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

Abstract

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.

1. Introduction

In his book devoted to the complex relationship between Sigmund Freud and Judaism, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi addresses the founder of psychoanalysis directly, accusing him of abandoning what he sees as the true core of “Jewishness”—more important than any religious dogma—namely, “the anticipation of a specific hope for the future”: “But it is on this question of hope or hopelessness, even more than on God or godlessness, that your teaching may be at its most un-Jewish” (Yerushalmi 1991, p. 95). In doing so, he joins other Jewish thinkers who situate psychoanalysis on the side of the Greek tragic paradigm, fatalistically fixated on the past and its inexorable return in everything that might appear new.1 Within this paradigm, the stake is not redemption—even as an unattainable horizon—but rather the alleviation of psychic pain and the famous transformation of “hysterical misery into common unhappiness” (Breuer and Freud 1895, p. 305). But must this necessarily be the case? In other words, is such a bleak, emphatically “non-Jewish” interpretation of Freud’s teaching the only possible one?

Much has been written about the Jewish identity of the founder of psychoanalysis. Scholars have reflected on the extent to which it shaped his theory while also examining the social conditions surrounding the emergence of the psychoanalytic movement, including the struggles of Sigmund Freud and his students with antisemitism and Nazism.2 The aim of this article, however, is not to determine whether psychoanalysis is a “Jewish science” (as it was claimed to be both by antisemitic critics and by many devoted Freudians), but rather to demonstrate that an interpretation of it is possible that is grounded in the philosophical structure of the Jewish messianic idea. This structure can operate independently of any religious context, functioning as a kind of “minimal theology” (De Vries 2005) within many twentieth-century Western philosophical projects (Kavka 2004). As Jacques Derrida puts it, what is at stake is “the formality of a structural messianism, a messianism without religion” (Derrida 1994, p. 74) or even a “messianicity without messianism” (Derrida 2002, p. 56). Whereas messianism always assigns a specific horizon to expectation, messianicity denotes the very gesture of unconditional openness to what is to come—to, in Gershom Scholem’s phrase, “a state of things which has never yet existed” (Scholem 1971, p. 3).

In this article, I am concerned with what Agata Bielik-Robson has termed “messianic psychoanalysis,” a concept coined to designate the possibility of reading Sigmund Freud “against the grain,” in conjunction with ideas derived from the Jewish messianic tradition (Bielik-Robson 2019). Messianic psychoanalysis would thus be a form of psychoanalysis augmented by a futural dimension, toward which classical Freudianism tends to remain cautiously sceptical. In her conceptualisation of such an unorthodox psychoanalytic model, Bielik-Robson draws, among others, on the insights of Eric L. Santner, who understands Freudian psychoanalysis as a kind of “psychotheology of everyday life,” placing it in dialogue with the messianic philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig in order to open it to the problematics of revelation and ethical subjectivity (Santner 2001). My own proposal for approaching the relation between psychoanalysis and messianicity, however, differs slightly and proceeds through the concept of love—more precisely, through a certain literary-psychoanalytic “love story.”3

Since the principal domain of psychoanalytic interventions—both therapeutic and theoretical—is human love life, the absence of what Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi called a “specific hope for the future” in the dominant understanding of psychoanalysis entails, above all, the impossibility of a new love. Jacques Lacan states explicitly: “There is no way, on the basis of observing just what crosses our senses, […] that anything new in love will ever be constructed” (Lacan 1990, p. 31). Within the scope of this analysis, messianic psychoanalysis concerns nothing less than the possibility of erotic innovation. Psychoanalytic thought has taught us that every love has its secret, remote past; the question is whether it can also have a future. I suggest that a model of psychoanalytic messianicity can be discerned in the only Freudian text devoted to fulfilled love, which is also one of his most important essays on literature: Delusion and Dreams in Jensen’s “Gradiva”, Freud’s analysis of the novella Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fancy by the German writer Wilhelm Jensen.

