Gradiva Medica

"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. 1 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 the northern Germany city of Kiel and studied in Berlin and Munich, had also been trained in medicine and then later in philology and philosophy (Musatti 1961, 7). When queried after the fact about Freud's analytic essay, Jensen stated that although he was a physician he had not written Gradiva under the impact of current psychological theories, but only according to his personal inspiration (McGuire 1974, 51-52). That was fine with Freud, who let the manifest content of the novel speak for itself, and sought the [End Page 285] latent or unconscious meaning in the actions and dreams of its central protagonist (Musatti 1961, 9, 12). Freud "discovered" in the novel a verification of his own psychoanalytic process, narrated by Jensen in a manner that was at once cryptic and innocent, with strata of latent content hidden beneath the words. But Delusions and Dreams is not a psychobiography of the artist (Wilhelm Jensen) as is, for example, Freud's great, failed study of Leonardo da Vinci (1910). Rather, it is the analysis of the psychic life of a created representation, like his examinations of Michelangelo's Moses or Shakespeare's Hamlet, for which the reader had to suspend disbelief to participate in the game. As in "The Moses of Michelangelo" (1914), Freud entered into Jensen's story as if it were a seamless whole existing in a reality contiguous with life and he protracted the illusion of art, suspending any and all critical judgment as he subjected the fictional characters living in the text, Hanold and Gradiva, to a profound biographical analysis. Unlike Michelangelo, however, who worked in sixteenth-century Rome, Wilhelm Jensen was operating within the same cultural system as Freud, and so his authorship tended to disappear even more rapidly under Freud's interpretive gaze. Although Jensen-as-author—an innocent transcriber of the narrative as manifest content—vanished for Freud, we in historical perspective can see Jensen-as-author to be eminently compatible with Freud-as-psychoanalyst insofar as their textual and visual resources were taken from the same material world and received under the same sets of intellectual conventions. In terms established by Michael Baxandall (1972), Jensen and Freud partook of the same "period eye" and "cognitive style." Cultural anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz (1983) have posited that an object and the ability to understand it are made in the same shop. According to this formula, Freud was an eyewitness-interpreter of Jensen's text; likewise, Jensen's Pompeiian Fantasy was composed within the same cultural system as Freud's Interpretation of Dreams of 1900, even though the novelist denied a direct influence. The process of visualization, therefore, moved from the novel to its analysis without any serious disjunction as Freud took up

Art · Fantasy · Freud's Psychoanalytic Theories · Freudian slip · Hysteria · Literature · Metaphor · Psychoanalysis · Psychoanalytic theory · Reading (process) · Philosophy · Psychology · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications · Themes in Literature Analysis

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