Delusion and Dream : an Interpretation in the Light of Psychoanalysis of Gradiva

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.

We notice that the conversation with Gradiva, and her gentle wooing “through the flower,” have already evoked important changes in Hanold. Traits of male desire, components of the libido are awakened in him, which, to be sure, cannot yet dispense with the concealment through conscious pretexts; but the problem of the corporeal nature of Gradiva, which has pursued him this whole day, cannot disavow its derivation from the erotic desire of the young man for possession of the woman, even if it is dragged into the scientific world by conscious stress on Gradiva’s peculiar hovering between life and death. Jealousy is an added mark of Hanold’s awakening activity in love; he expresses this at the opening of the conversation on the next day, and with the aid of a new pretext achieves his object of touching the girl’s body, and of striking her, as in times long past.

Now, however, it is time to ask if the course of delusion-formation which we have inferred from our author’s representation is one otherwise admitted or possible. From my experience as physician, I can answer only that it is surely the right way, perhaps the only one, in which the delusion receives the unswerving recognition due to its clinical character. If the patient believes in his delusion so firmly, it does not happen because of inversion of his powers of judgment, and does not proceed from what is erroneous in the delusion; but in every delusion there lies also a little grain of truth; there is something in it which really deserves belief, and this is the source of the conviction of the patient, who is, to this extent, justified. This true element, however, has been repressed for a long time; if it finally succeeds in pushing into consciousness (this time in disfigured form), the feeling of a conviction clinging to it, as if in compensation, is over-strong and now clings to and protects the disfigurement-substitute of the repressed, true element against every critical impugnment. The conviction at once shifts itself from the unconscious, true element to the conscious, erroneous one connected with it, and remains fixed there as a result of this very displacement. The case of delusion-formation which resulted from Hanold’s first dream is nothing but a similar, if not identical, case of such displacement. Yes, the depicted manner of development of conviction in the delusion is not fundamentally different from the way in which conviction is formed in normal cases, where repression does not enter into play. All our convictions lie in thought-contents in which the true and the false are combined and they stretch over the former and the latter. They differentiate at once between the true and whatever false is associated with it and protect this, even if not so immutably as in the delusion, against merited critique. Associations, protection, likewise, have their own value even for normal psychology.

I will now return to the dream and lay stress on a small, but not uninteresting feature which establishes a connection between two occasions of the dream. Gradiva had placed the white asphodel flower in definite contrast to the red rose; the finding of the asphodel flower again in the window of the “Albergo del Sole” becomes a weighty proof for Hanold’s unconscious idea which expresses itself in a new delusion; and to this is added the fact that the red rose in the dress of the congenial young girl helps Hanold again, in the unconscious, to a right estimation of her relation to her companion so that he can have her enter the dream as “woman colleague.”

But where in the manifest dream-content is found the trace and representation of that discovery of Hanold’s for which we find that the new delusion is substituted, the discovery that Gradiva lives with her father in the third hotel of Pompeii, the “Albergo del Sole,” which he has not been acquainted with? Well, it stands in its entirety and not even much disfigured in the dream; but I dread to point it out, for I know that even with the readers whose patience with me has lasted so long, a strong opposition to my attempts at interpretation will be stirred up. Hanold’s discovery is given in full in the dream-content, I repeat, but so cleverly concealed that one must needs overlook it. It is hidden there behind a play on words, an ambiguity. “Somewhere in the sun Gradiva sat”; this we have rightly connected with the locality where Hanold met the zoologist, her father; but can it not also mean in the “Sun,” that is, in the “Albergo del Sole,” in the “Sun Hotel” Gradiva lives? And doesn’t the “somewhere” which has no reference to the meeting with her father sound so hypocritically indefinite for the very reason that it introduces the definite information about the whereabouts of Gradiva? According to previous experience in the interpretation of real dreams, I am quite sure of such a meaning in the ambiguity, but I should really not venture to offer this bit of interpretation to my readers, if our author did not lend me here his powerful assistance. On the next day he puts into the mouth of the girl, when she sees the metal brooch, the same pun which we accept for the interpretation of the dream-content. “Did you find it in the sun, perhaps? It brings to light many such works of art”; and as Hanold does not understand the speech, she explains that she means the “Sun Hotel,” which is called “Sole” here, whence the supposed antique is also familiar to her.

And now may we make the attempt to substitute for Hanold’s “remarkably nonsensical” dream unconscious thoughts hidden behind it and as unlike it as possible? It runs somewhat as follows: “She lives in the ‘Sun’ with her father; why is she playing such a game with me? Does she wish to make fun of me? Or could it be possible that she loves me and wishes me for a husband?” To this latter possibility there now follows in sleep the rejection, “That is the most utter madness,” which is apparently directed against the whole manifest dream.