2. Gradiva: A “Commonplace Love Story” or a Messianic Narrative?

The plot of Gradiva is relatively straightforward.4 A young archaeologist, Norbert Hanold, previously absorbed entirely in his scholarly pursuits and indifferent to matters of desire, becomes captivated by the image of a woman carved on an ancient Roman relief. The figure, shown in motion with a strikingly unusual gait, fascinates him to such an extent that he names her “Gradiva,” meaning “the girl splendid in walking” (Jensen 1918, p. 5). While travelling in Pompeii, he unexpectedly comes across a living woman among the ruins who seems to embody this very image. It is eventually revealed that the woman he identifies as “Gradiva” is in fact Zoë Bertgang, a childhood companion he no longer consciously remembers. His former playmate, however, proves to be remarkably perceptive and well versed in the workings of the unconscious. Recognising the nature of his fantasy, Zoë deliberately adopts the role he has unwittingly assigned to her—that of a spectral inhabitant of Pompeii, lost to an irreversible catastrophe. At first glance, her performance as the ghostly Gradiva might seem no more than a playful manipulation of Hanold; yet, as the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that her intentions are of an entirely different order.

By maintaining the “Pompeian” fiction, Zoë seeks to cure him, guiding him back to a long-repressed affection from his youth, which has survived only in the distorted guise of an obsession with a marble image. As a child, Hanold had been in love with Zoë, and she continues to love him; it is for this reason that she assumes the role of Gradiva, hoping that through the medium of archaeology she will be able to reach the latent erotic dimension of his psyche. According to Freud, “[t]here was no other way of doing so; to contradict it would have put an end to any such possibility” (Freud 1907, pp. 21–22). In her efforts to free the young man from his illness, Zoë makes use of intentionally ambiguous, witty allusions during their encounters: “some of her remarks sound as though they had a double sense, as though besides their meaning in the context of the delusion they also meant something real and present-day […]” (Freud 1907, p. 21). The therapeutic process proves successful, and in the happy finale of this “‘commonplace’ love-story” (as Freud calls it), Norbert Hanold—at last cured of his “delusion”—falls in love with his brilliant saviour (Freud 1907, p. 22).

There is no doubt that Jensen’s novella interests Freud above all because he finds parallels between the “therapy” to which Zoë subjects Hanold and the practice of psychoanalysis. If, in Freud’s words, “the doctor, in his educative work, makes use of one of the components of love,” then the protagonist of Gradiva, Zoë Bertgang, not only behaves like a true therapist but also emerges as the most formidable rival to the founder of psychoanalysis (Freud 1916, p. 312). Freud praises Jensen’s heroine for employing allusive therapeutic interventions to restore Hanold’s repressed childhood memories, which, withheld from consciousness, found an outlet in the form of a fantasy centred on an ancient sculpture. “Every psycho-analytic treatment is an attempt at liberating repressed love which has found a meagre outlet in the compromise of a symptom,” he writes (Freud 1907, p. 90). He also notes that the undeniable success of Zoë-the-therapist stems from her privileged position: she herself was the object of Hanold’s former repressed love, and thus, following the “patient’s” recovery, she naturally becomes this object once again. Even her very surname, “Bertgang”—as the protagonist only comes to realise toward the end of the novella—“has the same meaning as Gradiva and signifies ‘the one splendid in walking’” (Jensen 1918, p. 111). The happy ending—both to Hanold’s therapy and to the “‘commonplace’ love-story”—would therefore not have been possible had Zoë “not taken his feelings into account and if her ultimate translation of the delusion had not been: ‘Look, all this only means that you love me’” (Freud 1907, p. 88).

Yet the difficulty lies in the fact that the object of Hanold’s forgotten first love is not, strictly speaking, the Zoë with whom he speaks in Pompeii, mistaking her for the imaginary Gradiva—the Zoë who becomes his therapist, saviour, and eventual beloved. The archaeologist’s repressed sexual drive has attached itself to a vague memory of a childhood companion, but only the intermediate stage of his infatuation with Gradiva guarantees any continuity between that little girl and the woman with whom Hanold ultimately ends up. Gradiva is therefore not a story about a return to the “lost paradise” of childhood love—nor is it (as will be shown) a celebration of abandoning past-rooted illusions in favour of a stark present reality. Rather, it is, in essence, a messianic story: a tale of a truly new love, whose novelty lies not in erasing the past, but in transforming it so as to bring closer what had previously remained beyond the horizon of possibility—the relational experience of being-together.

In a dream, Hanold realises that Gradiva “was living in her native city and, without him having any suspicion of it, was his contemporary” (Jensen 1918, p. 12). At this stage of his “delusion,” he naturally assumes that the city in question is Pompeii, whereas it is in fact a German town where both he and Zoë—his childhood friend—reside. The phrase “his contemporary” signals this ambiguity while at the same time foreshadowing the novella’s happy ending from the very beginning. Yet when Zoë remarks that, in order to confirm Gradiva’s identity, Hanold “should not have needed to come to Pompeii,” since he “could have confirmed it […] a good hundred miles nearer,” it becomes clear that this claim is only partially true (Jensen 1918, p. 105). New love appears to be possible only at the cost of a “Pompeiian fancy”—an archaeological delusion that buries the subject in the ashes of the past.

