The Figuration of the Transference

The erratic behaviour, to say the least, of Norbert Hanold (Freud, 1907) an unwitting lover, served Freud as a clinical example for enlarging on delusion. The deeds and acts of the hero of Gradiva initially seem strange to the reader: Hanold takes refuge in his work to escape his perception of his childhood love incarnated by Zoe. Now she lives just around the corner from him, but if he passes her during the day in the street, he does not see her. Fortunately, his unconscious decides otherwise and she appears to him in a dream: the figuration of Zoe is transposed to Pompeii; she is walking in the streets and is buried under the ashes of the eruption of Vesuvius. The next morning, he has forgotten the dream. Inwardly agitated, Hanold feels compelled to leave the town where he is living. He leaves “precisely” for Pompeii where, as soon as he arrives, he contemplates the relief named Gradiva. He does not recall that he has already seen at his friend Zoe's house a similar posture of the foot “lifted from the ground… [touching] it only with the tip of the toes”, but it suffices to awaken the childhood impression of the beautiful girl, even if it does not reach his conscious mind. He is then able to recall his initial dream, the traces of the lost object returning to him through the visual images and the enactment of the dream, which reveal to the reader and to Hanold a former link between two childhood friends, but transposed to Pompeii and to another epoch.

It is remarkable, Freud notes, that the recollected content of this dream initiates the delusion, here a transference love that sweeps along everything in its path. Thus, when, as a result of a fortunate fictional coincidence, Hanold catches sight of the real Zoe in Pompeii, the one his unconscious tells him not to notice, he is unable to realise that it is his childhood friend, alive and real, that he has seen. He makes her incarnate the figure of Gradiva, the name of the young girl in the relief, a fine example of a