speeches of Zoë Bertgang, this obscure part of the tale is illuminated
for our understanding. It was really the original of Gradiva, Miss Zoë,
herself, whom Hanold saw from his window walking on the street (_G._ p.
23), and whom he would soon have overtaken. The statement of the
dreamer—“she is really living now in the present, in the same city with
you,”—would, therefore, by a lucky chance, have experienced an
irrefutable corroboration, before which his inner resistance would have
collapsed. The canary, however, whose song impelled Hanold to go away,
belonged to Zoë, and his cage was in her window, in the house diagonally
opposite from Hanold’s (_G._ p. 98). Hanold, who, according to the
girl’s arraignment, was endowed with negative hallucination, understood
the art of not seeing nor recognizing people, and must from the
beginning have had unconscious knowledge of what we do not discover
until later. The signs of Zoë’s proximity, her appearance on the street,
and her bird’s song so near his window intensify the effect of the
dream, and in this condition, so dangerous for his resistance to the
eroticism, he takes flight. The journey arises from the recovery of the
resistance after that advance of erotic desire in the dream, an attempt
at flight from the living and present beloved. It means practically a
victory for repression, which, this time, in the delusion keeps the
upper hand, as, in his former action, the “pedestrian investigations” of
women and girls, the eroticism had been victorious. Everywhere, however,
the indecision of the struggle, the compromise nature of the results was
evident; the trip to Pompeii, which is to take him away from the living
Zoë leads, at any rate, to her substitute, Gradiva. The journey, which
is undertaken in defiance of the most recent dream-thoughts, follows,
however, the order of the manifest dream-content to Pompeii. Thus
delusion triumphs anew every time that eroticism and resistance struggle
anew.
This conception of Hanold’s trip, as a flight from the erotic desire for
the beloved, who is so near, which is awakening in him, harmonizes,
however, with the frame of mind portrayed in him during his stay in
Italy. The rejection of the eroticism, which dominates him, expresses
itself there in his abhorrence of honeymoon travellers. A little dream
in the “albergo” in Rome, caused by the proximity of a couple of German
lovers, “Augustus” and “Gretchen,” whose evening conversation he is
forced to overhear through the thin partition, casts a further light on
the erotic tendencies of his first great dream. The new dream transports
him again to Pompeii where Vesuvius is just having another eruption, and
thus refers to the dream which continues active during his trip; but
among the imperilled people he sees this time—not as before himself and
Gradiva—but Apollo Belvedere and the Capitoline Venus,—doubtless
ironic exaltation of the couple in the adjoining room. Apollo lifts
Venus, carries her away, and lays her on an object in the dark, which
seems to be a carriage or a cart, for a “rattling sound” comes from it.
Otherwise the dream needs no special skill for its interpretation. (_G._
p. 32.)
Our author, whom we have long relied on not to make a single stroke in
his picture idly and without purpose, has given us another bit of
testimony for the non-sexual force dominating Hanold on the trip. During
hours of wandering in Pompeii, it happens that “remarkably, it did not
once appear in his memory that he had dreamed some time ago that he had
been present at the destruction of Pompeii by the volcanic eruption of
79.” (_G._ p. 42.) At sight of Gradiva he first suddenly remembers this
dream, and at the same time the motive of the delusion for his puzzling
journey becomes conscious. Then what other meaning could there be for
forgetting the dream, this repression-boundary between the dream and the
psychic condition of the journey, than that the journey is not the
result of the direct instigation of the dream, but of the rejection of
this latter, as the emanation from a psychic force which desires no
knowledge of the secret meaning of the dream?
On the other hand, however, Hanold is not happy at this victory over his
eroticism. The suppressed psychic impulse remains strong enough to
revenge itself, by discontent and interception, on the suppressing
agency. His longing has changed to restlessness and dissatisfaction,
which make the trip seem senseless to him. His insight into the
motivation of his trip is obstructed in service of the delusion; his
relation to science, which ought, in such a place, to stir all his
interest, is upset. So our author shows his hero, after flight from
love, in a sort of crisis, in an utterly confused and unsettled
condition, in a derangement such as usually appears at the climax of
illness if neither of the two struggling forces is so much stronger than
the other, that the difference could establish a strict, psychic régime.
