Delusion and Dream in Jensen's "Gradiva" (1907)
A transformation of childhood passion into adult anguish
Every psychoanalytic treatment is an attempt to release the repressed love that found a poor outlet in the compromise of a symptom. – Freud
INTRODUCTION
Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva is a Freudian analysis of the romance written by German novelist Wilhelm Jensen, published in 1902. The story centers around a character, Norbert Hanold, an archeologist who, obsessed with a woman figure depicted in a bas-relief (a type of sculptural technique consisting in carving figures onto a flat surface), embarks on a quasi-fantastical journey to the Italian town of Pompei in search for the woman, characterized by a particular walking stance to which Hanold is erotically attracted.
The idea of undertaking Gradiva through a psychoanalytical lens was Carl Jung’s, Freud’s then-pupil (a fact not mentioned in the actual text but revealed later by Welsh neurologist and psychoanalyst Ernest Jones in his biography of Freud), and it is, along with many others, an example of the well-established dialogue between psychoanalysis and literature.
Throughout Freud’s work, the reader finds a relentless effort to attest to the applicability of psychoanalytical theory by means of expanding it to other contexts, such as literature, which in this case helped pave the way for psychoanalysis to enter the realm of literary criticism, a place occupied by it to this day.
Key concepts in this text are neurosis, sublimation, condensation, displacement, delusion, logic, desire, fantasy, and love.
A CHILDHOOD LOVE STORY
As mentioned above, Gradiva is a story, a love story, involving a man (Norbert Hanold) and his passion for archeology and his sudden discovery of another passion, one from childhood, for a woman he named Gradiva. For the reader, this woman does not exist just yet; she’s a product of Hanold’s imagination-turned-into-obsession. Out of a bas-relief depicting a woman walking, he becomes deeply enamored by her stance, for her back foot, more precisely, with her heel lifted high. It’s quite a sensual stance, and it leads the archeologist on a fantastic journey to Pompei, where he’s sure of the woman’s existence.
Once in Pompei, while meandering through its stone streets, Hanold ends up seeing Gradiva, in person, walking under the torching mid-day sun. At first, the reader cannot tell whether this is real or a delusion until a bit later, it is revealed that the lady was indeed real, looked like the Gradiva from the bas-relief, and, to Hanold’s surprise, was someone he already knew. As a matter of fact, she was a childhood friend, a close friend, who had fallen in love with our main character until he fell in love with archeology, and the two lost touch.
In the series of interactions between them during a couple of days in Pompei, Hanold is taken by some delusion, which is revealed to the reader in his sometimes unusual (yet familiar) decision-making. Perhaps the greatest of them is the actual idea of going to Pompei, a town covered by the lava of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D., confident that he would find the lady from a bas-relief. In other parts of the plot, the reader is dragged into Hanold’s almost irrational logic, which is not unfamiliar since making decisions that seem irrational is inherently human, as they follow a different kind of logic.
The critical moments in Freud’s account of the story are, along with Hanold’s delusion, his dreams. However, for conciseness, I won’t go into details of their content and their interpretation by Freud to instead skip to the fact that, in the end, Gradiva helps Hanold to overcome his delusion while also helping the reader learn that his love for her had been repressed, in childhood, which led to his developing of such neurotic symptom.
Gradiva (whose real name in the story is Zoé Bertgang) not only existed since Hanold’s early life, but she also lived in his town. Actually, her father, a zoologist, lived across the street from the archeologist’s apartment, making it evident that the two had crossed paths many times during their lifetimes, to the main character’s oblivion. This revelation is, for both the archeologist and the reader, a stunning confirmation that although his love for her had always been there, it was unconscious to him. Notwithstanding, it leads him to a reencounter: he escapes his town only to find, in Pompei, the woman who had always been there, simply across the street.
One encounters what one runs away from. – Freud
DELUSION AND DREAM
In analyzing Jensen’s Gradiva, Freud is initially intrigued by whether the author (or authors in a more general way) could have been aware of psychic phenomena such as dreams and delusions and psychic conditions such as neurosis when he developed the plot. From a psychoanalytical standpoint, the details presented in the main character’s dreams pointed the way to resolving his own drama. Moreover, Gradiva’s role, similar to that of an analyst, is, according to Freud, fundamental in assisting Hanold (and the reader) in understanding and overcoming his delusion while also offering elucidative information tying the story together, clarifying that Hanold indeed suffered from neurosis.
The cause of his neurosis was none other than repressed love, or a repressed sexual affect, from childhood, an affect he had towards Gradiva, his then-best friend, which succumbed to a censorship of his consciousness. As an adolescent, Hanold develops a deep curiosity for archeology, losing interest in all other things – including loving another person – and isolating himself from the world around him. This curiosity turns into an obsession that works both as a product of the repression and as a repository for the diverted psychic energy that was rechanneled from an unfulfilled love for a woman to a productive end (his profession), in an example of sublimation.
