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Geoffrey Hartman

American Imago, Volume 65, Number 4, Winter 2008, pp. 505-522 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/aim.0.0032

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/aim/summary/v065/65.4.hartman.html

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Geoffrey Hartman

505

Geoffrey Hartman

Psychoanalysis as a Cultural Ideal:

Form Feeling in Freuds Essay on Gradiva
The literary quality of Freuds prose is generally acknowledged,
and his case histories have the allure of novellas. The present essay
explores what Freud himself, in a letter to Fliess, called form feeling
(Formgefhl). Focusing mainly on his Gradiva commentary, the
author argues that this form sensitivity has not only presentational
importance but is deeply involved in the revisionary cultural aims of
the new science of psychoanalysis. Freud radically revises the Bildung
concept of lifelong educational self-development, as well as a neoclassical style ideal largely derived from Winkelmanns famous description of
Hellenic statuarys blend of moral and aesthetic qualities (noble simplicity and tranquil grandeur). By coming to terms with the unbeautiful
in the logic and wit of dreams he creates a dream pedagogy treatment
respecting the ecstatic or Dionysian element in human experience, one
that fully recognizes what art historian Aby Warburg characterized as
a classical disquiet (klassische Unruhe). Basic to Freuds essay
on Jensens romance is that Zoe/Gradiva figures there not just as a
proxy psychoanalyst but as a Hermes type of psychopomp accepting the
young archeologists dream-delusion, while leading him firmly via this
underworld into facing erotic feelings he had totally displaced from
life to ancient art.
Why should Freuds essay (1907) on Wilhelm Jensens Gradiva: A Pompeian Fantasy strike so many as an exemplary literary
analysis? The essay is but an extended footnote to the novel.
Freuds clearest aim is to affirm and popularize his method
of dream analysis. He does noteven incidentallyteach us
much about literary analysis except for noting word-plays,
Some of the ideas presented here were first broached during a Round Table on
Literature and Psychoanalysis: Reciprocal Insights sponsored by the Philoctetes Center
for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination in April 2008. I am grateful to Peter
Rudnytsky for suggesting several improvements.
American Imago, Vol. 65, No. 4, 505522. 2009 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

505

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Psychoanalysis as a Cultural Ideal

equivocations, and symbols that help the storyteller weave a

mystery as well as provide clues to solve it by uncovering a buried past. What mainly comes through, however, is something
more mysterious than Jensens mystery story: a pedagogic and
yet artistic factor Freud called Formgefhl, to which we respond
with pleasure even in his more technical writing.
How significant to Freuds work is this form feeling (or
form sensitivity), which seems to be an aesthetic matter hard
to define? One of the few overt clues comes in a letter Freud
writes to Fliess (September 21, 1899) shortly before the publication of the Interpretation of Dreams:
Es steckt auch in mir irgendwo ein Stck Formgefhl, eine
Schtzung der Schnheit als einer Art Vollkommenheit, und die
gewundenen, auf indirekten Worten stolzierenden, nach dem
Gedanken schielenden Stze meiner Traumschrift haben ein Ideal
in mir schwer beleidigt. Ich tue auch kaum Unrecht, wenn ich
diesen Formmangel als ein Zeichen fehlender Stoffbeherrschung
auffasse.1 (1950, 318)
Somewhere in me also there lodges a piece of form feeling, an appreciation of beauty as a type of perfection; so
that, in my dream book, a circuitous strutting with indirect
words, and sentences squinting at thoughts,2 have seriously
offended an ideal of mine. I am surely not wrong when I
characterize my deficiency of form as the sign of a faulty
mastery of the subject matter. (my translation)
Freuds concern, then, is with the presentational as well as
content-centered act of the mind. That two-in-one focus may
also mark various pronouncements acknowledging the importance of art, as in this from the Gradiva essay: The description
of the human mind is indeed the domain which is most [the
artists] own; he has from time immemorial been the precursor
of science, and so too of scientific psychology (1907, 4344).3
My effort, then, is to explore the aesthetic content and context
of Freuds ground-breaking work during a time rich in systematic German philosophizing about form and feeling. What at
first seems somewhat abstract and undefinable, his sensitivity
to presentational form, may turn out to encompass not only

Geoffrey Hartman

507

problems arising when dreams are made a subject matter for

clinical and scientific discourse but also the cultural nature
of an offended (though not clearly identified) stylistic ideal
mentioned in the letter to Fliess.
***
It was certainly a challenge to found a science with therapeutic ambitions based in good part on dreams and dream
effectsevidence usually considered chaotic and unscientific.
Freud had to devise an analytic technique and type of discourse
not contaminated by the very choice of subject-matter. He succeeded in this only partially. The Traumdeutungs final chapter, its
section on the psychological resistances to the dream thoughts,
leading to their censorship and inducing the very forgetting of
dreams, acknowledges the problem.
Indeed, a major source of trouble was the unruly Stoff, the
matter to be mastered analytically. Dreams were the royal road
to the unconscious, and dreamings strange and often absurd
character had to be redescribed as anything but that: it was
the result of dream-work operating on the dream thoughts
by distinctive laws.
In Jensens romance, of course, the dream-material is already tamed and artfully applied to the heros life situation
basically his escape from life, from early libidinal feelings. The
raw (less artful) dreams in the dream book, however, are a
trouble to the scientist not just because they are raw but because
in documenting them he has already been formativein that
he gives them a stabilized written transcript. After Freud, these
dreams become texts readable as other than primitive omens;
we read them somewhat like literary constructs, and even begin to dream Freudian dreams. His intervention, then, starts
before its explicitly interpretive part.4 The boundary between
primary (dream) text and secondary (commentary) text is porous, and the resulting product a shared creation of analysand
and analystmost naturally, of course, in dreams culled from
Freuds self-analysis.
Moreover, while Freud shows dreams to be meaningful,
more often than not they escape traditional canons of beauty or

