Freud - Complete Works (331 page)

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1876

   And now let us make a bold
attempt at replacing Hanold’s ‘remarkably
senseless’ dream by the unconscious thoughts that lay behind
it and were as unlike it as possible. They ran, perhaps, as
follows: ‘She is staying in the "Sun" with her
father. Why is she playing this game with me? Does she want to make
fun of me? Or can it possibly be that she loves me and wants to
have me as her husband?’ - And no doubt while he was still
asleep there came an answer dismissing this last possibility as
‘the merest madness’, a comment which was ostensibly
directed against the whole manifest dream.

   Critical readers will now justly
enquire about the origin of the interpolation (for which I have so
far given no grounds) of the reference to being ridiculed by
Gradiva. The answer to this is given in
The Interpretation of
Dreams
, which explains that if ridicule, derision, or
embittered contradiction occurs in the dream-thoughts, this is
expressed by the manifest dream being given a senseless form, by
absurdity in the dream. This absurdity does not mean, therefore,
that there is any paralysis of psychical activity: it is a method
of representation employed by the dream-work. As always happens at
specially difficult points, the author once more comes to our help
here. The senseless dream had a short epilogue, in which a bird
uttered a laughing call and carried the lizard away in its beak.
But Hanold had heard a similar laughing call after Gradiva’s
disappearance. It had in fact come from Zoe, who with this laugh
was shaking off the gloomy seriousness of her underworld role.
Gradiva had really laughed at him. But the dream-image of the bird
carrying off the lizard may have been a recollection of the earlier
dream, in which the Apollo Belvedere carried off the Capitoline
Venus.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1877

   There may still be some readers
who feel that the translation of the situation of lizard-catching
by the idea of wooing has not been sufficiently well established.
Some further support for it may be afforded by the consideration
that Zoe in her conversation with her newly-married friend admitted
precisely what Hanold’s thoughts about her suspected - when
she told her she had felt sure that she would ‘dig out’
something interesting in Pompeii. Here she was trespassing into the
field of archaeology, just as he had trespassed, with his simile of
lizard-catching, into the field of zoology; it was as though they
were struggling towards each other and each were trying to assume
the other’s character.

   Here then we seem to have
finished off the interpretation of this second dream as well. Both
of them have been made intelligible to us on the presupposition
that a dreamer knows in his unconscious thoughts all that he has
forgotten in his conscious ones, and that in the former he judges
correctly what in the latter he misunderstands in a delusion. In
the course of our arguments we have no doubt been obliged to make
some assertions which have seemed strange to the reader because of
their unfamiliarity; and we have probably often roused a suspicion
that what we pretended was the author’s meaning was in fact
only our own. I am anxious to do all I can to dissipate this
suspicion, and for that reason I will gladly enter into more detail
over one of the most delicate points - I mean the use of ambiguous
words and phrases, such as: ‘Somewhere in the Sun Gradiva was
sitting.’

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1878

   Anyone who reads
Gradiva
must be struck by the frequency with which the author puts
ambiguous remarks into the mouths of his two principal characters.
In Hanold’s case these remarks are intended by him
unambiguously and it is only the heroine, Gradiva, who is struck by
their second meaning. Thus, for instance, when in reply to her
first answer he exclaimed ‘I knew your voice sounded like
that’, Zoe, who was still in ignorance, could not but ask how
that could be, since he had not heard her speak before. In their
second conversation the girl was for a moment thrown into doubt
about his delusion, when he told her that he had recognized her at
once. She could not help taking these words in the sense (correct
so far as his unconscious was concerned) of being a recognition
that their acquaintance went back to their childhood; whereas he,
of course, knew nothing of this implication of his remark and
explained it only by reference to his dominant delusion. On the
other hand, the remarks made by the girl, whose personality shows
the most lucid clarity of mind in contrast to Hanold’s
delusion, exhibit an
intentional
ambiguity. One of their
meanings chimes in with Hanold’s delusion, so as to be able
to penetrate into his conscious understanding, but the other rises
above the delusion and gives us as a rule its translation into the
unconscious truth for which it stands. It is a triumph of ingenuity
and wit to be able to express the delusion and the truth in the
same turn of words.

   Zoe’s speech in which she
explains the situation to her friend and at the same time succeeds
in getting rid of the interrupter is full of ambiguities of this
kind. It is in reality a speech made by the author and aimed more
at the reader than at Zoe’s newly-married
‘colleague’. In her conversations with Hanold the
ambiguity is usually effected by Zoe’s using the same
symbolism that we found in Hanold’s first dream - the
equation of repression and burial, and of Pompeii and childhood.
Thus she is able in her speeches on the one hand to remain in the
role for which Hanold’s delusion has cast her, and on the
other hand to make contact with the real circumstances and awaken
an understanding of them in Hanold’s unconscious.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1879

   ‘I have long grown used to
being dead.’ (90.) ‘To me it is right that you should
give the flower of forgetfulness.’ [Ibid.] In these sentences
there was a faint foretaste of the reproaches which broke out
clearly enough later on in her final lecture to him, in which she
compared him to an archaeopteryx. ‘The fact of someone having
to die so as to come alive; but no doubt that must be so for
archaeologists.’ She made this last remark after the delusion
had been cleared up, as though to give a key to her ambiguous
speeches. But she made her neatest use of her symbolism when she
asked: ‘I feel as though we had shared a meal like this once
before, two thousand years ago; can’t you remember?’
(118.) Here the substitution of the historical past for childhood
and the effort to awaken the memory of the latter are quite
unmistakable.

