In 1915, Sigmund Freud published a short essay, “On Transience,” in which he addresses in a succinct and poetic way the ideas he had developed for his book Mourning and Melancholia (1917). For Freud, these two states—mourning and melancholia—are different psychological responses to traumatic loss, something the whole world seemed to be dealing with following the First World War.
For Freud, mourning is a conscious and natural reaction to a profound loss—someone or something I loved has disappeared from the world—while melancholia (what we would now call clinical depression) is an unconscious and debilitating dynamic in which loss is turned inward: the psyche creates a kind of shadow of the lost loved one or thing, which then takes up residence in and attaches itself to the self. In mourning, the world seems barren and bleak for a time, but eventually reality returns: there are other beautiful things to love in the world; the melancholic, however, is prevented from turning outward to the world. They become fixed on the shadow, the emptiness that has now attached itself internally—and thus seems immortal. When the melancholic looks out onto the world, they can see only the never-changing dead landscape of the self. The lush valleys of self-worth appear as the bombed and burnt fields of self-hatred and misery.
The “taciturn friend” and “young but already famous poet” in Freud’s essay have been identified as Lou Andreas-Salomé, one of the first women psychoanalysts, and her sometime lover Rainer Maria Rilke.
On Transience
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.
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