Here then our author takes hold to help and to settle, for, at this
place, he introduces Gradiva, who undertakes the cure of the delusion.
With his power to direct to a happy solution the fortunes of all the
characters created by him, in spite of all the requirements which he has
them conform to, he transports the girl, from whom Hanold has fled to
Pompeii, to that very place and thus corrects the folly which the
delusion caused the young man to commit in leaving the home-city of his
beloved for the dead abode of the one substituted for her by his fancy.
With the appearance of Zoë Bertgang as Gradiva, which marks the climax
of the suspense of the story, our interest is soon diverted. If we have
hitherto been living through the developments of a delusion, we shall
now become witnesses of its cure, and may ask ourselves if our author
has merely invented the procedure of this cure or has carried it out
according to actually existing possibilities. From Zoë’s own words in
the conversation with her friend, we have decidedly the right to ascribe
to her the intention to cure the hero (_G._ p. 97). But how does she go
about it? After she has cast aside the indignation which the
unreasonable request, to lie down to sleep again, as “then,” had evoked
in her, she appears again next day, at the same place, and elicits from
Hanold all the secret knowledge that was lacking to her for an
understanding of his conduct of the previous day. She learns of his
dream, of the bas-relief of Gradiva, and of the peculiarity of walk
which she shares with the relief. She accepts the rôle of a spirit
awakened to life for a short hour, which, she observes, his delusion
assigns to her, and in ambiguous words, she gently puts him in the way
of a new rôle by accepting from him the grave-flower which he had
brought along without conscious purpose, and expresses regret that he
has not given her roses (_G._ p. 70).
Our interest in the conduct of the eminently clever girl, who has
decided to win the lover of her youth as husband, after she has
recognized his love behind his delusion as its impelling force, is,
however, restrained at this place probably because of the strange
feelings that the delusion can arouse even in us. Its latest
development, that Gradiva, who was buried in the year 79, can now
exchange conversation with him as a noon-spirit, for an hour, after the
passing of which she sinks out of sight or seeks her grave again, this
chimæra, which is not confused by the perception of her modern
foot-covering, nor by her ignorance of the ancient tongues, nor by her
command of German, which did not exist in former times, seems indeed to
justify the author’s designation, “A Pompeiian Fancy,” but to exclude
every standard of clinical reality; and yet on closer consideration the
improbability in this delusion seems to me, for the most part, to
vanish. To be sure, our author has taken upon himself a part of the
blame, and in the first part of the story has offered the fact that Zoë
was the image of the bas-relief in every trait. One must, therefore,
guard against transferring the improbability of this preliminary to its
logical conclusion that Hanold considers the girl to be Gradiva come to
life. The explanation of the delusion is here enhanced by the fact that
our author has offered us no rational disposal of it. In the glowing sun
of the Campagna and in the bewildering magic powers of the vine which
grows on Vesuvius, our author has introduced helpful and mitigating
circumstances of the transgression of the hero. The most important of
all explanatory and exonerating considerations remains, however, the
facility with which our intellect decides to accept an absurd content if
impulses with a strong emotional stress find thereby their satisfaction.
It is astonishing, and generally meets with too little acceptance, how
easily and often intelligent people, under such psychological
constellations, give the reactions of partial mental weakness, and any
one who is not too conceited may observe this in himself as often as he
wishes, and especially when a part of the thought-processes under
consideration is connected with unconscious or repressed motives. I
cite, in this connection, the words of a philosopher who writes to me,
“I have also begun to make note of cases of striking mistakes, from my
own experience, and of thoughtless actions which one subsequently
explains to himself (in a very unreasonable way). It is amazing but
typical how much stupidity thereby comes to light.” Now let us consider
the fact that belief in spirits, apparitions and returning souls (which
finds so much support in the religions to which, at least as children,
we have all clung) is by no means destroyed among all educated people,
and that many otherwise reasonable people find their interest in
spiritism compatible with their reason. Yes, even one become
dispassionate and incredulous may perceive with shame how easily he
turns back for a moment to a belief in spirits, when emotions and
perplexity concur in him. I know of a physician who had once lost a
patient by Basedow’s disease and could not rid himself of the slight
suspicion that he had perhaps contributed by unwise medication to the
unfortunate outcome. One day several years later there stepped into his
office a girl, in whom, in spite of all reluctance, he was obliged to
recognize the dead woman. His only thought was that it was true that the
dead could return, and his fear did not give way to shame until the
visitor introduced herself as the sister of the woman who had died of
that disease. Basedow’s disease lends to those afflicted with it a great
similarity of features, which has often been noticed, and in this case
the typical resemblance was far more exaggerated than the family
resemblance. The physician, moreover, to whom this happened was I, and
therefore I am not inclined to quarrel with Norbert Hanold over the
clinical possibility of his short delusion about Gradiva, who had
returned to life. That in serious cases of chronic delusion (paranoia)
the most extreme absurdities, ingeniously devised and well supported,
are active is, finally, well known to every psychiatrist.
