Delusions and dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva (1907)1 5 страница

This obscure region of the story is made intelligible to us by some explanations which we derive from the later remarks of Zoe Bertgang. It was in fact the original of Gradiva, Fräulein Zoe herself, whom Hanold saw out of his window walking past in the street (89.) and whom he nearly overtook. If this had happened, the information given him by the dream - that she was in fact living at the same time and in the same town as he was - would by a lucky chance have received an irresistible confirmation, which would have brought about the collapse of his internal struggle. But the canary, whose singing sent Hanold off on his distant journey, belonged to Zoe, and its cage stood in her window diagonally across the street from Hanold’s house. (135.) Hanold, who, according to the girl’s accusation, had the gift of ‘negative hallucination’, who possessed the art of not seeing and not recognizing people who were actually present, must from the first have had an unconscious knowledge of what we only learned later. The indications of Zoe’s proximity (her appearance in the street and her bird’s singing so near his window) intensified the effect of the dream, and in this position, so perilous for his resistance to his erotic feelings, he took to flight. His journey was a result of his resistance gathering new strength after the surge forward of his erotic desires in the dream; it was an attempt at flight from the physical presence of the girl he loved. In a practical sense it meant a victory for repression, just as his earlier activity, his ‘pedestrian researches’ upon women and girls, had meant a victory for erotism. But everywhere in these oscillations in the struggle the compromise character of the outcome was preserved: the journey to Pompeii, which was supposed to lead him away from the living Zoe, led him at least to her surrogate, to Gradiva. The journey which was undertaken in defiance of the latent dream-thoughts, was nevertheless following the path to Pompeii that was pointed out by the manifest content of the dream. Thus at every fresh struggle between erotism and resistance we find the delusion triumphant.

This view of Hanold’s journey as a flight from his awakening erotic longing for the girl whom he loved and who was so close to him is the only one which will fit in with the description of his emotional states during his stay in Italy. The repudiation of erotism which dominated him was expressed there in his disgust at the honeymooners. A short dream which he had in his albergo in Rome, and which was occasioned by the proximity of a German loving couple, ‘Edwin and Angelina’, whose evening conversation he could not help hearing through the thin partition-wall, throws a retrospective light, as it were, on the erotic drift of his first major dream. In the new dream he was once again in Pompeii and Vesuvius was once again erupting, and it was thus linked to the earlier dream whose effects persisted during the journey. This time, however, among the people imperilled were - not, as on the former occasion, himself and Gradiva but - the Apollo Belvedere and the Capitoline Venus, no doubt by way of an ironical exaltation of the couple in the next room. Apollo lifted Venus up, carried her out, and laid her down on some object in the dark which seemed to be a carriage or cart, since it emitted ‘a creaking noise’. Apart from this, the interpretation of the dream calls for no special skill. (31.)

Our author, who, as we have long since realized, never introduces a single idle or unintentional feature into history, has given us another piece of evidence of the asexual current which dominated Hanold during his journey. As he roamed about for hours in Pompeii, ‘strangely enough it never once recurred to his memory that a short time before he had dreamt of being present at the burial of Pompeii in the eruption of 79 A.D.’ (47.) It was only when he caught sight of Gradiva that he suddenly remembered the dream and became conscious at the same time of the delusional reason for his puzzling journey. How could this forgetting of the dream, this barrier of repression between the dream and his mental state during the journey, be explained, except by supposing that the journey was undertaken not at the direct inspiration of the dream but as a revolt against it, as an emanation of a mental power that refused to know anything of the secret meaning of the dream?

