Image Details

Scala/Art Resource, NY

Caught forever in mid-stride, this young woman is thought to represent Aglauros, the daughter of the mythical first king of Attica. Now in the Vatican, the Roman relief is known as the Gradiva (“she who advances”). It inspired a 1903 novel by Wilhelm Jensen, which was recommended to Freud by Carl Jung. Jensen’s story is about an archaeologist attracted to the sculpted image of Gradiva. He has a dream in which he travels to Pompeii and searches for her, finding her in a lost love from his childhood. In 1907 Freud published “Delusion and Dream in Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva.” He later hung a plaster cast of the relief over the couch in his consulting room.