Gradiva
An archaeologist falls in love with a figure on a Roman relief. Freud wrote a whole book about his delusion.
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.
Norbert Hanold, a reclusive young scholar, fixes on a plaster cast of an antique relief, names the striding woman Gradiva, and grows convinced she perished in the eruption that buried Pompeii. A dream sends him south to the ruined city, where at midday among the excavations he meets a living woman whose step matches the stone. He treats her as a noon ghost; she, recognising an old playmate, takes up the part he assigns and slowly draws him back toward the present.
In 1907 Freud made the novella his first sustained reading of a literary work, arguing that Jensen, working without theory, had staged a buried wish surfacing as fixed conviction and dissolving as the forgotten memory behind it is restored. Helen Downey's English translation later carried both story and study to readers in English.
For a clinician the interest is structural: a symptom built on a childhood attachment, a treatment conducted by the very person the symptom disguised, and a recovery worked through recognition rather than argument.
About the author
Wilhelm Jensen
Wilhelm Jensen (1837 to 1911) was a German novelist and poet. Highly productive in his lifetime, he published more than one hundred and fifty works of fiction, along with poetry and tragedies. Today he is remembered almost entirely for one short book: his 1903 novella Gradiva, about an archaeologist's obsession with a figure on a Roman relief. In 1907 Sigmund Freud made it the subject of his study Delusion and Dream in Jensen's Gradiva, which secured Jensen a lasting, if secondhand, place in the history of psychoanalysis.
Details
- 1903
- German