Delusion and Dream E-Book

Sigmund Freud

• Herausgeber: Freudian Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist, now known as the father of psychoanalysis. Freud qualified as a doctor of medicine at the University of Vienna in 1881, and then carried out research into cerebral palsy, aphasia and microscopic neuroanatomy at the Vienna General Hospital. Upon completing his habilitation in 1885, he was appointed a docent in neuropathology in the same year and became an affiliated professor (professor extraordinarius) in 1902.In creating psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst, Freud developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association and discovered transference, establishing its central role in the analytic process. Freud's redefinition of sexuality to include its infantile forms led him to formulate the Oedipus complex as the central tenet of psychoanalytical theory. His analysis of dreams as wish-fulfillments provided him with models for the clinical analysis of symptom formation and the mechanisms of repression as well as for elaboration of his theory of the unconscious as an agency disruptive of conscious states of mind. Freud postulated the existence of libido, an energy with which mental processes and structures are invested and which generates erotic attachments, and a death drive, the source of repetition, hate, aggression and neurotic guilt. In his later work Freud developed a wide-ranging interpretation and critique of religion and culture.Psychoanalysis remains influential within psychotherapy, within some areas of psychiatry, and across the humanities. As such, it continues to generate extensive and highly contested debate with regard to its therapeutic efficacy, its scientific status, and whether it advances or is detrimental to the feminist cause. Nonetheless, Freud's work has suffused contemporary Western thought and popular culture. In the words of W. H. Auden's poetic tribute, by the time of Freud's death in 1939, he had become "a whole climate of opinion / under whom we conduct our different lives".

Leseprobe

DELUSION AND DREAM : AN INTERPRETATION IN THE LIGHT OF PSYCHOANALYSIS OF GRADIVA

………………

Sigmund Freud

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

PART I: GRADIVA

PART II: DELUSION AND DREAM

I.

II.

III.

IV.

Footnotes

Cover Credit

INTRODUCTION

………………

Jensen’s brilliant and unique story of Gradiva has not only literary

merit of very high order, but may be said to open up a new field for

romance. It is the story of a young archæologist who suffered a very

characteristic mental disturbance and was gradually but effectively

cured by a kind of native psychotherapeutic instinct, which probably

inheres in all of us, but which in this case was found in the girl he

formerly loved but had forgotten, and who restored at the same time his

health and his old affection for her.

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about the work is that the author

knew nothing of psychotherapy as such, but wrought his way through the

labyrinth of mechanisms that he in a sense rediscovered and set to work,

so that it needed only the application of technical terms to make this

romance at the same time a pretty good key to the whole domain of

psychoanalysis. In a sense it is a dream-story, but no single dream ever

began to be so true to the typical nature of dreams; it is a clinical

picture, but I can think of no clinical picture that had its natural

human interest so enhanced by a moving romance. Gradiva might be an

introduction to psychoanalysis, and is better than anything else we can

think of to popularize it.

It might be added that while this romance has been more thoroughly

analysed than any other, and that by Freud himself, it is really only

one of many which in the literature of the subject have been used to

show forth the mysterious ways of the unconscious. It indicates that

psychoanalysis has a future in literary criticism, if not that all art

and artists have, from the beginning, more or less anticipated as they

now illustrate it.

The translator is thoroughly competent and has done her work with

painstaking conscientiousness, and she has had the great advantage of

having it revised, especially with reference to the translation of

technical terms from the German, by no less an eminent expert in

psychotherapy than Dr. Smith Ely Jelliffe.

