Delusion And Dream

1927. An interpretation in the light of psychoanalysis of Gradiva a novel by Wilhelm Jensen, which is here reprinted. Introduction by Dr. G. Stanley Hall. Gradiva is the story of a young archaeologist who suffered a very characteristic mental disturbance and was gradually but effectively cured by a kind of native psychotherapeutic instinct, which probably inheres in all of us, but which in this case was found in the girl he formerly loved but had forgotten, and who restored at the same time his health and his old affection for her. Freud's analysis of the romance indicates that psychoanalysis has a future in literary criticism, if not that all art and artists have, from the beginning, more or less anticipated as they now illustrate it.