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Psychoanalysis as a Cultural Ideal

rationality (of the link between beauty and truth). This should
not matter, since such divergence is explained by mechanisms
of disguise, distortion, and condensation. The relation that
holds is of the unbeautiful to truth; if there is beauty, or at
least a quality to be esteemed, it would have to be ascribed to
the witty devices helping to form the dream rather than to a
manifest content that has undergone secondary revision and
is projected onto some Beautiful Dreamer.
It is certainly possible that Freuds stylistic scrupling arose
from having to disclose realities many would consider shocking
and shameful. He might have felt uneasy presenting those realities forthrightly rather than circuitously. Even so, I suspect a
deeper factor at play, namely that his self-blame for a circuitous
strutting with indirect words and deficiency of form reflects a
hankering after an ideal of beauty-as-perfection (eine Schtzung
der Schnheit als einer Art Vollkommenheit) promulgated by a great
many German scholars, artists, and neoclassical thinkers from
Winckelmann and Lessing on.
***
This ethical and stylistic ideal (based on a sublimation of
the myth-filled, multifaceted traditions of ancient Greece and
Rome5) often reinforced a more general educational concept,
that of Bildung. The Bildung concept stressed a lifelong commitment to personal development and reflected the Enlightenment
paradigm of humanitys steady cultural progress. Yet the latter
not only exempted Hellenistic art from being archaic in the
pejorative sense but exalted its universal significance; indeed,
this became one of the clearest signs of what E. M. Butler (1935)
called the tyranny of Greece over Germany, or of Germanys
ideological colonization of Greece.6
Moreover, even as the Bildung concept proclaimed the unity
of ethical and aesthetic, inspired by Winckelmanns eloquent
descriptions of Hellenic statuarys edle Einfalt und stille Grsse, it
contributed an essential counter-Enlightenment nuance. Art was
valued for awakening or reviving a sense of wonder, for its capacity to produce a magical, quasi-religious moment of presence,

Geoffrey Hartman

509

and for the symbol as a concrete universal, the translucence of

the spiritual in the corporeal and sensuous.
Let me select as an expression of this ideal a comment by
Wilhelm von Humboldt on Goethes visits to Italy. After citing
Goethe on the deeply felt presence (Gegenwart) of the classical
terrain (des classischen Bodens), a presence that, so Goethe wrote,
reveals itself both to ones intellectual grasp (Begriff) and sensuous contemplation (Anschauung), Humboldt remarks:
The depiction of this mighty presence is the basic theme
of [Goethes] book. Rome, through readings and pictorial reproductions, had long been familiar to Goethe
and those for whom he wrote. But in his first letter from
Rome he compares beautifully its live impression on him
with the animation of Pygmalions statue. As she finally
approached the artist and said, It is I! how different the
living being proved to be compared with the sculpted
stone. (1829, 400; my translation; italics in original)
I am emboldened to ask: is it not the case that Freuds sense
of the psychoanalytic vocation, if developing within the circuit
of Bildungs ethical and aesthetic ideal, is strongly touched by
the aura of classical myth, including an erotic polarity close
to Norbert Hanolds delusion in Gradiva? I suspect that Freud
was drawn via his Traumsachen (dream matters), and especially
the idea of their humane clinical application, into an intensely
personal field of force, even into identifying the role of the
analyst with a divine personas mythic function. (I will be more
specific about this persona later on.) Freuds unsatisfied Stck
Formgefhl suggests an admixture in his scientific commentary
of a Stck of primary process; and this would have kept him,
like Nietzsche too, and Freuds contemporary Aby Warburg,
aware of the Dionysian aspect of classical art, myth, and ancient
rituals.7
Freud may have indulged, therefore, a Pompeian Fantasy
of his own,8 one that enlivens his otherwise efficient rather than
remarkable study of Jensens novel. His Formgefhl, it seems to
me, encompasses more than a pedagogic style: it helps him at
once to honor and reshape the Bildung ideal, and produces in
the Gradiva essay an imaginative as well as analytic text serving

