4.8 (9 ratings)

Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fancy / Delusion and Dream in Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva (Green Integer: 86)

Name: Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fancy / Delusion and Dream in Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva (Green Integer: 86)
Rating: 4.8 (9 reviews)
Author: Wilhelm Jensen
ISBN: 189229589X

by Wilhelm Jensen

ghosts

About this book

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Here together in one volume are the ghostly love story by Wilhelm Jensen and the major text psychoanalyzing it by Sigmund Freud.

In Jensen’s story, a young man discovers a Roman statue that so attracts him he purchases a plaster cast for his home in a German university town. Intense study of the relief leads to a dream which transports him to Pompeii on the day of Vesuvius’s eruption in 79 AD. Encountering the statue’s beautiful model, Gradiva, he attempts to warn her of her fate.

After the dream, he returns to Italy and appears to actually meet Gradiva. But when he speaks to her in Latin, she answers in German. Is this woman real or a delusion?

The analysis by Freud that follows is both a brilliant literary interpretation of a symbolic work and a statement of the importance of literature on his thinking and the world of scientific study.

Publication Date: May 25, 2026
ASIN: 189229589X

Reader Reviews

... get Jensen's novella of an obsessive Archeologist with a bad memory and a thing for feet plus Vienna's greatest ...

May 19, 2015

A first-rate combo--you get Jensen's novella of an obsessive Archeologist with a bad memory and a thing for feet plus Vienna's greatest citizen, sans cigar, holding forth in a brief piece that is one part psychoanalysis and another part literary criticism. The perfect little volume for a course on the psychological novel, psychology and literature, or, for that matter, for a course on obsessions in literature. ) 3 people found this helpful

a charming little study

December 20, 2001

Freud shines here in a largely non-reductive analytic look at Jensen's well-plotted and psychologically rich but literarily mediocre novella Gravida: A Fancy, written about an archeologist who falls under the spell of a beautiful feminine image and travels to Pompeii to meet the authentic woman who reminds him of it. Or rather, the reverse.... Although I can't follow Freud's evocation of the dream censor, that device which scrambles images and feelings to keep them unconscious, or the...

This excellent product was delivered quite on time. My next supply will be with you again and again and again. I will even introduce more customers if the top quality service remains the same. )