Delusions and dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva (1907)1 3 страница

It is worth while pausing in order to convince oneself from pathological cases how sensitive a human mind becomes in states of repression to any approach by what has been repressed, and how even trivial similarities suffice for the repressed to emerge behind the repressing force and take effect by means of it. I once had under medical treatment a young man - he was still almost a boy - who, after he had first unwillingly become acquainted with the processes of sex, had taken flight from every sexual desire that arose in him. For that purpose he made use of various methods of repression-: he intensified his zeal in learning, exaggerated his dependence on his mother, and in general assumed a childish character. I will not here enter into the manner in which his repressed sexuality broke through once more precisely in his relation to his mother; but I will describe a rarer and stranger instance of how another of his bulwarks collapsed on an occasion which could scarcely be regarded as sufficient. Mathematics enjoys the greatest reputation as a diversion from sexuality. This had been the very advice to which Jean Jacques Rousseau was obliged to listen from a lady who was dissatisfied with him: ‘Lascia le donne e studia la matematica!’¹ So too our fugitive threw himself with special eagerness into the mathematics and geometry which he was taught at school, till suddenly one day his powers of comprehension were paralysed in the face of some apparently innocent problems. It was possible to establish two of these problems: ‘Two bodies come together, one with a speed of... etc.’ and ‘On a cylinder, the diameter of whose surface is m, describe a cone... etc.’ Other people would certainly not have regarded these as very striking allusions to sexual events; but he felt that he had been betrayed by mathematics as well, and took flight from it too.

¹ [‘Give up women and study mathematics!’]9

If Norbert Hanold were someone in real life who had in this way banished love and his childhood friendship with the help of archaeology, it would have been logical and according to rule that what revived in him the forgotten memory of the girl he had loved in his childhood should be precisely antique sculpture. It would have been his well-deserved fate to fall in love with the marble portrait of Gradiva, behind which, owing to an unexplained similarity, the living Zoe whom he had neglected made her influence felt.

Fräulein Zoe seems herself to have shared our view of the young archaeologist’s delusion, for the satisfaction she expressed at the end of her ‘frank, detailed and instructive speech of castigation’ could scarcely have been based on anything but a recognition that from the very first his interest in Gradiva had related to herself. It was this which she had not expected of him, but which, in spite of all its delusional disguise, she saw for what it was. The psychical treatment she had carried out, however, had now accomplished its beneficent effect on him. He felt free, for his delusion had now been replaced by the thing of which it could only have been a distorted and inadequate copy. Nor did he any longer hesitate to remember her and to recognize her as the kind, cheerful, clever playmate who in essentials was not in any way changed. But he found something else very strange-

‘You mean’, said the girl, ‘the fact of someone having to die so as to come alive; but no doubt that must be so for archaeologists.’ (141.) Evidently she had not forgiven him yet for the roundabout path by way of archaeology which he had followed from their childhood friendship to the new relation that was forming.

‘No, I mean your name... Because "Bertgang" means the same as "Gradiva" and describes someone "who steps along brilliantly".’¹ (142.)

We ourselves were unprepared for this. Our hero was beginning to cast off his humility and to play an active part. Evidently he was completely cured of his delusion and had risen above it; and he proved this by himself tearing the last threads of the cobweb of his delusion. This, too, is just how patients behave when one has loosened the compulsion of their delusional thoughts by revealing the repressed material lying behind them. Once they have understood, they themselves bring forward the solutions of the final and most important riddles of their strange condition in a number of ideas that suddenly occur to them. We had already guessed that the Greek origin of the imaginary Gradiva was an obscure result of the Greek name ‘Zoe’; but we had not ventured to approach the name ‘Gradiva’ itself, and had let it pass as the untrammelled creation of Norbert Hanold’s imagination. But, to and behold! that very name now turns out to have been a derivative - indeed a translation - of the repressed surname of the girl he had loved in the childhood which he was supposed to have forgotten.

