Delusions and dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva (1907)1 4 страница

Thus in the very first products of Hanold’s delusional phantasies and actions we already find a double set of determinants, a derivation from two different sources. One of these is the one that was manifest to Hanold himself, the other is the one which is revealed to us when we examine his mental processes. One of them, looked at from Hanold’s point of view, was conscious to him, the other was completely unconscious to him. One of them was derived wholly from the circle of ideas of the science of archaeology, the other arose from the repressed childhood memories that had become active in him and from the emotional instincts attached to them. One might be described as lying on the surface and covering the other, which was, as it were, concealed behind it. The scientific motivation might be said to serve as a pretext for the unconscious erotic one, and science had put itself completely at the service of the delusion. It should not be forgotten, however, that the unconscious determinants could not effect anything that did not simultaneously satisfy the conscious, scientific ones. The symptoms of a delusion - phantasies and actions alike - are in fact the products of compromise between the two mental currents, and in a compromise account is taken of the demands of each of the two parties to it; but each side must also renounce a part of what it wanted to achieve. Where a compromise comes about it must have been preceded by a struggle - in this case it was the conflict we have assumed between suppressed erotism and the forces that were keeping it in repression. In the formation of a delusion this struggle is in fact unending. Assault and resistance are renewed after the construction of each compromise, which is never, so to speak, entirely satisfying. Our author too is aware of this, and that is why he makes a peculiar unrest dominate this stage of his hero’s disorder, as a precursor and guarantee of further developments.

These significant peculiarities - the double motivation of phantasies and decisions, and the construction of conscious pretexts for actions to whose motivation the repressed has made the major contribution - will meet us often, and perhaps more clearly, in the further course of the story. And this is just as it should be, for the author has thus grasped and represented the unfailing chief characteristic of pathological mental processes.

The development of Norbert Hanold’s delusion proceeded with a dream which, since it was not occasioned by any new event, seems to have arisen entirely out of his mind, filled as it was by a conflict. But let us pause before we enquire whether, in the construction of his dreams, too, the author meets our expectation that he possesses a deep understanding. Let us ask first what psychiatric science has to say to his hypotheses about the origin of a delusion and what attitude it takes to the part played by repression and the unconscious, to conflict and to the formation of compromises. In short, let us ask whether this imaginative representation of the genesis of a delusion can hold its own before the judgement of science.

And here we must give what will perhaps be an unexpected answer. In fact the situation is quite the reverse: it is science that cannot hold its own before the achievement of the author. Science allows a gulf to yawn between the hereditary and constitutional preconditions of a delusion and its creations, which seem to emerge ready-made - a gulf which we find that our author has filled. Science does not as yet suspect the importance of repression, it does not recognize that in order to explain the world of psychopathological phenomena the unconscious is absolutely essential, it does not look for the basis of delusions in a psychical conflict, and it does not regard their symptoms as compromises. Does our author stand alone, then, in the face of united science? No, that is not the case (if, that is, I may count my own works as part of science), since for a number of years - and, until recently, more or less alone¹ - I myself have supported all the views that I have here extracted from Jensen’s Gradiva and stated in technical terms. I indicated, in most detail in connection with the states known as hysteria and obsessions, that the individual determinant of these psychical disorders is the suppression of a part of instinctual life and the repression of the ideas by which the suppressed instinct is represented, and soon afterwards I repeated the same views in relation to some forms of delusion.² The question whether the instincts concerned in this causation are always components of the sexual instinct or may be of another kind as well is a problem which may be regarded as a matter of indifference in the particular case of the analysis of Gradiva; for in the instance chosen by our author what was at issue was quite certainly nothing other than the suppression of erotic feelings. The validity of the hypotheses of psychical conflict and of the formation of symptoms by means of compromises between the two mental currents struggling against each other has been demonstrated by me in the case of patients observed and medically treated in real life, just as I have been able to in the imaginary case of Norbert Hanold.³ Even before me, Pierre Janet, a pupil of the great Charcot, and Josef Breuer, in collaboration with me, had traced back the products of neurotic, and especially of hysterical, illness to the power of unconscious thoughts.4

When, from the year 1893 onwards, I plunged into investigations such as these of the origin of mental disturbances, it would certainly never have occurred to me to look for a confirmation of my findings in imaginative writings. I was thus more than a little surprised to find that the author of Gradiva, which was published in 1903, had taken as the basis of its creation the very thing that I believed myself to have freshly discovered from the sources of my medical experience. How was it that the author arrived at the same knowledge as the doctor - or at least behaved as though he possessed the same knowledge?

