matters are here actually just reversed; science does not stand before
the accomplishment of our author. Between the essential facts of
heredity and constitution, and the seemingly complete creations of
delusion, there yawns a breach which we find filled up by the writer of
_Gradiva_. Science does not yet recognize the significance of repression
nor the fact that it needs the unconscious for explanation to the world
of psychopathological phenomena; it does not seek the basis of delusion
in psychic conflict, and does not regard its symptoms as a
compromise-formation. Then our author stands alone against all science?
No, not that—if the present writer may reckon his own works as science.
For he, himself, has for some years interceded—and until recently
almost alone[3]—for the views which he finds here in _Gradiva_ by W.
Jensen, and he has presented them in technical terms. He has pointed out
exhaustively, for the conditions known as hysteria and obsession, the
suppression of impulses and the repression of the ideas, through which
the suppressed impulse is represented, as a characteristic condition of
psychic disturbance, and he has repeated the same view soon afterwards
for many kinds of delusion.[4] Whether the impulses which are, for this
reason, considered are always components of the sex-impulse, or might be
of a different nature, is a problem of indifference in the analysis of
_Gradiva_, as, in the case chosen by the author, it is a matter only of
the suppression of the erotic feeling. The views concerning psychic
conflict, and the formation of symptoms by compromises between the two
psychic forces which are struggling with each other, the present writer
has found valid in cases professionally treated and actually observed,
in exactly the same way that he was able to observe it in Norbert
Hanold, the invention of our author.[5] The tracing back of neurotic,
especially of hysterically morbid activities to the influence of
unconscious thoughts, P. Janet, the pupil of the great Charcot, had
undertaken before the present writer, and in conjunction with Josef
Breuer in Vienna.[6]
It had actually occurred to the present writer, when, in the years
following 1893, he devoted himself to investigations of the origin of
psychic disturbances, to seek confirmation of his results from authors,
and therefore it was no slight surprise to him to learn that in
_Gradiva_, published in 1903, an author gave to his creation the very
foundation which the former supposed that he, himself, was finding
authority for, as new, from his experiences as a physician. How did the
author come upon the same knowledge as the physician, at least upon a
procedure which would suggest that he possessed it?
Norbert Hanold’s delusion, we said, acquires further development through
a dream, which he has in the midst of his efforts to authenticate a gait
like Gradiva’s in the streets of his home-city. The content of this
dream we can outline briefly. The dreamer is in Pompeii on that day
which brought destruction to the unfortunate city, experiences the
horrors without himself getting into danger, suddenly sees Gradiva
walking there and immediately understands, as quite natural, that, as
she is, of course, a Pompeiian, she is living in her native city and
“without his having any suspicion of it, was his contemporary.” He is
seized with fear for her, calls to her, whereupon she turns her face
toward him momentarily. Yet she walks on without heeding him at all,
lies down on the steps of the Apollo temple, and is buried by the rain
of ashes, after her face has changed colour as if it were turning to
white marble, until it completely resembles a bas-relief. On awakening,
he interprets the noise of the metropolis, which reaches his ear, as the
cries for help of the desperate inhabitants of Pompeii and the booming
of the turbulent sea. The feeling that what he has dreamed has really
happened to him persists for some time after his awakening, and the
conviction that Gradiva lived in Pompeii and died on that fatal day
remains from this dream as a new, supplementary fact for his delusion.
It is less easy for us to say what the author of _Gradiva_ intended by
this dream, and what caused him to connect the development of this
delusion directly with a dream. Assiduous investigation of dreams has,
to be sure, gathered enough examples of the fact that mental disturbance
is connected with and proceeds from dreams,[7] and even in the
life-history of certain eminent men, impulses for important deeds and
decisions are said to have been engendered by dreams; but our
comprehension does not gain much by these analogies; let us hold,
therefore, to our case, the case of the archæologist, Norbert Hanold, a
fiction of our author. At which end must one lay hold of such a dream to
introduce meaning into it, if it is not to remain an unnecessary
adornment of fiction? I can imagine that the reader exclaims at this
place: “The dream is, of course, easy to explain—a simple
anxiety-dream, caused by the noise of the metropolis, which is given the
new interpretation of the destruction of Pompeii, by the archæologist
busied with his Pompeiian girl!” On account of the commonly prevailing
disregard of the activities of dreams, one usually limits the demands
for dream-explanations so that one seeks for a part of the dream-content
an external excitation which covers itself by means of the content. This
external excitation for the dream would be given by the noise which
wakens the sleeper; the interest in this dream would be thereby
terminated. Would that we had even one reason to suppose that the
metropolis had been noisier than usual on this morning! If, for example,
our author had not omitted to inform us that Hanold had that night,
contrary to his custom, slept by an open window! What a shame that our
author didn’t take the trouble! And if an anxiety-dream were only so
simple a thing! No, this interest is not terminated in so simple a way.