After his first meeting with Gradiva, Norbert Hanold had drunk his wine
in first one and then another of the hotels of Pompeii known to him,
while the other guests were having their regular meals. “Of course, in
no way had the absurd supposition entered his mind” that he was doing
this to find out what hotel Gradiva lived and ate in, but it is hard to
say what other significance his action could have. On the day after his
second meeting in Meleager’s house, he has all sorts of remarkable and
apparently disconnected experiences; he finds a narrow cleft in the wall
of the portico where Gradiva had disappeared, meets a foolish
lizard-catcher, who addresses him as an acquaintance, discovers a
secluded hotel, the “Albergo del Sole,” whose owner talks him into
buying a metal brooch encrusted with green patina, which had been found
with the remains of a Pompeiian girl, and finally notices in his own
hotel a newly-arrived young couple, whom he diagnoses to be brother and
sister, and congenial. All these impressions are then woven into a
“remarkably nonsensical” dream as follows:
“Somewhere in the sun Gradiva sat making a trap out of a blade of grass
in order to catch a lizard, and she said, ‘Please stay quite still—my
colleague is right; the method is really good and she has used it with
the greatest success.’”
To this dream he offers resistance even while sleeping, with the
critique that it is indeed the most utter madness, and he casts about to
free himself from it. He succeeds in doing this, too, with the aid of an
invisible bird who utters a short, merry call, and carries the lizard
away in his beak.
Shall we risk an attempt to interpret this dream also, that is, to
substitute for it the latent thoughts from whose disfigurement it must
have proceeded? It is as nonsensical as one could expect a dream to be
and this absurdity of dreams is the mainstay of the view which denies to
the dream the character of a valid psychic act, and has it proceed from
a desultory stimulus of the psychic elements.
We can apply to this dream the technique which can be designated as the
regular procedure of dream-interpretation. It consists in disregarding
the apparent sequence in the manifest dream but in examining separately
every part of the content, and in seeking its derivation in the
impressions, memories and free ideas of the dreamer. As we cannot
examine Hanold, however, we must be satisfied with reference to his
impressions, and may with due caution substitute our own ideas for his.
“Somewhere in the sun Gradiva sat catching lizards, and said ...” What
impression of the day is this part of the dream reminiscent of?
Unquestionably of the meeting with the older man, the lizard-catcher,
for whom Gradiva is substituted in the dream. He was sitting or lying on
a “hot, sunny” slope and spoke to Hanold, too. Even the utterances of
Gradiva in the dream are copied from those of the man. Let us compare:
“‘The method suggested by my colleague, Eimer, is really good; I have
already used it often with the best of success. Please remain quite
still.’”—Quite similarly Gradiva speaks in the dream, only that for the
_colleague, Eimer_, is substituted an unnamed woman-colleague; the
_often_ from the zoologist’s speech is missing in the dream, and the
connection between the statements has been somewhat changed. It seems,
therefore, that this experience of the day has been transformed into a
dream by some changes and disfigurements. Why thus, and what is the
meaning of the disfigurements, the substitution of Gradiva for the old
gentleman, and the introduction of the puzzling “woman-colleague”?
There is a rule of dream-interpretation as follows: A speech heard in a
dream always originates from a speech either heard or uttered in waking
life. Well, this rule seems followed here; the speech of Gradiva is only
a modification of a speech heard in the daytime from the zoologist.