¹ [The German root ‘bert’ or ‘brecht’ is akin to the English ‘bright’; similarly ‘gang’ is akin to ‘go’ (in Scotland ‘gang’).]0

The tracing back of the delusion and its resolution were now complete. What the author now adds is no doubt designed to serve as a harmonious end to his story. We cannot but feel reassured about the future when we hear that the young man, who had earlier been obliged to play the pitiable part of a person in urgent need of treatment, advanced still further on the road to recovery and succeeded in arousing in her some of the feelings under which he himself had suffered before. Thus it was that he made her jealous by mentioning the sympathetic young lady who had previously interrupted their tête-à-tête in the House of Meleager, and by confessing that she had been the first woman for whom he had felt a very great liking. Whereupon Zoe prepared to take a chilly leave of him, remarking that everything had now returned to reason - she herself not least; he could look up Gisa Hartleben (or whatever she was now called) again and give her some scientific assistance over the purpose of her visit to Pompeii; she herself, however, must go back to the Albergo del Sole where her father was expecting her for lunch; perhaps they would meet again some time at a party in Germany or in the moon. But once more he was able to make the troublesome fly an excuse for taking possession first of her cheek and then of her lips, and to set in motion the aggressiveness which is a man’s inevitable duty in love making. Once only a shadow seemed to fall on their happiness, when Zoe declared that now she really must go back to her father or he will starve at the Sole. ‘Your father?... what will happen?...’ (147.) But the clever girl was able swiftly to quiet his concern. ‘Probably nothing will happen. I’m not an indispensable part of his zoological collection. If I had been, perhaps I shouldn’t have been so foolish as to give my heart to you.’ In the exceptional event, however, of her father taking a different view from hers, there was a safe expedient. Hanold need only cross to Capri, catch a Lacerta faraglionensis there (he could practise the technique on her little finger), set the creature free over here, catch it again before the zoologist’s eyes, and let him choose between a faraglionensis on the mainland and his daughter. The scheme, it is easy to see, was one in which the mockery was tinged with bitterness; it was a warning, as it were, to her fiancé not to keep too closely to the model on which she had chosen him. Here again Norbert Hanold reassures us, by showing by all sorts of apparently small signs the great transformation that had taken place in him. He proposed that he and his Zoe should come for their honeymoon to Italy and Pompeii, just as though he had never been indignant with the honeymooning Edwins and Angelinas. He had completely lost from his memory all his feelings against those happy pairs, who had so unnecessarily travelled more than a hundred miles from their German home. The author is certainly right in bringing forward a loss of memory like this as the most trustworthy sign of a change of attitude. Zoe’s reply to the plan for the scene of their honeymoon suggested by ‘her childhood friend who had also in a sense been dug out of the ruins again’ (150.) was that she did not feel quite alive enough yet to make a geographical decision of that sort.

The delusion had now been conquered by a beautiful reality; but before the two lovers left Pompeii it was still to be honoured once again. When they reached the Herculanean Gate, where, at the entrance to the Via Consolare, the street is crossed by some ancient stepping-stones, Norbert Hanold paused and asked the girl to go ahead of him. She understood him ‘and, pulling up her dress a little with her left hand, Zoe Bertgang, Gradiva rediviva, walked past, held in his eyes, which seemed to gaze as though in a dream; so, with her quietly tripping gait, she stepped through the sunlight over the stepping-stones to the other side of the street.’ With the triumph of love, what was beautiful and precious in the delusion found recognition as well.

In his last simile, however, - of the ‘childhood friend who had been dug out of the ruins’ - the author has presented us with the key to the symbolism of which the hero’s delusion made use in disguising his repressed memory. There is, in fact, no better analogy for repression, by which something in the mind is at once made inaccessible and preserved, than burial of the sort to which Pompeii fell a victim and from which it could emerge once more through the work of spades. Thus it was that the young archaeologist was obliged in his phantasy to transport to Pompeii the original of the relief which reminded him of the object of his youthful love. The author was well justified, indeed, in lingering over the valuable similarity which his delicate sense had perceived between a particular mental process in the individual and an isolated historical event in the history of mankind.

