This is a highly controversial book (or at the very least my friend Josie and I disagree about it). In the summer of 1906 Freud read a novella by a German guy named Wilhelm Jensen & decided to treat it as a psychological case study.
Why such an obscure literary work? Perhaps because the greatest literature cannot be exactly “analyzed.” Faulkner, for example, reaches beyond the merely neurotic to touch the feet of the gods.
“Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fancy,” on the other hand, was just waiting for Freud to explicate. It’s the story of a German youth named Norbert Hanold who’s obsessed – like Freud himself – with ancient Classical artifacts. In particular, he’s attracted to a woman depicted in a bas-relief in Rome, especially by the way she walks:
“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. This movement produced a double impression of exceptional agility and a confident composure, and the flight-like poise, combined with a firm step, lent her… peculiar grace.”
Norbert decides to call her Gradiva. I’m not going to give away any more of the plot. That’s part of MY neurosis – I hate plot-divulging. (Perhaps because my mother is oral-expulsive.)
(But I should explain that this edition – published by The Beacon Press of Boston in 1956 – includes the whole novella as a free 89 page appendix. Plus an essay with the delightful title “The Relation of the Poet to Daydreaming.” In fact, here’s an excerpt of it:
“The play of children is determined by their wishes – really by the child’s ONE wish, which is to be grown-up… He always plays at being grown-up; in play he imitates what is known to him of the lives of adults.”)
