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

“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.” (G. p. 70.) Melancholy is suited to one so long dead, who has now returned to life for a few short hours.

We begin now to understand and to hope. If the young lady, in whose form Gradiva is again revived, accepts Hanold’s delusion so completely, she does it probably to free him from it. No other course is open; by opposition, one would destroy that possibility. Even the serious treatment of a real condition of this kind could proceed no differently than to place itself first on the ground story of the delusion-structure, and investigate it then as thoroughly as possible. If Zoë is the right person, we shall soon learn how one cures delusions like those of our hero. We should also like to know how such a delusion originates. It would be very striking, and yet not without example and parallel, if the treatment and investigation of the delusion should coincide and, while it is being analysed, result in the explanation of its origin. We have a suspicion, of course, that our case might then turn out to be an “ordinary” love story, but one may not scorn love as a healing power for delusions; and was not our hero’s captivation by the Gradiva-relief also a complete infatuation, directed, to be sure, at the past and lifeless?

After Gradiva’s disappearance, there is heard once more a distant sound like the merry note of a bird flying over the city of ruins. The man who has remained behind picks up something white, which Gradiva has left, not a papyrus leaf, but a sketch-book with pencil drawings of Pompeii. We should say that the fact that she has forgotten the little book, in this place, is a pledge of her return, for we assert that one forgets nothing without a secret reason or a hidden motive.

The remainder of the day brings to our hero all sorts of remarkable discoveries and facts, which he neglects to fit together. In the wall of the portico where Gradiva disappeared, he notices to-day a narrow cleft, which is, however, wide enough to afford passage to an unusually slender figure. He recognizes the fact that Zoë-Gradiva does not need to sink into the ground here, an idea which is so senseless that he is now ashamed of the discarded belief, but that she uses this route to go back to her tomb. A faint shadow seems to him to dissolve at the end of the Street of Tombs, before the so-called Villa of Diomede. Dizzy, as on the previous day, and occupied with the same problem, he wanders now about Pompeii, wondering of what physical nature Zoë-Gradiva may be and whether one might feel anything if one touched her hand. A peculiar impulse urges him to undertake this experiment, and yet an equally great timidity in connection with the idea restrains him. On a hot, sunny slope he meets an older man who, from his equipment, must be a zoologist or a botanist, and seems to be busy catching things. The latter turns to him and says: “Are you interested in Faraglionensis? I should hardly have supposed it, but it seems thoroughly probable that they are found, not only in the Faraglioni of Capri, but also dwell permanently on the mainland. The method suggested by my colleague, Eimer, is really good; I have already used it often with the best of success. Please remain quite still.” (G. p. 74.) The speaker stops talking then, and holds a little snare, made of a long grass-blade, before a narrow crevice, from which the blue, chatoyant, little head of a lizard peeps. 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. As he continues his wandering, a side street leads him to a house not previously discovered by him; this proves to be the “Albergo del Sole.” The hotel-keeper, who is not busy, avails himself of the opportunity to recommend highly his house and the excavated treasures in it. He asserts that he was present when there were found near the Forum the young lovers who, on realizing their inevitable destruction, had clasped each other in firm embrace and thus awaited death. Hanold has already heard of that before, and shrugged his shoulders over it, as a fabulous invention of some especially imaginative narrator, but to-day the words of the hotel-keeper awaken in him credulity, which soon stretches itself more when the former brings forth a metal brooch encrusted with green patina, which, in his presence, was gathered, with the remains of the girl, from the ashes. He secures this brooch without further critical consideration, and when, as he is leaving the hotel, he sees in an open window, nodding down, a cluster of white asphodel blossoms, the sight of the grave-flower thrills him as an attestation of the genuineness of his new possession.

With this brooch, however, a new delusion takes possession of him or, rather, the old one continues for a while, apparently not a good omen for the treatment which has been started. Not far from the Forum a couple of young lovers were excavated in an embrace, and in the dream he saw Gradiva lie down to sleep in that very neighbourhood, at the Apollo temple. Was it not possible that in reality she went still farther from the Forum to meet there some one with whom she then died?

A tormenting feeling, which we can perhaps compare to jealousy, originates from this supposition. He appeases it by referring to the uncertainty of the combination, and so far regains his senses as to be able to have his evening meal in “Hotel Diomed.” His attention is attracted by two newly arrived guests, a man and a woman, whom, because of a certain resemblance, he considers brother and sister – in spite of the difference in the colour of their hair. They are the first people whom he has encountered on this trip who seem possibly congenial. A red Sorrento rose, which the young girl wears, awakes in him some memory – he cannot recall what. 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.