3. Original Hope: Past and Future, First Love and New Love

Within the framework of psychoanalysis, the reconciliation of past and future is by no means an easy task. As Anne Dufourmantelle observes, an unconscious struggle unfolds between them in the psyche, with both sides appearing as “two orders of indefectible loyalties”: “that which stems from childhood experiences, from secrets and truncated genealogies, or from interdicted or unreachable memories of war and sacrificial silence; and that which beckons us to a freedom wholly cut off from any past” (Dufourmantelle 2019, p. 64). Psychoanalysis teaches us that this struggle is not evenly matched. The past returns even where we seek the greatest freedom—it besieges the body in the form of the symptom, which turns out to be a kind of debt: a painful solution, yet “less worse than betraying the primal fidelity that we knitted with the first bonds of love […]” (Dufourmantelle 2019, p. 137). Jacques Derrida, whose thought constitutes one of Dufourmantelle’s key points of reference, described this obsessive fidelity as “archive fever” (mal d’archive):

It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement. No desire, no passion, no drive, no compulsion, indeed no repetition compulsion, no “mal-de” can arise for a person who is not already, in one way or another, en mal d’archive.

(Derrida 1995, p. 91)

Archive fever thus constitutes a form of fidelity to the first love, in which loyalty does not imply stagnation. On the contrary, it takes the form of a constant movement, an unrelenting drive that does not allow us a moment’s rest. This striving towards the origin, as Adam Phillips observes in his essay on the problem of new love in Freudian erotic theory, has a catastrophic character insofar as it forecloses any future (Phillips 2005, pp. 179–80). In order to account for this destructive and regressive dimension of the human psyche, Freud introduced the concept of the death drive (Freud 1920); in doing so, however, he compromised the revolutionary force of his earlier discovery, according to which sexuality itself constitutes a true catastrophe for the subject. Without erotic novelty, we cannot survive, yet at the same time we are unable to endure it: “The new, at its best, is an opportunity to viably desire a version of the old; the new at its worst is the defeat of original hope” (Phillips 2005, p. 187; emphasis added).

What, however, is this “original hope”? I highlight this formulation because it clearly breaks with the catastrophic logic of regressive desire. If, as Adam Phillips suggests, love resists all change and development, it is difficult to understand why it should be grounded precisely in hope—which, by its very nature, opens onto the future rather than denying its possibility (Phillips 2005, p. 186). If there is hope in the past—if our former attachments do not constitute merely a debt but also a promise—then the relation between the two orders of loyalty exceeds a simple opposition.

At the origin of human sexuality, as Sigmund Freud observed, lies a primordial tenderness that functions as a necessary supplement to the instinct of self-preservation—a pre-sexual affection that Michael Balint termed “primary love” (Balint 1960). Following Jean Laplanche’s interpretation of the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Freud 1905c), we may say that this early tenderness is almost immediately distorted, as the sexual drive “attaches itself” to it, gaining autonomy through the loss of its first, life-sustaining object (Laplanche 1985, pp. 19–20). Laplanche states explicitly that “sexual life is not something that exists from the very first” and should instead be understood as “something which is, so to speak, grafted on to or which emerges from […] a relational life […]” (Laplanche 1989, p. 72). From that moment on, the sexual object is both lost and, strictly speaking, never possessed by the libido: it is the object of primary love upon which sexuality “leans” (in accordance with the Freudian concept of Anlehnung), yet from which it remains irreversibly separated. Attempts to recover it take the form of “archive fever”—a burdensome, painful, but unavoidable striving.