¹ See Bleuler’s important work, Affektivität, Suggestibilität, Paranoia and C. G. Jung’s Diagnostische Assoziationsstudien, both published in Zurich in 1906. - [Added 1912:] To-day, in 1912, I am able to retract what is said above as being no longer true. Since it was written, the ‘psycho-analytic movement’ started by me has become widely extended, and it is constantly growing.

² See the author’s Sammlung Kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, 1906.

³ Cf. ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (1905e).

4 Cf. Studies on Hysteria (Freud, 1895d, with Breuer).2 Norbert Hanold’s delusion, as I was saying, was carried a step further by a dream which occurred in the middle of his efforts to discover a gait like Gradiva’s in the streets of the town where he lived. It is easy to give the content of this dream in brief. The dreamer found himself in Pompeii on the day on which that unhappy city was destroyed, and experienced its horrors without being in danger himself; he suddenly saw Gradiva stepping along there, and understood all at once, as though it was something quite natural, that since she was a Pompeian, she was living in her native town, and ‘without his having suspected it, living as his contemporary’. He was seized with fear on her account and gave a warning cry, whereupon she turned her face towards him for a moment. But she proceeded on her way without paying any attention to him, lay down on the steps of the Temple of Apollo, and was buried in the rain of ashes after her face had lost its colour, as though it were turning into white marble, until it had become just like a piece of sculpture. As he was waking up, he interpreted the noises of a big city penetrating into his bedroom as the cries for help of the despairing inhabitants of Pompeii and the thunder of the wildly agitated sea. The feeling that what he had dreamt had really happened to him would not leave him for some time after he had awoken, and a conviction that Gradiva had lived in Pompeii and had perished there on the fatal day was left over with him by the dream as a fresh starting-point for his delusion.

It is not so easy for us to say what the author intended with this dream and what caused him to link the development of the delusion precisely to a dream. Zealous investigators, it is true, have collected plenty of examples of the way in which mental disturbances are linked to dreams and arise out of dreams.¹ It appears, too, that in the lives of a few eminent men impulses to important actions and decisions have originated from dreams. But these analogies are not of much help to our understanding; so let us keep to our present case, our author’s imaginary case of Norbert Hanold the archaeologist. By which end are we to take hold of a dream like this so as to fit it into the whole context, if it is not to remain no more than an unnecessary decoration of the story?

¹ Sante de Sanctis (1899).3

I can well imagine that at this point a reader may exclaim: ‘The dream is quite easily explained - it is a simple anxiety dream, occasioned by the noises of the city, which were misinterpreted into the destruction of Pompeii by the archaeologist, whose mind was occupied with his Pompeian girl.’ In view of the low opinion generally prevailing of the performances of dreams, all that is usually asked from an explanation of one is that some external stimulus shall be found that more or less coincides with a piece of the dream’s content. This external stimulus to dreaming would be supplied by the noise which woke the sleeper; and with this, interest in the dream would be exhausted. If only we had some reason for supposing that the town was noisier than usual that morning! If only, for instance, the author had not omitted to tell us that Hanold, against his usual practice, had slept that night with his windows open! What a pity the author did not take the trouble to do that! And if only anxiety-dreams were as simple as that! But no, interest in the dream is not so easily exhausted.

There is nothing essential for the construction of a dream in a link with an external sensory stimulus. A sleeper can disregard a stimulus of this kind from the external world, or he can allow himself to be awakened by it without constructing a dream, or, as happened here, he can weave it into his dream if that suits him for some other reason; and there are numerous dreams of which it is impossible to show that their content was determined in this way by a stimulus impinging on the sleeper’s senses. No, we must try another path.

We may perhaps find a starting-point in the after-effects left by the dream in Hanold’s waking life. Up to then he had had a phantasy that Gradiva had been a Pompeian. This hypothesis now became a certainty for him, and a second certainty followed - that she was buried along with the rest in the year 79 A.D.¹ Melancholy feelings accompanied this extension of the delusional structure, like an echo of the anxiety which had filled the dream. This fresh pain about Gradiva does not seem very intelligible to us; Gradiva would have been dead for many centuries even if she had been saved from destruction in the year 79 A.D. Or ought we not to argue in this kind of way either with Norbert Hanold or with the author himself? Here again there seems no path to an understanding. Nevertheless it is worth remarking that the increment which the delusion acquired from this dream was accompanied by a feeling with a highly painful colouring.

