Freud - Complete Works (325 page)

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1842

II

But after all, what we really intended to do
originally was only to investigate two or three dreams that are to
be found here and there in
Gradiva
with the help of certain
analytic methods. How has it come about, then, that we have been
led into dissecting the whole story and examining the mental
processes in the two chief characters? This has not in fact been an
unnecessary piece of work; it was an essential preliminary. It is
equally the case that when we try to understand the real dreams of
a real person we have to concern ourselves intensively with his
character and his career, and we must get to know not only his
experiences shortly before the dream but also those dating far back
into the past. It is even my view that we are still not free to
turn to our proper task, but that we must linger a little more over
the story itself and carry out some further preliminary work.

   My readers will no doubt have
been puzzled to notice that so far I have treated Norbert Hanold
and Zoe Bertgang, in all their mental manifestations and
activities, as though they were real people and not the
author’s creations, as though the author’s mind were an
absolutely transparent medium and not a refractive or obscuring
one. And my procedure must seem all the more puzzling since the
author has expressly renounced the portrayal of reality by calling
his story a ‘phantasy’. We have found, however, that
all his descriptions are so faithfully copied from reality that we
should not object if
Gradiva
were described not as a
phantasy but as a psychiatric study. Only at two points has the
author availed himself of the licence open to him of laying down
premisses which do not seem to have their roots in the laws of
reality. The first time is where he makes the young archaeologist
come upon what is undoubtedly an ancient relief but which so
closely resembles a person living long afterwards, not only in the
peculiarity of the posture of the foot as it steps along but in
every detail of facial structure and bodily attitude, that the
young man is able to take the physical appearance of that person to
be the sculpture come to life. And the second time is where he
makes the young man meet the living woman precisely in Pompeii; for
the dead woman had been placed there only by his imagination, and
the journey to Pompeii had in fact carried him away from the living
woman, whom he had just seen in the street of the town in which he
lived. This second provision of the author’s, however,
involves no violent departure from actual possibility; it merely
makes use of chance, which unquestionably plays a part in many
human histories; and furthermore he uses it to good purpose, for
this chance reflects the fatal truth that has laid it down that
flight is precisely an instrument that delivers one over to what
one is fleeing from. The first premiss seems to lean more towards
phantasy and to spring entirely from the author’s arbitrary
decision - the premiss on which all that follows depends, the
far-reaching resemblance between the sculpture and the live girl,
which a more sober choice might have restricted to the single
feature of the posture of the foot as it steps along. We might be
tempted here to allow the play of our own phantasy to forge a link
with reality. The name of ‘Bertgang’ might point to the
fact that the women of that family had already been distinguished
in ancient days by the peculiarity of their graceful gait; and we
might suppose that the Germanic Bertgangs were descended from a
Roman family one member of which was the woman who had led the
artist to perpetuate the peculiarity of her gait in the sculpture.
Since, however, the different variations of the human form are not
independent of one another, and since in fact even among ourselves
the ancient types re-appear again and again (as we can see in art
collections), it would not be totally impossible that a modern
Bertgang might reproduce the shape of her ancient ancestress in all
the other features of her bodily structure as well. But it would no
doubt be wiser, instead of such speculations, to enquire from the
author himself what were the sources from which this part of his
creation was derived; we should then have a good prospect of
showing once again how what was ostensibly an arbitrary decision
rested in fact upon law. But since access to the sources in the
author’s mind is not open to us, we will leave him with an
undiminished right to construct a development that is wholly true
to life upon an improbable premiss - a right of which Shakespeare,
for instance, availed himself in
King Lear
.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1843

   Apart from this, it must be
repeated, the author has presented us with a perfectly correct
psychiatric study, on which we may measure our understanding of the
workings of the mind - a case history and the history of a cure
which might have been designed to emphasize certain fundamental
theories of medical psychology. It is strange enough that the
author should have done this. But how if, on being questioned, he
were completely to deny any such purpose? It is so easy to draw
analogies and to read meanings into things. Is it not rather we who
have slipped into this charming poetic story a secret meaning very
far from its author’s intentions? Possibly. We shall come
back to the question later. For the moment, however, we have tried
to save ourselves from making any such tendentious interpretation
by giving the story almost entirely in the author’s own
words. Anyone who compares our reproduction with the actual text of
Gradiva
will have to concede us that much.

   Perhaps, too, in most
people’s eyes we are doing our author a poor service in
declaring his work to be a psychiatric study. An author, we hear
them say, should keep out of the way of any contact with psychiatry
and should leave the description of pathological mental states to
the doctors. The truth is that no truly creative writer has ever
obeyed this injunction. The description of the human mind is indeed
the domain which is most his own; he has from time immemorial been
the precursor of science, and so too of scientific psychology. But
the frontier between states of mind described as normal and
pathological is in part a conventional one and in part so
fluctuating that each of us probably crosses it many times in the
course of a day. On the other hand, psychiatry would be doing wrong
if it tried to restrict itself permanently to the study of the
severe and gloomy illnesses that arise from gross injuries to the
delicate apparatus of the mind. Deviations from health which are
slighter and capable of correction, and which to-day we can trace
back no further than to disturbances in the interplay of mental
forces, arouse its interest no less. Indeed, only through the
medium of these can it understand either normal states or the
phenomena of severe illness. Thus the creative writer cannot evade
the psychiatrist nor the psychiatrist the creative writer, and the
poetic treatment of a psychiatric theme can turn out to be correct
without any sacrifice of its beauty.