G. STANLEY HALL.

………………

PART I: GRADIVA

………………

………………

A POMPEIIAN FANCY

BY

WILHELM JENSEN

………………

On a visit to one of the great antique collections of Rome, Norbert

Hanold had discovered a bas-relief which was exceptionally attractive to

him, so he was much pleased, after his return to Germany, to be able to

get a splendid plaster-cast of it. This had now been hanging for some

years on one of the walls of his work-room, all the other walls of which

were lined with bookcases. Here it had the advantage of a position with

the right light exposure, on a wall visited, though but briefly, by the

evening sun. About one-third life-size, the bas-relief represented a

complete female figure in the act of walking; she was still young, but

no longer in childhood and, on the other hand, apparently not a woman,

but a Roman virgin about in her twentieth year. In no way did she remind

one of the numerous extant bas-reliefs of a Venus, a Diana, or other

Olympian goddess, and equally little of a Psyche or nymph. In her was

embodied something humanly commonplace—not in a bad sense—to a degree

a sense of present time, as if the artist, instead of making a pencil

sketch of her on a sheet of paper, as is done in our day, had fixed her

in a clay model quickly, from life, as she passed on the street, a tall,

slight figure, whose soft, wavy hair a folded kerchief almost completely

bound; her rather slender face was not at all dazzling; and the desire

to produce such effect was obviously equally foreign to her; in the

delicately formed features was expressed a nonchalant equanimity in

regard to what was occurring about her; her eye, which gazed calmly

ahead, bespoke absolutely unimpaired powers of vision and thoughts

quietly withdrawn. So the young woman was fascinating, not at all

because of plastic beauty of form, but because she possessed something

rare in antique sculpture, a realistic, simple, maidenly grace which

gave the impression of imparting life to the relief. This was effected

chiefly by the movement represented in the picture. With her head bent

forward a little, she held slightly raised in her left hand, so that her

sandalled feet became visible, her garment which fell in exceedingly

voluminous folds from her throat to her ankles. The left foot had

advanced, and the right, about to follow, touched the ground only

lightly with the tips of the toes, while the sole and heel were raised

almost vertically. This movement produced a double impression of

exceptional agility and of confident composure, and the flight-like

poise, combined with a firm step, lent her the peculiar grace.

Where had she walked thus and whither was she going? Doctor Norbert

Hanold, docent of archæology, really found in the relief nothing

noteworthy for his science. It was not a plastic production of great art

of the antique times, but was essentially a Roman genre production,

and he could not explain what quality in it had aroused his attention;

he knew only that he had been attracted by something and this effect of

the first view had remained unchanged since then. In order to bestow a

name upon the piece of sculpture, he had called it to himself Gradiva,

“the girl splendid in walking.” That was an epithet applied by the

ancient poets solely to Mars Gradivus, the war-god going out to battle,

yet to Norbert it seemed the most appropriate designation for the

bearing and movement of the young girl, or, according to the expression

of our day, of the young lady, for obviously she did not belong to a

lower class but was the daughter of a nobleman, or at any rate was of

honourable family. Perhaps—her appearance brought the idea to his mind

involuntarily—she might be of the family of a patrician ædile whose

office was connected with the worship of Ceres, and she was on her way

to the temple of the goddess on some errand.

Yet it was contrary to the young archæologist’s feeling to put her in

the frame of great, noisy, cosmopolitan Rome. To his mind, her calm,

quiet manner did not belong in this complex machine where no one heeded

another, but she belonged rather in a smaller place where every one knew

her, and, stopping to glance after her, said to a companion, “That is

Gradiva”—her real name Norbert could not supply—“the daughter of ——,

she walks more beautifully than any other girl in our city.”