¹ See the text of Gradiva (15).4

Apart from that, however, we are as much at a loss as before. This dream is not self-explanatory, and we must resolve to borrow from my Interpretation of Dreams and apply to the present example a few of the rules to be found in it for the solution of dreams.

One of these rules is to the effect that a dream is invariably related to the events of the day before the dream. Our author seems to be wishing to show that he has followed this rule, for he attaches the dream immediately to Hanold’s ‘pedestrian researches’. Now these had no meaning other than a search for Gradiva, whose characteristic gait he was trying to recognize. So the dream ought to have contained an indication of where Gradiva was to be found. And it does so, by showing her in Pompeii; but that is no novelty to us.

Another rule tells as that, if a belief in the reality of the dream-images persists unusually long, so that one cannot tear oneself out of the dream, this is not a mistaken judgement provoked by the vividness of the dream-images, but is a psychical act on its own: it is an assurance, relating to the content of the dream, that something in it is really as one has dreamt it; and it is right to have faith in this assurance. If we keep to these two rules, we must conclude that the dream gave some information as to the whereabouts of the Gradiva he was in search of, and that that information tallied with the real state of things. We know Hanold’s dream: does the application of these two rules to it yield any reasonable sense?

Strange to say, it does. The sense is merely disguised in a particular way so that it is not immediately recognizable. Hanold learned in the dream that the girl he was looking for was living in a town and contemporaneously with him. Now this was true of Zoe Bertgang; only in the dream the town was not the German university town but Pompeii, and the time was not the present but the year 79 A.D. It is, as it were, a distortion by displacement: what we have is not Gradiva in the present but the dreamer transported into the past. Nevertheless, in this manner, the essential and new fact is stated: he is in the same place and time as the girl he is looking for. But whence come this displacement and disguise which were bound to deceive both us and the dreamer over the true meaning and content of the dream? Well, we already have the means at our disposal for giving a satisfactory answer to that question.

Let us recall all that we have heard about the nature and origin of the phantasies which are the precursors of delusions. They are substitutes for and derivatives of repressed memories which a resistance will not allow to enter consciousness unaltered, but which can purchase the possibility of becoming conscious by taking account, by means of changes and distortions, of the resistance’s censorship. When this compromise has been accomplished, the memories have turned into the phantasies, which can easily be misunderstood by the conscious personality - that is, understood so as to fit in with the dominant psychical current. Now let us suppose that dream-images are what might be described as the creations of people’s physiological delusions - the products of the compromise in the struggle between what is repressed and what is dominant which is probably present in every human being, including those who in the day-time are perfectly sound in mind. We shall then understand that dream-images have to be regarded as something distorted, behind which something else must be looked for, something not distorted, but in some sense objectionable, like Hanold’s repressed memories behind his phantasies. We can give expression to the contrast which we have thus recognized, by distinguishing what the dreamer remembers when he wakes up as the manifest content of the dream from what constituted the basis of the dream before the distortion imposed by the censorship - namely, the latent dream-thoughts. Thus, interpreting a dream consists in translating the manifest content of the dream into the latent dream-thoughts, in undoing the distortion which the dream-thoughts have had to submit to from the censorship of the resistance. If we apply these notions to the dream we are concerned with, we shall find that its latent dream-thoughts can only have been: ‘the girl you are looking for with the graceful gait is really living in this town with you.’ But in that form the thought could not become conscious. It was obstructed by the fact that a phantasy had laid it down, as the result of an earlier compromise, that Gradiva was a Pompeian; consequently, if the real fact that she was living in the same place and at the same time was to be affirmed, there was no choice but to adopt the distortion: ‘You are living at Pompeii at the time of Gradiva.’ This then was the idea which was realized by the manifest content of the dream, and was represented as a present event actually being experienced.

It is only rarely that a dream represents, or, as we might say, ‘stages’, a single thought: there are usually a number of them, a tissue of thoughts. Another component of the content of Hanold’s dream can be detached, the distortion of which can easily be got rid of, so that the latent idea represented by it can be detected. This is a piece of the dream to which once again it is possible to extend the assurance of reality with which the dream ended. In the dream Gradiva as she steps along is transformed into a marble sculpture. This is no more than an ingenious and poetical representation of the real event. Hanold had in fact transferred his interest from the living girl to the sculpture: the girl he loved had been transformed for him into a marble relief. The latent dream-thoughts, which were bound to remain unconscious, sought to change the sculpture back into the living girl; what they were saying to him accordingly was something like: ‘After all, you’re only interested in the statue of Gradiva because it reminds you of Zoe, who is living here and now.’ But if this discovery could have become conscious, it would have meant the end of the delusion.