The connection with the external, sensory stimulus is not at all
essential for the dream-formation. The sleeper can neglect this
excitation from the outer world; he may be awakened by it without
forming a dream, he may also weave it into his dream, as happens here,
if it is of no use to him from any other motive; and there is an
abundance of dreams for whose content such a determination by a sensory
excitation of the sleeper cannot be shown. No, let us try another way.
Perhaps we can start from the residue which the dream leaves in Hanold’s
waking life. It had formerly been his fancy that Gradiva was a
Pompeiian. Now this assumption becomes a certainty and the second
certainty is added that she was buried there in the year 79.[8]
Sorrowful feelings accompany this progress of the formation of the
delusion like an echo of the fear which had filled the dream. This new
grief about Gradiva will seem to us not exactly comprehensible; Gradiva
would now have been dead for many centuries even if she had been saved
in the year 79 from destruction. Or ought one to be permitted to
squabble thus with either Norbert Hanold or his creator? Here, too, no
way seems to lead to explanation. We wish, nevertheless, to remark that
a very painful, emotional stress clings to the augmentation which the
delusion derives from this dream.
Otherwise, however, our perplexity is not dispelled. This dream does not
explain itself; we must decide to borrow from _Traumdeutung_ by the
present writer, and to use some of the rules given there for the
solution of dreams.
One of these rules is that a dream is regularly connected with the day
before the dream. Our author seems to wish to intimate that he has
followed this rule by connecting the dream directly with Hanold’s
“pedestrian investigations.” Now the latter means nothing but a search
for Gradiva whom he expects to recognize by her characteristic manner of
walking. The dream ought, therefore, to contain a reference to where
Gradiva is to be found. It really does contain it by showing her in
Pompeii, but that is no news for us.
Another rule says: If, after the dream, the reality of the
dream-pictures continues unusually long so that one cannot free himself
from the dream, this is not a kind of mistake in judgment called forth
by the vividness of the dream-pictures, but is a psychic act in itself,
an assurance which refers to the dream-content, that something in it is
as real as it has been dreamed to be, and one is right to believe this
assurance. If we stop at these two rules, we must decide that the dream
gives real information about the whereabouts of Gradiva, who is being
sought. We now know Hanold’s dream; does the application of these two
rules lead to any sensible meaning?
Strange to say, yes. This meaning is disguised only in a special way so
that one does not recognize it immediately. Hanold learns in the dream
that the girl sought lives in the city and in his own day. That is, of
course, true of Zoë Bertgang, only that in his dream the city is not the
German university-city, but Pompeii, the time not the present, but the
year 79, according to our reckoning. It is a kind of disfigurement by
displacement; not Gradiva is transported to the present, but the dreamer
to the past; but we are also given the essential and new fact _that he
shares locality and time with the girl sought_. Whence, then, this
dissimulation and disguise which must deceive us as well as the dreamer
about the peculiar meaning and content of the dream? Well, we have
already means at hand to give us a satisfactory answer to this question.
Let us recall all that we have heard about the nature and origin of
fancies, these preliminaries of delusion. They are substitution for and
remnants of different repressed memories, which a resistance does not
allow to push into consciousness, which, however, become conscious by
heeding the censor of resistance, by means of transformations and
disfigurements. After this compromise is completed, the former memories
have become fancies, which may easily be misunderstood by the conscious
person, that is, may be understood to be the ruling psychic force. Now
let us suppose that the dream-pictures are the so-called physiological
delusion-products of a man, the compromise-results of that struggle
between what is repressed and what is dominant, which exist probably
even in people absolutely normal in the daytime. Then we understand that
we have to consider the dream something disfigured behind which there is
to be sought something else, not disfigured, but, in a sense, something
offensive, like Hanold’s repressed memories behind his fancies. One
expresses the admitted opposition by distinguishing what the dreamer
remembers on waking, as _manifest dream-content_, from what formed the
basis of the dream before the censor’s disfigurement, _the latent
dream-thoughts_. To interpret a dream, then, means to translate the
manifest dream-content into the latent dream-thoughts, which make
retrogressive the disfigurement that had to be approved by the
resistance censor. When we turn these deliberations to the dream which
is occupying us, we find that the latent dream-thoughts must have been
as follows: “The girl who has that beautiful walk, whom you are seeking,
lives really in this city with you;” but in this form the thought could
not become conscious; in its way there stood the fact that a fancy had
established, as a result of a former compromise, the idea that Gradiva
was a Pompeiian girl, and therefore nothing remained, if the actual fact
of her living in the same locality and at the same time was to be
perceived, but to assume the disfigurement: you are living in Pompeii at
the time of Gradiva; and this then is the idea which the manifest
dream-content realizes and represents as a present time which he is
living in.