As if he had heard it thus with his own ears, the idea had become firmly

rooted in his mind, where another supposition had developed almost into

a conviction. On his Italian journey, he had spent several weeks in

Pompeii studying the ruins; and in Germany, the idea had suddenly come

to him one day that the girl depicted by the relief was walking there,

somewhere, on the peculiar stepping-stones which have been excavated;

these had made a dry crossing possible in rainy weather, but had

afforded passage for chariot-wheels. Thus he saw her putting one foot

across the interstice while the other was about to follow, and as he

contemplated the girl, her immediate and more remote environment rose

before his imagination like an actuality. It created for him, with the

aid of his knowledge of antiquity, the vista of a long street, among the

houses of which were many temples and porticoes. Different kinds of

business and trades, stalls, work-shops, taverns came into view; bakers

had their breads on display; earthenware jugs, set into marble counters,

offered everything requisite for household and kitchen; at the street

corner sat a woman offering vegetables and fruit for sale from baskets;

from a half-dozen large walnuts she had removed half of the shell to

show the meat, fresh and sound, as a temptation for purchasers. Wherever

the eye turned, it fell upon lively colours, gaily painted wall

surfaces, pillars with red and yellow capitals; everything reflected the

glitter and glare of the dazzling noonday sun. Farther off on a high

base rose a gleaming, white statue, above which, in the distance, half

veiled by the tremulous vibrations of the hot air, loomed Mount

Vesuvius, not yet in its present cone shape and brown aridity, but

covered to its furrowed, rocky peak with glistening verdure. In the

street only a few people moved about, seeking shade wherever possible,

for the scorching heat of the summer noon hour paralysed the usually

bustling activities. There Gradiva walked over the stepping-stones and

scared away from them a shimmering, golden-green lizard.

Thus the picture stood vividly before Norbert Hanold’s eyes, but from

daily contemplation of her head, another new conjecture had gradually

arisen. The cut of her features seemed to him, more and more, not Roman

or Latin, but Greek, so that her Hellenic ancestry gradually became for

him a certainty. The ancient settlement of all southern Italy by Greeks

offered sufficient ground for that, and more ideas pleasantly associated

with the settlers developed. Then the young “domina” had perhaps spoken

Greek in her parental home, and had grown up fostered by Greek culture.

Upon closer consideration he found this also confirmed by the expression

of the face, for quite decidedly wisdom and a delicate spirituality lay

hidden beneath her modesty.

These conjectures or discoveries could, however, establish no real

archæological interest in the little relief, and Norbert was well aware

that something else, which no doubt might be under the head of science,

made him return to frequent contemplation of the likeness. For him it

was a question of critical judgment as to whether the artist had

reproduced Gradiva’s manner of walking from life. About that he could

not become absolutely certain, and his rich collection of copies of

antique plastic works did not help him in this matter. The nearly

vertical position of the right foot seemed exaggerated; in all

experiments which he himself made, the movement left his rising foot

always in a much less upright position; mathematically formulated, his

stood, during the brief moment of lingering, at an angle of only

forty-five degrees from the ground, and this seemed to him natural for

the mechanics of walking, because it served the purpose best. Once he

used the presence of a young anatomist friend as an opportunity for

raising the question, but the latter was not able to deliver a definite

decision, as he had made no observations in this connection. He

confirmed the experience of his friend, as agreeing with his own, but

could not say whether a woman’s manner of walking was different from

that of a man, and the question remained unanswered.

In spite of this, the discussion had not been without profit, for it

suggested something that had not formerly occurred to him; namely,

observation from life for the purpose of enlightenment on the matter.

That forced him, to be sure, to a mode of action utterly foreign to him;

women had formerly been for him only a conception in marble or bronze,

and he had never given his feminine contemporaries the least

consideration; but his desire for knowledge transported him into a

scientific passion in which he surrendered himself to the peculiar

investigation which he recognized as necessary. This was hindered by

many difficulties in the human throng of the large city, and results of

the research were to be hoped for only in the less frequented streets.

