6 h 13 minAudiobook8 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
Can an invented dream reveal something real about the mind?
In Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva: A Pompeian Fancy, Norbert Hanold lives among books and objects, keeping people at a distance. Then the young archaeologist sees an ancient relief in Rome: a woman walking, her foot placed in an unusual way. Her image becomes the focus of his strange fascination.
Delusion and Dream brings Jensen’s short novel together with Sigmund Freud’s essay, Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva. Freud treats the story as a case to explore. Can a novelist’s invented dream be read like a patient’s? His answer opens a path through buried memories, delusion, and his early ideas about healing.
What you’ll discover
- A scholar drawn inward Meet Norbert Hanold, whose life among ancient objects gives way to fascination with a walking woman.
- Meaning beneath strange behavior Follow Freud’s argument that Hanold’s delusion has hidden reasons rather than being simple nonsense.
- Pompeii and buried memory Explore Freud’s comparison between the buried city and memories held out of awareness.
- An invented dream examined Watch Freud apply his ideas about dreams to a scene created by a novelist.
- Writers and doctors meet Consider Freud’s belief that fiction and therapy can reach similar insights by different paths.
Who will love it
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.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- A scholar falls for a stone girl
- A delusion has a hidden reason
- Pompeii stands for the buried past
- Dreams in fiction can be read too
- The writer knew before the doctor
- Love, cure and what has lasted
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Délire et rêve
by Sigmund Freud ; Wilhelm Jensen · 1907
An archaeologist dreams of Pompeii’s destruction, and Freud reads his obsession as a clue to a buried memory.
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In short
This book joins two works. The first is Gradiva: A Pompeian Fancy, a short novel published in 1903 by the German writer Wilhelm Jensen.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
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.
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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.
The author
Sigmund Freud
1856–1939 · Austrian founder of psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was an Austrian psychiatrist and the founder of psychoanalysis. Born in Freiberg, now Příbor in the Czech Republic, he lived and worked in Vienna before moving to London in 1938. He wrote The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905).
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