A dream is rarely the representation, one might say the staging, of a
single thought, but generally of a number of them, a web of thoughts. In
Hanold’s dream there is conspicuous another component of the content,
whose disfigurement is easily put aside so that one may learn the latent
idea represented by it. This is the end of the dream to which the
assurance of reality can also be extended. In the dream the beautiful
walker, Gradiva, is transformed into a bas-relief. That is, of course,
nothing but an ingenious and poetic representation of the actual
procedure. Hanold had, indeed, transferred his interest from the living
girl to the bas-relief; the beloved had been transformed into a stone
relief. The latent dream-thoughts, which remain unconscious, wish to
transform the relief back into the living girl; in connection with the
foregoing they speak to him somewhat as follows: “You are, of course,
interested in the bas-relief of Gradiva only because it reminds you of
the present, here-living Zoë.” But this insight would mean the end of
the delusion, if it could become conscious.
Is it our duty to substitute unconscious thoughts thus for every single
bit of the manifest dream-content? Strictly speaking, yes; in the
interpretation of a dream which had actually been dreamed, we should not
be allowed to avoid this duty. The dreamer would then have to give us an
exhaustive account. It is easily understood that we cannot enforce such
a demand in connection with the creature of our author; we will not,
however, overlook the fact that we have not yet submitted the chief
content of this dream to the work of interpretation and translation.
Hanold’s dream is, of course, an anxiety-dream. Its content is fearful;
anxiety is felt by the dreamer in sleep, and painful feelings remain
after it. That is not of any great help for our attempt at explanation;
we are again forced to borrow largely from the teachings of
dream-interpretation. This admonishes us not to fall into the error of
deriving the fear that is felt in a dream from the content of a dream,
not to use the dream-content like the content of ideas of waking life.
It calls to our attention how often we dream the most horrible things
without feeling any trace of fear. Rather the true fact is a quite
different one, which cannot be easily guessed, but can certainly be
proved. The fear of the anxiety-dream corresponds to a sex-feeling, a
libidinous emotion, like every neurotic fear, and has, through the
process of repression, proceeded from the libido.[9] In the
interpretation of dreams, therefore, one must substitute for fear sexual
excitement. The fear which has thus come into existence, exercises
now—not regularly, but often—a selective influence on the
dream-content and brings into the dream ideational elements which seem
suitable to this fear for the conscious and erroneous conception of the
dream. This is, as has been said, by no means regularly the case, for
there are anxiety dreams in which the content is not at all frightful,
in which, therefore, one cannot explain consciously the anxiety
experienced.
I know that this explanation of fear in dreams sounds odd, and is not
easily believed; but I can only advise making friends with it. It would,
moreover, be remarkable if Norbert Hanold’s dream allowed itself to be
connected with this conception of fear and to be explained by it. We
should then say that in the dreamer, at night, the erotic desire stirs,
makes a powerful advance to bring his memory of the beloved into
consciousness and thus snatch him from the delusion, experiences
rejection and transformation into fear, which now, on its part, brings
the fearful pictures from the academic memory of the dreamer into the
dream-content. In this way the peculiar unconscious content of the
dream, the amorous longing for the once known Zoë, is transformed into
the manifest-content of the destruction of Pompeii and the loss of
Gradiva.
I think that sounds quite plausible so far. One might justly demand that
if erotic wishes form the undisfigured content of this dream, then one
must be able to point out, in the transformed dream, at least a
recognizable remnant of them hidden somewhere. Well, perhaps even this
will come about with the help of a suggestion which appears later in the
story. At the first meeting with the supposed Gradiva, Hanold remembers
this dream and requests the apparition to lie down again as he has seen
her.[10] Thereupon the young lady rises, indignant, and leaves her
strange companion, in whose delusion-ridden speech she has heard the
suggestion of an improper erotic wish. I think we may adopt Gradiva’s
interpretation; even from a real dream one cannot always demand more
definiteness for the representation of an erotic wish.
Thus the application of some rules of dream-interpretation have been
successful on Hanold’s first dream, in making this dream comprehensible
to us in its chief features, and in fitting it into the sequence of the
story. Then it must probably have been produced by its author with due
consideration for these rules. One could raise only one more question:
why the author should introduce a dream for further development of the
delusion. Well, I think that is very cleverly arranged and again keeps
faith with reality. We have already heard that in actual illness the
formation of a delusion is very often connected with a dream, but after
our explanation of the nature of dreams, we need find no new riddle in
this fact. Dreams and delusion spring from the same source, the
repressed; the dream is, so to speak, the physiological delusion of the
normal human being. Before the repressed has become strong enough to
push itself up into waking life as delusion, it may easily have won its
first success under the more favourable circumstances of sleep, in the
form of a dream having after-effects. During sleep, with the diminution
of psychic activity, there enters a slackening in the strength of the
resistance, which the dominant psychic forces oppose to the repressed.