But on the other hand Hanold did not enjoy this victory over his erotism. The suppressed mental impulse remained powerful enough to revenge itself on the suppressing one with discontent and inhibition. His longings turned into restlessness and dissatisfaction, which made his journey seem pointless to him. His insight into his reasons for the journey at the bidding of the delusion was inhibited and his relations with his science, which in such a spot should have stirred all his interest, were interfered with. So the author shows us his hero after his flight from love in a kind of crisis, in a state of complete confusion and distraction, in a turmoil such as we usually find at the climax of an illness, when neither of the two conflicting powers has any longer a sufficiently superior strength over the other for the margin between them to make it possible to establish a vigorous mental régime. But here the author intervenes helpfully, and smoothes things out by making Gradiva appear at this juncture and undertake the cure of the delusion. By the power he possesses of guiding the people of his creation towards a happy destiny, in spite of all the laws of necessity which he makes them obey, he arranges that the girl, to avoid whom Hanold had fled to Pompeii, shall be transported to that very place. In this way he corrects the folly to which the young man was led by his delusion - the folly of exchanging the home of the living girl whom he loved for the burial-place of her imaginary substitute.

With the appearance of Zoe Bertgang as Gradiva, which marks the climax of tension in the story, our interest, too, soon takes a new direction. So far we have been assisting at the development of a delusion; now we are to witness its cure. And we may ask whether the author has given a purely fanciful account of the course of this cure or whether he his constructed it in accordance with possibilities actually present. Zoe’s own words during her conversation with her newly-married friend give us a definite right to ascribe to her an intention to bring about the cure. (124.) But how did she set about it? When she had got over the indignation aroused in her by his suggestion that she should lie down to sleep again as she had ‘then’, she returned next day at the same mid-day hour to the same spot, and proceeded to entice out of Hanold all the secret knowledge her ignorance of which had prevented her from understanding his behaviour the day before. She learnt about his dream, about the sculpture of Gradiva, and about the peculiarity of gait which she herself shared with it. She accepted the role of the ghost awakened to life for a brief hour, a role for which, as she perceived, his delusion had cast her, and, by accepting the flowers of the dead which he had brought without conscious purpose, and by expressing a regret that he had not given her roses, she gently hinted in ambiguous words at the possibility of his taking up a new position. (90.)

This unusually clever girl, then, was determined to win her childhood’s friend for her husband, after she had recognized that the young man’s love for her was the motive force behind the delusion. Our interest in her behaviour, however, will probably yield for the moment to the surprise which we may feel at the delusion itself. The last form taken by it was that Gradiva, who had been buried in 79 A.D., was now able, as a mid-day ghost, to exchange words with him for an hour, at the end of which she must sink into the ground or seek her grave once more. This mental cobweb, which was not brushed away either by his perceiving that the apparition was wearing modern shoes or by her ignorance of the ancient languages and her command of German, which was not in existence in her day, certainly seems to justify the author’s description of his story as a ‘Pompeian phantasy’, but it seems also to exclude any possibility of measuring it by the standards of clinical reality.

