Sigmund Freud

“ So she has to look around for another person, and clings with especial fervour to the playmate of her youth. When he, too, no longer has any eyes for her, it does not destroy her love, rather augments it, for he has become like her father, like him absorbed by science and, by it, isolated from life and from Zoë. So it is granted to her to be faithful in unfaithfulness, to find her father again in her beloved, to embrace both with the same feeling as we may say, to make them both identical in her emotions. ”

“ For the present he can do nothing but adapt the delusion to the wonderful discovery which he has just made. Gradiva, who had perished at the destruction of Pompeii, can be nothing but a ghost of the noon hour, who returns to life for the noon hour of spirits; but why, after the answer given in German, does the exclamation escape him: “I knew that your voice sounded like that”? Not only we, but the girl, too, must ask, and Hanold must admit that he has never heard her voice before, but expected to hear it in the dream, when he called to her, as she lay down to sleep on the steps of the temple. ”

“ He could not understand how a human being could occupy himself with it, for there was only a single thing to which all thinking and investigation must be directed: what is the nature of the physical manifestation of a being like Gradiva, dead and alive at the same time, although the latter was true only in the noon hour of spirits—or had been the day before, perhaps the one time in a century or a thousand years, for it suddenly seemed certain that his return to-day was in vain. ”

“ For even if he grasped nothing, one fact was indisputable. Gradiva, with a warm, human hand, not unsubstantial, but possessing corporeal reality, had expressed an indubitable truth; his mind had, in the last two days, been in a condition of absolute madness; and not at all in a silly dream, but rather with the use of eyes and ears such as is given by nature to man for reasonable service. ”

“ Hardly anywhere was there a nook which successfully protected itself against the ocean of light and veiled itself in a dusky, silver web; every street lay between the old walls like long, rippling, white strips of linen spread out to bleach; and without exception all were equally motionless and mute, for not only had the last of the rasping and nasal tones of the English and American messengers disappeared, but the former slight evidences of lizard- and butterfly-life seemed also to have left the silent city of ruins. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Hanold leaves the lizard-hunter with the critical thought that it is hardly credible what foolishly remarkable purposes can cause people to make the long trip to Pompeii, in which criticism he does not, of course, include himself and his intention of seeking foot-prints of Gradiva in the ashes of Pompeii. The gentleman’s face, moreover, seems familiar to him, as if he has noticed it casually in one of the two hotels; the man’s manner of addressing him has also sounded as if directed at an acquaintance. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She learns also that he has named the bas-relief of her “Gradiva,” and tells him that her real name is Zoë!
“The name suits you beautifully, but it sounds to me like bitter mockery, for ‘Zoë’ means ‘life.’”
“One must adapt himself to the inevitable,” she responds. “And I have long accustomed myself to being dead.”
With the promise to be at the same place again on the morrow, she takes leave of him, after she has obtained the asphodel cluster. “To those who are more fortunate one gives roses in spring, but for me the flower of oblivion is the right one from your hand.” ”

“ It is the rejection of this which makes the dream an anxiety-dream. Less striking are, perhaps, the impelling wishes of the second dream, but if we recall its interpretation, we shall not hesitate to pronounce it also erotic. The wish to be captured by the beloved, to yield and surrender to her, as it may be construed behind the lizard-catching, has really a passive masochistic character. On the next day the dreamer strikes the beloved, as if under the sway of the antagonistic, erotic force; but we must stop or we may forget that Hanold and Gradiva are only creatures of our author. ”

“ Norbert Hanold could not recall; in his memory he retained only the idea that his appetite had peremptorily demanded to be appeased, though very tardily, at the “Diomed,” and then he had wandered forth aimlessly on the first good street, had arrived at the beach north of Castellamare, where he had seated himself on a lava-block, and the sea-wind had blown around his head until the sun had set about half-way between Monte Sant’ Angelo above Sorrento and Monte Epomeo on Ischia. ”

“ And when Gradiva puts to the archæologist the question whether it does not seem to him that they have once already, two thousand years ago, shared their luncheon, does not the incomprehensible question become suddenly senseful, when we substitute for the historical past the personal childhood, whose memories persist vividly for the girl, but seem to be forgotten by the young man? Does not the idea suddenly dawn upon us that the fancies of the young man about his Gradiva may be an echo of his childhood memories? ”

“ His fancies about Gradiva, due to the after-effects of this dream, continue so that he now, for the first time, begins to mourn her as lost.
While he leans from his window, prepossessed with these ideas, a canary, warbling his song in a cage at an open window of the house opposite, attracts his attention. Suddenly something like a thrill passes through the man not yet completely awakened from his dream. He believes that he sees, in the street, a figure like that of his Gradiva, and even recognizes the gait characteristic of her ”

“ Beautiful reality has now triumphed over the delusion. Yet an honour still awaits the latter before the two leave Pompeii. When they have arrived at the Hercules Gate, where, at the beginning of the Strada Consolare, old stepping-stones cross the street, Norbert Hanold stops and asks the girl to go ahead. She understands him and, “raising her dress slightly with her left hand, Gradiva rediviva Zoë Bertgang, viewed by him with dreamily observing eyes, crossed with her calmly buoyant walk, through the sunlight, over the stepping-stones.” ”

“ The development of Norbert Hanold’s delusion progresses in a dream, which, caused by no new event, seems to proceed entirely from his psychic life, which is occupied by a conflict. Yet let us stop before we proceed to test whether the author of Gradiva, in the formation of his dreams, meets our expectation of a deeper understanding. Let us first ask what psychiatry has to say about his ideas of the origin of a delusion, how it stands on the matter of the rôle of repression and the unconscious, of conflict and compromise-formation. ”

“ Ideas are repressed only because they are connected with liberations of emotions, which are not to come to light; it would be more correct to say that repression deals with the emotions, but these are comprehensible to us only in connection with ideas. Thus, in Norbert Hanold, the erotic feelings are repressed, and, as his eroticism neither knows nor has known another object than Zoë Bertgang of his youth, the memories of her are forgotten. The antique bas-relief awakens the slumbering eroticism in him and makes the childhood memories active. ”

“ Finally he goes to bed and dreams; it is remarkable nonsense, but apparently concocted of the day’s experiences. “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 greatest success!’” He resists the dream, even in his sleep, with the criticism that it is, of course, utter madness, and he succeeds in getting rid of it with the aid of an invisible bird, who utters a short, merry call and carries the lizard away in his beak. ”

“ The speeches of the girl, on the other hand, in whose person the most brilliant mental clarity is opposed to the delusion, are made intentionally ambiguous. One meaning of them falls in with the ideas of Hanold’s delusion, in order to enable her to penetrate into his conscious comprehension, the other raises itself above the delusion, and, as a rule, gives us the interpretation of it in the unconscious truth which has been represented by it. It is a triumph of wit to be able to represent the delusion and the truth in the same expression. ”