This slackening is what makes the dream-formation possible and therefore
the dream becomes, for us, the best means of approach to knowledge of
the unconscious psyche. Only the dream usually passes rapidly with the
re-establishment of the psychic revival of waking life, and the ground
won by the unconscious is again vacated.
III
In the further course of the story there is another dream, which can
tempt us, even more perhaps than the first, to try to interpret it and
fit it into the psychic life of the hero; but we save little if we leave
the representation of the author of _Gradiva_ here, to hasten directly
to this second dream, for whoever wishes to interpret the dream of
another, cannot help concerning himself, as extensively as possible,
with every subjective and objective experience of the dreamer. Therefore
it would be best to hold to the thread of the story and provide this
with our commentaries as we progress.
The new delusion of the death of Gradiva at the destruction of Pompeii
in the year 79 is not the only after-effect of the first dream analysed
by us. Directly afterwards Hanold decides upon a trip to Italy, which
finally takes him to Pompeii. Before this, however, something else has
happened to him; leaning from his window, he thinks he sees on the
street a figure with the bearing and walk of his Gradiva, hastens after
her, in spite of his scanty attire, does not overtake her, but is driven
back by the jeers of the people on the street. After he has returned to
his room, the song of a canary whose cage hangs in the window of the
opposite house calls forth in him a mood such as if he wished to get
from prison into freedom, and the spring trip is immediately decided
upon and accomplished.
Our author has put this trip of Hanold’s in an especially strong light,
and has given to the latter partial clearness about his subjective
processes. Hanold has, of course, given himself a scientific purpose for
his journey, but this is not substantial. Yet he knows that the “impulse
to travel has originated in a nameless feeling.” A peculiar restlessness
makes him dissatisfied with everything he encounters and drives him from
Rome to Naples, from there to Pompeii, without his mood’s being set
right, even at the last halting-place. He is annoyed by the foolishness
of honeymoon travellers, and is enraged over the boldness of
house-flies, which populate the hotels of Pompeii; but finally he does
not deceive himself over the fact that “his dissatisfaction was
certainly not caused by his surroundings alone, but, to a degree, found
its origin in him.” He considers himself over-excited, feels “that he
was out of sorts because he lacked something without being able to
explain what, and this ill-humour he took everywhere with him.” In such
a mood he is enraged even at his mistress, science; as he wanders for
the first time in the glow of the midday sun through Pompeii, all his
science had left him without the least desire to rediscover it; “he
remembered it as from a great distance, and he felt that it had been an
old, dried-up, boresome aunt, dullest and most superfluous creature in
the world.” (_G._ p. 48.)
In this uncomfortable and confused state of mind, one of the riddles
which are connected with this journey is solved for him at the moment
when he first sees Gradiva walking through Pompeii; “he became
conscious, for the first time, that he had, without himself knowing the
motive in his heart, come to Italy on that account and had, without
stop, continued from Rome and Naples to Pompeii to see if he could here
find trace of her—and that in a literal sense—for, with her unusual
gait, she must have left behind in the ashes a foot-print different from
all the others.” (_G._ p. 50.)
As our author has put so much care into the delineation of this trip, it
must be worth our while to explain its relation to Hanold’s delusion and
its place in the sequence of events. The journey is undertaken for
motives which the character does not at first recognize and does not
admit until later, motives which our author designates directly as
“unconscious.” This is certainly true to life; one does not need to have
a delusion to act thus; rather it is an everyday occurrence, even for
normal people, that they are deceived about the motives of their actions
and do not become conscious of them until subsequently, when a conflict
of several emotional currents re-establishes for them the condition for
such confusion. Hanold’s trip, therefore, was intended, from the
beginning, to serve the delusion, and was to take him to Pompeii to
continue there the search for Gradiva. Let us remember that before, and
directly after the dream, this search filled his mind and that the dream
itself was only a stifled answer of his consciousness to the question of
the whereabouts of Gradiva. Some force which we do not recognize,
however, next prevents the plan of the delusion from becoming conscious,
so that only insufficient pretexts, which can be but partially revived,
remain as a conscious motivation for the trip. The author gives us
another riddle by having the dream, the discovery of the supposed
Gradiva on the street, and the decision to make the journey because of
the influence of the singing canary follow one another like chance
occurrences without inner coherence.