Delusion and Dream

A plaster girl walks out of ancient Rome and into Norbert Hanold’s thoughts. He names her Gradiva—and begins watching the feet of women in the streets to discover whether she could really have walked that way.

Wilhelm Jensen’s story moves between a German archaeologist’s quiet study and the sun-struck streets of Pompeii, rebuilt in Hanold’s imagination around a graceful figure in a Roman relief. In this 1907 interpretation, Sigmund Freud follows Hanold’s fascination as it turns into a private conviction, and asks what dreams and delusions can reveal about desires their dreamer cannot name. The more closely Hanold studies Gradiva’s step, the more urgently the boundary between scholarship and obsession begins to blur. What is he really trying to see in her walk?

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