It must be striking to every reader of _Gradiva_ how often our author puts into the mouths of both the leading characters speeches which have double meaning. For Hanold these speeches are intended to have only one meaning, and only his companion, Gradiva, is affected by their other meaning. Thus, after her first answer, he exclaims: “I knew that your voice sounded so,” and the yet unenlightened Zoë has to ask how that is possible, as he has never before heard her speak. In the second conversation, the girl is for a moment puzzled by his delusion, as he assures her that he recognized her at once. She must understand these words in the meaning that is correct for his unconscious, as his recognition of their acquaintance which reaches back into childhood, while he, of course, knows nothing of this meaning of his speech and explains it only by reference to the delusion which dominates him. The speeches of the girl, on the other hand, in whose person the most brilliant mental clarity is opposed to the delusion, are made intentionally ambiguous. One meaning of them falls in with the ideas of Hanold’s delusion, in order to enable her to penetrate into his conscious comprehension, the other raises itself above the delusion, and, as a rule, gives us the interpretation of it in the unconscious truth which has been represented by it. It is a triumph of wit to be able to represent the delusion and the truth in the same expression. Interspersed with such ambiguities is Zoë’s speech in which she explains the situation to her girl friend and at the same time rids herself of her disturbing society; it is really spoken out of the book, calculated more for us readers than for her happy colleague. In the conversations with Hanold, the double meaning is chiefly established by the fact that Zoë makes use of the symbolism which we find followed in Hanold’s first dream, in the equivalence of repression and destruction, Pompeii and childhood. Thus on the one hand she can, in her speeches, continue in the rôle which Hanold’s delusion assigns to her, on the other, she can touch upon the real relations, and awaken in Hanold’s unconscious a knowledge of them.