Zusammenfassung
Zusammenfassung von Der Wahn und die Träume in W. Jensens „Gradiva“
Für wen es gedacht ist
For readers curious about Freud who enjoy a concrete introduction to his thinking, and anyone who likes to see a theory tried on a story of dreams, obsession and buried memories.
Worum es in diesem Buch geht
This book joins two works. The first is Gradiva: A Pompeian Fancy, a short novel published in 1903 by the German writer Wilhelm Jensen. The second is Freud's essay on that novel, Delusion and Dream in Jensen's Gradiva, written in 1906 and published in 1907. A younger colleague, Carl Jung, had pointed Freud to the story, and Freud found in it a case that seemed to follow the rules he had learned in his consulting room.
Freud asks a plain question. Can a dream that a novelist invents be read in the same way as a dream a patient reports? His answer is yes, and he uses the story to teach his early ideas about dreams, buried memories, delusion and cure. You get a small, readable tour of psychoanalysis, and a model of how Freud reads a text. You also see how he thinks writers and doctors reach the same truths by different roads. Let us begin with the story that Freud takes as his case.
In dieser Zusammenfassung
- 1A scholar falls for a stone girlFree
- 2A delusion has a hidden reason
- 3Pompeii stands for the buried past
- 4Dreams in fiction can be read too
- 5The writer knew before the doctor
- 6Love, cure and what has lasted
Punkt 1 von 6
A scholar falls for a stone girl
Jensen's story centers on Norbert Hanold, a young German archaeologist who lives among books and objects and avoids people. In a museum in Rome he sees an ancient relief of a young woman walking, her foot set down in an unusual way. He is so struck that he orders a plaster cast and hangs it in his study at home.
Hanold gives the figure a name, Gradiva, which means the girl who steps along. He studies her gait and imagines she came from Pompeii. He even tries to watch how real women walk in the street, to test whether anyone moves as she does. A man who ignored living people now watches them for the sake of a carving.
Then comes a dream. In it Hanold stands in Pompeii on the day Vesuvius buries the city in 79 AD, and he sees Gradiva walking calmly through the falling ash. He cannot warn her, and she lies down on the steps of a temple as the ash covers her. He wakes in distress and cannot shake the feeling that the dream was real.
Freud treats all this as a case history that Jensen has written out in advance. He notes that the writer gives the details a clinician would want, such as the odd fixation, the dream, and the restless trip that follows. The story is the patient, and Freud will play the doctor.
That’s 1 of 6 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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Questions about Der Wahn und die Träume in W. Jensens „Gradiva“
What is Delusion and Dream about?
It joins Wilhelm Jensen's novel Gradiva with Freud's essay on it. Freud reads the hero's obsession and dream as signs of a buried memory, and uses the story to explain his ideas on dreams and repression.
What does Gradiva mean?
Gradiva is the name that Jensen's hero gives to an ancient relief of a walking girl. It means the girl who steps along, and it echoes the Latin word for walking.
Did Jensen know Freud's theories when he wrote Gradiva?
According to Jensen's reply to Freud's letter, he did not. Freud took this as a sign that a writer and a scientist can reach the same insights about the mind from different directions.
Why did Freud write about a novel?
Freud believed that creative writers often grasp the workings of the mind before scientists do. He used Gradiva as a test case to show that invented dreams follow the same laws as real ones.
Is Delusion and Dream hard to read?
No. Freud's essay is short and clear, and it follows the plot of the novel closely.