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“And she departed, after having introduced herself to us as the daughter of the zoologist and lizard catcher and after having, by all kinds of ambiguous remarks, admitted her therapeutic intention and other secret designs as well.”
The second female practitioner of Freudian psychoanalysis (after Emma Eckstein, who, having been Freud's patient, herself began to treat others as early as ) was found, rather than made.1 She had no medical training; she came into being fully formed, in the guise of a reanimated ancient sculpture, effectively and ingeniously curing a case of male hysteria. The analyst in question was Gradiva, so named in Wilhelm Jensen's novel of 1903, Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fantasy.
Sigmund Freud's Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's “Gradiva” (1907) consists of a psychoanalysis of the central protagonist of Jensen's Gradiva, a young archeologist called Norbert Hanold, who was himself (in Freud's reading) Gradiva's analysand. Delusions and Dreams is in many ways an extension of Freud's archeological metaphor for psychoanalysis as such, where retrieval, analysis, and resolution of the past are likewise fundamental processes (see Kuspit 1989). Wilhelm Jensen, who was born in the northern Germany city of Kiel and studied in Berlin and Munich, had also been trained in medicine and then later in philology and philosophy (Musatti 1961, 7). When queried after the fact about Freud's analytic essay, Jensen stated that although he was a physician he had not written Gradiva under the impact of current psychological theories, but only according to his personal inspiration (McGuire 1974, 51-52). That was fine with Freud, who let the manifest content of the novel speak for itself, and sought the