Freud - Complete Works (332 page)

   But the similarity between
Gradiva’s procedure and the analytic method of psychotherapy
is not limited to these two points - the making conscious of what
has been repressed and the coinciding of explanation with cure. It
also extends to what turns out to be the essence of the whole
change - to the awakening of feelings. Every disorder analogous to
Hanold’s delusion, what in scientific terms we are in the
habit of calling ‘psychoneuroses’, has as its
precondition the repression of a portion of instinctual life, or,
as we can safely say, of the sexual instinct. At every attempt to
introduce the unconscious and repressed causes of the illness into
consciousness, the instinctual component concerned is necessarily
aroused to a renewed struggle with the repressing powers, only to
come to terms with them in the final outcome, often to the
accompaniment of violent manifestations of reaction. The process of
cure is accomplished in a relapse into love, if we combine all the
many components of the sexual instinct under the term
‘love’; and such a relapse is indispensable, for the
symptoms on account of which the treatment has been undertaken are
nothing other than precipitates of earlier struggles connected with
repression or the return of the repressed, and they can only be
resolved and washed away by a fresh high tide of the same passions.
Every psycho-analytic treatment is an attempt at liberating
repressed love which has found a meagre outlet in the compromise of
a symptom. Indeed, the agreement between such treatments and the
process of cure described by the author of
Gradiva
reaches
its climax in the further fact that in analytic psychotherapy too
the re-awakened passion, whether it is love or hate, invariably
chooses as its object the figure of the doctor.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1882

   It is here that the differences
begin, which made the case of Gradiva an ideal one which medical
technique cannot attain. Gradiva was able to return the love which
was making its way from the unconscious into consciousness, but the
doctor cannot. Gradiva had herself been the object of the earlier,
repressed love; her figure at once offered the liberated current of
love a desirable aim. The doctor has been a stranger, and must
endeavour to become a stranger once more after the cure; he is
often at a loss what advice to give the patients he has cured as to
how in real life they can use their recovered capacity to love. To
indicate the expedients and substitutes of which the doctor
therefore makes use to help him to approximate with more or less
success to the model of a cure by love which has been shown us by
our author - all this would take us much too far away from the task
before us.

   And now for the final question,
whose answer we have already evaded more than once. Our views on
repression, on the genesis of delusions and allied disorders, on
the formation and solution of dreams, on the part played by erotic
life, and on the method by which such disorders are cured, are far
from being the common property of science, let alone the assured
possession of educated people. If the insight which has enabled the
author to construct his ‘phantasy’ in such a way that
we have been able to dissect it like a real case history is in the
nature of knowledge, we should be curious to learn what were the
sources of that knowledge. One of our circle - the one who, as I
said at the beginning, was interested in the dreams in
Gradiva
and their possible interpretation - approached the
author with the direct question whether he knew anything of such
scientific theories as these. The author replied, as was to be
expected, in the negative, and, indeed, somewhat brusquely. His
imagination, he said, had inspired
Gradiva
, and he had
enjoyed it; if there was anyone whom it did not please, let him
simply leave it alone. He had no suspicion of how greatly it had in
fact pleased his readers.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1883

   It is quite possible that the
author’s disavowal does not stop at this. He may perhaps
altogether deny any knowledge of the rules which we have shown that
he has followed, and he may repudiate all the purposes we have
recognized in his work. I do not regard this as improbable; but if
it is so, there are only two possible explanations. It may be that
we have produced a complete caricature of an interpretation by
introducing into an innocent work of art purposes of which its
creator had no notion, and by so doing have shown once more how
easy it is to find what one is looking for and what is occupying
one’s own mind - a possibility of which the strangest
examples are to be found in the history of literature. Let every
reader now make up his mind whether he is able to accept this
explanation. We ourselves, of course, hold to the other view, the
remaining alternative. Our opinion is that the author need have
known nothing of these rules and purposes, so that he could disavow
them in good faith, but that nevertheless we have not discovered
anything in his work that is not already in it. We probably draw
from the same source and work upon the same object, each of us by
another method. And the agreement of our results seems to guarantee
that we have both worked correctly. Our procedure consists in the
conscious observation of abnormal mental processes in other people
so as to be able to elicit and announce their laws. The author no
doubt proceeds differently. He directs his attention to the
unconscious in his own mind, he listens to its possible
developments and lends them artistic expression instead of
suppressing them by conscious criticism. Thus he experiences from
himself what we learn from others - the laws which the activities
of this unconscious must obey. But he need not state these laws,
nor even be clearly aware of them; as a result of the tolerance of
his intelligence, they are incorporated within his creations. We
discover these laws by analysing his writings just as we find them
from cases of real illness; but the conclusion seems inescapable
that either both of us, the writer and the doctor, have
misunderstood the unconscious in the same way, or we have both
understood it correctly. This conclusion is of great value to us,
and it is on its account that it has been worth while to
investigate by the methods of medical psycho-analysis the way in
which the formation and the cure of the delusions as well as the
dreams are represented in Jensen’s
Gradiva
.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1884