Yet, even there, long skirts generally made the mode of walking

undiscernible, for almost no one but housemaids wore short skirts and

they, with the exception of a few, because of their heavy shoes could

not well be considered in solving the question. In spite of this he

steadfastly continued his survey in dry, as well as in wet weather; he

perceived that the latter promised the quickest results, for it caused

the ladies to raise their skirts. To many ladies, his searching glances

directed at their feet must have inevitably been quite noticeable;

sometimes a displeased expression of the lady observed showed that she

considered his demeanour a mark of boldness or ill-breeding; sometimes,

as he was a young man of very captivating appearance, the opposite, a

bit of encouragement, was expressed by a pair of eyes. Yet one was as

incomprehensible to him as the other. Gradually his perseverance

resulted in the collection of a considerable number of observations,

which brought to his attention many differences. Some walked slowly,

some fast, some ponderously, some buoyantly. Many let their soles merely

glide over the ground; not many raised them more obliquely to a smarter

position. Among all, however, not a single one presented to view

Gradiva’s manner of walking. That filled him with satisfaction that he

had not been mistaken in his archæological judgment of the relief. On

the other hand, however, his observations caused him annoyance, for he

found the vertical position of the lingering foot beautiful, and

regretted that it had been created by the imagination or arbitrary act

of the sculptor and did not correspond to reality.

Soon after his pedestrian investigations had yielded him this knowledge,

he had, one night, a dream which caused him great anguish of mind. In it

he was in old Pompeii, and on the twenty-fourth of August of the year

79, which witnessed the eruption of Vesuvius. The heavens held the

doomed city wrapped in a black mantle of smoke; only here and there the

flaring masses of flame from the crater made distinguishable, through a

rift, something steeped in blood-red light; all the inhabitants, either

individually or in confused crowd, stunned out of their senses by the

unusual horror, sought safety in flight; the pebbles and the rain of

ashes fell down on Norbert also, but, after the strange manner of

dreams, they did not hurt him, and in the same way, he smelled the

deadly sulphur fumes of the air without having his breathing impeded by

them. As he stood thus at the edge of the Forum near the Jupiter temple,

he suddenly saw Gradiva a short distance in front of him. Until then no

thought of her presence there had moved him, but now suddenly it seemed

natural to him, as she was, of course, a Pompeiian girl, that she was

living in her native city and, without his having any suspicion of it,

was his contemporary. He recognized her at first glance; the stone model

of her was splendidly striking in every detail, even to her gait;

involuntarily he designated this as “lente festinans.” So with buoyant

composure and the calm unmindfulness of her surroundings peculiar to

her, she walked across the flagstones of the Forum to the Temple of

Apollo. She seemed not to notice the impending fate of the city, but to

be given up to her thoughts; on that account he also forgot the

frightful occurrence, for at least a few moments, and because of a

feeling that the living reality would quickly disappear from him again,

he tried to impress it accurately on his mind. Then, however, he became

suddenly aware that if she did not quickly save herself, she must perish

in the general destruction, and violent fear forced from him a cry of

warning. She heard it, too, for her head turned toward him so that her

face now appeared for a moment in full view, yet with an utterly

uncomprehending expression; and, without paying any more attention to

him, she continued in the same direction as before. At the same time,

her face became paler as if it were changing to white marble; she

stepped up to the portico of the Temple, and then, between the pillars,

she sat down on a step and slowly laid her head upon it. Now the pebbles

were falling in such masses that they condensed into a completely opaque

curtain; hastening quickly after her, however, he found his way to the

place where she had disappeared from his view, and there she lay,

protected by the projecting roof, stretched out on the broad step, as if

for sleep, but no longer breathing, apparently stifled by the sulphur

fumes. From Vesuvius the red glow flared over her countenance, which,

with closed eyes, was exactly like that of a beautiful statue. No fear

nor distortion was apparent, but a strange equanimity, calmly submitting

to the inevitable, was manifest in her features. Yet they quickly became

more indistinct as the wind drove to the place the rain of ashes, which

spread over them, first like a grey gauze veil, then extinguished the

last glimpse of her face, and soon, like a Northern winter snowfall,

buried the whole figure under a smooth cover. Outside, the pillars of

the Temple of Apollo rose, now, however, only half of them, for the grey

fall of ashes heaped itself likewise against them.

