Transience and its cultural implications
In this article I discussed so far Freud’s thoughts on
transience and mortality, and explored how these issues are related to beauty,
value and art. It is very curious that similar type of discussions are found in
Japanese culture.
Some time ago, Japanese analyst Kitayama discussed
transience in relation to beauty and value, as well as other implications. In
his paper “Transience: its beauty and danger (1998)” he stressed the difference
between transience and transition. The former is seen in Winnicott’s notion
(“transitional object”) which involves “phenomenological description of
movement” while the latter describes “mainly emotional state”. Kitayama states
that transience is a universal phenomenon, but is less discussed than
transition in the analytic literature. He then discussed that there is a
tradition in Japan where they tend to find beauty in what is transient. People project
themselves onto the objects which are destined to disappear in time. Kitayama
points out that many Japanese are fond of stories which end with separation
instead of happy ending, and this can be related to Japanese people’s
masochistic tendency. He states as follows; “In my opinion, transition can be
just joyful, but it is often accompanied by a sense of transience or
transiency that is more or less painful sentiment, sometimes even involving an artistic
sense of beauty as well as sense of sadness, emptiness and depression” (p.940).[Emphasis
added by the author].
Kitayama did not discuss the rationale for the esthetic
value related to transience, similar to Freud. He would say that looking at transient
objects drawn in Ukiyo-es (literally meaning "pictures of the floating
world", a genre of Japanese art flourished in the 17th ~19th
centuries) is enough to appreciate its beauty, except that he suggested that “joyfulness”,
a sort of playfulness is involved in transience. I consider that Kitayama
implies that transience also belongs to the potential space proposed by
Winnicott (Kitayama, 1998). He states; “This process [of transience] is not
only fort/da, but also da/fort, that is presence/absence”(Kitayama,
p. 939).
Still related to the same topic, Okano (2018) discussed in
his paper “Passivity, non-expression and Oedipus in Japan (2018)” that in Japan
people tend to find truth and value in “what is kept secret and is not
expressed.” He discussed that in Japanese society passive attitude and absence
can paradoxically have some positive value. According to his theory, in
Japanese culture, people introduce the element of absence in order to express
beauty and value (Matsuki,不在論).
One of the examples he raises is “Haura”. “Haura” is the lining
of a jacket, which is elegant and stylish, but invisible from outside.
Thus, both Kitayama and Okano discuss the element of
absence that Japanese naturally or deliberately imply in order to add the value
and beauty. The question is, is it related to Freud’s discussion of the
foretaste of mourning??
There appears to be some psychoanalytic attempt to make a
crossover between psychoanalytic thinking and Japanese culture, including
Vermote, Matsuki, and Togashi.
不在論：根源的苦痛の精神分析 創元社 2011年