Critical readers have now the right to inquire about the origin of that interpolation, not formerly established, which refers to being made fun of by Gradiva. To this Traumdeutung gives the answer; if in dream-thoughts, taunts and sneers, or bitter contradictions occur, they are expressed by the nonsensical course of the manifest dream, through the absurdity in the dream. The latter means, therefore, no paralysis of psychic activity, but is one of the means of representation which the dream-work makes use of. As always in especially difficult passages, our author here comes to our assistance. The nonsensical dream has another postlude in which a bird utters a merry call and takes away the lizard in his beak. Such a laughing call Hanold had heard after Gradiva’s disappearance. It really came from Zoë who was shaking off the melancholy seriousness of her lower world rôle; with this laugh Gradiva had really derided him. The dream-picture, however, of the bird carrying away the lizard may recall that other one in a former dream in which Apollo Belvedere carried away the Capitoline Venus.

Perhaps the impression now exists with many readers that the interpretation of the lizard-catching situation by the idea of wooing is not sufficiently justified. Additional support is found here, perhaps in the hint that Zoë, in conversation with her colleague, admits about herself that very thing which Hanold’s thoughts suppose about her, when she tells that she had been sure of “digging up” something interesting for herself here in Pompeii. She thereby delves into the archæological series of associations as he did into the zoological with his allegory of lizard-catching, as if they were opposing each other and each wished to assume properties of the other.

Thus we have finished the interpretation of the second dream. Both have become accessible to our understanding under the presupposition that the dreamer, in his unconscious thought, knows all that he has forgotten in his conscious, has in the former rightly judged everything which, in the latter, he delusively misconstrues. In this connection we have, of course, been obliged to make many assertions which sounded odd to the reader because they were strange to him and probably often awakened the suspicion that we were giving out as our author’s meaning what is only our own meaning. We are ready to do everything to dissipate this suspicion and will therefore gladly consider more exhaustively one of the most knotty points – I mean the use of ambiguous words and speeches as in the example, “Somewhere in the Sun Gradiva sat.”

It must be striking to every reader of Gradiva how often our author puts into the mouths of both the leading characters speeches which have double meaning. For Hanold these speeches are intended to have only one meaning, and only his companion, Gradiva, is affected by their other meaning. Thus, after her first answer, he exclaims: “I knew that your voice sounded so,” and the yet unenlightened Zoë has to ask how that is possible, as he has never before heard her speak. In the second conversation, the girl is for a moment puzzled by his delusion, as he assures her that he recognized her at once. She must understand these words in the meaning that is correct for his unconscious, as his recognition of their acquaintance which reaches back into childhood, while he, of course, knows nothing of this meaning of his speech and explains it only by reference to the delusion which dominates him. 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.

Interspersed with such ambiguities is Zoë’s speech in which she explains the situation to her girl friend and at the same time rids herself of her disturbing society; it is really spoken out of the book, calculated more for us readers than for her happy colleague. In the conversations with Hanold, the double meaning is chiefly established by the fact that Zoë makes use of the symbolism which we find followed in Hanold’s first dream, in the equivalence of repression and destruction, Pompeii and childhood. Thus on the one hand she can, in her speeches, continue in the rôle which Hanold’s delusion assigns to her, on the other, she can touch upon the real relations, and awaken in Hanold’s unconscious a knowledge of them.

“I have long accustomed myself to being dead.” (G. p. 70.) “For me, the flower of oblivion is the right one from your hand” (G. p. 70). In these speeches is given lightly the reproof which then breaks out clearly enough in her last sermon when she compares him to an archæopteryx. “That a person must die to become alive again; but for archæologists that is, of course, necessary” (G. p. 102), she continues after the solution of the delusion as if to give us the key to her ambiguous speeches. The most beautiful symbolism appears, however, in the question (G. p. 88): “It seems to me as if we had already eaten our bread thus together once two thousand years ago. Can’t you remember it?” In this speech the substitution of historic antiquity for childhood, and the effort to awaken his memory of the latter are quite unmistakable.

Whence, therefore, comes this striking preference for ambiguous speeches in Gradiva? It seems to us not chance, but the necessary sequence from the preliminaries of the tale. It is nothing but the counterpart of the twofold determination of symptoms in so far as the speeches are themselves symptoms and proceed from compromises between the conscious and the unconscious; but one notices this double origin in the speeches more easily than in the acts; and when, as the pliability of the material of conversation often makes possible, each of the two intentions of a speech succeeds by the same arrangement of words in expressing itself well, then there is present what we call an “ambiguity.”