Another rule of dream-interpretation would tell us that the substitution
of one person for another, or the mixture of two people by showing one
in a position which characterizes the other means equivalence of the two
people, a correspondence between them. Let us venture to apply this rule
also to our dream; then the interpretation would follow: “Gradiva
catches lizards, as that old gentleman does, and like him, is skilled in
lizard-catching.” This result is not comprehensible yet, but we have
another riddle before us. To which impression of the day shall we refer
the “woman colleague,” who is substituted in the dream for the famous
zoologist, Eimer? We have here fortunately not much choice; only one
other girl can be meant by “woman-colleague,” the congenial young lady
in whom Hanold has conjectured a sister travelling with her brother. “In
her gown she wore a red Sorrento rose, the sight of which, as he looked
across from his corner, stirred something in his memory without his
being able to think what it was.” This observation on the part of the
author surely gives us the right to assert that she is the
“woman-colleague” of the dream. What Hanold cannot remember is certainly
nothing but the remark of the supposed Gradiva, as she asked him for the
grave-flower, that to more fortunate girls one brought roses in spring.
In this speech, however, lay a hidden wooing. What kind of
lizard-catching is it that this more fortunate woman-colleague has been
so successful with?
On the next day Hanold surprises the supposed brother and sister in
tender embrace and can thus correct his mistake of the previous day.
They are really a couple of lovers, on their honeymoon, as we later
learn, when the two disturb, so unexpectedly, Hanold’s third meeting
with Zoë. If we will now accept the idea that Hanold, who consciously
considers them brother and sister, has, in his unconscious, recognized
at once their real relation, which on the next day betrays itself so
unequivocally, there results a good meaning for Gradiva’s remark in the
dream. The red rose then becomes a symbol for being in love; Hanold
understands that the two are as Gradiva and he are soon to be; the
lizard-catching acquires the meaning of husband-catching, and Gradiva’s
speech means something like this: “Let me arrange things; I know how to
win a husband as well as this other girl does.”
Why must this penetration of Zoë’s intentions appear throughout in the
form of the speech of the old zoologist? Why is Zoë’s skill in
husband-catching represented by that of the old man in lizard-catching?
Well, it is easy for us to answer that question; we have long ago
guessed that the lizard-catcher is none other than the professor of
zoology, Bertgang, Zoë’s father, who must, of course, also know Hanold,
so that it is a matter of course that he addresses Hanold as an
acquaintance. Again, let us accept the idea that Hanold, in his
unconscious, immediately recognizes the professor—“It seemed to him
dimly that he had already seen the face of the lizard-hunter probably in
one of the two hotels.” Thus is explained the strange cloaking of the
purpose attributed to Zoë. She is the daughter of the lizard-catcher;
she has inherited this skill from him. The substitution of Gradiva for
the lizard-catcher in the dream-content, is, therefore, the
representation of the relation between the two people, which was
recognized by the unconscious; the introduction of “woman-colleague” in
place of _colleague, Eimer_, allows the dream to express comprehension
of her courtship of the man. The dream has welded two of the day’s
experiences in one situation, “condensed” as we say, in order to
procure, to be sure, very indiscernible expression for two ideas which
are not allowed to become conscious; but we can go on diminishing the
strangeness of the dream still more and pointing out the influence of
other experiences of the day on the formation of the manifest dream.
Dissatisfied by the former information, we might explain why the scene
of the lizard-catching was made the nucleus of the dream, and suppose
that the other elements in the dream-thoughts influence the term
“lizard” in the manifest dream. It might really be very easy. Let us
recall that Hanold has discovered a cleft in the wall, in the place
where Gradiva seems to him to disappear; this is “wide enough to afford
passage to an unusually slender figure.” By this perception he is forced
in the day-time to an alteration in his delusion; Gradiva did not sink
into the ground when she disappeared from his sight, but was going back,
by this route, to her grave. In his unconscious thought he might say to
himself that he had now found the natural explanation for the surprising
disappearance of the girl; but must not forcing one’s self through
narrow clefts, and disappearing in such clefts recall the conduct of
lizards? Does not Gradiva herself, then, in this connection, behave like
an agile little lizard? We think, therefore, that the discovery of this
cleft in the wall had worked as a determinant on the choice of the
“lizard” element for the manifest dream-content; the lizard-situation of
the dream, therefore, represented this impression of the day, and the
meeting with the zoologist, Zoë’s father.