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Psychoanalysis as a Cultural Ideal

the incorporation of dream pedagogy into that same ideal, as

well as popularizing his dream hermeneutic and (in the essays
final pages) the technical psychoanalytic concepts related to
it.
***
What I name dream pedagogy needs clarification. It involves
a potentially ecstatic (some might call it Romantic) remodeling
of the neoclassical ethos. To this end it mobilizes even dreams
and fantasies; and this despite something indeterminate: the
devious or ambiguous character of their imagistic/oneiric
texturewhich is precisely what necessitates the demand for
specialized interpretation. But this should not keep us from recognizing a clinical advance: the culturally holistic and maieutic
process by which analyst leads analysand (and thereby himself)
through an underworld of mental phenomena toward enlightenment and self-realization.9
To talk of an ecstatic remodeling of the German cultural
ideal might seem exaggerated. The ecstatic element, however,
is, like dreaming itself, part of everyday psychopathology. German aesthetic theory had begun to focus on it as an intense,
even involuntary empathy displaced into dreams or displayed by
the artistic temperament. Despite intensification or distortion
it could reveal a Formgefhl, a neuroaesthetic response to the
formal qualities of the artwork. In 1873 Robert Vischers small
tract ber das optische Formgefhl (see below note 10) initiated
a speculation of this kind, carried further by Theodor Lipps
(well-known to Freud), as by Warburg and an art historian such
as Heinrich Wlfflin, who opened the way for appreciating the
Baroque in Renaissance painting and sculpture. The empathic
response to emphatic artistry, especially valued by Warburg,
and swathed in different theories of significant form, on the
one hand, and how Einfhlung occurred, on the other,10 may
have contributed to change the art scene by introducing dream
textures and constructs (in their very ambiguity or polysemy)
to challenge the still influential Winckelmannian adherence
to an absolute standard of beauty, das Absolutschne, as Freud
called it in a letter to Fliess (see note 5 above).

Geoffrey Hartman

511

No wonder, then, that Freud realized that the sustained

fantasies of the creative writer also body forth the role of dream
pedagogy in personal development. These fantasies often involve
an imagery of adventurous wish-fulfillment, like being guided
to and through an under- or overworld. Does it matter whether
such other-world journeys are presented as actual or as dream
visions? I do not want to bypass entirely the issue of ambiguity,
also because therapy cannot do without an interpretive tolerance toward all imaginative constructs. While Freud threads
the labyrinth of his Traumsachen by describing dreamings psychological laws of operation, to connect the meaningfulness
of dreams with their clinical use, to value patiently their very
mode or modes of expression, required the concept of dream
pedagogy; and this is assumed and sometimes even dramatized
by the creative writer.
A conventional yet hyperbolic example, bordering on delusion, is Hlderlins Patmos (1803), in which the speaker, having
uttered a prayerful wish, is rapt by a Genius and transported
faster than he thought possible (denn ich vermutet) from the
twilight of his own Western landscape to the dawn of a flowering Asia, and there to Patmos, home of the apostle John, who
may have composed the Book of Revelation. Patmos, lengthy
and incomplete, is filled with striking if sometimes disjunctive
verses; here I focus only on the dream-inspiring figure of that
Genius, more complex in Hlderlin than in other Romantic
or neoclassic revivals.
The poet makes it clear from the outset that he does not
wish to disappear into the rapture, but to come back to his
native region. O Fittige gieb uns, treuesten Sinns / Hinberzugehn
und wiederzukehren (O give us wings, to take us there and to
return us in the most devoted frame of mind). The Germanic
source of this Genius loci is affirmed rather than cast off during
the poets ecstatic journeying through time and space toward
a synoptic East that is a gathering place of canonical Christian
figures. Yet the poem also evokes in passages on the absent presence of die Himmlichen (heavenly beings) traces of a pan-mythic
imagery, and so suggests the coincidence of Hlderlins national
prophetic vocation with the dawning of a new syncretistic EastWest revelation.

512

Psychoanalysis as a Cultural Ideal

But from the English tradition I will also mention in passing

Keatss representation of ecstasy, as in the Nightingale Odes
(1819) Already with thee! More daring is Keatss aphorism
based on his acquaintance with Milton: The imagination is like
Adams dream: he awoke and found it truth. This comes from
an 1817 letter to Benjamin Bailey in which the poet recalls a
dream pedagogy episode from Milton (Paradise Lost, 8.452ff.)
that depicts a divinely guided dreaming with the power to anticipate reality.
***
He awoke and found it truth. Of course, the truth is not
always, in fact is rarely beautiful or wish-fulfilling. In the climax
of Keatss La Belle Dame sans Merci (1819), the seduced
knight wakes from a nightmare on a cold hill side, where no
birds sing. Yet Gradivas disarmingly beautiful anxiety dream
eventuates in a happy denouement despite its delusional impact; and so Freuds analysis does something peculiar. Having
adopted the kind of eudaemonic fantasy Jung could have found
perfect for his particular mode of analysis, Freud moralizes the
entire story, turns it (contra Jung?) into a strict yet light-footed
admonition concerning sexuality.11
Even if the Gradiva commentary is Freud-on-holiday (this
little book, as he remarks in a May 1907 letter to Jung, was
written on sunny days [McGuire 1974, 51]), it provides an important clue to his ambition as cultural reformer. His commentary, with its restored rather than offended style ideal, discloses
not only an act of dream pedagogy but a distinctive mythical
persona illuminating the psychoanalytic vocation.
It is time to identify that persona. While Freud clearly turns
Zoe, the heroine of Gradiva, into a proxy analyst (1907, 87), what
has not been observed is that she conforms to an underlying,
proto-Jungian archetype, the psychopomp. I say proto-Jungian
because Jung in 1907 had not yet articulated his concept of
archetype. But, as Thomas Mann stated in Freud and the
Future (1936), during Freuds time myth was being revived as
the foundation of the imaginative life, as a reanimating rather
than archaic and transcended source. It was well on its way