Are we perhaps under an obligation to replace in this way each separate piece of the manifest content of the dream by unconscious thoughts? Strictly speaking, yes; if we were interpreting a dream that had really been dreamt, we could not avoid that duty. But in that case, too, the dreamer would have to give us the most copious explanations. Clearly, we cannot carry out this requirement in the case of the author’s creation; nevertheless, we shall not overlook the fact that we have not yet submitted the main content of the dream to the process of interpretation or translation.

For Hanold’s dream was an anxiety-dream. Its content was frightening, the dreamer felt anxiety while he slept and he was left with painful feelings afterwards. Now this is far from convenient for our attempt at an explanation; and we must once again borrow heavily from the theory of dream-interpretation. We are warned by that theory not to fall into the error of tracing the anxiety that may be felt in a dream to the content of the dream, and not to treat the content of the dream as though it were the content of an idea occurring in waking life. It points out to us how often we dream the most ghastly things without feeling a trace of anxiety. The true situation, we learn, is quite a different one, which cannot be easily guessed, but which can be proved with certainty. The anxiety in anxiety-dreams, like neurotic anxiety in general, corresponds to a sexual affect, a libidinal feeling, and arises out of libido by the process of repression.¹ When we interpret a dream, therefore, we must replace anxiety by sexual excitement. The anxiety that originates in this way has - not invariably, but frequently - a selective influence on the content of the dream and introduces into it ideational elements which seem, when the dream is looked at from a conscious and mistaken point of view, to be appropriate to the affect of anxiety. As I have said, this is not invariably so, for there are plenty of anxiety-dreams in which the content is not in the least frightening and where it is therefore impossible to give an explanation on conscious lines of the anxiety that is felt.

¹ Cf. my first paper on the anxiety neurosis (1895b) and The Interpretation of Dreams. 7

I am aware that this explanation of anxiety in dreams sounds very strange and is not easy to credit; but I can only advise the reader to come to terms with it. Moreover it would be a very remarkable thing if Norbert Hanold’s dream could be reconciled with this view of anxiety and could be explained in that way. On that basis, we should say that the dreamer’s erotic longings were stirred up during the night and made a powerful effort to make conscious his memory of the girl he loved and so to tear him out of his delusion, but that those longings met with a fresh repudiation and were transformed into anxiety, which in its turn introduced into the content of the dream the terrifying pictures from the memories of his schooldays. In this manner the true unconscious content of the dream, his passionate longing for the Zoe he had once known, became transformed into its manifest content of the destruction of Pompeii and the loss of Gradiva.

So far, I think, it sounds plausible. But it might justly be insisted that, if erotic wishes constitute the undistorted content of the dream, it ought also to be possible to point at least to some recognizable residue of those wishes concealed somewhere in the transformed dream. Well, even that may be possible, with the help of a hint from a later part of the story. When Hanold had his first meeting with the supposed Gradiva, he recollected the dream and begged the apparition to lie down again as he had seen her do then.¹ Thereupon, however, the young lady rose indignantly and left her strange companion, for she had detected the improper erotic wish behind what he had said under the domination of his delusion. We must, I think, accept Gradiva’s interpretation; even in a real dream we cannot always expect to find a more definite expression of an erotic wish.

¹ ‘No, I didn’t hear you speak. But I called to you when you lay down to sleep, and I stood beside you then - your face was as peaceful and beautiful as marble. May I beg of you - lie down once more on the step as you did then.’ (70.)8

The application of a few of the rules of dream-interpretation to Hanold’s first dream has thus resulted in making it intelligible to us in its main features and in inserting it into the nexus of the story. Surely, then, the author must have observed these rules in creating it? We might ask another question, too: why did the author introduce a dream at all to bring about the further development of the delusion? In my opinion it was an ingenious notion and once again true to reality. We have already heard that in real illnesses a delusion very often arises in connection with a dream, and, after what we have learnt about the nature of dreams, there is no need to see a fresh riddle in this fact. Dreams and delusions arise from the same source - from what is repressed. Dreams are, as one might say, the physiological delusions of normal people. Before what is repressed has become strong enough to break through into waking life as a delusion, it may easily have achieved a first success, under the more favourable conditions of the state of sleep, in the form of a dream with persisting effects. For during sleep, along with a general lowering of mental activity, there is a relaxation in the strength of the resistance with which the dominant psychical forces oppose what is repressed. It is this relaxation that makes the formation of dreams possible, and that is why dreams give us our best access to a knowledge of the unconscious part of the mind - except that, as a rule, with the re-establishment of the psychical cathexes of waking life, the dream once more takes to flight and the ground that had been won by the unconscious is evacuated once again.