What if, become bold, we now wished to attempt to find in the
dream-content a representation also for the one experience of the day
which has not yet been turned to account, the discovery of the third
hotel, “del Sole”? Our author has treated this episode so exhaustively
and linked so much with it, we should be surprised if it, alone, had
yielded no contribution to the dream-formation. Hanold enters this
hotel, which, because of its secluded situation and its distance from
the station, has remained unknown to him, to get a bottle of lime-water
for congestion of blood. The hotel-keeper uses this opportunity to extol
his antiques and shows him a brooch which, it was alleged, had belonged
to that Pompeiian girl who was found near the Forum in fond embrace with
her lover. Hanold, who had never before believed this frequently
repeated story, is now compelled, by a force strange to him, to believe
in the truth of this touching story and in the genuineness of the
article found, buys the brooch and leaves the hotel with his purchase.
In passing, he sees nodding down at him from one of the windows a
cluster of white, asphodel blossoms which had been placed in a
water-glass, and he feels that this sight is an attestation of the
genuineness of his new possession. The sincere conviction is now
impressed upon him that the green brooch belonged to Gradiva, and that
she was the girl who died in her lover’s embrace. The tormenting
jealousy, which thereupon seizes him, he appeases with the resolution to
assure himself about this suspicion, the next day, from Gradiva,
herself, by showing the brooch. This is a strange bit of new delusion;
and shouldn’t any trace point to it in the dream of the following night?
It will be well worth our while to get an understanding of the origin of
this augmentation of the delusion, to look up the new unconscious idea
for which the new bit of delusion is substituted. The delusion
originates under the influence of the proprietor of the “Sun Hotel,”
toward whom Hanold conducts himself in so remarkably credulous a manner,
as if he has received a suggestion from him. The proprietor shows him a
small metal brooch as genuine, and as the possession of that girl who
was found in the arms of her lover, buried in the ashes, and Hanold, who
could be critical enough to doubt the truth of the story as well as the
genuineness of the brooch, is caught, credulous, and buys the more than
doubtful antique. It is quite incomprehensible why he should act so, and
no hint is given that the personality of the proprietor himself might
solve this riddle for us. There is, however, another riddle in this
incident, and two riddles sometimes solve each other. On leaving the
“albergo,” he catches sight of an asphodel cluster in a glass at a
window, and finds in it an attestation of the genuineness of the metal
brooch. How can that be? This last stroke is fortunately easy of
solution. The white flower is, of course, the one which he presented to
Gradiva at noon, and it is quite right that through the sight of it at
one of the windows of this hotel, something is corroborated, not the
genuineness of the brooch, but something else which has become clear to
him at the discovery of this formerly overlooked “albergo.” In the
forenoon he has already acted as if he were seeking, in the two hotels
of Pompeii, where the person lived who appeared to him as Gradiva. Now,
as he stumbles so unexpectedly upon a third, he must say in the
unconscious: “So she lives here”; and then, on leaving: “Right there is
the asphodel flower I gave her; that is, therefore, her window.” This,
then, is the new idea for which the delusion is substituted, and which
cannot become conscious because its assumption that Gradiva is living, a
person known by him, cannot become conscious.
How then is the substitution of the delusion for the new idea supposed
to have occurred? I think thus: that the feeling of conviction which
clung to the idea was able to assert itself and persisted, while another
ideational content related to it by thought-connection acted as
substitute for the idea itself which was incapable of consciousness.
Thus the feeling of conviction was connected with a really strange
content, and this latter attained, as delusion, a recognition which did
not belong to it. Hanold transfers his conviction that Gradiva lives in
this house to other impressions which he receives in this house,
becomes, in a way, credulous about what the proprietor says, the
genuineness of the metal brooch, and the truth of the anecdote about the
lovers found in an embrace, but only by this route, that he connects
what he has heard in this house with Gradiva. The jealousy which has
been lying ready in him gets possession of this material, and even in
contradiction to his first dream there appears the delusion that Gradiva
was the girl who died in the arms of her lover, and that the brooch
which he bought belonged to her.