LAIKA DEATH FREE
When it has renounced everything that has been lost, then it has consumed itself, and our libido is once more free … to replace the lost objects by fresh ones, equally or still more precious. Mourning, however painful, comes to a spontaneous end.
It destroyed not only the beauty of the countryside through which it passed … and the works of art which it met with on its path … but it also shattered our pride in the achievements of our civilisation … It robbed us of much that we had loved … and showed us how ephemeral were many things that we had regarded as changeless … The war broke out and robbed the world of its beauties. According to one commentator, Freud strives in the text to “work through” the loss of his own illusions about self and world, performing an act of “psychic repair.” But what illusions, exactly, has the war deprived Freud of? And where does this process of repair ultimately arrive at? The close of the essay is revealing: Originally composed as a tribute to Goethe, “On Transience” was written fifteen months into World War I. The young companions refuse to mourn and this refusal constitutes a rebellion against transience and loss, both of which are constitutive of human reality.Ĭhristopher R. The despondency felt by the poet and the friend in the face of natural beauty is, for Freud, a kind of immature response. Since the mind instinctively recoils from anything that is painful, they felt their enjoyment of beauty interfered with by thoughts of its transience.” 2 While all of these considerations appear utterly “incontestable” to the psychoanalyst, he notices that they make “no impression” on either of his companions, and he is thus moved to make the following diagnosis: “What spoilt their enjoyment of beauty must have been a revolt in their minds against mourning. The transience of things, he argues, increases the pleasure that we take in them the fact that life and beauty, including the beauty of nature, are subject to time, decay, and (eventual) death is precisely the source of their “worth.” 1įreud disputes the view of the pessimistic poet. All that he would otherwise have loved and admired seemed to him to be shorn of its worth by the transience that was its doom. 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. While the young poet admires the pastoral scene that he encounters, he cannot take any “joy in it.” For, as Freud explains: In his 1915 essay “On Transience,” Freud describes a “summer walk through a smiling countryside” in which he and two companions-a “taciturn friend” and a “young but already famous poet”-discuss the beauty of nature.
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