Thus our author has connected the treatment of the delusion and the
breaking forth of the desire for love most closely with one another, and
prepared the outcome in a love-affair as necessary. He knows the nature
of the delusion even better than his critics; he knows that a component
of amorous desire has combined with a component of resistance in the
formation of the delusion, and he has the girl who undertakes the cure
discover in Hanold’s delusion the component referring to her. Only this
insight can make her decide to devote herself to treating him, only the
certainty of knowing herself loved by him can move her to confess to him
her love. The treatment consists in restoring to him, from without, the
repressed memories which he cannot release from within; it would be
ineffective if the therapeutist did not consider the emotions; and the
interpretation of the delusion would not finally be: “See; all that
means only that you love me.”
The procedure which our author has his Zoë follow for the cure of the
delusion of the friend of her youth, shows a considerable resemblance,
no, complete agreement, essentially, with a therapeutic method which Dr.
J. Breuer and the present writer introduced into medicine in 1895, and
to the perfection of which the latter has since devoted himself. This
method of treatment, first called the “cathartic” by Breuer, which the
present writer has preferred to designate as “analytic,” consists in
rather forcibly bringing into the consciousness of the patients who
suffer from disturbances analogous to Hanold’s delusion, the
unconscious, through the repression of which they have become ill, just
as Gradiva does with the repressed memories of their childhood
relations. To be sure, accomplishment of this task is easier for Gradiva
than for the physician; she is, in this connection, in a position which
might be called ideal from many view-points. The physician who does not
fathom his patient in advance, and does not possess within himself, as
conscious memory, what is working in the patient as unconscious, must
call to his aid a complicated technique in order to overcome this
disadvantage. He must learn to gather with absolute certainty, from the
patient’s conscious ideas and statements, the repressed material in him,
to guess the unconscious, when it betrays itself behind the patient’s
conscious expressions and acts. The latter then does something similar
to what Norbert Hanold did at the end of the story, when he
re-translates the name, Gradiva, into _Bertgang_. The disturbance
disappears then by being traced back to its origin; analysis brings cure
at the same time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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