When Norbert Hanold awoke, he still heard the confused cries of the

Pompeiians who were seeking safety, and the dully resounding boom of the

surf of the turbulent sea. Then he came to his senses; the sun cast a

golden gleam of light across his bed; it was an April morning and

outside sounded the various noises of the city, cries of venders, and

the rumbling of vehicles. Yet the dream picture still stood most

distinctly in every detail before his open eyes, and some time was

necessary before he could get rid of a feeling that he had really been

present at the destruction on the bay of Naples, that night nearly two

thousand years ago. While he was dressing, he first became gradually

free from it, yet he did not succeed, even by the use of critical

thought, in breaking away from the idea that Gradiva had lived in

Pompeii and had been buried there in 79. Rather, the former conjecture

had now become to him an established certainty, and now the second also

was added. With woful feeling he now viewed in his living-room the old

relief which had assumed new significance for him. It was, in a way, a

tombstone by which the artist had preserved for posterity the likeness

of the girl who had so early departed this life. Yet if one looked at

her with enlightened understanding, the expression of her whole being

left no doubt that, on that fateful night, she had actually lain down to

die with just such calm as the dream had showed. An old proverb says

that the darlings of the gods are taken from the earth in the full

vigour of youth.

Without having yet put on a collar, in morning array, with slippers on

his feet, Norbert leaned on the open window and gazed out. The spring,

which had finally arrived in the north also, was without, but announced

itself in the great quarry of the city only by the blue sky and the soft

air, yet a foreboding of it reached the senses, and awoke in remote,

sunny places a desire for leaf-green, fragrance and bird song; a breath

of it came as far as this place; the market women on the street had

their baskets adorned with a few, bright wild flowers, and at an open

window, a canary in a cage warbled his song. Norbert felt sorry for the

poor fellow for, beneath the clear tone, in spite of the joyful note, he

heard the longing for freedom and the open.

Yet the thoughts of the young archæologist dallied but briefly there,

for something else had crowded into them. Not until then had he become

aware that in the dream he had not noticed exactly whether the living

Gradiva had really walked as the piece of sculpture represented her, and

as the women of to-day, at any rate, did not walk. That was remarkable

because it was the basis of his scientific interest in the relief; on

the other hand, it could be explained by his excitement over the danger

to her life. He tried, in vain, however, to recall her gait.

Then suddenly something like a thrill passed through him; in the first

moment he could not say whence. But then he realized; down in the

street, with her back toward him, a female, from figure and dress

undoubtedly a young lady, was walking along with easy, elastic step. Her

dress, which reached only to her ankles, she held lifted a little in her

left hand, and he saw that in walking the sole of her slender foot, as

it followed, rose for a moment vertically on the tips of the toes. It

appeared so, but the distance and the fact that he was looking down did

not admit of certainty.

Quickly Norbert Hanold was in the street without yet knowing exactly how

he had come there. He had, like a boy sliding down a railing, flown like

lightning down the steps, and was running down among the carriages,

carts and people. The latter directed looks of wonder at him, and from

several lips came laughing, half mocking exclamations. He was unaware

that these referred to him; his glance was seeking the young lady and he

thought that he distinguished her dress a few dozen steps ahead of him,

but only the upper part; of the lower half, and of her feet, he could

perceive nothing, for they were concealed by the crowd thronging on the

sidewalk.

Now an old, comfortable, vegetable woman stretched her hand toward his

sleeve, stopped him and said, half grinning, “Say, my dear, you probably

drank a little too much last night, and are you looking for your bed

here in the street? You would do better to go home and look at yourself

in the mirror.”

A burst of laughter from those near by proved it true that he had shown

himself in garb not suited to public appearance, and brought him now to

realization that he had heedlessly run from his room. That surprised him

because he insisted upon conventionality of attire and, forsaking his

project, he quickly returned home, apparently, however, with his mind

still somewhat confused by the dream and dazed by illusion, for he had

perceived that, at the laughter and exclamation, the young lady had

turned her head a moment, and he thought he had seen not the face of a

stranger, but that of Gradiva looking down upon him.

