American Imago

Bergstein, Mary.
Gradiva Medica: Freud's Model Female Analyst as Lizard-Slayer
American Imago - Volume 60, Number 3, Fall 2003, pp. 285-301

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Mary Bergstein - Gradiva Medica: Freud's Model Female Analyst as Lizard-Slayer - American Imago 60:3 American Imago 60.3 (2003) 285-301 Gradiva Medica: Freud's Model Female Analyst as Lizard-Slayer Mary Bergstein [Figures] "And she departed, after having introduced herself to us as the daughter of the zoologist and lizard catcher and after having, by all kinds of ambiguous remarks, admitted her therapeutic intention and other secret designs as well." --Freud, Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's "Gradiva" The second female practitioner of Freudian psychoanalysis (after Emma Eckstein, who, having been Freud's patient, herself began to treat others as early as 1897) was found, rather than made. She had no medical training; she came into being fully formed, in the guise of a reanimated ancient sculpture, effectively and ingeniously curing a case of male hysteria. The analyst in question was Gradiva, so named in Wilhelm Jensen's novel of 1903, Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fantasy. Sigmund Freud's Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's "Gradiva" (1907) consists of a psychoanalysis of the central protagonist of Jensen's Gradiva, a young archeologist called Norbert Hanold, who was himself (in Freud's reading) Gradiva's analysand. Delusions and Dreams is in many ways an extension of Freud's archeological metaphor for psychoanalysis as such, where retrieval, analysis, and resolution of the past are likewise fundamental processes (see Kuspit 1989). Wilhelm Jensen, who was born in...