Geoffrey Hartman

513

to becoming the pious (i.e. traditional) formula into which

life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious
(422).12
The psychopomp is a major figure in Greek mythology
associated with Hermess underworld function as a guide shuttling between the gods and mankind. Zoe-Gradiva, as Freud
understands her, is a psychopomp who assists the pedagogic
character of dreams, and even their hallucinating effect, in
order to lead her charge back into life via the underworld of
the unconscious.13 (She becomes, in effect, a successful Orpheus
avatar.) Freuds summary of her behavior is not only movingly
empathic but also quietly interpretive of this helpmeet role:
She learnt about his [Norberts] dream, about the sculpture of Gradiva, and about the peculiarity of gait which
she herself shared with it. She accepted her role as the
ghost wakened to life for a brief hour, a role for which,
as she perceived, his delusion had cast her, and, by accepting the flowers of the dead which he had brought
without conscious purpose, and by repressing a regret
that he had not given her roses, she gently hinted in
ambiguous words at the possibility of taking up a new
position.14 (1907, 79)
As apparition and guide, Zoe tolerates the heros dream, when,
stimulated by the days residue, it has passed from illusion back
into the daylight of a compelling delusion. But she then frees
her patient from it, though not by a rough disenchantment.
She leads the dreamer to understand by ambiguous words the
hidden truth of his delusional phase. Also relevant is a later
finding of Freuds. The mystery of Gradivas ghosting, the uncanny (unheimlich) event, is explained by the young scholars
earlier (homely-heimlich) and then repressed attraction to his
childhood friend Zoe Bertgang.15
In the absence, moreover, of private associations generated
by the psychoanalytic interview, literary adepts can retrieve an
alternate set of collective associations, which were certainly familiar to Mittel-Europa writers and audiences of Jensens time.
Jensens Gradiva has links to over a century-long development of
the gothic or mock-supernatural tale. The novels plot exploits

514

Psychoanalysis as a Cultural Ideal

the surnaturel expliqu formula (its dark italics, to borrow a

phrase from Wallace Stevenss Vesuvian Esthtique du Mal),
and extends a German (originally English) tradition starting
with Schillers Geisterseher (1789).
That extraordinary story is about a German Protestant
Prince lured to Catholicism by a series of wondrous (really
Vatican-engineered) incidents, intending to awake in him a sense
of wonder leading to his conversion. Schillers story inspired
Romantic novellas including some E. T. A. Hoffmann tales; it
may even have influenced Thomas Manns Death in Venice where
Dionysian and death-summoning themes converge.16
Yet what these sometimes anticlerical mystery tales mainly
achieve (before they become formulaic detective novels) is to
strengthen the Romantic Enlightenment in order to save the
marvelous from total disenchantment, and fiction from the
charge of archaism, superstition, inutility, obfuscation, etc.
Freud understood the hermeneutic drama staged by Jensen,
who skillfully prolongs the readers uncertainty about a series
of preternatural happenings. After encouraging in this way
our willing suspension of disbelief, he resolves matters without
too brutal or tricky a solution. So that even a devotee of the
Enlightenment such as Freud can shift his attention back to the
interpretive faculty in general17 as it faces daily truths stranger
than fiction, and analyzes dreams or other paranormal psychic
phenomena.
***
Freud the commentator, I should add, is also akin to Zoe in
shaking off, by his light touch in this essay, the gloomy seriousness of [an] underworld role (1907, 83). His 1912 Postscript
identifies the sculpted Gradiva figure as one of the personified
Hours (or Seasons) allied to deities of the fertilizing dew.
Indeed, the fertility theme joined to that of light-footedness
is associated in classical literature with nymphs in general,
nymphs as dancing, frolicking adjuncts of Pan or the satyrs,
maidens whose step is like a breeze that barely leaves any but
a dream traceyet even a fugitive encounter of that sort can
explode affectively and connect with the Pompeian theme, as