In spite of all this ghostly visitation, he awakes rather cleared and settled mentally. A rose-bush, which bears flowers of the kind that he noticed yesterday on the young lady, recalls to him that in the night some one said that in the spring one gave roses. He plucks some of the roses involuntarily, and there must be some association with these which has a liberating effect upon his mind. Rid of his aversion to human beings, he takes the customary road to Pompeii, laden with the roses, the brooch and the sketch-book, and occupied by the different problems relating to Gradiva. The old delusion has become full of flaws; he already doubts if she is permitted to stay in Pompeii in the noon hour only, and not at other times. Emphasis, on that account, is transferred to the object recently acquired, and the jealousy connected with it torments him in all sorts of disguises. He might almost wish that the apparition should remain visible to only his eyes and escape the notice of others; in that way, he might consider her his exclusive property. During his ramble awaiting the noon hour he has a surprising encounter. In the Casa del Fauno he happens upon two people who doubtless believe themselves undiscoverable in a nook, for they are embracing each other and their lips meet. With amazement he recognizes in them the congenial couple of yesterday evening; but for brother and sister their present position, the embrace and the kiss are of too long duration. So it is a couple of lovers, probably a young bridal couple, another Augustus and Gretchen. Strange to relate, the sight of this now arouses in him nothing but pleasure, and fearful, as if he had disturbed a secret act of devotion, he withdraws unobserved. A deference which has long been lacking in him has been restored.

Arriving at Meleager’s house, he is afraid that he may find Gradiva in the company of another man, and becomes so excited about it that he can find no other greeting for her than the question: “Are you alone?” With difficulty she makes him realize that he has picked the roses for her; he confesses to her the latest delusion, that she is the girl who was found in the Forum in her lover’s embrace and to whom the green brooch had belonged. Not without mockery, she inquires if he found the piece in the sun. The latter – here called “Sole” – brings to light many things of that sort. As cure for the dizziness which he admits, she proposes to him to share a lunch with her and offers him half of a piece of white bread wrapped in tissue paper; the other half of this she consumes with apparent appetite. Thereat her faultless teeth gleam between her lips and, in biting the crust, cause a slight crunching sound. To her remark, “It seems to me as if we had already eaten our bread thus together once two thousand years ago. Can’t you remember it?” (G. p. 88.) he cannot answer, but the strengthening of his mind by the nourishment, and all the evidences of present time in her do not fail to have effect on him. Reason stirs in him and makes him doubt the whole delusion that Gradiva is only a noonday ghost; on the other hand, there is the objection that she, herself, has just said that she had already shared her repast with him two thousand years ago. As a means of settling this conflict there occurs to him an experiment which he executes with slyness and restored courage. Her left hand, with its slender fingers, is resting on her knees, and one of the house-flies, about whose boldness and worthlessness he formerly became so indignant, alights on this hand. Suddenly Hanold’s hand rises and claps, with no gentle stroke, on the fly and on Gradiva’s hand. This bold experiment affords him twofold success: first the joyous conviction that he actually touched a really living, warm hand, then, however, a reprimand, before which he starts up in terror from his seat on the step. For from Gradiva’s lips come the words, after she has recovered from her amazement, “You are surely apparently crazy, Norbert Hanold.”

Calling a person by name is recognized as the best method of awakening him, when he is sleeping, or of awakening a somnambulist. Unfortunately we are not permitted to observe the results, for Norbert Hanold, of Gradiva’s calling his name, which he had told to no one in Pompeii. For at this critical moment, the congenial lovers appear from the Casa del Fauno and the young lady calls, in a tone of pleasant surprise, “Zoë! You here, too? and also on your honeymoon? You have not written me a word about it, you know.” Before this new proof of the living reality of Gradiva, Hanold flees.

