Delusions and dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva (1907)1 6 страница

5 I will now return to the dream and bring out a small but not uninteresting feature in it, which forms a connection between two of its provoking causes. Gradiva had drawn a kind of contrast between the white asphodel blossoms and the red rose. Seeing the asphodel again in the window of the Albergo del Sole became an important piece of evidence in support of Hanold’s unconscious discovery, which was expressed in the new delusion; and alongside this was the fact that the red rose in the dress of the sympathetic girl helped Hanold in his unconscious to a correct view of her relation to her companion, so that he was able to make her appear in the dream as the ‘lady colleague’.

But where in the manifest content of the dream, it will be asked, do we find anything to indicate and replace the discovery for which, as we have seen, Hanold’s new delusion was a substitute - the discovery that Gradiva was staying with her father in the third, concealed Pompeii hotel, the Albergo del Sole? Nevertheless it is all there in the dream, and not even very much distorted, and I merely hesitate to point to it because I know that even those of my readers who have followed me patiently so far will begin to rebel strongly against my attempts at interpretation. Hanold’s discovery, I repeat, is fully announced in the dream, but so cleverly concealed that it is bound to be overlooked. It is hidden behind a play upon words, an ambiguity. ‘Somewhere in the sun Gradiva was sitting.’ We have quite correctly related this to the spot where Hanold met her father, the zoologist. But could it not also mean in the ‘Sun’ - that is, Gradiva is staying in the Albergo del Sole, the Sun Hotel? And was not the ‘somewhere’, which had no bearing on the encounter with her father, made to sound so hypocritically indefinite precisely because it introduced a definite piece of information about the place where Gradiva was staying? From my experience elsewhere of real dreams, I myself am perfectly certain that this is how the ambiguity is to be understood. But I should not in fact have ventured to present this piece of interpretative work to my readers, if the author had not at this point lent me his powerful assistance. He puts the very same play upon words into the girl’s mouth when next day she saw the metal clasp: ‘Did you find it in the sun, perhaps, which produces things of this kind?’ And since Hanold failed to understand what she had said, she explained that she meant the Sun Hotel, which they call ‘Sole’ here, and where she had already seen the supposititious antique.

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.

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.’

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.

‘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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

4 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.

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.]6

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