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515

in Grard de Nervals Myrtho (from his Chimres [1854], that

is Chimeras or Delusions):
Je sais pourquoi l-bas le volcan sest rouvert. . . .
Cest quhier tu lavais touch dun pied agile,
Et de cendres soudain lhorizon sest couvert.18
Freuds retelling shares the lightness, the serious playfulness, attributed to Zoe. But if the method is playful, the aim is earnest,
since in Freuds unvarnished formulation it is to have Norbert,
the sublimating hero of Gradiva, pay off the debt to life with
which we are burdened from our birth (1907, 49). Freud could
not be clearer: sexuality imposes a burden, an inexorable debt
to be discharged in the service of propagation.
So Freud, despite the urbanity of his style, never loses sight
ofnor lets his reader lose sight ofhis scientific, moral, and
didactic side. There is a buried logic in dreams, as in the pleasurable effect of art and illusion.19 Dream pedagogy, moreover,
calls for a vital application, not just affirmation, of the interpretable dreams, particularly when their meaning seems absurd or
absent. There is far less freedom and arbitrariness in mental
life, Freud tells us, than we are inclined to assumethere may
even be none at all (1907, 9). Gradivas hero must be brought
back to real life by a roundabout path which was strange but
perfectly logical (10). The science of dream interpretation,
then, like psychoanalysis generally, is an existential therapy in
the service of treating an anxiety inevitably both biological and
social. Thus, Freud as hermeneutic psychopomp (pardon that
mouthful) complements and completes the enlightenment
function of the dream.20
The moral implication may not stop there. Freuds essay
makes it abundantly clear that the treatment of a delusion
must take up the same ground as the delusional structure and
investigate it as completely as possible (1907, 22). Moreover, as
in Jensens romance, the healing power of love is not to be
despised (22). But the mind of the moralist will also observe
that whereas Gradiva was able to return the love which was
making its way from the unconscious into consciousness . . .
the doctor cannot (90). This aside is not without its pathos.
It may even be an admonition to Jung.21 Where, indeed, one

516

Psychoanalysis as a Cultural Ideal

is left to wonder, is the analysts Gradiva, the physicians own

physician?
***
Two concluding remarks. The young archeologists compelling wish-fulfillment dream, fostering the Gradiva delusion,
entails something of the near-ecstatic voyeurism also found in
Aby Warburg.22 Warburgs wish is an Already with thee! transposed to the realm of scholarship. Through art appreciation
the scholar can be transported in time and place to become a
contemporary of the bygone culture being studied.23 Yet that
transport, according to Freud, instead of liberating, evades the
debt owed the sexual side of life. Freuds retelling of Jensen
develops the (archeological) theme of saxa loquuntur as Gradiva
comes alivewhen the one who really must be revived is the
scholar himself, trapped by feelings diverted from a human to an
antiquarian object of regard, an artifice of eternity (Yeats).
A second concluding thought. Has my appreciation of
Freuds Formgefhl made too great a leap from his pedagogic
style in the Gradiva essay to his (in my view) deeper, underlying
presentation of the psychoanalyst as a complex Hermes figure?
While the psychopomp is clearly part of a mythic picture of the
world and belongs to the realm of classical art and culture, I
suspect it was Jensens naming his novel A Pompeian Fantasy
that led me (quite unawares at first) to extract pomp as a punnable pseudo-morpheme and explore Freuds new science as if
it were motivated by his own Psychopompeian Fantasy.
Yet Freuds pedagogic, but really, as we now see, ideal
cultural style also benefits from a myth. I began by jokingly
calling his essay a footnote, yet hesitated to follow his hint of
the fetish disclosing Norberts repressed erotic motivation. I did
mention, however, the pied agile attributed to the Nympha (it
also recalls Hermess winged footing24), and quoted Nervals
hyperbole concerning its effect.25 It may be fanciful of me to
associate that theme with Freuds style, yet his Gradiva essay
does apply, in the lightest manner, an uncompromising thesis
to Jensens novel. The impression, then, left by such deftness
is not that everything in the text could and must be reduced

Geoffrey Hartman

517

to fit a specific doctrine, and that the formal literary elements

are, in the light of that doctrine, disguises of a content that dare
not reveal itself directly. The emphasis falls, rather, on a quality
of attentiveness that could alight on any phrase, and so endow
even a minor text with the inspiring illusion that nothing in it
should be overlooked, or that any detail, even when apparently
insignificant, might show its synecdochal strength and explode
into significance.
260 Everit St.
New Haven, CT 06511
geoffrey.hartman@yale.edu
Notes
1.

In a previous letter (September 11, 1899; 1950, 31617) Freud had already expressed a stylistic misgiving referring apparently to chapter 7 of the Traumdeutung.
See, on this issue, James Strachey, General Preface (1958, xvxx), which mentions
Freuds self-criticism of his style and literary form. In this earlier letter to Fliess
Freud thinks the Traumsachen (dream matters) incontrovertible, but the style, he
says, was totally incapable of finding the noble and simple expression [an echo
of Winckelmanns criterion, derived supposedly from Hellenistic art, of edle Einfalt
und stille Grsse], and which falls into lowly-witty, picturesque circumlocutions (my
translation). Indeed, Freud goes on to call the dreamer in general too witty. A
few years later, in his book on jokes, Freud will psychologically revalue the wit in
witticisms, and so (as Seymour Simckes suggests to me) can accommodate a very
non-Greek, a Yiddish element.
2. Literally: squinting at the thought, i.e., a particular thought he wishes to communicate. This might indicate something Freud could not yet put effectively into
print and may allude to the consequences of the infant sexuality thesis for his
Neurotica. Freud was concerned from early on with what he called pedagogic tact,
given that his radical ideas might alienate not only the public but medical colleagues, and prevent or seriously undermine the acceptance of psychoanalysis.
3. I agree with Meredith Skuras caution that Freud meant by such statements it
was something like psychoanalysis, not the naked unconscious, which the poets
discovered (1981, 11). But is there a naked unconscious, or is the question,
precisely, how to understand and deal with something known only through
disguises and displacements? This raises not only the issue of the legibility of the
dream imagery but also that of what goes into Freuds culture of reading dream
imagery. See note 4 below.
4. In a different but relevant context Sigrid Weigel (1995) examines propadeutic
issues of legibility, especially when images are involved.
5. Freuds compulsion for antiquity, as Richard H. Armstrong named it in a book
subtitled Freud and the Ancient World (2005), is well known. But the aesthetic
dimension and appeal of that compulsion (reflected in Freuds Formgefhl) have
not been given enough attention. Armstrongs pages on Gradiva partly make up
for this lack by pointing to an intellectual milieu characterized by the aestheticization of ancient culture, and which, basically since the Renaissance, though in
Germany primarily through Winckelmann in the second half of the eighteenth
century, restored a historical archive authorizing an alternative [i.e., pagan, and
specifically Hellenistic] view of human nature and human sexuality (1415). In
his correspondence with Fliess (August 18, 1897; 1950, 22829) Freud indicates