And yet, this primordial love also holds out the promise of a different shape of interpersonal relations. This does not mean that prior to the emergence of the sexual drive we actually enjoyed some alternative mode of loving relationality: the earliest, “affectionate” love was never experienced as love, since both the sexual subject capable of feeling it and its separate object were constituted only through its loss. Balint’s “primary love”—an undifferentiated, affective harmony between the individual and its environment (Balint 1960, p. 39)—has little to do with an actual relation, as it describes a hypothetical state prior to subjectivation, which in the psychoanalytic universe is always paid for by a painful encounter with alterity and externality. When, in his essay on jokes, Freud evokes the euphoric “mood of our childhood”—supposedly belonging to a time when “we were ignorant of the comic, when we were incapable of jokes and when we had no need of humour to make us feel happy in our life”—he gives in to precisely this nostalgic fantasy of a lost paradise (Freud 1905b, p. 236). Fifteen years later, however, he would claim that the true “mood of our childhood” is rather one of disappointment and frustration: “The tie of affection, which binds the child as a rule to the parent of the opposite sex, succumbs to disappointment […]” (Freud 1920, p. 21). The promise of primary love was not fulfilled—but it is precisely for this reason that it can remain a promise.5

This dialectical relation between past and future is also central to the messianic structure of temporality.6 Gershom Scholem asserts that in messianism, the utopian element (the orientation towards the future) is inseparably linked to the restorative element, that is, the return to the past. Yet this is not a restoration based on a simple return to origins. The entirely new state of affairs that is the object of messianic hope has, in Scholem’s words, “elements of the completely old, but even this old order does not consist of the actual past; rather, it is a past transformed and transfigured in a dream brightened by the rays of utopianism” (Scholem 1971, p. 4). The idea that the image of happiness, which gives content to the category of redemption, is necessarily tied to what is past is also articulated by Walter Benjamin in his famous second thesis on the philosophy of history:

The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption.

(Benjamin 1968, p. 254)

As Arthur Bradley argues, what is to be redeemed is not a past that once existed but the originary potentiality of the past itself: “what never existed in the first place” (Bradley 2019, p. 176). This should not be understood merely as a metaphor for the future redress of past wrongs. Rather, the past becomes “every bit as open as the future” (Bradley 2019, p. 182). Benjaminian happiness—the redemption of possibilities that were never actualised, including friendships and love affairs that never came to fruition—thus resonates with the psychoanalytic vision of the promise held out by a first love that was never experienced as such. But how, then, are these latent possibilities to be redeemed? Where are we to look for the unrealised potentialities of the past—or, more precisely, where are we to find them?

In an earlier note titled Agesilaus Santander, Benjamin approaches the relationship between happiness and the past somewhat differently. There, he defines happiness as “the conflict in which the rapture of the unique, the new, the yet unborn is combined with that bliss of experiencing something once more,” a contradiction that can be paraphrased as a duel between new and first love (Benjamin 1999a, p. 715). The “temporal index” that directs the past toward redemption therefore also refers it toward the future, making any attempt to recover it as past necessarily futile. Ernst Bloch cautions against the overvaluation of former happiness in the fragment from Traces titled “Reunion Without Connection,” which can be read as a veiled critique of Walter Benjamin, who, in the dialectical tension between the old and the new, at times gave undue primacy to the past: “Even what was should not hold us as such. Nothing past should be sought so faithfully that one goes back, truly back. One often dreams of it, but one should beware” (Bloch 2006, p. 62).7 Although “there simply is no reunion with union” and “a sentimental reunion is poisonous, not nutritious,” there remain possibilities for a “true” return (Bloch 2006, p. 64)—one that occurs when, in Bloch’s words, we get out of the past “somehow faithfully,” faithful to it in a different way (Bloch 2006, p. 63; emphasis added). In other words, when we have not forgotten the hope once harboured, but we understand that the happiness it promised cannot be found in the depths of memory.

4. Life Amid the Ruins

Returning to Gradiva, one can say that if Norbert Hanold, cured of his “Pompeiian” delusion, had merely recovered his repressed love for the charming childhood friend (as Freud sometimes suggests), we would be witnessing what Bloch calls a “sentimental return”—an illusion that fails to account for how the relationship between the novella’s protagonists can truly have a future. At the root of Hanold’s fascination with the marble relief—a captivation with, as Freud notes, “something past and lifeless”—lies a repressed first love; yet without the intervention of this obsessive fantasy and the process by which it is worked through, that early affection would remain, quite literally, “something past and lifeless” (Freud 1907, p. 22).

