これから英文に直していく。
Transience and Mortality in Psychoanalysis
“If you want to endure life, prepare for death”. (Freud, 1915,p.299)
We human beings are living in this chaotic world without any definite sight for the future. Perhaps the world is more stable than past centuries, but nonetheless, we are keenly aware of the fleeting and transient nature of our living situation. New things keep occurring and even the development of technology, such as artificial intelligence can be a source of our anxiety. Is my job stable? Wouldn’t AI turn against us and deprive us of our autonomy and confidential information? Nothing seems to be certain in our future, except for the fact that the reality is very fleeting and nothing remains unchanged, and all of us are definitely mortal. Recently COVID-19 pandemic reminded us of the unpredictability of our world and future.
What has psychoanalytic knowledge given us in
order to endure this doomed life? I would like to discuss with this issue by
re-examining Freud’s work and the Japanese philosophy.
In his psychoanalytic endeavor,
Freud investigated what is in the unconscious and attempted to reach its
content. Although Freud seemed rather optimistic from our standpoint about
making unconscious unknown to conscious known, quite a number of modern
analysts show interest in what is non-articulated and unknowable. It is as
though we are making a distinction between what is unconscious, but there, and
what is unknown, including its existence.
Regarding the condition for terminating analysis, Freud said that “so
much repressed material has been made conscious, so much that was
unintelligible has been explained, and so much internal resistance conquered”
(Freud, 1937, p. 219). He seemed to advocate some stable, hard, and fast
material, or even a “bedrock” of the mind, that would hold the key to understanding
the mind. Certainly, Freud was breathing the air of the positivism of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Tauber, 2009). However, it is still
not widely acknowledged that Freud also discussed value and meaning in terms of
what is fleeting, transient, and ephemeral.
Freud, S. (1913). On beginning the
treatment. S.E., 12:121-144.
Freud’s “On Transience”
In 1915, Freud
wrote a short essay “on Transience” at the invitation of the Berliner
Goethebund for a commemorative volume under the title of Das Land
Goethes (the Land of Goethe), among a large number of
well-known contributors. The essay echoes his paper “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), that Freud
wrote some months before, which was not published until two years later.
In this
essay, Freud went on a summer walk in a countryside “in the company of a taciturn
friend and of a young but already famous poet”. The poet friend admires the
beautiful landscape, but expressed 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 splendor that men have created or may create”
(Freud, p.304). The poet thinks that the worth of “[A]ll that he would
otherwise have loved and admired” seemed to diminish by their transience.
Some studies ((Herbert
Lehmann (1966)) revealed that the poet and his friend turned out to be Rainer
Maria Rilke and Low Andreas Salome, and their Sommer walk described here was a
fictional one.