   And it is really correct - this
imaginative picture of the history of a case and its treatment. Now
that we have finished telling the story and satisfied our own
suspense, we can get a better view of it, and we shall now
reproduce it with the technical terminology of our science, and in
doing so we shall not feel disconcerted at the necessity for
repeating what we have said before.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1844

   Norbert Hanold’s condition
is often spoken of by the author as a ‘delusion’, and
we have no reason to reject that designation. We can state two
chief characteristics of a ‘delusion’, which do not, it
is true, describe it exhaustively, but which distinguish it
recognizably from other disorders. In the first place it is one of
the group of pathological states which do not produce a direct
effect upon the body but are manifested only by mental indications.
And secondly it is characterized by the fact that in it
‘phantasies’ have gained the upper hand - that is, have
obtained belief and have acquired an influence on action. If we
recall Hanold’s journey to Pompeii in order to look for
Gradiva’s peculiarly formed footprints in the ashes, we shall
have a fine example of an action under the dominance of a delusion.
A psychiatrist would perhaps place Norbert Hanold’s delusion
in the great group of ‘paranoia’ and possibly describe
it as ‘fetishistic erotomania’, because the most
striking thing about it was his being in love with the piece of
sculpture and because in the psychiatrist’s view, with its
tendency to coarsen everything, the young archaeologist’s
interest in feet and the postures of feet would be bound to suggest
‘fetishism’. Nevertheless all such systems of
nomenclature and classification of the different kinds of delusion
according to their subject-matter have something precarious and
barren about them.¹

   Furthermore, since our hero was a
person capable of developing a delusion on the basis of such a
strange preference, a strict psychiatrist would at once stamp him
as a
dégénéré
and would
investigate the heredity which had remorselessly driven him to this
fate. But here the author does not follow the psychiatrist, and
with good reason. He wishes to bring the hero closer to us so as to
make ‘empathy’ easier; the diagnosis of
‘
dégénéré
', whether it
is right or wrong, at once puts the young archaeologist at a
distance from us, for we readers are the normal people and the
standard of humanity. Nor is the author greatly concerned with the
hereditary and constitutional preconditions of the state, but on
the other hand he plunges deep into the personal mental make-up
which can give rise to such a delusion.

  
¹
In point of fact, the case of N. H. would
have to be described as a
hysterical
delusion, not a
paranoic one. The indications of paranoia are absent from
it.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1845

   In one important respect Norbert
Hanold behaved quite differently from an ordinary human being. He
took no interest in living women; the science of which he was the
servant had taken that interest away from him and displaced it on
to women of marble or bronze. This is not to be regarded as a
trivial peculiarity; on the contrary, it was the basic precondition
of the events to be described. For one day it came about that one
particular sculpture of that kind laid claim to the whole of the
interest which is ordinarily directed only to a living woman, and
with that his delusion was there. We then see unrolled before our
eyes the manner in which his delusion is cured through a happy turn
of events, and his interest displaced back from the marble to a
living woman. The author does not let us follow the influences
which led our hero to turn away from women; he only informs us that
his attitude was not explained by his innate disposition, which, on
the contrary, included some amount of imaginative (and, we might
add, erotic) needs. And, as we learn later in the story, he did not
avoid other children in his childhood: he had a friendship at that
age with a little girl, was her inseparable companion, shared his
little meals with her, used to thump her too and let her rumple his
hair. It is in attachments such as this, in combinations like this
of affection and aggressiveness, that the immature erotism of
childhood finds its expression; its consequences only emerge later,
but then they are irresistible, and during childhood itself it is
as a rule recognized as erotism only by doctors and creative
writers. Our own writer shows us clearly that he too is of the same
opinion; for he makes his hero suddenly develop a lively interest
in women’s feet and their way of placing them. This interest
was bound to bring him a bad reputation both among scientists and
among the women of the town he lived in, a reputation of being a
foot-fetishist; but
we
cannot avoid tracing the interest
back to the memory of his childhood playmate. For there can be no
doubt that even in her childhood the girl showed the same
peculiarity of a graceful gait, with her toes almost
perpendicularly raised as she stepped along; and it was because it
represented that same gait that an ancient marble relief acquired
such great importance for Norbert Hanold. Incidentally we may add
that in his derivation of the remarkable phenomenon of fetishism
the author is in complete agreement with science. Ever since Binet
we have in fact tried to trace fetishism back to erotic impressions
in childhood.

Delusions And Dreams In Jensen's Gradiva

1846

   The state of permanently turning
away from women produces a personal susceptibility, or, as we are
accustomed to say, a ‘disposition’ to the formation of
a delusion. The development of the mental disorder sets in at the
moment when a chance impression arouses the childhood experiences
which have been forgotten and which have traces, at least, of an
erotic colouring. ‘Arouses’, however, is certainly not
the right description, if we take into account what follows. We
must repeat the author’s accurate account in correct
psychological technical terms. When Norbert Hanold saw the relief,
he did not remember that he had already seen a similar posture of
the foot in his childhood friend; he remembered nothing at all, but
all the effects brought about by the relief originated from this
link that was made with the impression of his childhood. Thus the
childhood impression was stirred up, it became active, so that it
began to produce effects, but it did not come into consciousness -
it remained ‘unconscious’, to use a term which has
to-day become unavoidable in psychopathology. We are anxious that
this unconscious shall not be involved in any of the disputes of
philosophers and natural philosophers, which have often no more
than an etymological importance. For the time being we possess no
better name for psychical processes which behave actively but
nevertheless do not reach the consciousness of the person
concerned, and that is all we mean by our
‘unconsciousness’. When some thinkers try to dispute
the existence of an unconscious of this kind, on the ground that it
is nonsensical, we can only suppose that they have never had to do
with the corresponding mental phenomena, that they are under the
spell of the regular experience that everything mental that becomes
active and intense becomes at the same time conscious as well, and
that they have still to learn (what our author knows very well)
that there are most certainly mental processes which, in spite of
being intense and producing effects, none the less remain apart
from consciousness.