Nevertheless, on closer consideration this delusion of Hanold’s seems to me to lose the greater part of its improbability. The author, indeed, has made himself responsible for one part of it by basing his story on the premiss that Zoe was in every detail a duplicate of the relief. We must therefore avoid shifting the improbability of this premiss on to its consequence - that Hanold took the girl for Gradiva come to life. Greater value is given to the delusional explanation by the fact that the author has put no rational one at our disposal. Moreover the author has adduced contributory and mitigating circumstances on behalf of his hero’s excesses in the shape of the glare of the campagna sunlight and the intoxicating magic of the wine grown on the slopes of Vesuvius. But the most important of all the explanatory and exculpatory factors remains the ease with which our intellect is prepared to accept something absurd provided it satisfies powerful emotional impulses. It is an astonishing fact, and one that is too generally overlooked, how readily and frequently under these psychological conditions people of even the most powerful intelligence react as though they were feeble-minded; and anyone who is not too conceited may see this happening in himself as often as he pleases. And this is far more so if some of the mental processes concerned are linked with unconscious or repressed motives. In this connection I am happy to quote the words of a philosopher, who writes to me: ‘I have been noting down the instances I myself experience of striking mistakes and unthinking actions, for which one finds motives afterwards (in a most unreasonable way). It is an alarming thing, but typical, to find how much folly this brings to light.’ It must be remembered, too, that the belief in spirits and ghosts and the return of the dead, which finds so much support in the religions to which we have all been attached, at least in our childhood, is far from having disappeared among educated people, and that many who are sensible in other respects find it possible to combine spiritualism with reason. A man who has grown rational and sceptical, even, may be ashamed to discover how easily he may for a moment return to a belief in spirits under the combined impact of strong emotion and perplexity. I know of a doctor who had once lost one of his women patients suffering from Graves’ disease, and who could not get rid of a faint suspicion that he might perhaps have contributed to the unhappy outcome by a thoughtless prescription. One day, several years later, a girl entered his consulting-room, who, in spite of all his efforts, he could not help recognizing as the dead one. He could frame only a single thought: ‘So after all it’s true that the dead can come back to life.’ His dread did not give way to shame till the girl introduced herself as the sister of the one who had died of the same disease as she herself was suffering from. The victims of Graves’ disease, as has often been observed, have a marked facial resemblance to one another; and in this case this typical likeness was reinforced by a family one. The doctor to whom this occurred was, however, none other than myself; so I have a personal reason for not disputing the clinical possibility of Norbert Hanold’s temporary delusion that Gradiva had come back to life. The fact, finally, is familiar to every psychiatrist that in severe cases of chronic delusions (in paranoia) the most extreme examples occur of ingeniously elaborated and well-supported absurdities.

After his first meeting with Gradiva, Norbert Hanold had drunk his wine first in one and then in the other of the two restaurants that he knew in Pompeii, while the other visitors were engaged in eating the main meal of the day. ‘Of course it never came into his head to think of the nonsensical idea’ that he was doing it in order to discover in which of the hotels Gradiva was living and taking her meals. But it is difficult to say what other sense his actions could have had. On the day after their second meeting in the House of Meleager, he had all kinds of strange and apparently unconnected experiences. He found a narrow gap in the wall of the portico, at the point where Gradiva had disappeared. He met a foolish lizard-catcher who addressed him as though he were an acquaintance. He discovered a third hotel, in an out-of-the-way situation, the ‘Albergo del Sole’, whose proprietor palmed off on him a metal clasp with a green patina as a find from beside the remains of a Pompeian girl. And, lastly, in his own hotel he noticed a newly-arrived young couple whom he diagnosed as a brother and sister and whom he found sympathetic. All these impressions were afterwards woven together into a ‘remarkably senseless’ dream, which ran as follows:

‘Somewhere in the sun Gradiva was sitting, making a snare out of a blade of grass to catch a lizard in, and said: "Please keep quite still. Our lady colleague is right; the method is a really good one and she has made use of it with excellent results."'

He fended off this dream while he was still asleep, with the critical thought that it was utter madness, and cast around in all directions to get free from it. He succeeded in doing so with the help of an invisible bird, which uttered a short laughing call and carried off the lizard in its beak.

7 Are we to venture on an attempt at interpreting this dream too - that is, at replacing it by the latent thoughts from whose distortion it must have arisen? It is as senseless as only a dream can be expected to be; and this absurdity of dreams is the mainstay of the view which refuses to characterize dreams as completely valid psychical acts and maintains that they arise out of a purposeless excitation of the elements of the mind.

We are able to apply to this dream the technique which may be described as the regular procedure for interpreting dreams. It consists in paying no attention to the apparent connections in the manifest dream but in fixing our eyes upon each portion of its content independently, and in looking for its origin in the dreamer’s impressions, memories, and free associations. Since, however, we cannot question Hanold, we shall have to content ourselves with referring to his impressions, and we may very tentatively put our own association in place of his.

