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Gradiva and Delusion and Dream in Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva

Sigmund Freud

With Wilhelm Jensen
Translated from the German by Helen M. Downey

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Here together in one volume are the ghostly love story by Wilhelm Jensen and the major text psychoanalyzing it by ­Sigmund Freud.

In Jensen’s story, a young man discovers a Roman statue that so attracts him he purchases a plaster cast for his home in a German university town. Intense study of the relief leads to a dream which transports him to Pompeii on the day of Vesuvius’s eruption in 79 AD. Encountering the statue’s beautiful model, Gradiva, he attempts to warn her of her fate.

After the dream, he returns to Italy and appears to actually meet Gradiva. But when he speaks to her in Latin, she answers in German. Is this woman real or a delusion?

The analysis by Freud that follows is both a brilliant literary interpretation of a symbolic work and a statement of the importance of literature on his thinking and the world of scientific study.