II

But after all, what we really intended to do originally was only to investigate two or three dreams that are to be found here and there in Gradiva with the help of certain analytic methods. How has it come about, then, that we have been led into dissecting the whole story and examining the mental processes in the two chief characters? This has not in fact been an unnecessary piece of work; it was an essential preliminary. It is equally the case that when we try to understand the real dreams of a real person we have to concern ourselves intensively with his character and his career, and we must get to know not only his experiences shortly before the dream but also those dating far back into the past. It is even my view that we are still not free to turn to our proper task, but that we must linger a little more over the story itself and carry out some further preliminary work.

My readers will no doubt have been puzzled to notice that so far I have treated Norbert Hanold and Zoe Bertgang, in all their mental manifestations and activities, as though they were real people and not the author’s creations, as though the author’s mind were an absolutely transparent medium and not a refractive or obscuring one. And my procedure must seem all the more puzzling since the author has expressly renounced the portrayal of reality by calling his story a ‘phantasy’. We have found, however, that all his descriptions are so faithfully copied from reality that we should not object if Gradiva were described not as a phantasy but as a psychiatric study. Only at two points has the author availed himself of the licence open to him of laying down premisses which do not seem to have their roots in the laws of reality. The first time is where he makes the young archaeologist come upon what is undoubtedly an ancient relief but which so closely resembles a person living long afterwards, not only in the peculiarity of the posture of the foot as it steps along but in every detail of facial structure and bodily attitude, that the young man is able to take the physical appearance of that person to be the sculpture come to life. And the second time is where he makes the young man meet the living woman precisely in Pompeii; for the dead woman had been placed there only by his imagination, and the journey to Pompeii had in fact carried him away from the living woman, whom he had just seen in the street of the town in which he lived. This second provision of the author’s, however, involves no violent departure from actual possibility; it merely makes use of chance, which unquestionably plays a part in many human histories; and furthermore he uses it to good purpose, for this chance reflects the fatal truth that has laid it down that flight is precisely an instrument that delivers one over to what one is fleeing from. The first premiss seems to lean more towards phantasy and to spring entirely from the author’s arbitrary decision - the premiss on which all that follows depends, the far-reaching resemblance between the sculpture and the live girl, which a more sober choice might have restricted to the single feature of the posture of the foot as it steps along. We might be tempted here to allow the play of our own phantasy to forge a link with reality. The name of ‘Bertgang’ might point to the fact that the women of that family had already been distinguished in ancient days by the peculiarity of their graceful gait; and we might suppose that the Germanic Bertgangs were descended from a Roman family one member of which was the woman who had led the artist to perpetuate the peculiarity of her gait in the sculpture. Since, however, the different variations of the human form are not independent of one another, and since in fact even among ourselves the ancient types re-appear again and again (as we can see in art collections), it would not be totally impossible that a modern Bertgang might reproduce the shape of her ancient ancestress in all the other features of her bodily structure as well. But it would no doubt be wiser, instead of such speculations, to enquire from the author himself what were the sources from which this part of his creation was derived; we should then have a good prospect of showing once again how what was ostensibly an arbitrary decision rested in fact upon law. But since access to the sources in the author’s mind is not open to us, we will leave him with an undiminished right to construct a development that is wholly true to life upon an improbable premiss - a right of which Shakespeare, for instance, availed himself in King Lear.

Apart from this, it must be repeated, the author has presented us with a perfectly correct psychiatric study, on which we may measure our understanding of the workings of the mind - a case history and the history of a cure which might have been designed to emphasize certain fundamental theories of medical psychology. It is strange enough that the author should have done this. But how if, on being questioned, he were completely to deny any such purpose? It is so easy to draw analogies and to read meanings into things. Is it not rather we who have slipped into this charming poetic story a secret meaning very far from its author’s intentions? Possibly. We shall come back to the question later. For the moment, however, we have tried to save ourselves from making any such tendentious interpretation by giving the story almost entirely in the author’s own words. Anyone who compares our reproduction with the actual text of Gradiva will have to concede us that much.