‘Somewhere in the sun Gradiva was sitting, catching lizards and speaking.’ What impression of the previous day finds an echo in this part of the dream? Undoubtedly the encounter with the elderly gentleman, the lizard-catcher, who was thus replaced in the dream by Gradiva. He sat or lay ‘on a sun-bathed slope’ and he, too, spoke to Hanold. Furthermore, Gradiva’s remarks in the dream were copied from this man’s remarks: viz. ‘The method prescribed by our colleague Eimer is a really good one; I have made use of it many times already with excellent results. Please keep quite still.’ Gradiva used much the same words in the dream, except that ‘our colleague Eimer’ was replaced by an unnamed ‘lady colleague’; moreover, the ‘many times’ in the zoologist’s speech was omitted in the dream and the order of the sentences was somewhat altered. It seems, therefore, that this experience of the previous day was transformed into the dream with the help of a few changes and distortions. Why this particular experience? And what is the meaning of the changes - the replacement of the elderly gentleman by Gradiva and the introduction of the enigmatic ‘lady colleague’?

There is a rule in interpreting dreams which runs as follows: ‘A speech heard in a dream is always derived from one that has been heard or made by the dreamer in waking life.’ This rule seems to have been observed here: Gradiva’s speech is only a modification of the old zoologist’s speech which Hanold had heard the day before. Another rule in dream-interpretation would tell us that when one person is replaced by another or when two people are mixed up together (for instance, by one of them being shown in a situation that is characteristic of the other), it means that the two people are being equated, that there is a similarity between them. If we venture to apply this rule too to our dream, we should arrive at this translation: ‘Gradiva catches lizards just like the old man; she is skilled in lizard-catching just as he is.’ This result cannot exactly be said to be intelligible as yet; but we have yet another puzzle to solve. To what impression of the previous day are we to relate the ‘lady colleague’ who in the dream replaces the famous zoologist Eimer? Fortunately we have very little choice here. A ‘lady colleague’ can only mean another girl - that is to say, represents/represented the sympathetic young lady whom Hanold had taken for a sister travelling with her brother. ‘She was wearing a red Sorrento rose in her dress, the sight of which reminded him of something as he looked across from his corner of the dining-room, but he could not think what.’ This remark of the author’s gives us a right to regard her as the ‘lady colleague’ in the dream. What Hanold could not recall were, it cannot be doubted, the words spoken by the supposed Gradiva, who had told him, as she asked him for the white flowers of the dead, that in the spring people give happier girls roses. But behind those words there had lain a hint of wooing. So what sort of lizard-catching was it that the happier ‘lady colleague’ had carried out so successfully?

Next day Hanold came upon the supposed brother and sister in an affectionate embrace, and was thus able to correct his earlier mistake. They were in fact a pair of lovers, and moreover on their honeymoon, as we discovered later when they so unexpectedly interrupted Hanold’s third interview with Zoe. If now we are willing to assume that Hanold, though consciously taking them for a brother and sister, had immediately recognized their true relationship (which was unambiguously betrayed next day) in his unconscious, Gradiva’s speech in the dream acquires a clear meaning. The red rose had become the symbol of a love-relation. Hanold understood that the couple were already what he and Gradiva had yet to become; the lizard-catching had come to signify man-catching; and Gradiva’s speech meant something like: ‘Only let me alone: I know how to win a man just as well as the other girl does.’

But why was it necessary for this penetration of Zoe’s intentions to appear in the dream in the form of the old zoologist’s speech? the old gentleman’s skill in lizard-catching? Well, we can have no difficulty in answering that question. We guessed long ago that the lizard-catcher was none other than Bertgang, the professor of Zoology and Zoe’s father, who, incidentally, must have known Hanold too - which explains how he came to address him as an acquaintance. Let us assume, once again, that in his unconscious Hanold at once recognized the Professor. ‘He had a vague notion that he had already had a passing glimpse of the lizard hunter’s face, probably in one of the two hotels.’ This, then, is the explanation of the strange disguise under which the intention attributed to Zoe made its appearance: she was the lizard-catcher’s daughter and had acquired her skill from him.

