Description

ORIGINAL FRENCH EDITION translated by Marie Bonaparte.
ONE OF 70 COPIES ON PUR-FIL, only large paper edition.

Published in German in 1907 under the title Der Wahn und die Traüme in W. Jensens "Gradiva",  the book opens with a translation of the short story Gradiva of Jensen by E. Zak and G. Sadoul.
This is followed by a psychoanalytical analysis of the dream and fascination of the young archaeologist Norbert Hanold with the representation of a young girl sculpted in a bas-relief in the collections of the Museum of Rome.
"Writers are invaluable allies and their testimony should be highly valued, because they always know a great deal about things between heaven and earth that our school wisdom cannot yet dream of. Even in psychology, they are far ahead of us ordinary men, because they draw on sources that we have not yet tapped for science."
Like Hanold, Freud acquired a plaster cast of the bas-relief; he kept it in his Viennese consulting room and took it to England when he went into exile in 1938.

This analysis of the Gradiva myth was widely adopted by the Surrealists: the central figure in a painting by André Masson (1938), it was also the name of the gallery André Breton opened in St Germain des Prés in 1937, and of a Brussels-based Surrealist magazine from 1971 to 1975.