518

6.

7.

8.

9.

Psychoanalysis as a Cultural Ideal

that he shares Fliesss interest in the art of Italy insofar as it seems to focus not on
historical knowledge as such but on the Absolute of Beauty [das Absolutschne]
in the complete correspondence of thought and bestowal of form [Formgebung],
and in the elementary, pleasurable sense-experience of space and color (my
translation).
The most suggestive, wide-ranging view of the Bildung ideals intersection with
psychoanalysis is offered by Eric Downing (2006). Downing views that intersection
through the metaphorical fields of photography and archeology, with the latter
considered a privileged site for cultural introjection, particularly in an increasingly
nationalistic Germany aspiring to a more distinctive self-identity through its imaginary constructions of a relation to Greco-Roman culture. See especially chapter 2,
Psychoanalysis, Archeology, and Bildung in Freud and Wilhelm Jensens Gradiva.
I should also mention Downings pages on the significance of artistic reproduction
(simulacra) through copies such as the Gradiva relief itself, photography more
generally (with reference to Walter Benjamin), and Freuds own Gradiva essay,
which is a subtly transformative reproduction (indeed a parallel and displacing
fantasy) rather than a nonfictional scientific commentary. But while one might
agree with Downings main argument that classical archeology in Germany was
deeply involved in the process of manufacturing, or discovering, a specifically
German, and specifically modern, national, even racial, identity (125), I would
not charge Freud with adhering to those motivations.
Here may be another clue to that overdetermined issue: Freuds charged,
nervous attitude to seeing Rome (he hesitated to visit the city and did so only
after the publication of Traumdeutung). His only, not very telling, reference to
Winckelmann in the Standard Edition comes in the context of one of his dreams
about Rome (1900, 19597). For Aby Warburg and the Dionysian aspect, or what
he once called, contra Winckelmann, klassische Unruhe, see note 22. It should
be noted that Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy branded Winckelmanns ideal a
niaiserie allemandefrom which he (Nietzsche) claimed to have been saved by the
psychologist in him! On the importance of Nietzsche for Warburg, see Georges
Didi-Huberman (2002, esp. 142ff). On Warburgs affinity to Freud, also in terms
of cultural discontent and revision, see further (27677).
I am anticipated in this observation by Peter L. Rudnytsky (2002) as well as by
Downing. Rudnytskys first chapter is called Freuds Pompeian Fantasy. We take
different paths, however, analyzing that fantasy and characterizing how Freud appropriates Jensen novel as a parable of psychoanalysis (1). Rudnytsky also gives
an exemplary account not only of how Freuds essay reverses the customary relation between primary and secondary texts (1) but how Freud himself, as well as
others, understand the fact that many of the case histories read like imaginative
stories. See also Downing, above note 6, for the suspicion that Freuds scientific
commentary was not devoid of a cultural fantasy element.
That there is a danger for the analyst, and not only for the analysand, in that
underworld guidance is already obvious from almost every page of Freuds letters
to Fliess during the composition and printing of the Traumdeutung. The danger is
mainly expressed by concerns about the reception of the book; but the frequent
periods of migraine and depression Freud experienced during this intense period of discovery, which is in good part a self-discovery (analyst coinciding with
analysand), tells us that more is involved than concern for his scientific reputation.
It is also in the period leading up to the Traumdeutung that Freud struggles with
the constitutive force of dream and delusion: of endogenous psychic acts that
influence, given the early onset of sexuality, the patients later conviction of the
reality of a seduction that may only have been a fantasy. (See Ernst Kriss comments
about this in his Introduction to Freuds letters to Fliess [1950, 41].) In writing
the Gradiva essay Freud finds an evident pleasure; this suggests a stylistic release
from the fear that scandal or shame would inevitably attach to his insistence on
the imaginative and determinative consequences of libidinal issues.