The replacement of the lizard-catcher by Gradiva in the content of the dream is accordingly a representation of the relation between the two figures which was known to Hanold in his unconscious; the introduction of the ‘lady colleague’ instead of ‘our colleague Eimer’ allowed the dream to express Hanold’s realization that she was wooing a man. So far the dream welded together (‘condensed’, as we say) two experiences of the previous day into one situation, in order to bring to expression (in a very obscure way, it is true) two discoveries which were not allotted to become conscious. But we can go further, we can diminish the strangeness of the dream still more and we can demonstrate the influence of his other experiences of the previous day on the form taken by the manifest dream.

We may declare ourselves dissatisfied with the explanation that has hitherto been given of why it was that precisely the scene of the lizard-catching was made into the nucleus of the dream, and we may suspect that still other elements of the dream-thoughts were bringing their influence to bear in the emphasis that was laid on the ‘lizard’ in the manifest dream. Indeed, it may easily have been so. It will be recalled that Hanold had discovered a gap in the wall at the point where Gradiva had seemed to vanish - a gap ‘which was nevertheless wide enough to allow a form that was unusually slim’ to slip through. This observation led him in daytime to make an alteration in his delusion - an alteration to the effect that when Gradiva disappeared from his sight she did not sink into the earth but used the gap as a way of reaching her grave. In his unconscious thoughts he may have told himself that he had now discovered the natural explanation of the girl’s surprising disappearance. But must not the idea of slipping through narrow gaps and disappearing in them have recalled the behaviour of lizards? Was not Gradiva herself in this way behaving like an agile little lizard? In our view, then, the discovery of the gap in the wall contributed to determining the choice of the element ‘lizard’ in the manifest content of the dream. The lizard situation in the dream represented this impression of the previous day as well as the encounter with Zoe’s father, the zoologist.

And what if now, growing bold, we were to try to find a representation in the content of the dream of the one experience of the previous day which has not yet been exploited - the discovery of the third inn, the Albergo del Sole? The author has treated this episode at such length and has linked so many things to it that it would surprise us if it alone had made no contribution to the construction of the dream. Hanold went into this inn, which, owing to its out-of-the-way situation and its distance from the railway station, had remained unknown to him, to purchase a bottle of soda-water to cool his heated blood. The landlord took the opportunity of displaying his antiquities, and showed him a clasp which the pretended had belonged to the Pompeian girl who had been found in the neighbourhood of the Forum closely embraced by her lover. Hanold, who had never hitherto believed this often-repeated tale, was now compelled by a power unknown to him to believe in the truth of this moving story and in the genuineness of the find; he purchased the brooch and left the inn with his acquisition. As he was going out, he saw, standing in a glass of water in a window, a nodding sprig of asphodel covered with white blossoms, and took the sight of it as a confirmation of the genuineness of his new possession. He now felt a positive conviction that the green clasp had belonged to Gradiva and that she had been the girl who had died in her lover’s arms. He quieted the jealousy which thereupon seized him, by deciding that next day he would show the clasp to Gradiva herself and arrive at certainty about his suspicion. It cannot be denied that this was a curious new piece of delusion; yet are we to suppose that no trace of it was to be found in his dream of the same night?

It will certainly be worth while to explain the origin of this addition to the delusion and to look for the fresh piece of unconscious discovery which was replaced by the fresh piece of delusion. The delusion appeared under the influence of the landlord of the ‘Sun Hotel’ to whom Hanold behaved in such a remarkably credulous fashion that it was almost as though he had been given a hypnotic suggestion by him. The landlord showed him a metal clasp for a garment, represented it as genuine and as having belonged to the girl who had been found buried in the arms of her lover; and Hanold, who was capable of being sufficiently critical to doubt both the truth of the story and the genuineness of the clasp, was at once taken in, and purchased the highly dubious antique. Why he should have behaved in this way is quite incomprehensible, and there is nothing to suggest that the landlord’s personality might offer us a solution. But there is yet another riddle about the incident, and two riddles often solve each other. As he was leaving the albergo he saw a sprig of asphodel standing in a glass in a window and took it as a confirmation of the genuineness of the metal clasp. How could that have come about? But fortunately this last point is easy to solve. The white flower was no doubt the one which he had given to Gradiva at mid-day, and it is perfectly true that something was confirmed by the sight of it in the window of the inn. Not, it is true, the genuineness of the clasp, but something else that had already become clear to him when he discovered this albergo after having previously overlooked it. Already on the day before he had behaved as though he was searching in the two Pompeii hotels to find the person who appeared to him as Gradiva. And now, since he had so unexpectedly come upon a third one, he must have said to himself in his unconscious: ‘So this is where she is staying!’ And added, as he was going out: ‘Yes, that’s right! There’s the asphodel that I gave her! So that’s her window!’ This then was the new discovery which was replaced by the delusion, and which could not become conscious because its underlying postulate that Gradiva was a living person whom he had once known could not become conscious.

