Disjecta Membra: Freud on Transience
Freud calls melancholia a defense against mourning. In a fragment, “On Transience,” written during World War I — two years before his essay on “Mourning and Melancholia” — he recalls walking in a beautiful countryside with a friend and a brooding poet. He finds that his companions could not bring themselves to enjoy the natural beauty of the landscape for fear of its inevitable passing. For Freud himself it was precisely the transience of things that increased their value, but even when he explains this to the young people, his words seem to fall on unheeding ears. He concludes that what held them back from experiencing ephemeral beauty was the fear of mourning it in the future. Allowing themselves to enjoy what must eventually pass would mean experiencing loss at a later date and their minds revolted unconsciously against that prospect. According to the later essay, when you lose what you love the libido undergoes a painful process of coming to terms with the loss by temporarily retreating into the ego, identifying with the self, and eventually finding new objects of love. What Freud comes to call melancholia is a permanent retreat inward in response to loss, except that in the case of the melancholic it remains unclear what has been or might be lost. The melancholic’s inwardness is without cause or end. Insofar as there is no mention in this account of the poet’s having lost an object of love, and insofar as the problem seems to be an attribute of his disposition and not a passing affliction, the poet’s inability to delight in nature’s changeable charms is a form of melancholia. Freud gives us a psychological reading of the condition, but what would it mean to say that the pathological fear of mourning preventing the poet from experiencing the world did not stem from some peculiarity of his psyche alone? Freud reflects on his own historical moment in the last paragraph of this essay fragment, on how the war had destroyed so many things we treasured as a civilization and how we would build them all up again to be perhaps even more beautiful than before. One cannot help but notice something almost like desperation in Freud’s rhetoric, in the firmness of his conviction that he will not be beaten into resignation in the face of great losses. What if the poet’s resolve to not enjoy anything for fear of its destruction were, in fact, a sober indictment of reality? Perhaps resignation is a perfectly reasonable response to a world reeling from a seemingly irreparable loss. Politically, melancholia may be more destructive than idealism, but aesthetically, doesn’t melancholia, as a kind of negative idealism, seem almost natural?
Freud’s belief that the war would in no way lessen but only increase the value of experience brings to mind, by way of sharp contrast, Benjamin’s essay on experience from nearly two decades after the war and in the shadow of the next one looming ahead. It should come as no wonder that Benjamin sides with the melancholic poet; his “Experience and Poverty” declares the utter impoverishment of experience. To him this much is clear:
[…] experience has fallen in value, amid a generation which from 1914 to 1918 had to experience some of the most monstrous events in the history of the world. Perhaps this is less remarkable than it appears. Wasn’t it noticed at the time how many people returned from the front in silence? Not richer but poorer in communicable experience? …. For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly: strategic experience … by positional warfare; economic experience, by the inflation; physical experience, by hunger; moral experiences, by the ruling powers. A generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn streetcars now stood in the open air, amid a landscape in which nothing was the same except the clouds and, at its center, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body. [1]
For Benjamin, experience is the experience of barbarism. It is no longer something we seek out to pass down. We only wish to survive its endless barrage: to cope, if we can, with what passes for experience. Yet Benjamin does not yearn for a more authentic variety of experience. He recognizes that humanity’s lot is with barbarism. This does not make him a cynic, necessarily. In fact, the essay ends on a messianic note, with the “hope that from time to time the individual will give a little humanity to the masses, who one day will repay him with compound interest.” [2] If Freud believes we can build all we have destroyed again, then Benjamin does not want to. If Freud clings to the value of experience, then Benjamin wants freedom from experience.
—Divya Menon
Edvard Munch, Melancholy, 1891. Oil on canvas.
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.