III

In the further course of the story there is yet another dream, which may perhaps tempt us even more than the first to try to translate it and insert it into the train of events in the hero’s mind. But we should save very little by diverging from the author’s account and hurrying on immediately to this second dream; for no one who wishes to analyse some one else’s dream can avoid turning his attention in the greatest detail to all the dreamer’s experiences, both external and internal. It will probably be best, therefore, to keep close to the thread of the story and to intersperse it with our glosses as we proceed.

The construction of the fresh delusion about Gradiva’s death during the destruction of Pompeii in the year 79 A.D. was not the only result of the first dream, which we have already analysed. Immediately after it Hanold decided on his journey to Italy, which eventually brought him to Pompeii. But, before that, something else happened to him. As he was leaning out of the window, he thought he saw a figure in the street with the bearing and gait of his Gradiva. In spite of being insufficiently dressed, he hurried after her, but failed to overtake her, and was driven back into the house by the jeers of the passers-by. When he was in his room once more, the song of a canary from its cage in the window of a house opposite stirred up in him a mood in which he too seemed to be a prisoner longing for freedom; and his spring-time journey was no sooner decided on than it was carried out.

The author has thrown a particularly clear light on this journey of Hanold’s and has allotted him to have a partial insight into his own internal processes. Hanold of course found himself a scientific pretext for his journey, but this did not last long. After all, he was in fact aware that ‘the impulse to make this journey had arisen from a feeling he could not name’. A strange restlessness made him dissatisfied with everything he came across, and drove him from Rome to Naples and from there to Pompeii; but even at this last halting-place he was still uneasy in his mood. He was annoyed at the folly of the honeymooners, and enraged at the impertinence of the house-flies which inhabit Pompeii’s hotels. But at last he could no longer disguise from himself ‘that his dissatisfaction could not be caused solely by what was around him but that there was something that sprang from himself as well’. He thought he was over-excited, felt ‘that he was discontented because he lacked something, but he had no idea what. And this ill-humour followed him about everywhere.’ In this frame of mind he was even furious with his mistress - with Science. When in the heat of the mid-day sun he wandered for the first time through Pompeii, ‘the whole of his science had not merely abandoned him, but had left him without the slightest desire to find her again. He remembered her only as something in the far distance, and he felt that she had been an old, dried-up, tedious aunt, the dullest and most unwanted creature in the world.’ (55.)

And then, while he was in this disagreeable and confused state of feeling, one of the problems attaching to his journey was solved for him - at the moment when he first saw Gradiva stepping through Pompeii. Something ‘came into his consciousness for the first time: without being aware himself of the impulse within him, he had come to Italy and had travelled on to Pompeii, without stopping in Rome or Naples, in order to see whether he could find any traces of her. And "traces" literally; for with her peculiar gait she must have left behind an imprint of her toes in the ashes distinct from all the rest.’ (58.)

Since the author has taken so much trouble over describing the journey, it must be worth while too to discuss its relation to Hanold’s delusion and its position in the chain of events. The journey was undertaken for reasons which its subject did not recognize at first and only admitted to himself later on, reasons which the author describes in so many words as ‘unconscious’. This is certainly taken from the life. One does not need to be suffering from a delusion in order to behave like this. On the contrary, it is an event of daily occurrence for a person - even a healthy person - to deceive himself over the motives for an action and to become conscious of them only after the event, provided only that a conflict between several currents of feeling furnishes the necessary condition for such a confusion. Accordingly, Hanold’s journey was from the first calculated to serve the delusion, and was intended to take him to Pompeii, where he could proceed further with his search for Gradiva. It will be recalled that his mind was occupied with that search both before and immediately after the dream, and that the dream itself was simply an answer to the question of Gradiva’s whereabouts, though an answer which was stifled by his consciousness. Some power which we do not recognize was, however, also inhibiting him to begin with from becoming aware of his delusional intention; so that, for the conscious reasons for his journey, he was left only with insufficient pretexts which had to be renewed from place to place. The author presents us with a further puzzle by making the dream, the discovery of the supposed Gradiva in the street, and the decision to undertake the journey as a result of the singing canary succeed one another as a series of chance events without any internal connection with one another.

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