But how did the replacement of the new discovery by the delusion take place? What happened, I think, was that the sense of conviction attaching to the discovery was able to persist and was retained, while the discovery itself, which was inadmissible to consciousness, was replaced by another ideational content connected with it by associations of thought. Thus the sense of conviction became attached to a content which was in fact foreign to it and this, in the form of a delusion, won a recognition which did not apply to it. Hanold transferred his conviction that Gradiva lived in the house to other impressions which he had received in the house; this led to his credulity in regard to the landlord’s remarks, the genuineness of the metal clasp and the truth of the anecdote about the discovery of the embracing lovers - but only through his linking what he heard in the house with Gradiva. The jealousy which was already latent in him seized upon this material and the consequence was the delusion (though it contradicted his first dream) that Gradiva was the girl who had died in her lover’s arms and that the clasp he had bought had belonged to her.

It will be observed that his conversation with Gradiva and her hint at wooing him (her ‘saying it with flowers’) had already brought about important changes in Hanold. Traits of masculine desire - components of the libido - had awakened in him, though it is true that they could not yet dispense with the disguise of conscious pretexts. But the problem of the ‘bodily nature’ of Gradiva, which pursued him all that day, cannot disavow its origin in a young man’s erotic curiosity about a woman’s body, even if it is involved in a scientific question by the conscious insistence on Gradiva’s peculiar oscillation between death and life. His jealousy was a further sign of the increasingly active aspect of Hanold’s love; he expressed this jealousy at the beginning of their conversation the next day and with the help of a fresh pretext proceeded to touch the girl’s body and, as he used to do in the far-off past, to hit her.

4 But it is now time to ask ourselves whether the method of constructing a delusion which we have inferred from our author’s account is one that is known from other sources, or whether, indeed, it is possible at all. From our medical knowledge we can only reply that it is certainly the correct method, and perhaps the sole method, by which a delusion acquires the unshakable conviction which is one of its clinical characteristics. If a patient believes in his delusion so firmly, this is not because his faculty of judgement has been overturned and does not arise from what is false in the delusion. On the contrary, there is a grain of truth concealed in every delusion, there is something in it that really deserves belief, and this is the source of the patient’s conviction, which is therefore to that extent justified. This true element, however, has long been repressed. If eventually it is able to penetrate into consciousness, this time in a distorted form, the sense of conviction attaching to it is over-intensified as though by way of compensation and is now attached to the distorted substitute of the repressed truth, and protects it from any critical attacks. The conviction is displaced, as it were, from the unconscious truth on to the conscious error that is linked to it, and remains fixated there precisely as a result of this displacement. The instance of the formation of a delusion which arose from Hanold’s first dream is no more than a similar, though not identical, example of such a displacement. Indeed, the method described here by which conviction arises in the case of a delusion does not differ fundamentally from the method by which a conviction is formed in normal cases, where repression does not come into the picture. We all attach our conviction to thought-contents in which truth is combined with error, and let it extend from the former over the latter. It becomes diffused, as it were, from the truth over the error associated with it and protects the latter, though not so unalterably as in the case of a delusion, against deserved criticism. In normal psychology, too, being well-connected - ‘having influence’, so to speak - can take the place of true worth.

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