Freud - Complete Works (329 page)

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1864

   But on the other hand Hanold did
not enjoy this victory over his erotism. The suppressed mental
impulse remained powerful enough to revenge itself on the
suppressing one with discontent and inhibition. His longings turned
into restlessness and dissatisfaction, which made his journey seem
pointless to him. His insight into his reasons for the journey at
the bidding of the delusion was inhibited and his relations with
his science, which in such a spot should have stirred all his
interest, were interfered with. So the author shows us his hero
after his flight from love in a kind of crisis, in a state of
complete confusion and distraction, in a turmoil such as we usually
find at the climax of an illness, when neither of the two
conflicting powers has any longer a sufficiently superior strength
over the other for the margin between them to make it possible to
establish a vigorous mental régime. But here the author
intervenes helpfully, and smoothes things out by making Gradiva
appear at this juncture and undertake the cure of the delusion. By
the power he possesses of guiding the people of his creation
towards a happy destiny, in spite of all the laws of necessity
which he makes them obey, he arranges that the girl, to avoid whom
Hanold had fled to Pompeii, shall be transported to that very
place. In this way he corrects the folly to which the young man was
led by his delusion - the folly of exchanging the home of the
living girl whom he loved for the burial-place of her imaginary
substitute.

   With the appearance of Zoe
Bertgang as Gradiva, which marks the climax of tension in the
story, our interest, too, soon takes a new direction. So far we
have been assisting at the development of a delusion; now we are to
witness its cure. And we may ask whether the author has given a
purely fanciful account of the course of this cure or whether he
his constructed it in accordance with possibilities actually
present. Zoe’s own words during her conversation with her
newly-married friend give us a definite right to ascribe to her an
intention to bring about the cure. (124.) But how did she set about
it? When she had got over the indignation aroused in her by his
suggestion that she should lie down to sleep again as she had
‘then’, she returned next day at the same mid-day hour
to the same spot, and proceeded to entice out of Hanold all the
secret knowledge her ignorance of which had prevented her from
understanding his behaviour the day before. She learnt about his
dream, about the sculpture of Gradiva, and about the peculiarity of
gait which she herself shared with it. She accepted the role of the
ghost awakened to life for a brief hour, a role for which, as she
perceived, his delusion had cast her, and, by accepting the flowers
of the dead which he had brought without conscious purpose, and by
expressing a regret that he had not given her roses, she gently
hinted in ambiguous words at the possibility of his taking up a new
position. (90.)

   This unusually clever girl, then,
was determined to win her childhood’s friend for her husband,
after she had recognized that the young man’s love for her
was the motive force behind the delusion. Our interest in her
behaviour, however, will probably yield for the moment to the
surprise which we may feel at the delusion itself. The last form
taken by it was that Gradiva, who had been buried in 79 A.D., was
now able, as a mid-day ghost, to exchange words with him for an
hour, at the end of which she must sink into the ground or seek her
grave once more. This mental cobweb, which was not brushed away
either by his perceiving that the apparition was wearing modern
shoes or by her ignorance of the ancient languages and her command
of German, which was not in existence in her day, certainly seems
to justify the author’s description of his story as a
‘Pompeian phantasy’, but it seems also to exclude any
possibility of measuring it by the standards of clinical
reality.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1865

   Nevertheless, on closer
consideration this delusion of Hanold’s seems to me to lose
the greater part of its improbability. The author, indeed, has made
himself responsible for one part of it by basing his story on the
premiss that Zoe was in every detail a duplicate of the relief. We
must therefore avoid shifting the improbability of this premiss on
to its consequence - that Hanold took the girl for Gradiva come to
life. Greater value is given to the delusional explanation by the
fact that the author has put no rational one at our disposal.
Moreover the author has adduced contributory and mitigating
circumstances on behalf of his hero’s excesses in the shape
of the glare of the
campagna
sunlight and the intoxicating
magic of the wine grown on the slopes of Vesuvius. But the most
important of all the explanatory and exculpatory factors remains
the ease with which our intellect is prepared to accept something
absurd provided it satisfies powerful emotional impulses. It is an
astonishing fact, and one that is too generally overlooked, how
readily and frequently under these psychological conditions people
of even the most powerful intelligence react as though they were
feeble-minded; and anyone who is not too conceited may see this
happening in himself as often as he pleases. And this is far more
so if some of the mental processes concerned are linked with
unconscious or repressed motives. In this connection I am happy to
quote the words of a philosopher, who writes to me: ‘I have
been noting down the instances I myself experience of striking
mistakes and unthinking actions, for which one finds motives
afterwards (in a most unreasonable way). It is an alarming thing,
but typical, to find how much folly this brings to light.’ It
must be remembered, too, that the belief in spirits and ghosts and
the return of the dead, which finds so much support in the
religions to which we have all been attached, at least in our
childhood, is far from having disappeared among educated people,
and that many who are sensible in other respects find it possible
to combine spiritualism with reason. A man who has grown rational
and sceptical, even, may be ashamed to discover how easily he may
for a moment return to a belief in spirits under the combined
impact of strong emotion and perplexity. I know of a doctor who had
once lost one of his women patients suffering from Graves’
disease, and who could not get rid of a faint suspicion that he
might perhaps have contributed to the unhappy outcome by a
thoughtless prescription. One day, several years later, a girl
entered his consulting-room, who, in spite of all his efforts, he
could not help recognizing as the dead one. He could frame only a
single thought: ‘So after all it’s true that the dead
can come back to life.’ His dread did not give way to shame
till the girl introduced herself as the sister of the one who had
died of the same disease as she herself was suffering from. The
victims of Graves’ disease, as has often been observed, have
a marked facial resemblance to one another; and in this case this
typical likeness was reinforced by a family one. The doctor to whom
this occurred was, however, none other than myself; so I have a
personal reason for not disputing the clinical possibility of
Norbert Hanold’s temporary delusion that Gradiva had come
back to life. The fact, finally, is familiar to every psychiatrist
that in severe cases of chronic delusions (in paranoia) the most
extreme examples occur of ingeniously elaborated and well-supported
absurdities.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1866