During the psychotherapeutic treatment of a delusion, or an analogous disturbance, one often evolves such ambiguous speeches in patients as new symptoms of the most fleeting duration, and can even succeed in making use of them, whereby, with the meaning intended for the consciousness of the patient, one can, not infrequently, stimulate the understanding for the one valid in the unconscious. I know from experience that among the uninitiate this rôle of ambiguity usually gives the greatest offence, and causes the grossest misunderstanding, but our author was right, at any rate, in representing in his production this characteristic feature of the processes of the formation of dream and delusion.

IV

With Zoë’s entrance as physician there is awakened in us, we said, a new interest. We are eager to learn if such a cure as she accomplishes on Hanold is comprehensible or possible, whether our author has observed the conditions of the passing of a delusion as correctly as those of its development.

Without doubt a view will be advanced denying to the case portrayed by our author such a principal interest, and recognizing no problem requiring an explanation. For Hanold nothing more remains, it might be asserted, but to solve his delusion again, after its object, the supposed Gradiva, conveys to him the incorrectness of all his assertions and gives him the most natural explanations for everything puzzling; for example, how she knows his name. Thereby the affair would be settled logically; as, however, the girl in this case has confessed her love, for the satisfaction of his feminine readers, our author would surely allow the otherwise not uninteresting story to end in the usually happy way, marriage. More consistent, and just as possible, would have been the different conclusion that the young scholar, after the explanation of his mistake, should, with polite thanks, take his leave of the young lady and in that way motivate the rejection of her love so that he might offer an intense interest to ancient women of bronze or stone, or the originals of these, if they were attainable, but might have no idea of how to deal with a girl of flesh and blood of his own time. The archæological fancy was most arbitrarily cemented into a love-story by our author, himself.

In discountenancing this conception as impossible, our attention is first called to the fact that we have to attribute the change beginning in Norbert Hanold not to the relinquishment of the delusion alone. At the same time, indeed before the solution of the latter, there is in him an undeniable awakening of the desire for love, which, of course, results in his asking for the hand of the girl who has freed him from delusion. We have already shown under what pretexts and cloakings, curiosity about her corporeal nature, jealousy, and the brutal male impulse for possession are expressed in him in the midst of the delusion, since repressed desire put the first dream into his mind. Let us add the further testimony that in the evening after the second talk with Gradiva a living woman for the first time seems congenial to him, although he still makes the concession to his abhorrence of honeymoon travellers, by not recognizing the congenial girl as newly married. The next forenoon, however, chance makes him witness of an exchange of caresses between the girl and her supposed brother, and he draws back shyly as if he had disturbed a holy ceremony. Disdain for “Augustus” and “Gretchen” is forgotten and respect for love is restored to him.

Thus our author has connected the treatment of the delusion and the breaking forth of the desire for love most closely with one another, and prepared the outcome in a love-affair as necessary. He knows the nature of the delusion even better than his critics; he knows that a component of amorous desire has combined with a component of resistance in the formation of the delusion, and he has the girl who undertakes the cure discover in Hanold’s delusion the component referring to her. Only this insight can make her decide to devote herself to treating him, only the certainty of knowing herself loved by him can move her to confess to him her love. The treatment consists in restoring to him, from without, the repressed memories which he cannot release from within; it would be ineffective if the therapeutist did not consider the emotions; and the interpretation of the delusion would not finally be: “See; all that means only that you love me.”

The procedure which our author has his Zoë follow for the cure of the delusion of the friend of her youth, shows a considerable resemblance, no, complete agreement, essentially, with a therapeutic method which Dr. J. Breuer and the present writer introduced into medicine in 1895, and to the perfection of which the latter has since devoted himself. This method of treatment, first called the “cathartic” by Breuer, which the present writer has preferred to designate as “analytic,” consists in rather forcibly bringing into the consciousness of the patients who suffer from disturbances analogous to Hanold’s delusion, the unconscious, through the repression of which they have become ill, just as Gradiva does with the repressed memories of their childhood relations. To be sure, accomplishment of this task is easier for Gradiva than for the physician; she is, in this connection, in a position which might be called ideal from many view-points. The physician who does not fathom his patient in advance, and does not possess within himself, as conscious memory, what is working in the patient as unconscious, must call to his aid a complicated technique in order to overcome this disadvantage. He must learn to gather with absolute certainty, from the patient’s conscious ideas and statements, the repressed material in him, to guess the unconscious, when it betrays itself behind the patient’s conscious expressions and acts. The latter then does something similar to what Norbert Hanold did at the end of the story, when he re-translates the name, Gradiva, into Bertgang. The disturbance disappears then by being traced back to its origin; analysis brings cure at the same time.