Alongside the dialectic of new and old, Jensen’s novella also enacts a related dialectic of life and death. Zoë Bertgang is the daughter of a zoologist, and her name—not coincidentally—means “life” in Greek. At the same time, Hanold identifies her with a deceased inhabitant of Pompeii, granted only a spectral presence: when the archaeologist encounters her among the Pompeiian ruins, he regards her as a noonday spirit. This irony is emphasised in the novella itself. When Zoë reveals her true name to Hanold, he—still believing her to be the ghost of Gradiva—remarks: “The name suits you beautifully, but it sounds to me like bitter mockery, for ‘Zoë’ means ‘life,’” to which she responds: “One must adapt himself to the inevitable. […] And I have long accustomed myself to being dead” (Jensen 1918, p. 71). Just as new love can exist only by breaking away from the old, so too can life—in the form of the young, clever Zoë, whose cunning interventions bring about the novella’s happy ending—assert itself only upon death-like ruins.8

Jensen writes that “a person must die to become alive again” (Jensen 1918, p. 110). At first glance, this statement seems to refer to Gradiva, yet it is equally—if not more—apt in relation to Norbert Hanold, consumed by a deadening passion for the stone relief. “I should certainly dig up something interesting […] here,” remarks Zoë, stepping out of the role of the object of archaeological inquiry and assuming the position of the archaeologist herself, in effect exchanging places with the unsuspecting Hanold (Jensen 1918, p. 98). The clever heroine is fully aware that the archaeological space of ruins and devastation provides the necessary setting for her future romantic happiness. Freud observes that an ending in which the archaeologist politely thanks the young lady and takes his leave would have been “more consistent and equally possible” than the actual conclusion, in which the protagonists become engaged (Freud 1907, p. 87). Indeed, if Hanold’s libido had not been tainted by the Derridean “archive fever”—the compulsive fidelity to his Pompeian obsession—it would be difficult to understand why he should commit himself specifically to Zoë. The fantasy of “something past and lifeless” plays here a fundamental, saving role: it allows the drive to halt its eternally insatiable motion and to attach itself to a particular person—no longer in the form of a dead fixation, but as a future-oriented work of love.

It is Derrida himself who diagnoses Norbert Hanold with archive fever. In his book on the subject of this affliction he also defends the inseparable connection between messianic openness to the future and the “archaeological” imperative of remembrance. Referring to Yerushalmi’s accusation of fatalistic “non-Jewishness” directed at Freud, Derrida argues that “there would be no future without repetition” (Derrida 1995, p. 80): “This is why Freud might not have accepted in this form the alternative between the future and the past […], or between ‘hope’ and ‘hopelessness,’ the Jew and the non-Jew […]” (Derrida 1995, p. 79). Love needs death-like desire—the archive fever—not only to overcome it but also to do justice to the hope from which that desire springs. The tragedy inherent in the logic of desire rests on the unconscious conviction that what is most essential to our erotic constitution is indeed a matter of a distant, lost past. Yet, as Derrida observes, the problem of the archive is primarily a problem of the future, a “question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow” (Derrida 1995, p. 36). This “spectral messianicity” (ibid.), which, according to Derrida, is at work in the concept of the archive, also comes to the fore in the imperative of the “intimate rupture,” upon which Anne Dufourmantelle bases her vision of psychoanalytic therapy: “Not to go deeper into debt or to make things worse by forgetting, but rather, on the contrary, to leave the ruins behind and exit from silences” (Dufourmantelle 2019, p. 157).

Jensen’s protagonists eventually leave the ruins in a kind of erotic, psychoanalytic exodus, yet at the same time they retain something from them, incorporating it into the fabric of their new relationship. In the novella’s final scene, Zoë once again assumes the role of Gradiva for the “cured” Norbert Hanold: “[…] raising her dress slightly with her left hand, Gradiva rediviva Zoë Bertgang, viewed by him with dreamily observing eyes, crossed with her calmly buoyant walk, through the sunlight, over the stepping-stones, to the other side of the street” (Jensen 1918, pp. 117–18). Commenting on this passage, Freud notes: “The delusion had now been conquered by a beautiful reality […]” (Freud 1907, p. 39). However, as Adam Lipszyc aptly observes, this is not a matter of the defeat or expulsion of delusion, but rather of its fortunate penetration into reality—a contamination by madness that renders reality truly beautiful (Lipszyc 2019, p. 153). The story of Hanold and Zoë-Gradiva, despite its particularity, can be read as a universal tale of love. No erotic feeling could arise without an element of delusion, an archaeological passion for what lies buried in the ruins. Yet delusion alone, unconfronted by reality, is not enough for the feeling to develop into anything new. Gradiva’s magnificent final sequence constitutes, as Freud rightly observes, “a triumph of love” because it simultaneously captures delusion and truth in their happily unresolvable entanglement (Freud 1907, p. 40).