Perhaps, too, in most people’s eyes we are doing our author a poor service in declaring his work to be a psychiatric study. An author, we hear them say, should keep out of the way of any contact with psychiatry and should leave the description of pathological mental states to the doctors. The truth is that no truly creative writer has ever obeyed this injunction. The description of the human mind is indeed the domain which is most his own; he has from time immemorial been the precursor of science, and so too of scientific psychology. But the frontier between states of mind described as normal and pathological is in part a conventional one and in part so fluctuating that each of us probably crosses it many times in the course of a day. On the other hand, psychiatry would be doing wrong if it tried to restrict itself permanently to the study of the severe and gloomy illnesses that arise from gross injuries to the delicate apparatus of the mind. Deviations from health which are slighter and capable of correction, and which to-day we can trace back no further than to disturbances in the interplay of mental forces, arouse its interest no less. Indeed, only through the medium of these can it understand either normal states or the phenomena of severe illness. Thus the creative writer cannot evade the psychiatrist nor the psychiatrist the creative writer, and the poetic treatment of a psychiatric theme can turn out to be correct without any sacrifice of its beauty.

And it is really correct - this imaginative picture of the history of a case and its treatment. Now that we have finished telling the story and satisfied our own suspense, we can get a better view of it, and we shall now reproduce it with the technical terminology of our science, and in doing so we shall not feel disconcerted at the necessity for repeating what we have said before.4 Norbert Hanold’s condition is often spoken of by the author as a ‘delusion’, and we have no reason to reject that designation. We can state two chief characteristics of a ‘delusion’, which do not, it is true, describe it exhaustively, but which distinguish it recognizably from other disorders. In the first place it is one of the group of pathological states which do not produce a direct effect upon the body but are manifested only by mental indications. And secondly it is characterized by the fact that in it ‘phantasies’ have gained the upper hand - that is, have obtained belief and have acquired an influence on action. If we recall Hanold’s journey to Pompeii in order to look for Gradiva’s peculiarly formed footprints in the ashes, we shall have a fine example of an action under the dominance of a delusion. A psychiatrist would perhaps place Norbert Hanold’s delusion in the great group of ‘paranoia’ and possibly describe it as ‘fetishistic erotomania’, because the most striking thing about it was his being in love with the piece of sculpture and because in the psychiatrist’s view, with its tendency to coarsen everything, the young archaeologist’s interest in feet and the postures of feet would be bound to suggest ‘fetishism’. Nevertheless all such systems of nomenclature and classification of the different kinds of delusion according to their subject-matter have something precarious and barren about them.¹

Furthermore, since our hero was a person capable of developing a delusion on the basis of such a strange preference, a strict psychiatrist would at once stamp him as a dégénéré and would investigate the heredity which had remorselessly driven him to this fate. But here the author does not follow the psychiatrist, and with good reason. He wishes to bring the hero closer to us so as to make ‘empathy’ easier; the diagnosis of ‘

dégénéré', whether it is right or wrong, at once puts the young archaeologist at a distance from us, for we readers are the normal people and the standard of humanity. Nor is the author greatly concerned with the hereditary and constitutional preconditions of the state, but on the other hand he plunges deep into the personal mental make-up which can give rise to such a delusion.

¹ In point of fact, the case of N. H. would have to be described as a hysterical delusion, not a paranoic one. The indications of paranoia are absent from it.5

In one important respect Norbert Hanold behaved quite differently from an ordinary human being. He took no interest in living women; the science of which he was the servant had taken that interest away from him and displaced it on to women of marble or bronze. This is not to be regarded as a trivial peculiarity; on the contrary, it was the basic precondition of the events to be described. For one day it came about that one particular sculpture of that kind laid claim to the whole of the interest which is ordinarily directed only to a living woman, and with that his delusion was there. We then see unrolled before our eyes the manner in which his delusion is cured through a happy turn of events, and his interest displaced back from the marble to a living woman. The author does not let us follow the influences which led our hero to turn away from women; he only informs us that his attitude was not explained by his innate disposition, which, on the contrary, included some amount of imaginative (and, we might add, erotic) needs. And, as we learn later in the story, he did not avoid other children in his childhood: he had a friendship at that age with a little girl, was her inseparable companion, shared his little meals with her, used to thump her too and let her rumple his hair. It is in attachments such as this, in combinations like this of affection and aggressiveness, that the immature erotism of childhood finds its expression; its consequences only emerge later, but then they are irresistible, and during childhood itself it is as a rule recognized as erotism only by doctors and creative writers. Our own writer shows us clearly that he too is of the same opinion; for he makes his hero suddenly develop a lively interest in women’s feet and their way of placing them. This interest was bound to bring him a bad reputation both among scientists and among the women of the town he lived in, a reputation of being a foot-fetishist; but we cannot avoid tracing the interest back to the memory of his childhood playmate. For there can be no doubt that even in her childhood the girl showed the same peculiarity of a graceful gait, with her toes almost perpendicularly raised as she stepped along; and it was because it represented that same gait that an ancient marble relief acquired such great importance for Norbert Hanold. Incidentally we may add that in his derivation of the remarkable phenomenon of fetishism the author is in complete agreement with science. Ever since Binet we have in fact tried to trace fetishism back to erotic impressions in childhood.

