Sigmund Freud, Der Wahn und die Traüme in W. Jensens 'Gradiva' [Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's 'Gradiva']

Scott Brewster (University of Lincoln)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.4.2: German-language Writing and Culture: Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, 800-present.
Vol. editors: Gerhard P. Knapp (University of Utah), Jennifer Marston William (Purdue University), Herbert Rowland (Purdue University), Jill E. Twark (East Carolina University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1907

Places

Czech Republic (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Non-Fiction
- Commentary / Criticism (literary)
Essays/ Lectures (any)

Resources

Freud’s long essay, an analysis of the German novelist Wilhelm Jensen’s story Gradiva, is his first work to deal explicitly and systematically with literature and aesthetics, although he had commented at some length on Oedipus Rex and Hamlet in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). In asserting that dreams have meaning, psychoanalysts are aligned with the ancients, a “superstitious” public and creative writers. Through the close analysis of a story that Jensen termed a “Pompeiian phantasy”, Freud considers “the class of dreams that have never been dreamt at all – dreams created by imaginative writers and ascribed to invented characters in the course of a story.”

The story …

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1374 words

Citation: Brewster, Scott. "Der Wahn und die Traüme in W. Jensens 'Gradiva'". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 28 April 2002 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=5620, accessed 22 November 2024.]

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