The similarity between the procedure of Gradiva and the analytic method of psychotherapy is, however, not limited to these two points, making the repressed conscious, and the concurrence of explanation and cure. It extends itself to what proves the essential of the whole change, the awakening of the emotions. Every disturbance analogous to Hanold’s delusion, which in science we usually designate as a psychoneurosis, has, as a preliminary, the repression of part of the emotional life, to speak boldly, of the sex-impulse, and at every attempt to introduce the unconscious and repressed cause of illness into consciousness, the emotional component necessarily awakens to renewed struggle with the forces repressing it, to adjust itself for final result, often under violent manifestations of reaction. In reawakening, in consciousness, of repressed love, the process of recuperation is accomplished when we sum up all the various components of sex-impulse as “love,” and this reawakening is irremissible, for the symptoms on account of which the treatment was undertaken are nothing but the precipitations of former struggles of repression and recurrence and can be solved and washed away only by a new high-tide of these very passions. Every psychoanalytic treatment is an attempt to free repressed love, which has formed a miserable compromise-outlet in a symptom. Yes, the conformity with the therapeutic process pictured by the author in Gradiva reaches its height when we add that even in analytical psychotherapy the reawakened passion, whether love or hate, chooses the person of the physician as its object every time.

Then, of course, appear the differences which make the case of Gradiva an ideal one such as the technique of physicians cannot attain. Gradiva can respond to the love which is pushing through from the unconscious into the conscious; the physician cannot; Gradiva was herself the object of the former repressed love; her person offers at once a desirable object to the freed erotic activity. The physician has been a stranger, and after the cure must try to become a stranger again; often he does not know how to advise the cured patient to apply in life her regained capacity for love. To suggest what resources and makeshifts the physician then employs to approach with more or less success the model of a love-cure which our author has drawn for us, would carry us too far away from our present task.

Now, however, the last question which we have already evaded answering several times. Our views about repression, the formation of delusion and related disturbances, the formation and interpretation of dreams, the rôle of erotic life, and the manner of cure for such disturbances are, of course, not by any means the common property of science, to say nothing of being the possession of educated people. If the insight which makes our author able to create his “Fancy” in such a way that we can analyse it like a real history of disease has for its foundation the above-mentioned knowledge, we should like to find out the source of it. One of the circle who, as was explained at the beginning, was interested in the dreams of Gradiva and their possible interpretation, put the direct question to Wilhelm Jensen, whether any such similar theories of science had been known to him. Our author answered, as was to be expected, in the negative, and rather testily. His imagination had put into his mind the Gradiva in whom he had his joy; any one whom she did not please might leave her alone. He did not suspect how much she had pleased the readers.

It is easily possible that our author’s rejection does not stop at that. Perhaps he denies knowledge of the rules which we have shown that he follows, and disavows all the intentions which we recognized in his production; I do not consider this improbable; then, however, only two possibilities remain. Either we have presented a true caricature of interpretation, by transferring to a harmless work of art tendencies of which its creator had no idea, and have thereby shown again how easy it is to find what one seeks and what one is engrossed with, a possibility of which most strange examples are recorded in the history of literature. Every reader may now decide for himself whether he cares to accept such an explanation; we, of course, hold fast to the other, still remaining view. We think that our author needed to know nothing of such rules and intentions, so that he may disavow them in good faith, and that we have surely found nothing in his romance which was not contained in it. We are probably drawing from the same source, working over the same material, each of us with a different method, and agreement in results seems to vouch for the fact that both have worked correctly. Our procedure consists of the conscious observation of abnormal psychic processes in others, in order to be able to discover and express their laws. Our author proceeds in another way; he directs his attention to the unconscious in his own psyche, listens to its possibilities of development and grants them artistic expression, instead of suppressing them with conscious critique. Thus he learns from himself what we learn from others, what laws the activity of this unconscious must follow, but he does not need to express these laws, need not even recognize them clearly; they are, as a result of his intelligent patience, contained incarnate in his creatures. We unfold these laws by analysis of his fiction as we discover them from cases of real illness, but the conclusion seems irrefutable, that either both (our author, as well as the physician) have misunderstood the unconscious in the same way or we have both understood it correctly. This conclusion is very valuable for us; for its sake, it was worth while for us to investigate the representation of the formation and cure of delusion, as well as the dreams, in Jensen’s Gradiva by the methods of therapeutic psychoanalysis.