The state of permanently turning away from women produces a personal susceptibility, or, as we are accustomed to say, a ‘disposition’ to the formation of a delusion. The development of the mental disorder sets in at the moment when a chance impression arouses the childhood experiences which have been forgotten and which have traces, at least, of an erotic colouring. ‘Arouses’, however, is certainly not the right description, if we take into account what follows. We must repeat the author’s accurate account in correct psychological technical terms. When Norbert Hanold saw the relief, he did not remember that he had already seen a similar posture of the foot in his childhood friend; he remembered nothing at all, but all the effects brought about by the relief originated from this link that was made with the impression of his childhood. Thus the childhood impression was stirred up, it became active, so that it began to produce effects, but it did not come into consciousness - it remained ‘unconscious’, to use a term which has to-day become unavoidable in psychopathology. We are anxious that this unconscious shall not be involved in any of the disputes of philosophers and natural philosophers, which have often no more than an etymological importance. For the time being we possess no better name for psychical processes which behave actively but nevertheless do not reach the consciousness of the person concerned, and that is all we mean by our ‘unconsciousness’. When some thinkers try to dispute the existence of an unconscious of this kind, on the ground that it is nonsensical, we can only suppose that they have never had to do with the corresponding mental phenomena, that they are under the spell of the regular experience that everything mental that becomes active and intense becomes at the same time conscious as well, and that they have still to learn (what our author knows very well) that there are most certainly mental processes which, in spite of being intense and producing effects, none the less remain apart from consciousness.

We said a little earlier that Norbert Hanold’s memories of his childhood relations with Zoe were in a state of ‘repression’; and here we have called them ‘unconscious’ memories. So we must now pay a little attention to the relation between these two technical terms, which, indeed, appear to coincide in their meaning. It is not difficult to make the matter plain. ‘Unconscious’ is the wider concept; ‘repressed’ is the narrower one. Everything that is repressed is unconscious; but we cannot assert that everything unconscious is repressed. If when Hanold saw the relief he had remembered his Zoe’s gait, what had earlier been an unconscious memory of his would have become simultaneously active and conscious, and this would have shown that it had not earlier been repressed. ‘Unconscious’ is a purely descriptive term, one that is indefinite in some respects and, as we might say, static. ‘Repressed’ is a dynamic expression, which takes account of the interplay of mental forces; it implies that there is a force present which is seeking to bring about all kinds of psychical effects, including that of becoming conscious, but that there is also an opposing force which is able to obstruct some of these psychical effects, once more including that of becoming conscious. The mark of something repressed is precisely that in spite of its intensity it is unable to enter consciousness. In Hanold’s case, therefore, from the moment of the appearance of the relief onwards, we are concerned with something unconscious that is repressed, or, more briefly with something repressed.

Norbert Hanold’s memories of his childhood relations with the girl with the graceful gait were repressed; but this is not yet the correct view of the psychological situation. We remain on the surface so long as we are dealing only with memories and ideas. What is alone of value in mental life is rather the feelings. No mental forces are significant unless they possess the characteristic of arousing feelings. Ideas are only repressed because they are associated with the release of feelings which ought not to occur. It would be more correct to say that repression acts upon feelings, but we can only be aware of these in their association with ideas. So that it was Norbert Hanold’s erotic feelings that were repressed; and since his erotism knew and had known no other object than Zoe Bertgang in his childhood, his memories of her were forgotten. The ancient relief aroused the slumbering erotism in him, and made his childhood memories active. On account of a resistance to erotism that was present in him, these memories could only become operative as unconscious ones. What now took place in him was a struggle between the power of erotism and that of the forces that were repressing it; the manifestation of this struggle was a delusion.