5. “Not Too Closely”: Love Happily (Un)fulfilled

The “triumph of love” here is also—in Freud’s words—equally a “triumph of […] wit” (Freud 1907, p. 84). As Freud rightly observes, in Jensen’s novella it is not only Norbert Hanold who “chooses” the object of love on the basis of its resemblance to a pattern from the past. Zoë’s own feelings for the young archaeologist are likewise structured by the transference of an earlier relational scheme. A man wholly devoted to science, who shows her no interest (at least until he is “cured”), recalls her absent father, perpetually absorbed in his zoological research: “Thus it was made possible for her to remain faithful in her unfaithfulness—to find her father once more in her loved one […]” (Freud 1907, p. 33; emphasis added). Yet—and this, too, does not escape Freud’s attention—at the end of the story, when Hanold asks Zoë whether Professor Bertgang would consent to their marriage, she replies mockingly that, for her father, the sight of a rare lizard would matter more than his own daughter. As Freud comments: “The scheme, it is easy to see, was one in which the mockery was tinged with bitterness; it was a warning, as it were, to her fiancé not to keep too closely to the model on which she had chosen him” (Freud 1907, p. 39; emphasis added).9 To a purely transferential, regressive feeling laden with strict conditions, Zoë thus opposes not an unconditional love—thinned out by its lack of selectivity—but a love for the very failure to meet the conditions. A romantic relationship can be truly new—and therefore distinct from fantasy—not because it fully detaches itself from the old requirements that once constrained desire, but because it fulfils them only somewhat faithfully: “not too closely,” never entirely.

In his text on transference love—the patient’s love for the analyst, which arises during analytic treatment as a repetition of earlier, infantile relationships—Freud argues that the worst thing an analyst can do is to reciprocate the patient’s feelings:

If the patient’s advances were returned it would be a great triumph for her, but a complete defeat for the treatment. […] In the further course of the love relationship she would bring out all the inhibitions and pathological reactions of her erotic life, without there being any possibility of correcting them.

(Freud 1915, p. 166; emphasis added)

In Jensen’s novella, however, Zoë accomplishes something that goes beyond what Freud attributes to psychoanalytic treatment: the feeling is reciprocated and develops into a romantic relationship, while at the same time the necessary correction is introduced—an equivalent of the messianic figure of the “slight adjustment.”10 As Bloch writes, likely echoing Scholem: “Another rabbi, a true Kabbalist, once said: To bring about the kingdom of freedom, it is not necessary that everything be destroyed, and a new world begin; rather, this cup, or that bush, or that stone, and so all things must only be shifted a little” (Bloch 2006, p. 158). Benjamin invokes the same parable when he notes that in the future world of redemption, “everything will be the same as here—only a little bit different” (Benjamin 1999b, p. 664). Such minimal displacement can be understood as the lover’s subtle deviation from the past scenario—a fidelity sustained precisely by following it “not too closely.”

Elsewhere, Benjamin speaks of a “minute deviation from the regular pattern” as an “inconspicuous mark of authenticity” (Benjamin 1999c, p. 609). In Jensen’s Gradiva, this “minute deviation” (which is also a “slight adjustment”) appears in the form of a small, telling detail. Norbert Hanold, as Jensen writes, “noticed for the first time a quite insignificant deviation” that set the living Gradiva apart from the stone one (Jensen 1918, p. 113; emphasis added):

The latter lacked something possessed by the former, which appeared at the moment quite clear, a little dimple in her cheek, which produced a slight, indefinable effect. It puckered and wrinkled a little and could therefore express annoyance or a suppressed impulse to laugh, possibly both together.

(ibid.)

It is precisely in such imperfection—this slight deviation from a pattern, accompanied by “an annoyance or a suppressed impulse to laugh, possibly both together”—that one can also find what Freud, despite his disenchanted pessimism, earnestly wanted to believe in: the possibility of happiness.

Although Freud posits that the sole aim of the drive is satisfaction—pleasure understood as the relief of tension—he repeatedly encounters evidence suggesting the opposite: that the drive’s purpose is merely its own persistence, the maintenance of an energetic thrust that no experience of fulfilment can entirely neutralise. This is exemplified in the phenomenon of “those wrecked by success”: individuals who develop neurotic illness not from frustration with an unsatisfying reality but, paradoxically, from the long-awaited fulfilment of their deepest desires. “It seems then as though they were not able to tolerate their happiness,” Freud observes, implying that “happiness” here refers to narcissistic gratification—the triumph of the autonomous subject over external reality (Freud 1916, p. 316). Perhaps, however, happiness lies elsewhere, and those “wrecked by success” cannot endure precisely this misapprehension: the failure of their own narcissism, which led them to conceive of happiness as the subordination of reality to their fantasies.

