Freud, Rilke and Transience

Abstract

In his 1915 essay ‘On Transience’, Freud begins by describing a conversation with a poet (Rilke) and a taciturn friend (Lou Andreas-Salomé). Around that time Freud and Rilke shared a concern with the problem of transience: Freud being preoccupied with the survival of psychoanalysis and Rilke with his aging and the decrease in creativity that ensued. In the midst of the First World War, Freud expressed – in this essay – a firm hope that mourning enables human beings to overcome even the gravest loss, contrary to the marked pessimism of the poet. Later, though, the Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle will be much more pessimistic: by the time you begin to mourn – he seems to say – destruction will have already taken place, and your mourning will have come too late; and it will end with being only an attempt to get through a loss so enormous as to be irreparable. Such pessimism already seems to underpin and taint ‘On Transience’. The late Rilke would overcome this paralysing pessimism: perhaps it is not, as Freud thought, mourning – neither anticipated nor post rem – that we need. Instead, we need an acceptance, a capacity for immersing ourselves, in which we, the wounded, will become the mother of all wounded creatures.

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