; for with her peculiar gait she must
have left behind an imprint of her toes in the ashes distinct from
all the rest.’ (58.)

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1861

   Since the author has taken so
much trouble over describing the journey, it must be worth while
too to discuss its relation to Hanold’s delusion and its
position in the chain of events. The journey was undertaken for
reasons which its subject did not recognize at first and only
admitted to himself later on, reasons which the author describes in
so many words as ‘unconscious’. This is certainly taken
from the life. One does not need to be suffering from a delusion in
order to behave like this. On the contrary, it is an event of daily
occurrence for a person - even a healthy person - to deceive
himself over the motives for an action and to become conscious of
them only after the event, provided only that a conflict between
several currents of feeling furnishes the necessary condition for
such a confusion. Accordingly, Hanold’s journey was from the
first calculated to serve the delusion, and was intended to take
him to Pompeii, where he could proceed further with his search for
Gradiva. It will be recalled that his mind was occupied with that
search both before and immediately after the dream, and that the
dream itself was simply an answer to the question of
Gradiva’s whereabouts, though an answer which was stifled by
his consciousness. Some power which we do not recognize was,
however, also inhibiting him to begin with from becoming aware of
his delusional intention; so that, for the conscious reasons for
his journey, he was left only with insufficient pretexts which had
to be renewed from place to place. The author presents us with a
further puzzle by making the dream, the discovery of the supposed
Gradiva in the street, and the decision to undertake the journey as
a result of the singing canary succeed one another as a series of
chance events without any internal connection with one another.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1862

   This obscure region of the story
is made intelligible to us by some explanations which we derive
from the later remarks of Zoe Bertgang. It was in fact the original
of Gradiva, Fräulein Zoe herself, whom Hanold saw out of his
window walking past in the street (89.) and whom he nearly
overtook. If this had happened, the information given him by the
dream - that she was in fact living at the same time and in the
same town as he was - would by a lucky chance have received an
irresistible confirmation, which would have brought about the
collapse of his internal struggle. But the canary, whose singing
sent Hanold off on his distant journey, belonged to Zoe, and its
cage stood in her window diagonally across the street from
Hanold’s house. (135.) Hanold, who, according to the
girl’s accusation, had the gift of ‘negative
hallucination’, who possessed the art of not seeing and not
recognizing people who were actually present, must from the first
have had an unconscious knowledge of what we only learned later.
The indications of Zoe’s proximity (her appearance in the
street and her bird’s singing so near his window) intensified
the effect of the dream, and in this position, so perilous for his
resistance to his erotic feelings, he took to flight. His journey
was a result of his resistance gathering new strength after the
surge forward of his erotic desires in the dream; it was an attempt
at flight from the physical presence of the girl he loved. In a
practical sense it meant a victory for repression, just as his
earlier activity, his ‘pedestrian researches’ upon
women and girls, had meant a victory for erotism. But everywhere in
these oscillations in the struggle the compromise character of the
outcome was preserved: the journey to Pompeii, which was supposed
to lead him away from the living Zoe, led him at least to her
surrogate, to Gradiva. The journey which was undertaken in defiance
of the latent dream-thoughts, was nevertheless following the path
to Pompeii that was pointed out by the manifest content of the
dream. Thus at every fresh struggle between erotism and resistance
we find the delusion triumphant.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1863

   This view of Hanold’s
journey as a flight from his awakening erotic longing for the girl
whom he loved and who was so close to him is the only one which
will fit in with the description of his emotional states during his
stay in Italy. The repudiation of erotism which dominated him was
expressed there in his disgust at the honeymooners. A short dream
which he had in his
albergo
in Rome, and which was
occasioned by the proximity of a German loving couple, ‘Edwin
and Angelina’, whose evening conversation he could not help
hearing through the thin partition-wall, throws a retrospective
light, as it were, on the erotic drift of his first major dream. In
the new dream he was once again in Pompeii and Vesuvius was once
again erupting, and it was thus linked to the earlier dream whose
effects persisted during the journey. This time, however, among the
people imperilled were - not, as on the former occasion, himself
and Gradiva but - the Apollo Belvedere and the Capitoline Venus, no
doubt by way of an ironical exaltation of the couple in the next
room. Apollo lifted Venus up, carried her out, and laid her down on
some object in the dark which seemed to be a carriage or cart,
since it emitted ‘a creaking noise’. Apart from this,
the interpretation of the dream calls for no special skill.
(31.)

   Our author, who, as we have long
since realized, never introduces a single idle or unintentional
feature into history, has given us another piece of evidence of the
asexual current which dominated Hanold during his journey. As he
roamed about for hours in Pompeii, ‘strangely enough it never
once recurred to his memory that a short time before he had dreamt
of being present at the burial of Pompeii in the eruption of 79
A.D.’ (47.) It was only when he caught sight of Gradiva that
he suddenly remembered the dream and became conscious at the same
time of the delusional reason for his puzzling journey. How could
this forgetting of the dream, this barrier of repression between
the dream and his mental state during the journey, be explained,
except by supposing that the journey was undertaken not at the
direct inspiration of the dream but as a revolt against it, as an
emanation of a mental power that refused to know anything of the
secret meaning of the dream?