In a justified manner, it is an ancient piece, the sculpture of a woman, which pulls the character out of their estrangement before love and warns them to settle the debt with life, which weighs upon us since our birth. – Freud
Freud shows that Hanold’s dreams present the two cornerstone processes in dream-work, condensation (when multiple images or words are fused into one) and displacement (when something irrelevant takes center stage in the dream, leaving something else more important in the background), with an added component, which was the fact that they seemed so real that Hanold has trouble discerning between reality and his newly born delusion. His delusion leads him to great lengths in trying to find Gradiva (who had already appeared in his first dream), ultimately leaving all behind to pursue his object of love.
The challenging aspect highlighted by Freud is that in every delusion, there is a component (even if small) of truth, and this truth is what makes the whole creation seem so real to the person who has it. As a matter of fact, someone suffering from delusion experiences it as real. In Hanold’s case, the truth existed in his desire for Gradiva, expressed in a love that had been dormant in his unconscious since his childhood that expressed itself also in his dreams - fulfilling his wish to have her. Freud uses the term fantasy interchangeably with delusion to describe the phenomena in Hanold of naming the figure from the bas-relief as Gradiva, creating a place for her origin in Pompei, and even locating her there despite almost two thousand years since the town’s burial due to the eruption.
These creations, along with the decisions made by Hanold, are the basis for what Freud claims to be a “set of rules” that govern the individual, making the case that a person is led by something other than their will. It is the unconscious, instead, that occupies the driver’s seat. However, there’s a commitment relationship between consciousness and the unconscious that produces the symptoms, which in themselves are full of ambiguities, a clear sign that they satisfy both the unconscious and the individual’s consciousness. These ambiguities support other psychic phenomena such as slips of the tongue, lapses of memory, and other daily errors, all of them not only bound by a set of rules (the unconscious) but rules of a different logic.
What in the external world we call chance is resolved by laws, as is well known. Also, what we call free will in the psychic sphere is based on laws - only dimly intuited. – Freud
THE TREATMENT
The last section of the text is mainly dedicated to Freud’s analysis of the role Zoé (Gradiva) took, likening it to that of an analyst, even if the similarities were a product of coincidence rather than direct allusion by the novel’s author. Freud points out that Zoé helps Hanold bring back his childhood memories and, through these, liberate in him his already latent and growing need to love (her).
As a side note, it’s worth mentioning that, at this point in Freud’s developing of his method, the figure of the analyst still held much of the responsibility for inferring meaning from the associations consciously expressed by patients and attempting to make a highly educated guess for the message communicated by what had been repressed in their unconscious. This dynamic still denoted a somewhat prevalent relation of subject-object, with the doctor as the subject who knows and the patient as a known object.
Hanold was a neurotic, and just a neurotic. As such, it was characteristic of his condition the repression of part of his instinctual life, more precisely sexual life, and in each attempt to revive such instincts, what erupts is another manifestation of his symptoms (including here, at their peak, his delusions) in the relationship commitment mentioned earlier. Freud’s discovery in psychoanalysis is that, thankfully, this internal battle is a matter of love, in what he phrased as a healing process that instills a relapse (as in reappearance) of love, considering the various components of the sexual instinct gathered under the word love. This relapse is paramount in that symptoms are nothing but a precipitate from earlier battles related to repression or its return.
Every psychoanalytic treatment is an attempt to release the repressed love that found a poor outlet in the compromise of a symptom. – Freud
A PERSONAL TAKE
As alluded to in the introduction, Freud’s reading of Gradiva can be considered as another push of his theories – the unconscious, repression, dream, delusion, etc. – in an environment far from ripe for such takes on what was seen as abnormal psychic processes observed in people. Under such a lens, Gradiva is yet another compelling case for dream-work, albeit here with the added component of how delusion operates in neurosis, just as Freud had extensively gathered and examined in his The Interpretation of Dreams a few years prior.
Freud is both confronted with and aware of the fact that he is dealing with something of a different logic – the unconscious – which he would, a few years later in his work, mistakenly refer to as illogical. As I hinted a couple of times during this text, the unconscious is nothing of illogical but rather of a different kind of logic than that applied by traditional science (and Western philosophical thought, for that matter). Even if this realization doesn’t make things easier for psychoanalysis (and for Freud), at least it locates the fulcrum of the debate about the validity and applicability of Freudian theory then and now. The concept of logic and how it permeates the evolution of the psychoanalytical movement will be increasingly central in the PANORAMA.
With care,
Gui