‘The healing power of love’: The literary/analytic bond of marriage in Freud’s essay on Gradiva

Abstract

Freud ’s declared position regarding the management of ‘transference love’ advocated ‘abstinence’, objectivity and even ‘emotional coldness in the analyst’. However, his essay on Jensen’s Gradiva reveals an identification with an involved and responsive ‘maternal’ analytic position associated with theorists such as Ferenczi, Balint and Winnicott. These theorists attribute the origins of transference love to the pre‐oedipal stage, shaping their analytic model on the basis of the early relationship with the mother. Freud generally had difficulty identifying with such a position, since it entailed addressing his own inner feminine aspects. Yet a literary analysis of his ‘Gradiva’ reveals this stance in his textual performance, i.e. in the ways in which he reads and retells Jensen’s story. Freud ’s narration not only expresses identification with Zoe, the female protagonist, but also idealizes her ‘therapeutic’ conduct, which is closer in spirit to that of object‐relations theorists. His subtext even implies, however unintended, that an ideal treatment of transference love culminates in a psychical ‘marriage’ bond between the analytic couple, a metaphor used by Winnicott to describe the essence of the mother–baby (analyst/patient) bond. Freud ’s reading process is itself analogous to Zoe’s ‘therapeutic’ conduct, in that both perform a creative and involved interaction with the text/patient.

Key words:

• feminine
• Gradiva
• interpretation
• literature and psychoanalysis
• maternal
• mother–baby
• play
• pre‐oedipal
• reading process
• transference love

Notes

1. An interesting contemporary example of the successful use of this distinction in a case of intense erotic transference is described by K.J. Ogden (1999).

2. The supposition that Hanold’s condition can be interpreted as stemming from unresolved pre‐oedipal conflicts is also raised, from a different perspective, in Rudnytsky’s essay, which briefly addresses this issue, focusing mostly on Hanold’s unprocessed bereavement following the death of his mother (Rudnytsky, 1994).

3. On this point I am completely at odds with the position voiced by Jacobus, according to which Zoe/Gradiva is just another Galatea in the pantheon of Western literature, in which women are represented as the objects of male fantasies devoid of their own subjectivity (see Jacobus, 1986).

4. Balint describes this state as ‘a sort of harmonious interpenetrating mix‐up’ (Balint, 1968, p. 136).

5. Kofman considers Freud’s reading in this essay to be an aggressive distortion of the text, intended to direct it towards a preconceived interpretation. In her opinion, this reading violently dispels the aesthetic charm of the work. In my opinion, the opposite is true (see Kofman, 1974).

6. For example, Freud employs the image of a volcanic catastrophe that buries beneath it a primeval mother in his work Moses and Monotheism, when considering the hypothesis of a transition from a matriarchal to a patriarchal culture in the Greek world (Freud, 1939).