Reading “On Transience”

The following piece was originally printed in the Spring/Summer 2017 edition of the BPSI Bulletin, which can be read here.

December 2016. I am reeling from the sociopolitical earthquakes of Brexit and the U.S. election. I am also starting the second year of my candidacy and struggling with how to make sense of my role as a psychotherapist and future analyst in this new world order. In this moment when the political is colliding with the personal in ever-clearer and ever-deeper ways, how do I keep working within a theoretical framework that has tended to repress the political and maintain the capitalist fantasy of the individual untethered from the social and political world (Jacoby, 1983; Layton, 2006); whose emphasis on the individual within the family may collude with a neoliberal framework that relies on keeping people apolitical?

It was in this context that I read Freud’s “On Transience.” It is a striking essay because, while it seems to be an attempt to explore an aesthetic construct and explicate Freud’s ideas on mourning, it is also very much a response to a sociopolitical trauma: the Great War and its accompanying losses. In fact, I read it while visiting my family in Britain, after an evening with old friends from Germany. We were grieving together the collapse of the project that was an attempt to prevent our countries from trying to destroy each other, as they were when Freud was writing this essay, and would do again within decades. So I scoured the essay for guidance and wisdom to deal with these times. Yet, in my scouring, I started to notice the gaps in the piece—the lost objects of the essay.

In his opening, Freud talks of his poet friend admiring the beauty of the landscape they walked in but feeling “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” (Freud, 1915, p. 305). Freud notes two possible responses to “the proneness to decay of all that is beautiful and perfect”: the “despondency” of the poet or “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” (p. 305).

Later in the essay, Freud attributes the response of the poet, and that of the other friend he now references—if these friends are indeed Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé, did Andreas-Salomé’s individual response get lost somehow?—to “a revolt in their minds against mourning” (p. 306). Freud understands mourning as the painful process of detaching libido from its objects. In “Mourning and Melancholia,” he describes how this process—a result of “orders” from reality stating that the “loved object no longer exists”—is “carried out bit by bit, at great expense of time and cathectic energy, and in the meantime the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged. Each single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hyper-cathected, and detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it” (Freud, 1917, p. 245).

Yet is the first of the responses described above—the poet’s despondency—really a revolt against mourning? If anything, it seems that the second, “No! it is impossible,” is the revolt  – the “clinging to the object through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis” that Freud refers to in “Mourning and Melancholia” (p. 244). Freud had written, but not published, “Mourning and Melancholia” at the time of this essay. And since he refers to the poet’s despondency, it may be that he sees this first response to the transience of beauty as a melancholia, in which “the free libido was not displaced on to another object; it was withdrawn into the ego” (Freud, 1917, p. 249), where an identification with the lost object is set up that—because of the ambivalence in the object relationship—includes hatred as well as love and leads to the self-reproach of depression. But the poet’s despondency, as described in this piece, does not have those elements. It may be, rather, that Freud sees the poet’s response as a refusal to cathect the beauty in anticipation of the future loss. Whatever Freud means here, it is notable that, while he uses his friends’ response to transience as a counterpoint to mourning, he does not actually explain the precise contrast between the two.

If Freud sees his friends’ response as a revolt against mourning, he surely means to portray his own as a mourning process. Yet he expresses his response as follows:

I could not see my way to dispute the transience of all things, nor could I insist upon an exception in favour of what is beautiful and perfect. But I did dispute the pessimistic poet’s view that the transience of what is beautiful involves any loss in its worth. On the contrary, an increase! Transience value is scarcity value in time. Limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of the enjoyment. It was incomprehensible, I declared, that the thought of the transience of beauty should interfere with our joy in it. As regards the beauty of Nature, each time it is destroyed by winter it comes again next year, so that in relation to the length of our lives it can in fact be regarded as eternal. (p. 305)

Though Freud attempts to frame it with “orders” from reality, this defense of transience actually has very much the feel of “No! it is impossible that all this loveliness of Nature and Art…will really fade away into nothing.” It also introduces a strangely economic (capitalist, even!) argument about scarcity as value that has little to do with the internal object world that he appears to want to outline in this essay. In short, Freud tries to explain his argument with friends about transience in terms of mourning, but does not seem to really achieve this.

