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

“I said to myself that I should certainly dig up something interesting alone here. Of course, I had not reckoned at all on the find which I made.” (G. p. 92.) At the end (G. p. 108), the girl answers to the announced desire about the destination of their journey, “by her childhood friend who had, in a way, also been excavated from the ashes.”

Thus we find at the very beginning of the performances of Hanold’s fancies and actions, a twofold determination, a derivation from two different sources. One determination is the one which appears to Hanold, himself; the other, the one which discloses itself to us upon re-examination of his psychic processes. One, the conscious one, is related to the person of Hanold; the other is the one entirely unconscious to him. One originates entirely from the series of associations connected with archæological science; the other, however, proceeds from the repressed memories which have become active in him, and the emotional impulses attached to them. The one seems superficial, and covers up the other, which masks itself behind the former. One might say that the scientific motivation serves the unconscious eroticism as cloak, and that science has placed itself completely at the service of the delusion, but one may not forget, either, that the unconscious determination can effect nothing but what is at the time satisfactory to the scientific conscious. The symptoms of delusion – fancies as well as acts – are results of a compromise between two psychic streams, and in a compromise the demands of each of the two parties are considered; each party has been obliged to forego something that he wished to carry out. Where a compromise has been established, there was a struggle, here the conflict assumed by us between the suppressed eroticism and the forces which keep it alive in the repression. In the formation of a delusion this struggle is never ended.

Attack and resistance are renewed after every compromise-formation, which is, so to speak, never fully satisfactory. This our author also knows and therefore he causes a feeling of discontent, a peculiar restlessness, to dominate his hero in this phase of the disturbance, as preliminary to and guarantee of further developments.

These significant peculiarities of the twofold determination for fancies and decisions, of the formation of conscious pretexts for actions, for the motivation of which the repressed has given the greater contribution, will, in the further progress of the story, occur to us oftener, and perhaps more clearly; and this rightfully, for in this Jensen has grasped and represented the never-failing, chief characteristic of the morbid psychic processes. 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. Briefly, can our author’s representation of the genesis of a delusion stand before the judgment of science?

And here we must give the perhaps unexpected answer that, unfortunately, 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 alone3– 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.)