   After his first meeting with
Gradiva, Norbert Hanold had drunk his wine first in one and then in
the other of the two restaurants that he knew in Pompeii, while the
other visitors were engaged in eating the main meal of the day.
‘Of course it never came into his head to think of the
nonsensical idea’ that he was doing it in order to discover
in which of the hotels Gradiva was living and taking her meals. But
it is difficult to say what other sense his actions could have had.
On the day after their second meeting in the House of Meleager, he
had all kinds of strange and apparently unconnected experiences. He
found a narrow gap in the wall of the portico, at the point where
Gradiva had disappeared. He met a foolish lizard-catcher who
addressed him as though he were an acquaintance. He discovered a
third hotel, in an out-of-the-way situation, the ‘Albergo del
Sole’, whose proprietor palmed off on him a metal clasp with
a green patina as a find from beside the remains of a Pompeian
girl. And, lastly, in his own hotel he noticed a newly-arrived
young couple whom he diagnosed as a brother and sister and whom he
found sympathetic. All these impressions were afterwards woven
together into a ‘remarkably senseless’ dream, which ran
as follows:

   ‘Somewhere in the sun
Gradiva was sitting, making a snare out of a blade of grass to
catch a lizard in, and said: "Please keep quite still. Our
lady colleague is right; the method is a really good one and she
has made use of it with excellent results."'

   He fended off this dream while he
was still asleep, with the critical thought that it was utter
madness, and cast around in all directions to get free from it. He
succeeded in doing so with the help of an invisible bird, which
uttered a short laughing call and carried off the lizard in its
beak.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1867

   Are we to venture on an attempt
at interpreting this dream too - that is, at replacing it by the
latent thoughts from whose distortion it must have arisen? It is as
senseless as only a dream can be expected to be; and this absurdity
of dreams is the mainstay of the view which refuses to characterize
dreams as completely valid psychical acts and maintains that they
arise out of a purposeless excitation of the elements of the
mind.

   We are able to apply to this
dream the technique which may be described as the regular procedure
for interpreting dreams. It consists in paying no attention to the
apparent connections in the manifest dream but in fixing our eyes
upon each portion of its content independently, and in looking for
its origin in the dreamer’s impressions, memories, and free
associations. Since, however, we cannot question Hanold, we shall
have to content ourselves with referring to his impressions, and we
may very tentatively put our own association in place of his.

   ‘Somewhere in the sun
Gradiva was sitting, catching lizards and speaking.’ What
impression of the previous day finds an echo in this part of the
dream? Undoubtedly the encounter with the elderly gentleman, the
lizard-catcher, who was thus replaced in the dream by Gradiva. He
sat or lay ‘on a sun-bathed slope’ and he, too, spoke
to Hanold. Furthermore, Gradiva’s remarks in the dream were
copied from this man’s remarks: viz. ‘The method
prescribed by our colleague Eimer is a really good one; I have made
use of it many times already with excellent results. Please keep
quite still.’ Gradiva used much the same words in the dream,
except that  ‘our colleague Eimer’ was replaced by
an unnamed ‘lady colleague’; moreover, the ‘many
times’ in the zoologist’s speech was omitted in the
dream and the order of the sentences was somewhat altered. It
seems, therefore, that this experience of the previous day was
transformed into the dream with the help of a few changes and
distortions. Why this particular experience? And what is the
meaning of the changes - the replacement of the elderly gentleman
by Gradiva and the introduction of the enigmatic ‘lady
colleague’?

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1868

   There is a rule in interpreting
dreams which runs as follows: ‘A speech heard in a dream is
always derived from one that has been heard or made by the dreamer
in waking life.’ This rule seems to have been observed here:
Gradiva’s speech is only a modification of the old
zoologist’s speech which Hanold had heard the day before.
Another rule in dream-interpretation would tell us that when one
person is replaced by another or when two people are mixed up
together (for instance, by one of them being shown in a situation
that is characteristic of the other), it means that the two people
are being equated, that there is a similarity between them. If we
venture to apply this rule too to our dream, we should arrive at
this translation: ‘Gradiva catches lizards just like the old
man; she is skilled in lizard-catching just as he is.’ This
result cannot exactly be said to be intelligible as yet; but we
have yet another puzzle to solve. To what impression of the
previous day are we to relate the ‘lady colleague’ who
in the dream replaces the famous zoologist Eimer? Fortunately we
have very little choice here. A ‘lady colleague’ can
only mean another girl - that is to say, represents/represented the
sympathetic young lady whom Hanold had taken for a sister
travelling with her brother. ‘She was wearing a red Sorrento
rose in her dress, the sight of which reminded him of something as
he looked across from his corner of the dining-room, but he could
not think what.’ This remark of the author’s gives us a
right to regard her as the ‘lady colleague’ in the
dream. What Hanold could not recall were, it cannot be doubted, the
words spoken by the supposed Gradiva, who had told him, as she
asked him for the white flowers of the dead, that in the spring
people give happier girls roses. But behind those words there had
lain a hint of wooing. So what sort of lizard-catching was it that
the happier ‘lady colleague’ had carried out so
successfully?