This does not mean, of course, that the path to happiness lies in sustaining actual dissatisfaction, which serves as an unending fuel for phantasmatic desire. According to Freud, it is precisely in this way that neurosis operates:

Incapacity for meeting a real erotic demand is one of the most essential features of a neurosis. Neurotics are dominated by the opposition between reality and phantasy. If what they long for the most intensely in their phantasies is presented to them in reality, they none the less flee from it; and they abandon themselves to their phantasies the most readily where they need no longer fear to see them realized.

(Freud 1905a, p. 110)

If the protagonists of Jensen’s novella had remained at that stage, they would simply have parted ways at the end of the story—he would have lost interest in Gradiva the moment she proved to be a woman of flesh and blood, while she could have continued to sustain her fantasy of the absent, indifferent, father-beloved. In the story of Hanold and Zoë, however, something else occurs—precisely what Freud describes later in the same passage: “Nevertheless, the barrier erected by repression can fall before the onslaught of a violent emotional excitement produced by a real cause; it is possible for a neurosis to be overcome by reality” (ibid.). Insights from Gradiva allow us to introduce a necessary adjustment here: reality can overcome neurosis only through the mediation of fantasy—by fulfilling it “not too closely,” thereby simultaneously breaking it. This formulation makes possible a conceptualisation of another kind of pleasure, understood not merely as satisfaction, but precisely as happiness.

Happiness—a paradigmatically messianic category—is neither the fulfilment of a wish nor the surge of an ever-unsatisfied drive, but a non-fulfilment that paradoxically turns out to be an unexpected and joyful fulfilment. Lear (2000, p. 129) draws on the older sense of “happiness” as happenstance—a chance occurrence that turns out well—to develop a psychoanalytic account of a “lucky break”: a moment in which a disruption of established psychic structures creates an opportunity for something unexpected. Happiness, in this sense, is not the culmination of a pre-existing project but a contingent event that occurs when the very framework organising one’s strivings is momentarily unsettled—a “break” akin to the one encountered by Zoë and Hanold. In his famous essay Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud (1930) enumerates the ways in which people attempt to bring themselves closer to happiness. Most of these amount merely to neutralising inherent discomfort, and their effectiveness is often limited. Only one of the methods listed by Freud does not aim at the “avoidance of unpleasure” but at a “positive fulfilment of happiness,” deserving to be called a truly messianic method: it is “the way of life which makes love the centre of everything, which looks for all satisfaction in loving and being loved” (Freud 1930, p. 82).

6. Responding to the Enigma

It is in the “insignificant deviation” from a preestablished pattern—the small dimple of Zoë-Gradiva—that the unfathomable, sexual singularity of the individual is also realised. This singularity, at the psychoanalytic origin of human psychic life, is primarily the source of foundational trauma. As I have noted, according to the psychoanalytic genesis of sexuality, the sexual drive can be said to “lean on” the tender, life-sustaining “primary love.” However, following the insights of Laplanche (1989), it must be emphasised that what grafts the drive onto the sphere of self-preservation is traumatic seduction. According to Laplanche’s General Theory of Seduction, we become sexual subjects through an encounter with the enigma of the Other: a puzzling message, charged with implicit, libidinal content, which the adult caregiver unwittingly directs to a child incapable of interpreting it (Laplanche 1989, pp. 126–30). The enigmatic message seduces its recipient, becoming the seed of the child’s own internal otherness, which psychoanalysis identifies with the unconscious. This seduction is inevitably disruptive—it confronts the subject with the unassimilable particular excess in the Other and within themselves, provoking an immediate defensive reaction (Stein 2008, p. 51). The seduced psychoanalytic subject is thus formed through the endless process of translating the enigmatic message, which always leaves an untranslated residue: the indelible trace of the first Other’s traumatic singularity (Laplanche 1999, p. 168).

Taking into account the role of the enigmatic message at the root of our sexual prehistory allows us to enrich the temporal-erotic model of psychoanalytic messianicity. If truly new love betrays past conditioning while remaining “somehow faithful” to it, this happens because said love turns to what, in the past, necessarily eluded us: the unique, particular excess in the beloved Other. When we first encountered this excess, it brought an end to the original affection, transforming it into unsettling seduction, yet at the same time it made us sexual subjects capable of experiencing love at all. Our “original hope,” therefore, does not concern the lost pre-sexual, supposedly harmonious bond, but rather something that we had hitherto been unable to experience: a loving relationship with that which previously overwhelmed and unsettled us.

