#  Gradiva 

 



   ![Bas Relief of Gradiva.](/sites/g/files/omnuum6316/files/styles/hwp_1_1__960x960_scale/public/chsi/files/gradiva_01.jpg?itok=A8omKZJH) 

 

Gradiva, “the lady who paces away,” was a source of unremitting fascination for Freud. A plaster-cast relief of the figure hung on the wall over his analytic couch in his Vienna office. In a 1907 letter to his wife, Freud describes meeting his Gradiva in the Vatican museum. In the same year, he also offered an analysis of Wilhelm Jensen’s novel *Gradiva* (1902-3), first published as installments in the *Neue Freie Presse*, a Viennese newspaper. In his reading, Freud distilled a literary understanding of the death drive, the wish (*die* *Wahn)*, and death’s inconsolable connection to seduction and sexuality. According to Freud, Gradiva—a fictional specter from Pompei reincarnated in the figure of Zoe—unhinges the psychic economy of the novel’s protagonist Norbert Hanold, who develops a fetish for Gradiva’s gait. Transformed by Freud into a paradigm for analysis, requiring the analyst to assume the position of detective and archaeologist, Gradiva would become one of the images of psychoanalysis, transcending the domain of his clinic and informing the practice of other theorists.



 

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### Figure 1

Gradiva’s posture was significant for Freud. For Freud, her poise represented the variegated positions of the analyst’s work.  
She looks down, in introspection.  
She is silent.

 ![A section of the Gradiva wall relief featuring her shoulders and head.](/sites/g/files/omnuum6316/files/2025-06/Screenshot%202025-06-02%20at%2017-35-05%20Key%20Image%20Gradiva.png)

 

**Figure 1**---

### Figure 2

And yet her gesture is energetic and active, for she lifts her draped tunic to reveal her feet.  
For Freud, the fact that her center of gravity is shifted towards the front signifies that she is leaving the scene with only a trace of her feet impressed on the ground.  
This elusive trace, says Freud, is where the analytic work begins.

 ![A section of the Gradiva wall relief featuring her hands and feet.](/sites/g/files/omnuum6316/files/2025-06/Screenshot%202025-06-02%20at%2017-38-41%20Key%20Image%20Gradiva.png)

 

**Figure 2**---

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