In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

A second opinion on delusions and dreams. A reading of Freud's interpretation of Jensen Nora Crow Jaffe The North German playwright and novelist Wilhelm Jensen (1837-1911), a respected writer but one who had aroused no extraordinary interest, published in 1903 a short novel, Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fancy. Though Freud and Jung had not yet met, Jung called Freud's attention to the novel; and in 1907, Freud published a long commentary entitled Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's "Gradiva," written expressly to please his new acquaintance.1 If the novel had done no more than encourage the collaboration of Freud and Jung, it would have been significant enough. But this slight and charming book accomplished much more: it provided the occasion for Freud to articulate his concept of delusion and his images of both patient and healer in a richly suggestive literary context. An important difference exists between Freud's perception of delusion , patient, and healer and the view of these phenomena that I think Jensen wishes his readers to take. It consists in Jensen's implications that delusion and the imaginative powers that lie behind it are sometimes beneficent, not malign; that his hero-patient is not wholly cured of delusion by the end, as Freud seems to claim; and that his lover-physician would be wrong even to attempt such a total cure. Jensen's novel throws light on the value of imaginative truth that literary art can bring to the medical sciences, and in fact to all sciences that owe their allegiance to "reality." This imaginative truth can be decried by the physician as "delusion," scoffed at by the casual observer as "illusion," or appreciated by the sympathetic listener as the stuff of "fiction" itself. Jensen's view of imaginative truth, though uniquely highlighted by its juxtaposition with the medical commentary by Freud, is shared by an astonishing range of major literary artists writing in all periods and genres. 102 A SECOND OPINION ON DELUSIONS AND DREAMS Norbert Hanold, the hero-patient of Jensen's Gradiva, falls in love with an ancient Roman bas-relief depicting a girl with one foot poised in what he thinks is a peculiar and especially graceful position. Drawn irresistibly to Pompeii, where he imagines that the girl once lived and where he hopes to find traces of her footprints in the dust, he succumbs to the delusion that he has discovered his long-dead love in the person of a ghost who possesses the same strange and beautiful walk. The "ghost," Zoe Bertgang, is really a childhood friend of Norbert's, though beneath his devotion to the study of archeology, he has buried his memory of her. She perceives his delusion and assumes the role of physician in order to cure him. Freud claims that Zoe's interest in the case is awakened by her recognition that the delusion stems from Norbert's repressed love for her. In the commentary he writes: "Fräulein Zoe seems herself to have shared our view of the young archaeologist's delusion, for the satisfaction she expressed at the end of her 'frank, detailed and instructive speech of castigation' could scarcely have been based on anything but a recognition that from the very first his interest in Gradiva [the name Norbert has given to the bas-relief] had related to herself."2 But Zoe's own words to Norbert in the novel seem to me to explain the intensity of her reaction better: "but that your head harbored an imagination so magnificent as here in Pompeii to consider me something excavated and restored to life— I had not surmised that of you."3 I agree with Freud that Zoe undertakes to cure Norbert of the parts of the delusion that stand in their way as lovers—his beliefs, for example, that she cannot speak or that she is not flesh and blood; but it seems to me that she appreciates and even encourages the basic capacity for forming the delusion and the aspects of it that promote their union. She is exceedingly surprised to hear that Norbert thinks she walks in an unusual and particularly graceful way. With great curiosity and confusion, she...

pdf

Share