   But whence comes this striking
preference for ambiguous speeches in
Gradiva
? It is no
chance event, so it seems to us, but a necessary consequence of the
premisses of the story. It is nothing other than a counterpart to
the twofold determination of symptoms, in so far as speeches are
themselves symptoms and, like them, arise from compromises between
the conscious and the unconscious. It is simply that this double
origin is more easily noticed in speeches than, for instance, in
actions. And when, as is often made possible by the malleable
nature of the material of speech, each of the two intentions lying
behind the speech can be successfully expressed in the same turn of
words, we have before us what we call an
‘ambiguity’.

   In the course of the
psychotherapeutic treatment of a delusion or of an analogous
disorder, ambiguous speeches of this kind are often produced by the
patient, as new symptoms of the briefest duration; and it can
happen that the doctor finds himself too in the position of making
use of them. In that way it not infrequently happens that with the
meaning that is intended for the patient’s conscious he stirs
up an understanding of the meaning that applies to his unconscious.
I know from experience that the part thus played by ambiguity is
apt to raise the greatest objection in the uninitiated and to give
rise to the greatest misunderstandings. But in any case our author
was right in giving a place in his creation to a picture of this
characteristic feature of what takes place in the formation of
dreams and delusions.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1880

IV

The emergence of Zoe as a physician, as I have
already remarked, arouses a new interest in us. We shall be anxious
to learn whether a cure of the kind she performed upon Hanold is
conceivable or even possible, and whether the author has taken as
correct a view of the conditions for the disappearance of a
delusion as he has of those for its genesis.

   We shall unquestionably be met at
this point by an opinion which denies that the case presented by
the author possesses any such general interest and disputes the
existence of any problem requiring solution. Hanold, it will be
said, had no alternative but to abandon his delusion, after its
subject, the supposed ‘Gradiva’ herself, had shown him
that all his hypotheses were incorrect and after she had given him
the most natural explanations of everything puzzling - for
instance, of how it was that she had known his name. This would be
the logical end of the matter; but since the girl had incidentally
revealed her love to him, the author, no doubt to the satisfaction
of his female readers, arranged that his story, a not uninteresting
one otherwise, should have the usual happy ending in marriage. It
would have been more consistent and equally possible, the argument
will proceed, if the young scientist, after his error had been
pointed out, had taken his leave of the lady with polite thanks and
given as the reason for refusing her love the fact that he was able
to feel an intense interest in antique women made of bronze or
marble, and in their originals if they were accessible to contact,
but that he did not know what to do with contemporary girls of
flesh and blood. The author, in short, had quite arbitrarily tacked
a love story on to his archaeological phantasy.

   In rejecting this view as an
impossible one, we observe in the first place that the beginnings
of a change in Hanold were not shown only in his abandoning his
delusion. Simultaneously, and indeed before his delusion was
cleared up, an unmistakable craving for love awakened in him, which
found its outcome, naturally as it were, in his courting the girl
who had freed him from his delusion. We have already laid emphasis
on the pretexts and disguises under which his curiosity about her
‘bodily nature’, his jealousy, and his brutal masculine
instinct for mastery were expressed in the midst of his delusion,
after his repressed erotic desire had led to his first dream. As
further evidence of this we may recall that on the evening after
his second interview with Gradiva a live woman for the first time
struck him as sympathetic, though he still made a concession to his
earlier horror of honeymooning couples by not recognizing her as
being newly married. Next morning, however, he was a chance witness
of an exchange of endearments between the girl and her supposed
brother, and he withdrew with a sense of awe as though he had
interrupted some sacred act. His derision of ‘ Edwin and
Angelina’ was forgotten, and he had acquired a sense of
respect for the erotic side of life.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1881

   Thus the author has drawn the
closest link between the clearing up of the delusion and the
outbreak of a craving for love, and he has paved the way for the
inevitable outcome in a courtship. He knows the essential nature of
the delusion better than his critics: he knows that a component of
loving desire had combined with a component of resistance to it in
bringing about the delusion, and he makes the girl who undertakes
the cure sensitive to the element in Hanold’s delusion which
is agreeable to her. It was only this knowledge which could decide
her to devote herself to the treatment; it was only the certainty
of being loved by him that could induce her to admit her love to
him. The treatment consisted in giving him back from outside the
repressed memories which he could not set free from inside; but it
would have had no effect if in the course of it the therapist had
not taken his feelings into account and if her ultimate translation
of the delusion had not been: ‘Look, all this only means that
you love me.

   The procedure which the author
makes his Zoe adopt for curing her childhood friend’s
delusion shows a far-reaching similarity - no, a complete agreement
in its essence - with a therapeutic method which was introduced
into medical practice in 1895 by Dr. Josef Breuer and myself, and
to the perfecting of which I have since then devoted myself. This
method of treatment, to which Breuer first gave the name of
‘cathartic’ but which I prefer to describe as
‘analytic’, consists, as applied to patients suffering
from disorders analogous to Hanold’s delusion, in bringing to
their consciousness, to some extent forcibly, the unconscious whose
repression led to their falling ill - exactly as Gradiva did with
the repressed memories of their childhood relations. Gradiva, it is
true, could carry out this task more easily than a doctor: in
several respects she was in what may be described as an ideal
position for it. The doctor, who has no pre-existing knowledge of
his patient and possesses no conscious memory of what is
unconsciously at work in him, must call a complicated technique to
his help in order to make up for this disadvantage. He must learn
how to infer with great certainty from the conscious associations
and communications of the patient what is repressed in him, how to
discover his unconscious as it betrays itself behind his conscious
words and acts. He then brings about something like what Norbert
Hanold grasped at the end of the story when he translated back the
name ‘Gradiva’ into ‘Bertgang’. The
disorder vanishes while being traced back to its origin; analysis,
too, brings simultaneous cure.