Our author has omitted to give the reasons which led to the repression of the erotic life of his hero; for of course Hanold’s concern with science was only the instrument which the repression employed. A doctor would have to dig deeper here, but perhaps without hitting upon the reason in this case. But, as we have insisted with admiration, the author has not failed to show us how the arousing of the repressed erotism came precisely from the field of the instruments that served to bring about the repression. It was right that an antique, the marble sculpture of a woman, should have been what tore our archaeologist away from his retreat from love and warned him to pay off the debt to life with which we are burdened from our birth.

The first manifestations of the process that had been set going in Hanold by the relief were phantasies, which played around the figure represented in it. The figure seemed to him to have something ‘of to-day’ about her, in the best sense of the words, and it was as though the artist had captured her ‘from the life’ stepping along the street. He gave the girl in the ancient relief the name of ‘Gradiva’, which he constructed on the model of an epithet of the war-god striding into battle - ‘Mars Gradivus’. He endowed her personality with more and more characteristics. She may have been the daughter of a respected personage, of a patrician, perhaps, who was connected with the temple service of a deity. He thought he could trace a Greek origin in her features; and finally he felt compelled to remove her from the busy life of a capital and to transport her to the more peaceful Pompeii, and there he made her step across the lava stepping-stones which made it possible to cross from one side of the street to the other. These products of his phantasy seem arbitrary enough, but at the same time innocently unsuspicious. And, indeed, even when for the first time they gave rise to an incitement to action - when the archaeologist, obsessed by the problem of whether this posture of the feet corresponded to reality, began to make observations from life in order to examine the feet of contemporary women and girls - even this action was screened by conscious scientific motives, as though all his interest in the sculpture of Gradiva had sprung from the soil of his professional concern with archaeology. The women and girls in the street, whom he chose as the subjects of his investigation, must, of course, have taken another, crudely erotic view of his behaviour, and we cannot but think them right. We ourselves can be in no doubt that Hanold was as much in ignorance of the motives of his researches as he was of the origin of his phantasies about Gradiva. These, as we learned later, were echoes of his memories of his youthful love, derivatives of those memories, transformations and distortions of them, after they had failed to make their way into his consciousness in an unmodified form. The ostensibly aesthetic judgement that the sculpture had something ‘of to-day’ about it took the place of his knowledge that a gait of that kind belonged to a girl whom he knew and who stepped across the street at the present time. Behind the impression of the sculpture being ‘from the life’ and the phantasy of its subject being Greek lay his memory of the name Zoe, which means ‘life’ in Greek. ‘Gradiva’, as we learn from our hero himself at the end of the story, after he has been cured of his delusion, is a good translation of the surname ‘Bertgang’ which means something like ‘someone who steps along brilliantly or splendidly’. The details about Gradiva’s father originated from Hanold’s knowledge that Zoe Bertgang was the daughter of a respected teacher at the University, which can well be translated into classical terms as ‘temple-service’. Finally, his phantasy transported her to Pompeii, not ‘because her quiet, calm nature seemed to demand it’, but because no other or better analogy could be found in his science for his remarkable state, in which he became aware of his memories of his childhood friendship through obscure channels of information. Once he had made his own childhood coincide with the classical past (which it was so easy for him to do), there was a perfect similarity between the burial of Pompeii - the disappearance of the past combined with its preservation - and repression, of which he possessed a knowledge through what might be described as ‘endopsychic’ perception. In this he was employing the same symbolism that the author makes the girl use consciously towards the conclusion of the story: ‘I told myself I should be able to dig out something interesting here even by myself. Of course I hadn’t counted on making the find that I have...’ (124.) And at the very end she replied to Hanold’s plan for their honeymoon with a reference to ‘her childhood friend who had also in a sense been dug out of the ruins again’. (150.)

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