   We would seem to have reached the
end. But an attentive reader might remind us that at the beginning
we threw out an assertion that dreams are wishes represented as
fulfilled and that we gave no proof of this. Well, is our reply,
what we have described in these pages might show how little
justification there is for trying to cover the explanations we have
to give of dreams with the single formula that dreams are
wish-fulfilments. Nevertheless the assertion stands and can easily
be proved too for the dreams in
Gradiva
. The latent
dream-thoughts - we know now what is meant by them - may be of the
most various kinds; in
Gradiva
they are 
‘days’ residues’, thoughts that have been left
over unnoticed and undealt-with from the mental activities of
waking life. But in order for a dream to develop out of them, the
co-operation of a wish (usually an unconscious one) is required;
this contributes the motive force for constructing the dream, while
the day’s residues provide the material. In Norbert
Hanold’s first dream two wishes competed with each other in
making the dream; one of them was actually admissible to
consciousness, while the other belonged to the unconscious and
operated from out of repression. The first was a wish,
understandable in any archaeologist, to have been present as an
eye-witness at the catastrophe in the year 79 A.D. What sacrifice
would an archaeologist think too great if this wish could be
realized in any way other than in a dream! The other wish, the
other constructor of the dream, was of an erotic nature: it might
be crudely and also incompletely stated as a wish to be there when
the girl he loved lay down to sleep. This was the wish the
rejection of which caused the dream to become an anxiety-dream. The
wishes that were the motive forces of the second dream are perhaps
less conspicuous; but if we recall its translation we shall not
hesitate to describe them too as erotic. The wish to be taken
captive by the girl he loved, to fall in with her wishes and to be
subjected to her - for so we may construe the wish behind the
situation of the lizard-catching - was in fact of a passive,
masochistic character. Next day the dreamer hit the girl, as though
he was dominated by the contrary erotic current . . . But we must
stop here, or we may really forget that Hanold and Gradiva are only
creatures of their author’s mind.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1885

POSTSCRIPT TO THE SECOND EDITION

(1912)

In the five years that have passed since this
study was completed, psycho-analytic research has summoned up the
courage to approach the creations of imaginative writers with yet
another purpose in view. It no longer merely seeks in them for
confirmations of the findings it has made from unpoetic, neurotic
human beings; it also demands to know the material of impressions
and memories from which the author has built the work, and the
methods and processes by which he has converted this material into
a work of art. It has turned out that these questions can be most
easily answered in the case of writers who (like our Wilhelm
Jensen, who died in 1911) were in the habit of giving themselves
over to their imagination in a simple-minded joy in creating. Soon
after the publication of my analytic examination of
Gradiva
I attempted to interest the elderly author in these new tasks of
psycho-analytic research. But he refused his co-operation.

