Published
Vergänglichkeit. Das Land Goethes 1914–1916. Gedenkbuch, in Berliner Goethebund: Stuttgart;
G.W., 10, 358-361.
On transience. SE XIV, 1916a, p303- 307 : Translated by James Strachey
Available here http://www.freuds-requiem.com/transience.html
Bilingual www.Freud2Lacan.com /Freud-Philosophy (34. On Transience (Vergänglichkeit))

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Introduction from
On Transience – Dictionary definition of On Transience | Encyclopedia.com …
Available https://www.encyclopedia.com/psychology/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/transience

“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.

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Citations

– We shall build up again… : 31st March 2020 : Jorge Assef, see this site /5 Authors A-Z (Assef or Index of Authors’ texts)

From Assef, ‘In the summer of 1913, during his vacation in northern Italy, Sigmund Freud went walking with two friends’

Quotation : On Transience : 1915 [1916] by Sigmund Freud, Translation by James Strachey :

Not long ago I went on a summer walk through a smiling countryside in the company of a taciturn friend and of a young but already famous poet. The poet admired the beauty of the scene around us but felt no joy in it. He was disturbed by the thought that all this beauty was fated to extinction, that it would vanish when winter came, like all human beauty and all the beauty and splendour that men have created or may create. All that he would otherwise have loved and admired seemed to him to be shorn of its worth by the transience which was its doom.

The proneness to decay of all that is beautiful and perfect can, as we know, give rise to two different impulses in the mind. The one leads to the aching despondency felt by the young poet, while the other leads to rebellion against the fact asserted. No! it is impossible that all this loveliness of Nature and Art, of the world of our sensations and of the world outside, will really fade away into nothing. It would be too senseless and too presumptuous to believe it. Somehow or other this loveliness must be able to persist and to escape all the powers of destruction.

But this demand for immortality is a product of our wishes too unmistakable to lay claim to reality: what is painful may none the less be true. I could not see my way to dispute the transience of all things, nor could I insist upon an exception in favour of what is beautiful and perfect. But I did dispute the pessimistic poet’s view that the transience of what is beautiful involves any loss in its worth.

On the contrary, an increase! Transience value is scarcity value in time. Limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of the enjoyment. It was incomprehensible, I declared, that the thought of the transience of beauty should interfere with our joy in it. As regards the beauty of Nature, each time it is destroyed by winter it comes again next year, so that in relation to the length of our lives it can in fact be regarded as eternal. The beauty of the human form and face vanish for ever in the course of our own lives, but their evanescence only lends them a fresh charm. A flower that blossoms only for a single night does not seem to us on that account less lovely. Nor can I understand any better why the beauty and perfection of a work of art or of an intellectual achievement should lose its worth because of its temporal limitation. A time may indeed come when the pictures and statues which we admire to-day will crumble to dust, or a race of men may follow us who no longer understand the works of our poets and thinkers, or a geological epoch may even arrive when all animate life upon the earth ceases; but since the value of all this beauty and perfection is determined only by its significance for our own emotional lives, it has no need to survive us and is therefore independent of absolute duration.

These considerations appeared to me incontestable; but I noticed that I had made no impression either upon the poet or upon my friend. …

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– Decided Desires and Joyful Passions in Democracy : 18th November 2017 (Turin) : Éric Laurent, see this site /5 Authors A-Z (Laurent or Index of Authors’ texts)

P156 of Laurent, ‘Prof Zygmunt Bauman has described this movement of the dissolution of comprehensive civic identities as “liquid”. … Bauman chose the word “liquid” in order to convey the transformation of what was still solid but fragmented into a new, transient intensity. With this term, he thus updated what, in 1915, Freud had referred to [in an article of the same name] as Verganglichkeit, transience.’

From On Transience : November 1915, . The idea that all this beauty was transient was giving these two sensitive minds a foretaste of mourning over its decease; and, since the mind instinctively recoils from anything that is painful, they felt their enjoyment of beauty interfered with by thoughts of its transience.

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– We shall build up again… : 31st March 2020 : Jorge Assef, see this site /5 Authors A-Z (Assef or Index of Authors’ texts)

From Assef, As for the anecdote Freud tells in that beautiful text of 1915, after explaining that the most intriguing aspect of the mourning mechanisms is the rigidity with which the libido clings to the lost object without noticing that the New is already awaiting it, Freud writes:

My conversation with the poet took place in the summer before the war. A year later the war broke up and robbed the world of its beauty (…) it also shattered our pride in the achievements of our civilization, our hopes of a final triumph over the differences between nations and races. It tarnished the lofty impartiality of our science, it revealed our instincts in all their nakedness (…) It robbed us of very much we had loved, and showed us how ephemeral were many things that we had regarded as changeless.

So Freud warns that those who relinquish the enjoyment of something because what is valued does not prove to be long-lasting are simply in a state of mourning for the loss, but he makes it clear that mourning will at some point expire, and adds: When once the mourning is over, it will found that our high opinion of the riches of civilization has lost nothing from our discovery of their fragility. We shall build up again all that war has destroyed, and perhaps on firmer ground and more lastingly than before[3]v

[3] Freud, S.: “On Transience”, “Complete Works”, Vol. XVI, p. 307. The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis. London, 1957, p. 307.

From Freud, November 1915, last two paragraphs: My conversation with the poet took place in the summer before the war. A year later the war broke out and robbed the world of its beauties. It destroyed not only the beauty of the countrysides through which it passed and the works of art which it met with on its path but it also shattered our pride in the achievements of our civilization, our admiration for many philosophers and artists and our hopes of a final triumph over the differences between nations and races. It tarnished the lofty impartiality of our science, it revealed our instincts in all their nakedness and let loose the evil spirits within us which we thought had been tamed for ever by centuries of continuous education by the noblest minds. It made our country small again and made the rest of the world far remote. It robbed us of very much that we had loved, and showed us how ephemeral were many things that we had regarded as changeless.

We cannot be surprised that our libido, thus bereft of so many of its objects, has clung with all the greater intensity to what is left to us, that our love of our country, our affection for those nearest us and our pride in what is common to us have suddenly grown stronger. But have those other possessions, which we have now lost, really ceased to have any worth for us because they have proved so perishable and so unresistant? To many of us this seems to be so, but once more wrongly, in my view. I believe that those who think thus, and seem ready to make a permanent renunciation because what was precious has proved not to be lasting,