ABSTRACT
This chapter describes and elucidates some of the themes and particularly with reference to Freud's analysis of Jensen's Gradiva, perhaps the most remarkable 'ghost' story of all time. The spectre of Gradiva appears in that most haunted landscape – Pompeii. The chapter discusses the multiple psychoanalytic projects of the last century which have had at their heart the idea of haunting as an individual and collective experience and the idea of visitation as trauma or pathology. Projects to understand the 'textual ghosts' of the gothic have increasingly relied on psychoanalysis in order to excavate the crypts and the tombs in search of the elusive ghosts. The multiple entanglements between body, mind and worlds as well as other human beings and ghosts accounts for the permeable relations between entities as well as the prosthetic extensions of and incorporations into the social body itself.