Zoë-Gradiva, too, is not most pleasantly surprised by the unexpected visit which disturbs her, it seems, in an important piece of work. Soon composed, she answers the question with a glib speech, in which she informs her friend, and especially us, about the situation; and thereby she knows how to get rid of the young couple. She extends her compliments, but she is not on her wedding-trip. “The young man who just went out is labouring also under a remarkable delusion; it seems to me that he believes a fly is buzzing in his head; well, every one has, of course, some kind of bee in his bonnet. As is my duty, I have some knowledge of entomology and can, therefore, be of a little service in such cases. My father and I live in the ‘Sole’; he, too, had a sudden and pleasing idea of bringing me here with him if I would be responsible for my own entertainment and make no demands upon him. 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 – I mean the good fortune of meeting you, Gisa.” (G. p. 92.) Zoë now feels obliged to leave at once, to be company for her father at the “Sole.” So she goes, after she has introduced herself to us as the daughter of the zoologist and lizard-catcher, and has admitted in ambiguous words her therapeutic intentions and other secret ones. The direction which she takes is not that of the “Sun Hotel,” in which her father is awaiting her, but it seems to her, too, that in the region of the Villa of Diomede a shadowy form is seeking its burial-place and disappears under one of the monuments; therefore, with foot poised each time almost perpendicularly, she directs her steps to the Street of Tombs. Thither, in shame and confusion, Hanold has fled, and is wandering up and down in the portico of the court without stopping, occupied with settling the rest of his problem by mental efforts. One thing has become unimpeachably clear to him; that he was utterly foolish and irrational to believe that he communed with a young Pompeiian girl who had become more or less physically alive again; and this clear insight into his madness forms incontestably an essential bit of progress in the return to sound reason. On the other hand, however, this living girl, with whom other people also communicate, as with one of a corporeal reality like theirs, is Gradiva, and she knows his name; for the solution of this riddle his scarcely awakened reason is not strong enough. Emotionally, also, he is not calm enough to be equal to so difficult a task, for he would most gladly have been buried two thousand years ago in the Villa of Diomede, only to be sure of never meeting Zoë-Gradiva again. A violent longing to see her struggles meanwhile with the remnants of the inclination to flee, which has persisted in him.

Turning at one of the four corners of the colonnade, he suddenly recoils. On a fragmentary wall-ruin there sits one of the girls who met death here in the Villa of Diomede; but that attempt to take refuge again in the realm of madness is soon put aside; no, it is Gradiva, who has apparently come to give him the last bit of her treatment. She interprets rightly his first instinctive movement to flee, as an attempt to leave the place, and points out to him that he cannot escape, for outside a frightful cloudburst is in progress. The merciless girl begins the examination with the question as to what he intended in connection with the fly on her hand. He does not find courage to make use of a definite pronoun, but acquires the more valuable kind needed to put the deciding question.

“I was – as they say – somewhat confused mentally and ask pardon that I – the hand – in that way – how I could be so stupid, I can’t understand – but I can’t understand either how its owner could use my name in upbraiding me for my – my madness.” (G. p. 98.)

“Your power of understanding has not yet progressed that far, Norbert Hanold. Of course, I cannot be surprised, for you have long ago accustomed me to it. To make that discovery again, I should not have needed to come to Pompeii, and you could have confirmed it for me a good hundred miles nearer.”

“A good hundred miles nearer; diagonally across from your house, in the corner house; in my window, in a cage, is a canary,” she discloses to the still bewildered man.

This last word touches the hero like a memory from afar. That is surely the same bird whose song has suggested to him the trip to Italy.

“In that house lives my father, Richard Bertgang, professor of zoology.”

As his neighbour, therefore, she is acquainted with him and his name. It seems as if the disappointment of a superficial solution is threatening us – a solution unworthy of our expectations.

As yet Norbert Hanold shows no regained independence of thought, when he repeats, “Then are you – are you Miss Zoë Bertgang? But she looked quite different – ”

Miss Bertgang’s answer shows then that other relations besides those of neighbourliness have existed between them. She knows how to intercede for the familiar manner of address, which he has, of course, used to the noonday spirit, but withdrawn again from the living girl; she makes former privileges of use to her here. “If you find that form of address more suitable between us, I can use it too, you know, but the other came to me more naturally. I don’t know whether I looked different when we used to run about before with each other as friends, every day, and occasionally beat and cuffed each other for a change, but if, in recent years, you had favoured me with even one glance you might perhaps have seen that I have looked like this for a long time.”

A childhood friendship had therefore existed between the two, perhaps a childhood love, from which the familiar form of address derived its justification. Isn’t this solution perhaps as superficial as the one first supposed? The fact that it occurs to us that this childhood relation explains in an unexpected way so many details of what has occurred in the present intercourse between them makes the matter essentially deeper. Does it not seem that the blow on Zoë-Gradiva’s hand which Norbert Hanold has so splendidly motivated by the necessity of solving, experimentally, the question of the physical existence of the apparition, is, from another standpoint, remarkably similar to a revival of the impulse for “beating and cuffing,” whose sway in childhood Zoë’s words have testified to? 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? Then they would, therefore, be no arbitrary products of his imagination, but determined, without his knowing it, by the existing material of childhood impressions already forgotten, but still active in him. We must be able to point out in detail the origin of these fancies, even if only by conjecture. If, for instance, Gradiva must be of pure Greek ancestry, the daughter of a respected man, perhaps of a priest of Ceres, that predisposes us fairly well for an after-effect of the knowledge of her Greek name – Zoë, and of her membership in the family of a professor of zoology. If, however, these fancies of Hanold’s are transformed memories, we may expect to find in the disclosures of Zoë Bertgang, the suggestion of the sources of these fancies. Let us listen; she tells us of an intimate friendship of childhood; we shall soon learn what further development this childhood relation had in both.

