Freud’s attitude toward transience of the object can be summarized into two statements.
1st statement: The painful mourning process of a lost object spontaneously ends, and we can turn to a new object.
2nd statement: An object’s beauty and value increase due to its transience.
As for the 1st statement, it is practically a restatement of Freud’s assertion that he made in “Mourning and Melancholia” that he wrote several months earlier. When the mourning work is over as it is supposed, our attention shifts to a new object with its own beauty and value. Freud does not think the poet’s despondency due to the “foretaste of mourning” as abnormal or pathological, as he states that this can be a common reaction to the object loss.(’ The proneness to decay of all that is beautiful and perfect can … give rise to two different impulses…. The one leads to the aching despondency felt by the young poet…. (p305)”)
However, Freud discussed as though he is the exception and is somewhat beyond the poet’s agonizing response (as we will see later, Freud changed this view six years later when he wrote “the Ego and the ID” where he stated that the mourning works can hardly end (Clewell)
The 2nd statement implies that an object grows more beautiful and valuable due to that fact that it is transient and is destined to perish. Some of us might wonder if this 2nd statement is in accord with the 1st statement. In the 1st statement, it is the new flower which carries renewed beauty and value. However, in the 2nd statement, it is the original flower which adds its value due to its destiny to disappear. These two statements are not exactly contradictory, but rather are discussing two different flowers. In his short essay, however, Freud never dealt with this apparent discordance.
Probably Freud’s originality in the “transience” stays with the 2nd statement which deals with the beauty and value of objects despite their transient nature. Freud mentions repeatedly beauty and value, and he makes a poet appear in this essay. As all of us know, the issue of sublimation and artistic activities appear repeatedly in Freud’s works. He is also well known as a collector of artistic items.
What attracts our attention also is a theme which runs deep in this essay, which is that of mortality. What is most typical of transience is no doubt human life. In his paper “Thoughts on Wars and Deaths” that he wrote almost in a same period as he wrote “On Transience”, he made a statement that if we take the truth of our mortality more seriously, our life becomes more tolerable and meaningful. Then he states: “If you want to endure life, prepare for death”. (Freud, Thoughts on War and Death, 1915,p.299)
Freud was then talking about life itself, rather than objects in general which value is increased due to its transience. Freud appears to be hinting at his attitude toward our mortality and meaning of our life, instead of limiting his discussion to just beauty. Freud lost so many people by this period of his life, and faced a destruction of the civilization that the war destroyed so mercilessly. Obviously, Freud was aware and was intere
sted in his own doomed destiny. What this essay invites us is to explore how transience of the objects and our lives entail their value and beauty, perhaps starting from where Freud stopped.
Note 1
What should be mentioned here before discussing any further the historical meaning of this essay is the
work of Matthew von Unwerth: “Freud’s Requiem：Mourning, memory and Invisible History of a Summer Walk” (2006). This work focuses uniquely on this particular essay and discuss relevant topics in detai, with a belief that ”’On Transience’ is a portrait in miniature of the world of its writer, rich and teeming with the same themes that shaped his life and his work.” Certainly the readers grasp a sentimental, melancholic, even Romantic aspect of Freud .(Book Review. Richard Gottlieb,p. 592）von Unwerth discussed on a deeper level the relationship between Freud’s theory of mourning and the art and culture, while focusing on Freud’s personal relationship with Rilke or Salome. Unfortunately, Unwerth did not discuss Freud’s concern with mortality which I consider is one of the big topics of this essay.