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519

10. Warburgs Pathosformel conjoined the ideas of (emphatic) form and (empathic)
feeling, or topos and pathos. Wilhelm Worringers famous book of 1908 on empathy and abstraction introduces, I should add, a dialectical psychology of style that
also, like Wlfflin, revalues an often disparaged type of art and helps to justify, in
Worringers case, both older stylized (gothic) forms and modern nonfigurative
experiments. Significant form theories emphasizing psychology, or the nexus
of emotion (Herbert Read), developed also in British aesthetics and reached an
important degree of Anglo-American influence via Susanne Langers Philosophy
in a New Key (1941) and follow-up books indebted to Ernst Cassirer. Langers
emphasis on the musical rather than semantic relation of form and feeling, of
music as the very form of feeling, has remained intriguing. For Freuds relation
to Lipps, see Mark Kanzer (1981); and for the philosophical background, see
inter alia, Ernest K. Mundt (1959) and George W. Pigman (1995). Robert Vischer
(1873) discriminates between several kinds of empathy (Einfhlung, Nachfhlung,
etc.), but particularly suggestive is his borrowing from a contemporary work by
K. A. Scherner that shows how in dreams there is an unconscious displacement
[ein unbewusstes Versetzen] of the form of ones own body, together with that of the
soul, into an [optical] object form. Vischer adds, That provided me with the
concept I call empathy [Einfhlung] (vii). The entire preface is of interest.
11. Downings (2006) intensive reading, I admit, of both Jensens and Freuds text
finds so many traces of a Germanic cultural introjection that this light-footedness
might be contested. It also raises, however, a methodological question about
proleptic readings that pick on and magnify every linguistic and rhetorical mark
as a symptom of an ominous future development.
12. I need not point out how politically fatal an overestimation of myth as an exalting self- or national identification could become in the very future anticipated
by Mann. He guards against that tendency, stating that the analytic revelation
was a revolutionary force that fostered a blithe skepticism, a mistrust that
unmasks all the schemes and subterfuges of our own souls (1936, 427). Freuds
The Future of an Illusion (1927), too, acts as a cautionary antidote.
13. Freud marks with the marginal comment schn his copy of Gradiva where Zoe
reflects, not without irony, that in Norbert Hanolds archeological studies someone
must die first, in order to become alive (see Gay 1988, 321).
14. The sustained use here of free indirect speech, while unexceptional because Zoe/
Gradivas speech and actions are being summarized, heightens the sense that
Freud is a participant commentator rather than a detached analyst.
15. On Freuds personal anxiety about the dead coming back, see the remarks by
Rudnytsky (2002, 16ff.).
16. In the background there also hover Italy and the lure of the South in awakening
a Pagan sensuality as well as a lost sense of wonder. Mme de Staels Corinne or
Italy, andespeciallyGoethes two Italian journeys should not be forgotten. The
theme persists to the present day in novels and films about a Northern temperament encountering Italy.
17. Cf. Tzvetan Todorovs (1970) analysis of the readers hermeneutic hesitation
between natural and supernatural explanations. Psychoanalysis, starting with
Freud, develops its own technique of hesitation, its own temporal thought-space
enabling the act of interpretation.
18. I know why down yonder the volcano erupted again. . . . It was because yesterday
you touched it with an agile foot, and suddenly the entire horizon is covered with
cinders. The knights fatal encounter in La Belle Dame sans Merci is with a
faerys child whose foot is light. Remarkable also is Aby Warburgs focus on a
figure from Florentine Renaissance art he called the Nympha (or ninfa). E.
H. Gombrich, in his large and fascinating Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography
(1970), describes that preoccupation with one individual motif, the striding
young woman in fluttering garments (106). See also Louis Rose (2001, 7677),
who notes the affinity of the Gradiva image with Warburgs Nympha motif.
Actually, though, Jensen characterizes the Gradiva image as Ruhe in Bewegung

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Psychoanalysis as a Cultural Ideal

(stillness in movement) and her garments cannot be exactly called fluttering

or a billowing veil (approximating, say, the locks and garments in Botticellis
Birth of Venus). Still, what should not be overlooked is Warburgs empathicto
the verge of ecstaticrelation to the Nympha, a relation that tells us something
about the Kunstwissenschaft passion of antiquity-lovers such as Warburg and Freud,
as of Norbert Hanold. A Dutch humanist scholar and friend of Warburgs, Andr Jolles, even hatched a plan to compose a fictitious correspondence between
himself and Warburg, set in the time of the Florentine Renaissance. (Warburgs
thesis and first publication, in 1893, dealt with Botticellis Birth of Venus and
Spring as examples of how artists in that century transformed works from classical antiquity by heightening the dynamic movement of minor features such as
clothing and hair. Warburg adds that this is noteworthy for the psychological
aesthetic of the creative artist and refers the reader to R. Vischers ber das Optische
Formgefhl.) Drafts of those fictive letters in which Jolles pretends that a figure
from art passes into life were preserved by Warburg. Gombrich (1970) quotes a
passage from a letter dated November 23, 1900 in which Jolles seems to vary
the Pygmalion theme and claims to have fallen in love with the Nympha on a
fresco by Ghirlandaio (the translation is by Gombrich):
A fantastic figureshould I call her a servant girl, or rather a classical nymph?
enters the room . . . with a billowing veil. . . . This lively, light-footed and rapid
gait, this irresistible energy, this striding step, which contrasts with the aloof
distance of all the other figures, what is the meaning of it all? . . . It sometimes
looks to me as if the servant girl rushed with winged feet through the clear
ether instead of running on the real ground. . . . Enough, I lost my heart to
her and in the days of preoccupation which followed I saw her everywhere.
. . . Who is she? Where does she come from? Have I encountered her before?
I mean one and a half millennia earlier. (107f.)