“Then up to the time when people call us ‘Backfisch,’ for some unknown reason, I had really acquired a remarkable attachment for you, and thought that I could never find a more pleasing friend in the world. Mother, sister, or brother I had not, you know; to my father a slow-worm in alcohol was far more interesting than I, and people (I count girls such) must surely have something with which they can occupy their thoughts and the like. Then you were that something, but when archæology overcame you, I made the discovery that you – excuse the familiarity, but your new formality sounds absurd to me – I was saying that I imagined that you had become an intolerable person, who had no longer, at least for me, an eye in his head, a tongue in his mouth, nor any of the memories that I retained of our childhood friendship. So I probably looked different from what I did formerly, for when, occasionally, I met you at a party, even last winter, you did not look at me and I did not hear your voice; in this, of course, there was nothing that marked me out especially, for you treated all the others in the same way. To you I was but air, and you, with your shock of light hair, which I had formerly pulled so often, were as boresome, dry and tongue-tied as a stuffed cockatoo and at the same time as grandiose as an – archæopteryx; I believe the excavated antediluvian bird-monster is so called; but that your head harboured an imagination so magnificent as here in Pompeii to consider me as something excavated and restored to life – I had not surmised that of you, and when you suddenly stood before me unexpectedly, it cost me some effort at first to understand what kind of incredible fancy your imagination had invented. Then I was amused and, in spite of its madness, it was not entirely displeasing to me. For, as I said, I had not expected it of you.” (G. p. 101.)

So she thus tells us clearly enough what, with the years, has become of the childhood friendship for both of them. With her it expanded into an intense love affair, for one must have something, you know, to which one, that is, a girl, pins her affections. Miss Zoë, the incarnation of cleverness and clarity, makes her psychic life, too, quite transparent for us. If it is already the general rule for a normal girl that she first turns her affection to her father, she is especially ready to do it, she who has no one but her father in her family; but this father has nothing left for her; the objects of science have captured all his interest. 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. Where do we get justification for this little psychological analysis, which may easily seem autocratic? In a single, but intensely characteristic detail the author of the romance gives it to us. When Zoë pictures for us the transformation of the playmate of her youth, which seems so sad for her, she insults him by a comparison with the archæopteryx, that bird-monster which belongs to the archæology of zoology. So she has found a single concrete expression for identifying the two people; her resentment strikes the beloved as well as the father with the same word. The archæopteryx is, so to speak, the compromise, or intermediary representation in which the folly of her beloved coincides with her thought of an analogous folly of her father.

With the young man, things have taken a different turn. The science of antiquity overcame him and left to him interest only in the women of bronze and stone. The childhood friendship died, instead of developing into a passion, and the memories of it passed into such absolute forgetfulness that he does not recognize nor pay any attention to the friend of his youth, when he meets her in society. Of course, when we continue our observations, we may doubt if “forgetfulness” is the right psychological term for the fate of these memories of our archæologist. There is a kind of forgetting which distinguishes itself by the difficulty with which the memory is awakened, even by strong objective appeals, as if a subjective resistance struggled against the revival. Such forgetting has received the name “repression” in psychopathology; the case which Jensen has presented to us seems to be an example of repression. Now we do not know, in general, whether, in psychic life, forgetting an impression is connected with the destruction of its memory-trace; about repression we can assert with certainty that it does not coincide with the destruction, the obliteration, of the memory. The repressed material cannot, as a rule, break through, of itself, as a memory, but remains potent and effective. Some day, under external influence, it causes psychic results which one may accept as products of transformation or as remnants of forgotten memories; and if one does not view them as such, they remain incomprehensible. In the fancies of Norbert Hanold about Gradiva, we thought we recognized already the remnants of the repressed memories of his childhood friendship with Zoë Bertgang. Quite legitimately one may expect such a recurrence of the repressed material, if the man’s erotic feelings cling to the repressed ideas, if his erotic life has been involved in the repression. Then there is truth in the old Latin proverb which was perhaps originally aimed at expulsion through external influences, not at inner conflict: “You may drive out natural disposition with a two-pronged fork, but it will always return,” but it does not tell all, announces only the fact of the recurrence of repressed material, and does not describe at all the most remarkable manner of this recurrence, which is accomplished as if by malicious treason; the very thing which has been chosen as a means of repression – like the “two-pronged fork” of the proverb – becomes the carrier of the thing recurring; in and behind the agencies of repression the material repressed finally asserts itself victoriously. A well-known etching by Félicien Rops illustrates this fact, which is generally overlooked and lacks acceptance, more impressively than many explanations could; and he does it in the typical case of the repression in the lives of saints and penitents. From the temptations of the world, an ascetic monk has sought refuge in the image of the crucified Saviour. Then, phantom-like, this cross sinks and, in its stead, there rises shining, the image of a voluptuous, unclad woman, in the same position of the crucifixion. Other painters of less psychological insight have, in such representations of temptation, depicted sin as bold and triumphant, near the Saviour on the cross. Rops, alone, has allowed it to take the place of the Saviour on the cross; he seems to have known that the thing repressed proceeds, at its recurrence, from the agency of repression itself.

