On Transience

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"ON TRANSIENCE"

"On Transience" was written by Freud in November, 1915, at the invitation of the Goethe Society of Berlin for a commemorative volume scheduled to appear the following year, Das Land Goethes 1914-1916. According to H. Lehmann (Schur, 1972), the characters referred to, that is the taciturn friend and the young poet, are respectively Lou Andreas-Salomé and Rainer Maria Rilke. This has not been confirmed, although Rilke visited Freud one month after the preparation of the text, in December, 1915 (letter to Sándor Ferenczi, December 24, 1915).

This short essay, over which hover the background of war and death that were prevalent at the time, was written the same year as Freud's "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death" (1915b) and Mourning and Melancholia (1917a [1915]). These three essays constitute a whole focused on the notion of mourning. The theme of the relationship between mourning and melancholia had already been broached in Manuscript G (1950a, January 7, 1895): "melancholia consists in mourning over loss of libido" (p. 201). In "On Transience" the approach is one of a moral philosophical defense of the love of life when confronted with a depressive pseudo-wisdom, but it also contains some of Freud's thoughts on culture and time.

In the essay Freud describes a conversation that takes place one summer day between a taciturn friend and a young poet who suffers from an inability to enjoy the beauty of nature because it will disappear during the coming winter. For Freud the waning of beauty leads to two different mental concepts: a painful disgust, related to the devaluation of the object, which can no longer keep the promise of pleasure, and a revolt against the reality of facts, that is, the denial of time, which essentially corrupts. Freud begins by rejecting the second concept as being an illusion resulting from desire ("what is painful can also be true"). He then reverses this concept, providing several justifications for his argument: the objects are often less transient than we are and therefore we have no reason to deplore their loss, their transience confers upon them a supplementary charm, the value of things is independent of their duration.

As in the story of the cauldron, these arguments cancel each other out and are hardly convincing. There is no point in the poet torturing himself further for his own transience. Market logic ("what is rare is expensive") implies either a position of omnipotence with respect to the object and the rivals that want to hold of it, or a romantic, or even masochistic, identification with the object's transience, the presentiment of death adding to the worth of the object, as if mourning were taking place during the object's lifetime.

Freud's most interesting argument comes later and can be summarized as the affirmation that transience does not alter the object's value, which is independent of time. This dissociation implies that value doesn't disappear, even when there is no one to cathect to it as such. This paradoxical argument is combined with another that states that, unless the concept of value is isolated, there will be nothing left to cathect to because everything is transient. The atemporal nature of value connects the poet's complaint about transience to its subjective and narcissistic dimensions when he complains that the object is not isomorphous to him in its duration. This short, penetrating essay is driven by the notion of mourning and the possibility of expressing and overcoming it.

In "On Transience" Freud introduced an original aspect of mourning, the "anticipatory mourning" of the object, which consists in the rejection of its cathexis to avoid suffering from its loss. Anticipatory mourning is a mechanism of narcissistic defense that denies the libidinal attachment as it is being developed. By debasing any possible relationship, the subject also debases a part of himself in the hope that the remainder will be preserved from suffering. This withdrawal of libido in the face of anything that is liable to be transient is a form of protection against the depressive catastrophe that mourning would entail for certain subjects. This exclusion of the object differs from the work of mourning and the hate-filled attachment of the melancholic individual to an object.

Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor

See also: Mourning; Time.

Source Citation

Freud, Sigmund. (1916a [1915]). Vergänglichkeit. Das Land Goethes 1914-1916. Gedenkbuch, in Berliner Goethebund: Stuttgart; G.W., 10, 358-361. On transience. SE, 14: 303-307.