Out of the Ruins: Messianicity, Psychoanalysis and Love in Wilhelm Jensen’s and Sigmund Freud’s Gradiva

In this article, I outline a model of “messianic psychoanalysis”—a psychoanalysis “slightly adjusted” to incorporate the future-oriented dimension of hope characteristic of the Jewish messianic idea—through a close reading of one of Sigmund Freud’s most significant essays on literature, namely his analysis of Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva. I argue that the possibility of a messianic reading of both Jensen’s novella and Freud’s interpretation depends on the relation between first love and new love, which mirrors the dialectic of past and future found in philosophical models of messianic temporality developed by Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Bloch. Drawing on the work of these thinkers, I demonstrate that Gradiva, at the level of its deep structure, is a psychoanalytic story about the possibility that love—and with it, singular life—can indeed have a future, provided it parts ways with the past while remaining faithful to it in a different manner. The “triumph of love” presented in the novella rests on a fundamentally messianic conception of happiness, understood as a new response to the original enigma of the Other: an enigma transformed from the site of catastrophic trauma into the source of previously unimaginable bliss.