If Norbert Hanold were a living person, who had, by means of archæology, driven love and the memory of his childhood friendship out of his life, it would now be legitimate and correct that an antique relief should awaken in him the forgotten memory of the girl beloved in his childhood; it would be his well-deserved fate to have fallen in love with the stone representation of Gradiva, behind which, by virtue of an unexplained resemblance, the living and neglected Zoë becomes effective.

Miss Zoë, herself, seems to share our conception of the delusion of the young archæologist, for the pleasure which she expresses at the end of her “unreserved, detailed and instructive lecture” is hardly based on anything other than her readiness to refer his entire interest in Gradiva to her person. This is exactly what she does not believe him capable of, and what, in spite of all the disguises of the delusion, she recognizes as such. Her psychic treatment of him has a beneficent effect; he feels himself free, as the delusion is now replaced by that of which it can be only a distorted and unsatisfactory copy. He immediately remembers and recognizes her as his good, cheerful, clever comrade who has not changed essentially; but he finds something else most strange —

“That a person must die to become alive again,” says the girl, “but for archæologists that is of course necessary.” (G. p. 102.) She has apparently not yet pardoned him for the détour which he made from the childhood friendship through the science of antiquity to this relation which has recently been established.

“No, I mean your name – Because Bertgang has the same meaning as Gradiva and signifies ‘the one splendid in walking.’” (G. p. 102.)

Even we are not prepared for that. Our hero begins to rise from his humility and to play an active rôle. He is, apparently, entirely cured of his delusion, lifted far above it, and proves this by tearing asunder the last threads of the web of delusion. Patients, also, who have been freed from the compulsion of their delusion, by the disclosure of the repression behind it, always act in just that way. When they have once understood, they themselves offer the solutions for the last and most significant riddles of their strange condition in suddenly emerging ideas. We had already believed, of course, that the Greek ancestry of the mythical Gradiva was an after-effect of the Greek name, Zoë, but with the name, Gradiva, we had ventured nothing; we had supposed it the free creation of Norbert Hanold’s imagination, and behold! this very name now shows itself to be a remnant, really a translation of the repressed family-name of the supposedly forgotten beloved of his youth.

The derivation and solution of the delusion are now completed. What follows may well serve as a harmonious conclusion of the tale. In regard to the future, it can have only a pleasant effect on us, if the rehabilitation of the man, who formerly had to play the lamentable rôle of one needing to be cured, progresses, and he succeeds in awakening in the girl some of the emotions which he formerly experienced. Thus it happens that he makes her jealous by mentioning the congenial young lady, who disturbed them in Meleager’s house, and by the acknowledgment that the latter was the first girl who had impressed him much. When Zoë is then about to take a cool departure, with the remark that now everything is reasonable again, she herself not least of all, that he might look up Gisa Hartleben, or whatever her name might now be, and be of scientific assistance to her about the purpose of her stay in Pompeii, but she has to go now to the “Albergo del Sole” where her father is already waiting for her at lunch, perhaps they may see each other again some time at a party in Germany or on the moon, he seizes upon the troublesome fly as a means of taking possession of her cheek, first, and then of her lips, and assumes the aggressive, which is the duty of a man in the game of love. Only once more does a shadow seem to fall on their happiness, when Zoë reminds him that now she must really go to her father, who will otherwise starve in the “Sole.” “Your father – what will he – ?” (G. p. 106.)