See also note 22 below, and Didi-Huberman (2002, 24973), but who emphasizes
only the orgiastic dance aspect.
19. Freuds Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming (1908), composed close to the essay
on Gradiva, speculates (very briefly) on the aesthetic pleasure given by creative
writers, and finds a clue to it in the way they communicate their day dreams by
disguising them. Though that pleasure may be linked to the confluence of many
sources, Freud attributes it explicitly to the removal through poetic art of the
shame or disgust preventing the presentation of his fantasies (153). And so the
Formgefhl enters once more: the very act of disclosing to others a daydream (and
all the more so a night-dream?) is socially as well as psychically risky and has to be
done through artful disguises. Yet Freud leaves much untheorized. He concedes
that art in releasing us from disgust or shame achieves only a forepleasure,
without indicating what would constitute a still greater pleasure arising from
deeper psychical sources (153).
20. We do not have to agree, of course, with Freuds particular interpretive conclusion
or all of his generalized principles in the Gradiva essay. We must replace anxiety
by sexual excitement, he writes. I am aware that this explanation of anxiety in
dreams sounds very strange and is not easy to credit; but I can only advise the
reader to come to terms with it (1907, 61).
21. Though Freud mentions in a letter of December 6, 1906 to Jung the link of
transference with a cure . . . effected by love (McGuire 1974, 1213), there is
no clear evidence that he knew in 19061907 of Jungs liaison with his patient,
Sabina Spielrein.
22. A spirited review by Spyros Papapetros (2003) of Georges Didi-Hubermans Limage
survivante spells out Warburgs Dionysian strain. Warburg regrets that his own
time had lost the practice of the orgiastic ecstasies of antiquity yet he also seeks
to defend against the practice and so produces an eternal seesaw or oscillation
by exorcizing or else maintaining a distance from that strain. Warburgs striding
nymph, Papapetros writes amusingly (commenting on Didi-Huberman), seems
to be closer to the headhuntress Judith unwavering in her mission to decapitate

Geoffrey Hartman

521

Holoferness than to Freuds liberating Gradiva, who succeeded in curing her

delusional archeologist. More generally, Warburgs use of the dynamogramme
(the famous Pathosformel) is, according to this review, a conceptual apparatus visualizing historical turmoil. Every pleat of fabric, every lock of hair, had historical
energy. I can add that it is already clear from Warburgs first publication (see my
comments above, note 18) that his fascination with this energy, characterized
there as a heightened, dynamic motion (the fabric and locks of hair in Botticellis
Birth of Venus), expresses a revisionist Formgefhl that counters Winckelmanns
stille Grsse and signals a Dionysian turn in art appreciation. Warburgs brief summary of his thesis, some twenty years later, on the antikiesierenden Idealstils in the
painting of the early Italian Renaissance, spells out his position unequivocally. He
mentions a Laokoon sculpture apparently discovered in 1488 and to be admired
for its superlatively pathos-filled expressive power, which contradicts diametrically the still influential conception of Winckelmann about the nature of ancient
[classical] art (1932, 175). And Warburg adds (I will keep this final sentence of
his in the original German): [The presenter, i.e. Warburg himself, claims that]
Die tragische klassische Unruhe gehre . . . wesentlich zur Kultur des griechisch-rmischen
Altertums, das man gleichsam im Symbol einer Doppelherme von Apollo-Dionysos schauen
msse (176). Also, on the nympha, and Warburgs understanding of the polarity
of classical art, reflected as well at the methodological level of art-historical study
by a schizophrenic rift between ecstatic empathy and detached, categorizing
contemplation, see Giorgio Agamben (1975, 9698).
23. This aspect of a metaphysics of presence, which so urbanely underwrites Goethes
Gegenwart des classischen Bodens (the spirit of place emanating from the monuments
and landscape of Rome; see above, p. 509.), animates all the major German Romantic poets, though it is clearest, perhaps, as well as most tragically embodied,
in Hlderlins poetic quest that looks, however, further East, even toward India.
24. One also wonders about an antithetical instance, that of Oedipus as swell
foot.
25. In Nerval, the theme of inconsolable loss prevails and extends in Myrtho, as in
other poems of the Chimres, to the twilight of pagan myth and indeed of religious
belief generally, as this affects the poets inspiration, his luth constelle. In an obscure
yet suggestive verse Nerval claims Et jai deux fois travers lAcheron (And I have
crossed Acheron twice). Rudnytsky (2002) gives a thorough account of Freuds
own transferential relation to Jensens novel in terms of early object loss.

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