On messianic links

The messianic structure of human experience is manifest in the form of waiting—for an object who will alleviate suffering, and thereby, bring about change. The underpinning of such waiting is imagined here as messianic hope. In individuals, families, cults, religion, and politics, we may detect such hope—one that perhaps makes the unbearability of life bearable. This longing may get concretized in the shape of a person who comes to represent a link with God. From different vertices, messianic power may get located in the analyst, patriarch, the godman, or the political leader. Links that get forged between such figures and those who are waiting, may be thought of as messianic links. As a messianic group gets consolidated, it often displays certain primitive features. Such groups tend to veer towards a display of omnipotence, resolute action, a solution‐driven language. They may seek to cut off contact with painful reality and anoint someone who can enable that. Ideas of time are wrenched away from its painful association with loss. Time is made predictable and repetitive. Deliverance is promised, incertitude discarded. Messianic language is often evocative and enigmatic. It can be an expression of impotency. But language may also be used to fuel omnipotent longing, as with the use of omniscience by the anointed messiah. Such messianic groups may come together with shared magical beliefs in the annointed figure. But links by their very nature are dynamic and so, a link fueled by awe may also devolve into paranoia or else dependency or may be discarded altogether. This paper looks at two documentaries, and a novel, to give shape to messianic links. Here we see instances of how enigma may be replaced by charisma, and strength by hypervigilance. In that sense it seems that regardless of how they originate, they are condemned to move towards what Bion (1962) calls “minus links” or links that lead away from truth and the growth of the mind. We see that messianic links may either end catastrophically, or decay and degenerate to the point of disappearing, or else, lose the kernel, but assiduously preserve the shell, or finally institutionalized as deifying links.