   A friend of mine has since then
drawn my attention to two other of the author’s short
stories, which might stand in a genetic relation to
Gradiva
,
as preliminary studies or earlier attempts at a satisfactory
poetical solution of the same problem in the psychology of love.
The first of these stories, ‘Der rote Schirm’,¹
recalls
Gradiva
by the recurrence in it of a number of small
motifs
, such as white flowers of the dead, a forgotten
object (Gradiva’s sketch-book), and a significant small
animal (the butterfly and the lizard in
Gradiva
), but more
especially by the repetition of the main situation - the apparition
in the mid-day glare of a summer’s day of a girl who had died
(or was believed to have died). In ‘Der rote Schirm’
the scene of the apparition is a ruined castle, just as are the
ruins of the excavated Pompeii in
Gradiva
. The other story,
‘Im gotischen Hause’,² shows no such resemblances
either to
Gradiva
or to ‘Der rote Schirm’ in its
manifest content. But the fact that it was given an external unity
with the latter story by being published with it under a common
title³ points unmistakably to their having a closely related
latent meaning. It is easy to see that all three stories treat of
the same theme: the development of a love (in ‘Der rote
Schirm’ the inhibition of a love) as an after-effect of an
intimate association in childhood of a
brother‑and‑sister kind. I gather further from a review
by Eva, Countess Baudissin (in the Vienna daily paper
Die
Zeit
of February 11, 1912) that Jensen’s last novel
Fremdlinge unter den Menschen
,
⁴
which contains much material from
the author’s own childhood, describes the history of a man
who ‘sees a sister in the woman he loves’. In neither
of the two earlier stories is there a trace of the main
motif
of
Gradiva
: the girl’s peculiarly
charming gait with the nearly perpendicular posture of her
foot.

   The relief of the girl who steps
along in this way, which Jensen describes as being Roman, and to
which he gives the name of ‘Gradiva’, is in fact
derived from the zenith of Greek art. It is in the Museo
Chiaramonti in the Vatican (No. 644), and has been restored and
interpreted by Hauser. By the combination of ‘Gradiva’
and some other fragments, in Florence and Munich, two reliefs were
obtained, each representing three figures, who seem to be
identified as the Horae, the goddesses of vegetation, and the
deities of the fertilizing dew who are allied to them.

  
¹
[‘The Red Parasol.’]

  
²
[‘In the Gothic
House.’]

  
³
Übermächte
. Two short
stories by Wilhelm Jensen, Berlin, Emil Felber, 1892.

  
⁴
[
Strangers among Men
.]

1886

PSYCHO-ANALYSIS AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE FACTS

IN LEGAL PROCEEDINGS

(1906)

1887

Intentionally left blank

1888

PSYCHO-ANALYSIS AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE FACTS

IN LEGAL PROCEEDINGS

Gentlemen, -There is a growing recognition of
the untrustworthiness of statements made by witnesses, on which,
nevertheless, so many convictions are based to-day in court cases;
and this has quickened in all of you, future judges and defending
counsel, an interest in a new method of investigation, the aim of
which is to compel the accused person himself to establish his own
guilt or innocence by objective signs. This method consists in a
psychological experiment and is based on psychological research. It
is closely connected with certain views which have only recently
come to the notice of medical psychology. I understand that you are
already engaged in testing the use and possibilities of this new
method by means of what might be called ‘dummy
exercises’, and I have gladly accepted the invitation of your
President, Professor Löffler, to explain to you more fully the
relation of this method to psychology.

   You are all acquainted with the
game played at parties or among children in which a word is called
out at random and someone has to add a second word, which, when it
is added to the first, results in a compound word being formed. For
instance, ‘steam’ - ‘ship’, making
‘steam-ship’. The ‘association experiment’
introduced into psychology by the school of Wundt is nothing more
than a modification of this children’s game, merely omitting
one rule of the game.

   The experiment is as follows: a
word (termed the ‘stimulus word’) is called out to the
subject and he replies as quickly as possible with some other word
that occurs to him (the so called ‘reaction’), his
choice of this reaction not being restricted by anything. The
points to be observed are the
time
required for the reaction
and the
relation
- which may be of many different kinds -
between the stimulus-word and the reaction-word. It cannot be
claimed that in the first instance very much came of these
experiments. This was to be expected, however, since they were
carried out without framing any definite question and without any
guiding idea which could be brought to bear on the results. They
only became significant and fruitful when Bleuler in Zurich and his
pupils, especially Jung, began to turn their attention to these
‘association experiments’. The experiments which they
carried out acquired their value from the fact that they assumed
that the reaction to the stimulus-word could not be a chance one
but must be determined by an ideational content present in the mind
of the reacting subject.