But this demand for immortality is a product of our wishes too unmistakable to lay claim to reality: what is painful may nonetheless be true. I could not see my way to dispute the transience of all things, nor could I insist upon an exception in favor 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. The beauty of the human form and face vanish forever in the course of our own lives, but their evanescence only lends them a fresh charm. A flower that blossoms only for a single night does not seem to us on that account less lovely. Nor can I understand any better why the beauty and perfection of a work of art or of an intellectual achievement should lose its worth because of its temporal limitation. A time may indeed come when the pictures and statues which we admire today will crumble to dust, or a race of men may follow us who no longer understand the works of our poets and thinkers, or a geological epoch may even arrive when all animate life upon the earth ceases; but since the value of all this beauty and perfection is determined only by its significance for our own emotional lives, it has no need to survive us and is therefore independent of absolute duration.
John Constable, Hampstead Heath looking West towards Harrow (II), ca. 1821. Oil on canvas.
These considerations appeared to me incontestable; but I noticed that I had made no impression either upon the poet or upon my friend. My failure led me to infer that some powerful emotional factor was at work which was disturbing their judgement, and I believed later that I had discovered what it was. What spoiled their enjoyment of beauty must have been a revolt in their minds against mourning. The idea that all this beauty was transient was giving these two sensitive minds a foretaste of mourning over its decease; and, since the mind instinctively recoils from anything that is painful, they felt their enjoyment of beauty interfered with by thoughts of its transience.
Mourning over the loss of something that we have loved or admired seems so natural to the layman that he regards it as self-evident. But to psychologists mourning is a great riddle, one of those phenomena which cannot themselves be explained but to which other obscurities can be traced back. We possess, as it seems, a certain amount of capacity for love — what we call libido — which in the earliest stages of development is directed towards our own ego. Later, though still at a very early time, this libido is diverted from the ego on to objects, which are thus in a sense taken into our ego. If the objects are destroyed or if they are lost to us, our capacity for love (our libido) is once more liberated; and it can then either take other objects instead or can temporarily return to the ego. But why it is that this detachment of libido from its objects should be such a painful process is a mystery to us and we have not hitherto been able to frame any hypothesis to account for it. We only see that libido clings to its objects and will not renounce those that are lost even when a substitute lies ready to hand. Such then is mourning.
My conversation with the poet took place in the summer before the war. A year later the war broke out and robbed the world of its beauties. It destroyed not only the beauty of the countrysides 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 civilization, our admiration for many philosophers and artists and our hopes of a final triumph over the differences between nations and races. It tarnished the lofty impartiality of our science, it revealed our instincts in all their nakedness and let loose the evil spirits within us which we thought had been tamed forever by centuries of continuous education by the noblest minds. It made our country small again and made the rest of the world far remote. It robbed us of very much that we had loved, and showed us how ephemeral were many things that we had regarded as changeless.
Imogen Cunningham, Self Portrait in Broken Mirror 2, 1973. Silver gelatin print.
We cannot be surprised that our libido, thus bereft of so many of its objects, has clung with all the greater intensity to what is left to us, that our love of our country, our affection for those nearest us and our pride in what is common to us have suddenly grown stronger. But have those other possessions, which we have now lost, really ceased to have any worth for us because they have proved so perishable and so unresistant? To many of us this seems to be so, but once more wrongly, in my view. I believe that those who think thus, and seem ready to make a permanent renunciation because what was precious has proved not to be lasting, are simply in a state of mourning for what is Lost. Mourning, as we know, however painful it may be, comes to a spontaneous end. When it has renounced everything that has been lost, then it has consumed itself, and our libido is once more free (insofar as we are still young and active) to replace the lost objects by fresh ones equally or still more precious. It is to be hoped that the same will be true of the losses caused by this war. When once the mourning is over, it will be found that our high opinion of the riches of civilization has lost nothing from our discovery of their fragility. We shall build up again all that war has destroyed, and perhaps on firmer ground and more lastingly than before.
from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Volume XIV (1914–1916), On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology, and Other Works. Translated and edited by James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1957.
Roberto Matta, Untitled, 1942 - 1943, Oil on canvas.
NOTES
[1] Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934, translated by Rodney Livingstone and others, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 731.
[2] Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” Selected Writings, 735.
