xi

INTRODUCTION

Jensen’s brilliant and unique story of Gradiva
has not only literary merit of very high order,
but may be said to open up a new field for
romance. It is the story of a young archæologist
who suffered a very characteristic mental disturb-
ance and was gradually but effectively cured by
a kind of native psychotherapeutic instinct, which
probably inheres in all of us, but which in this
case was found in the girl he formerly loved but
had forgotten, and who restored at the same time
his health and his old affection for her.

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about
the work is that the author knew nothing of psy-
chotherapy as such, but wrought his way through
the labyrinth of mechanisms that he in a sense
rediscovered and set to work, so that it needed
only the application of technical terms to make
this romance at the same time a pretty good key
to the whole domain of psychoanalysis. In a
sense it is a dream-story, but no single dream ever
began to be so true to the typical nature of
dreams; it is a clinical picture, but I can think of
no clinical picture that had its natural human

xii

interest so enhanced by a moving romance.
Gradiva might be an introduction to psychoanal-
ysis, and is better than anything else we can think
of to popularize it.

It might be added that while this romance has
been more thoroughly analysed than any other,
and that by Freud himself, it is really only one
of many which in the literature of the subject
have been used to show forth the mysterious ways
of the unconscious. It indicates that psychoanal-
ysis has a future in literary criticism, if not that
all art and artists have, from the beginning, more
or less anticipated as they now illustrate it.

The translator is thoroughly competent and
has done her work with painstaking conscientious-
ness, and she has had the great advantage of hav-
ing it revised, especially with reference to the
translation of technical terms from the German,
by no less an eminent expert in psychotherapy
than Dr. Smith Ely Jelliffe.

G. STANLEY HALL.