Then comes the Great War. Freud’s description of its attendant losses—beauty, pride, admiration, hope—is powerful. But another notable gap emerges: life. Freud fails to mention the massive loss of life that the no-longer-impartial science has already wrought by 1915 and that threatens his own sons. Just as his application of mourning to the debate with his friends does not quite fit, he seems to struggle to apply it to the Great War. Instead of describing the process of detaching libido from the cherished objects and replacing them with new ones, he talks about clinging with greater intensity to those that remain, then questions whether lost objects have really lost their worth, then promises that we will replace the lost objects, and finally suggests that “our high opinion of the riches of civilization” has in fact not been lost and can be rebuilt, “perhaps on firmer ground and more lastingly than before” (p. 307). The essay itself seems to become a revolt against mourning.

I think that the Great War exerted its force on this essay, breaking some connections and leaving its scars and erasures. In fact, for me, the most important part of the essay is almost lost in a short phrase, as Freud describes the human capacity for love and sets the stage for the human response to loss. After being directed in earliest development to our own ego, he explains, libido is then diverted to objects, that “are thus in a sense taken into our ego” (p. 306). Shouldn’t this be Freud’s counter to his friends’ pessimistic view of transience? That “the world of our sensations and…the world outside” (p. 305) are in fact taken into our ego—that we hold it within us? I think we maintain the unconscious memory-traces of summer’s beauty through the winter, and that is how we neither deny transience nor become despondent about it. And I think that similar internalizations are required to survive war, fascism, and other sociopolitical and environmental catastrophes.

The social and the political, like other objects, are “taken into our ego.” They encroach on our lives, even when pretending not to in times of relative peace. They can nurture and enrich or wound and diminish us, physically and mentally. Just as Freud was wrestling with how to make sense of the Great War, my patients and I are wrestling with our sociopolitical catastrophe. Under orders from reality, we have to face the racism, colonialism, and genocide on which this country was built, which, for those not overtly “othered” and dehumanized by them, have been known and not known, and now resurface. We have to mourn our belief in the United States as a resilient democracy, or at least a democratic work-in-progress, striving for equality and justice. Perhaps—to help us hold on to our well-being and our minds—we have to work together to replace it with a belief in the power of resistance, in the value of “living in truth.” Surely this is psychotherapy with the political self.

I believe that psychotherapy can in fact be a political act. Its political nature lies in its emphasis on freedom, freedom of speech, and the powerful resistance to tyranny encapsulated in the radical idea of creating a private space, free of censorship, in which to explore our own humanity. In The Power of the Powerless, Václav Havel describes the incredible power of the greengrocer in the totalitarian regime who one day refuses to put up a sign that says, “Workers of the world unite,” a slogan that, in this context, really means “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient.” Havel explains that “by breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game. He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system” (Havel, 1992, p. 147). In some sense, psychoanalysis exposes the game every day. It refuses to believe that the manifest is all there is, looks underneath every slogan. Psychoanalysis has the capacity to represent this very power of the powerless, because “if the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth” (p. 148).

Internalizing and holding onto a belief in “living in truth” may help us maintain hope and a sense of meaning in the face of these great losses. For, as Havel points out in Disturbing the Peace, “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

References

Freud, S. (1915). On Transience. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 14, pp. 305–307): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement. Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, Hogarth, London.

Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and Melancholia. In Standard Edition (Vol. 14, pp. 237–258).

Havel, V. (1990). Disturbing the Peace: A Convesation with Karel Hvizd’ala. NY: Knopf.

Havel, V. (1992). The Power of the Powerless. In Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965–1990 (pp. 125–214). Wilson, P (Ed.).

Jacoby, R. (1983). The Repression of Psychoanalysis: Otto Fenichel and the Freudians. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Layton, L. (2006). Attacks on Linking: The Unconscious Pull to Dissociate Individuals from Their Social Context. In L. Layton, N. C. Hollander & S. Gutwill (Eds.), Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics: Encounters in the Clinical Setting (pp. 107–117). London, UK: Routledge.

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