Psycho-Analysis And The Establishment Of The Facts In Legal Proceedings

1889

   It has become customary to speak
of an ideational content of this kind, which is able to influence
the reaction to the stimulus-word, as a ‘complex’. This
influence works either by the stimulus-word touching the complex
directly or by the complex succeeding in making a connection with
the word through intermediate links. Such a determination of the
reaction is a very remarkable fact; you will find undisguised
astonishment expressed at it in the literature of the subject. But
its truth admits of no doubt. For as a rule you can lay bare the
particular complex at work, and so explain reactions which could
not otherwise be understood, by asking the subject himself to give
the reasons for his reaction. Examples like those given by Jung
(1906, 6 and 8-9) are well calculated to make us doubt the
occurrence of chance or of what is alleged to be arbitrary in
mental events.

   Let us now glance at the earlier
history of this view of Bleuler and Jung that the reaction of the
subject under examination is determined by his complex. In 19011
published a work¹ in which I demonstrated that a whole number
of actions which were held to be unmotivated are on the contrary
strictly determined, and to that extent I contributed towards
restricting the arbitrary factor in psychology. I took as examples
slight failures of memory, slips of the tongue or pen, and the
mislaying of objects. I showed that when someone makes a slip of
the tongue it is not chance, nor simply difficulty in articulation
or similarity in sound, that is responsible, but that in every case
a disturbing ideational content - a complex - can be brought to
light which has altered the sense of the intended speech under the
apparent form of a slip of the tongue. Furthermore, I examined the
small actions which are performed apparently by chance and without
any purpose - habits of playing or fiddling with things, and so on
- and revealed them as ‘symptomatic actions’ linked
with a hidden meaning and intended to give unobtrusive expression
to it. I found, moreover, that not even a first name can occur
arbitrarily to the mind, without having been determined by some
powerful ideational complex. Even arithmetical numbers that one
believes one has chosen at random can be traced to the influence of
a hidden complex of this kind. A few years after this, a colleague
of mine, Dr. Alfred Adler, was able to substantiate this most
astonishing of my assertions by some very striking examples (Adler,
1905). Once one has accustomed oneself to this view of determinism
in psychical life, one is justified in inferring from the findings
in the psychopathology of everyday life that the ideas which occur
to the subject in an association experiment may not be arbitrary
either, but determined by an ideational content that is operative
in him.

  
¹
The Psychopathology of Everyday
Life
.

Psycho-Analysis And The Establishment Of The Facts In Legal Proceedings

1890

   And now, Gentlemen, let us return
to the association experiment. In the kind of experiment we have
referred to so far, it was the person under examination who
explained to us the origin of his reactions, and the experiments,
if they are subject to this condition, will be of no interest from
the point of view of judicial procedure. But how would it be if we
were to make a change in our planning of the experiment? Might we
not proceed as one does in solving an equation which involves
several quantities, where one can take any one of them as the
starting-point - by making
either
the
a or
the
b
into the
x
we are looking for? Up to now in our
experiments it has been the
complex
that has been unknown to
us. We have used stimulus-words selected at random, and the subject
under examination has revealed to us the complex brought to
expression by those stimulus-words. But let us now set about it
differently. Let us take a complex that is
known
to us and
ourselves react to it with stimulus-words deliberately chosen; and
let us then transfer the
x
to the person who is reacting.
Will it then be possible to decide, from the way in which he
reacts, whether the complex we have chosen is also present in
him?  You can see that this way of planning the experiment
corresponds exactly to the method adopted by an examining
magistrate who is trying to find out whether something of which he
is aware is also known to the accused as an agent. Wertheimer and
Klein, two pupils of Hans Gross, the Professor of Criminal Law in
Prague, seem to have been the first to adopt this change, which is
of such importance for your purposes, in the planning of the
experiment.¹

  
¹
Cf. Jung, 1906.