………………

Because of considerable property, Doctor Norbert Hanold was in the

pleasant position of being unhampered master of his own acts and wishes

and, upon the appearance of any inclination, of not depending for expert

counsel about it on any higher court than his own decision. In this way

he differed most favourably from the canary, who could only warble out,

without success, his inborn impulse to get out of the cage into the

sunny open. Otherwise, however, the young archæologist resembled the

latter in many respects. He had not come into the world and grown up in

natural freedom, but already at birth had been hedged in by the grating

with which family tradition, by education and predestination, had

surrounded him. From his early childhood no doubt had existed in his

parents’ house that he, as the only son of a university professor and

antiquarian, was called upon to preserve, if possible to exalt, by that

very activity the glory of his father’s name; so this business

continuity had always seemed to him the natural task of his future. He

had clung loyally to it even after the early deaths of his parents had

left him absolutely alone; in connection with his brilliantly passed

examination in philology, he had taken the prescribed student trip to

Italy and had seen in the original a number of old works of art whose

imitations, only, had formerly been accessible to him. Nothing more

instructive for him than the collections of Florence, Rome, Naples could

be offered anywhere; he could furnish evidence that the period of his

stay there had been used excellently for the enrichment of his

knowledge, and he had returned home fully satisfied to devote himself

with the new acquisitions to his science. That besides these objects

from the distant past, the present still existed round about him, he

felt only in the most shadowy way; for his feelings marble and bronze

were not dead, but rather the only really vital thing which expressed

the purpose and value of human life; and so he sat in the midst of his

walls, books and pictures, with no need of any other intercourse, but

whenever possible avoiding the latter as an empty squandering of time

and only very reluctantly submitting occasionally to an inevitable

party, attendance at which was required by the connections handed down

from his parents. Yet it was known that at such gatherings he was

present without eyes or ears for his surroundings, and as soon as it was

any way permissible, he always took his leave, under some pretext, at

the end of the lunch or dinner, and on the street he greeted none of

those whom he had sat with at the table. That served, especially with

young ladies, to put him in a rather unfavourable light; for upon

meeting even a girl with whom he had, by way of exception, spoken a few

words, he looked at her without a greeting as at a quite unknown person

whom he had never seen. Although perhaps archæology, in itself, might be

a rather curious science and although its alloy had effected a

remarkable amalgamation with Norbert Hanold’s nature, it could not

exercise much attraction for others and afforded even him little

enjoyment in life according to the usual views of youth. Yet with a

perhaps kindly intent Nature had added to his blood, without his knowing

of the possession, a kind of corrective of a thoroughly unscientific

sort, an unusually lively imagination which was present not only in

dreams, but often in his waking hours, and essentially made his mind not

preponderantly adapted to strict research method devoid of interest.

From this endowment, however, originated another similarity between him

and the canary. The latter was born in captivity, had never known

anything else than the cage which confined him in narrow quarters, but

he had an inner feeling that something was lacking to him, and sounded

from his throat his desire for the unknown. Thus Norbert Hanold

understood it, pitied him for it, returned to his room, leaned again

from the window and was thereupon moved by a feeling that he, too,

lacked a nameless something. Meditation on it, therefore, could be of no

use. The indefinite stir of emotion came from the mild, spring air, the

sunbeams and the broad expanse with its fragrant breath, and formed a

comparison for him; he was likewise sitting in a cage behind a grating.

Yet this idea was immediately followed by the palliating one that his

position was more advantageous than that of the canary, for he had in

his possession wings which were hindered by nothing from flying out into

the open at his pleasure.

But that was an idea which developed more upon reflection. Norbert gave

himself up for a time to this occupation, yet it was not long before the

project of a spring journey assumed definite shape. This he carried out