Why read Delusion and Dream in Wilhelm Jensen's 'Gradiva'?

Book cover of Delusion and Dream in Wilhelm Jensen's 'Gradiva'

Book description

Freud's essay which subjects Jensen's novel and its protagonist to psychoanalysis was first published in 1907.

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Why read it?

1 author picked Delusion and Dream in Wilhelm Jensen's 'Gradiva' as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Maya Balakirsky-Katz

Author

Freud’s highly influential essay—reprinted in pamphlet form by bookseller Hugo Heller—argues that the Austrian author Wilhelm Jenson translated his daydreams into aesthetic form. This focus on the internal life of the author became widely influential to interwar modernism.

I am as interested in Freud’s analysis of Jenson as an author and his central protagonist Norbert Hanold, as he idealizes the memory of a childhood loss of his beloved that he associates to the Gradiva bas-relief as I am with the establishment of Freud the critic, analyst, and writer.

Around the same time Freud first delivered this paper as a lecture…

From Maya's list on the work of contemplation and physical space.