Psycho-Analysis And The Establishment Of The Facts In Legal Proceedings

1891

   You already know from your own
experiments that in this question of the subject’s reactions,
several points are to be taken into account in deciding whether he
possesses the complex to which
you
are reacting with your
stimulus-words. I will enumerate these points for you one by one.
(1) The
content
of the reaction may be unusual, which
requires explanation. (2) The
reaction-time
may be
prolonged; for it appears that stimulus-words which have touched
the complex produce a reaction only after a considerable delay (a
delay which may be several times as long as the ordinary
reaction-time). (3) There may be a mistake in
reproducing
the reaction. You know the remarkable fact that is meant by this.
If the subject has been given an association experiment consisting
of a comparatively long list of stimulus-words, and if a short time
after the end of the experiment the stimulus words are once more
presented to him, he will produce the same reactions as on the
first occasion except when the stimulus-word has touched a complex,
in which case he is very liable to replace his first reaction by
another one. (4) The phenomenon of
perseveration
(or it
might be better to use the term ‘after-effect’) may
occur. When a complex is aroused by a stimulus-word which touches
it - by a ‘critical’ stimulus-word - it often happens
that the effects of this (for instance, a prolonging of the
reaction-time) persist and alter the subject’s reactions to
the next, non-critical words as well. When all or several of these
indications are present together, it proves that the complex which
is known to us is present as a disturbing factor in the person who
is being questioned. This disturbance is taken by you to mean that
the complex in his mind is cathected with affect and is able to
distract his attention from the task of reacting; thus you see in
the disturbance a ‘psychical self-betrayal’.

   I know that you are at the moment
concerned with the potentialities and difficulties of this
procedure, whose aim is to lead the accused into an objective
self-betrayal. I should therefore like to bring to your notice the
fact that an exactly similar method of disclosing psychical
material which is buried away or kept secret has been practised for
more than a decade in another field. My purpose is to lay before
you the resemblances and differences between conditions in the two
fields.

Psycho-Analysis And The Establishment Of The Facts In Legal Proceedings

1892

   The field I have in mind is
indeed very different from yours. I am referring to the therapy
employed for certain ‘nervous diseases’ - what are
known as the psychoneuroses - of which hysteria and obsessional
ideas may be taken as samples. The method is called
‘psycho-analysis’; it was evolved by me from the
‘cathartic’ method of therapy first practised by Josef
Breuer in Vienna.¹ To combat your surprise, I must draw an
analogy between the criminal and the hysteric. In both we are
concerned with a secret, with something hidden. But in order not to
be paradoxical I must at once point out the difference. In the case
of the criminal it is a secret which he knows and hides from you,
whereas in the case of the hysteric it is a secret which he himself
does not know either, which is hidden even from himself. How is
this possible? Now we know, through laborious research, that all
these illnesses are the result of the patient’s having
succeeded in repressing certain ideas and memories that are
strongly cathected with affect, together with the wishes that arise
from them, in such a way that they play no part in his thinking -
do not enter into his consciousness - and thus remain unknown to
him. But from this repressed psychical material (these
‘complexes’) are generated the somatic and psychical
symptoms which plague the patient in just the same way as a guilty
conscience does. In this one respect, therefore, the difference
between the criminal and the hysteric is fundamental.

   The task of the therapist,
however, is the same as that of the examining magistrate. We have
to uncover the hidden psychical material; and in order to do this
we have invented a number of detective devices, some of which it
seems that you gentlemen of the law are now about to copy from
us.

  
¹
Cf. Breuer and Freud,
Studies on
Hysteria
, 1895.

Psycho-Analysis And The Establishment Of The Facts In Legal Proceedings

1893

   It will interest you, from the
point of view of your own profession, to hear how we doctors
proceed in psycho-analysis. After the patient has given us a first
account of his history, we ask him to give himself up to the
thoughts that occur to him spontaneously and to say without any
critical reserve whatever comes into his head. We start, as you
see, on the assumption, which he does not share in the least, that
these spontaneous thoughts will not be arbitrarily chosen but will
be determined by their relation to his secret - to his
‘complex’ - and may, as it were, be regarded as
derivatives of that complex. You will note that this is the same
assumption as the one with the help of which you were able to
interpret the association experiments. But although we have
instructed the patient to follow the rule of communicating all the
thoughts that occur to him, he seems to be unable to do so. He soon
begins to hold back first one thought and then another. He gives
various reasons to account for this: either the thought was quite
unimportant, or it was irrelevant or it was totally meaningless. We
thereupon demand that he shall tell us the thought in spite of
these objections and shall follow it up; for the very fact of his
criticism proves to us that the thought belongs to the
‘complex’ which we are seeking to uncover. We recognize
in this behaviour of the patient’s a manifestation of the
‘resistance’ present in him, which we are never free
from through the whole duration of the treatment. I will merely
indicate briefly that this concept of resistance has acquired the
highest importance for us in understanding the origin of an illness
as well as the mechanism of its cure.