儚さ 英文 5

 Note 2
　Schimmel (2018) proposed that Freud’s theory of mourning demonstrated in the “On Transience” was born in the context of a major paradigm shift in Freud’s theories which was in the context of Freud’s emotional journey (Schimmel, 224) in which he went through many losses in his life. According to Schimmel Freud’s several papers beginning “Mourning and Melancholia” should be classed to a category, along with “On Transience”, “Thoughts on Wars and Death”. This group of papers reflect Freud’s major shift of interest, from psychosexual view to object relations and object losses. By the time he wrote these papers, the World War 1 just began, and despite Freud’s optimistic outlook, the situation got worse and his eldest son Ernst got drafted. Freud reportedly got seriously depressed which was also influenced by separation from Jung and his half-brother Emanuel’s death.
Paul Schimmel (2018) Freud’s “selected fact”: His journey of mourning. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 99(1):208-229）

 　Slavin (2013) followed up on Hoffman’s steps and discussed further the dialectical constructivism and its relationship to the issue of mortality. He calls Hoffman’s constructivist view as the “universal features of the human condition”(p.296). He thinks that human being acquired symbolic and abstract thinking at the cost of a significant loss with “our awareness of the finiteness of our own existence”. He calls this an “evolutionary trade-off". Slavin states: “Human meanings - hope, love, purpose, beauty, like everything we hold, we make, we construct, do not last.(297)” . “[T]he haunting fact of our allotted speck of time, on a speck of a planet, in an infinite universe, erodes meaning, drains it out (297).

Slavin states that human condition from the constructivist view as something “bracing, quite beautiful” although he does not give any particular rationale for its esthetic nature, except to say “because it’s hard won.” Slavin’s statement reminds us of Freud’s own rationale that transience is valuable as “transient value is a scarcity in time". Rather, Slavin introduces the issue of authenticity.  He states that dialectical constructivism draws upon our existential tradition of “making authentic personal meaning on face of both our mortality and of the alienating pressures of the world towards conformity and accommodation".

   The originality of Slavin’s view includes his extension of Hoffman’s view to the tension between self and other. Our finitude naturally includes the fact that we live with others. He considers that our subjectivity is made by what we absorb from otherness “that is inevitably geared to its own naturally self-interested motive, needs, and biases”(p.297). Slavin also stresses the importance of the mother’s role, which make our mortality more tolerable. Hoffman states that our life is given meaning by our parents with their state of semi-deities. However, sooner or later children face that their parents also love themselves, perhaps more than they love their children.

Slavin, MO. (2013) Meaning, Mortality, and the Search for Realness and Reciprocity: An Evolutionary/Existential Perspective on Hoffman’s Dialectical Constructivism. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 23:296–314, 2013.