In her psychoanalytic conceptualisation of love as comedy, Alenka Zupančič observes that in love, just as in comedy, “not only do we not get what we asked for”—that is, in Bloch’s terms, a reunion—“but we get something we haven’t even asked for” (Zupančič 2008, p. 135). To this observation, one might add that what we have not even asked for may in fact be precisely that for which we were not yet able to ask. The worn-out phrase “I have waited for you my whole life” obviously distorts reality, obscuring the discontinuity inherent in the experience of love, yet on an entirely different, unconscious level, it testifies to a crucial truth. We have been waiting, without knowing it, for someone who would astonish us just as the earliest Other did, leaving us with an inexplicable, haunting surplus of excitation. The key difference is that this encounter with the enigma, once terrifying, now proves to be joyous and liberating.

The final scene of Gradiva, in which Zoë once again assumes the role of the figure from the marble relief to demonstrate her characteristic walk to her beloved, is directly preceded by a request from the enamoured Norbert Hanold—request exhibiting many of the features of the Laplanchean enigmatic message:

They had arrived again at the Hercules gate where, at the beginning of the Strada Consolare, old stepping-stones crossed the street. Norbert Hanold stopped before them and said with a peculiar tone, “Please go ahead here.” A merry, comprehending, laughing expression lurked around his companion’s mouth […].

(Jensen 1918, p. 117)

In the “peculiar tone” and the peculiar, allusive content of the man’s request, the impenetrable eccentricity of each particular love manifests itself. The request, “Please go ahead here,” is charged with erotic sexuality, yet the eroticism at work here arises solely from the unique context of this couple’s love story—an uninformed observer would find little, if anything, sexually stimulating in Hanold’s words. The hero’s erotic wish is by no means identical with a fetishist demand for the fulfilment of a predetermined scenario. It is articulated only when the man recognises that Zoë diverges from the pattern of his fantasy and falls in love with her precisely because of this divergence. The enigmatic element present in this request no longer has the same character as the original, traumatic enigma of the Other that seduced the subject, implanting sexuality into their psyche, but still refers back to that event like a resonant echo. Zoë, in turn, responds to this puzzling interpellation with a “merry, comprehending, laughing expression”—a comprehension which, in the context of love, always entails a certain affirmation of the incomprehensible.11

7. Conclusions

Jensen’s Gradiva and Freud’s reading of it offer a praise of deviation from a preordained erotic path—one that has nothing to do, however, with a naïve affirmation of absolute and unproblematic novelty. Rather, they suggest that we remain truly faithful to the original hope—the unfulfilled promise of relation that lies at the origin of our sexuality—precisely when we relinquish the fantasy of reunion and thereby return to what, in our first love, was truly first: namely, that which, from the perspective of the fragile proto-subject, appeared as traumatically and excessively new. By entering into a relation with this incomprehensible, surprising excess in the other person, the loving subject performs the most felicitous “intimate rupture”—and at the same time, at its very core, constructs an impossible bridge between past and future, which constitutes the heart of messianic temporality.

The question of love returns in key philosophical articulations of Jewish messianism—for example, in Benjamin’s analysis of Goethe’s Elective Affinities (Benjamin 1996b), or in Rosenzweig’s reflections on revelation grounded in his interpretation of the biblical Song of Songs (Rosenzweig 1985). Significantly, it is in each case a passionate, sexual, and selective form of love, entirely distinct from the one celebrated in Christianity, yet one that nonetheless brings the subject closer to a secular form of redemption: happiness. From a psychoanalytic perspective, one might say that the “trick” of love, as it appears in Gradiva, lies in a “slight adjustment” of the subject’s libidinal vicissitudes. The amorous interpellation allows us to confront our beginnings once more, opening them to a future they had previously foreclosed, in a way that resonates with the messianic intuitions of Benjamin, Bloch, and Derrida. In Jensen’s novella, it is no accident that this interpellation, articulated in Hanold’s request—“Please, go ahead here”—takes place among the excavated ruins of Pompeii. For the psychoanalytic subject—seduced by a prehistoric, “archaeological” enigma and consumed by archive fever—messianic hope for “more life” (Bloom 1991, p. 160) can be realised only at the site of the greatest catastrophe.