Vol. 29 No. 1 (2022): Transience(s) - continuous publishing edition

In 1915, at the invitation of the Goethe Society of Berlin for a commemorative volume entitled Goethe’s country, Freud has left us a brief and thought-provoking text. It encourages us to reflect on the then-current feelings in situations of mourning and melancholy, which today are refreshed by the impression that we are living in a constant state of expectancy and unpredictability of return, by the successive partiality of progress and, particularly, by repeated and daily mourning.

Freud starts his text with a beautiful sentence: “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 young poet claimed to be sad as he noticed that all the beauty of not only nature around them, but also that created by men, was fated to extinction. To counter the poet's dismay would be the concept that nothing could diminish the beauty of the world from our sensations and, hence, the demand for immortality. Freud then reflects on perishing and, rightfully so, finds admiration and enchantment for transience, for the comings and goings, for the perpetual return, for the aesthetic fruition brought by the inherent fleetingness of this movement: dying, reviving, springing up, maturing, developing, growing old and dying again. He will then conclude that only by facing the work of mourning, arising from the transience of unusual experiences, will the individual be free for the profound act of living and its subsequent reinvestments.

We believe that fruitful insights can be gained from the perception of transience in everything we live: whether good, beautiful and just; or evil, disgusting and sinister. Transience in its multiple domains of meaning, ranging from softness, delicacy, lightness, fluidity, tenuity, to fleetingness, swiftness, immediacy, haste, and even perishability. Therefore, as we are plunged into the unexpectancy and violence that hits us and reminds us of our inevitable loneliness, dependence, helplessness, and powerlessness in the face of death, the subject of loss and mourning emerges, while offering us a sense of renewal. One needs the winter for new seeds to sprout. One needs death for Life to rise again. As Freud did when he addressed the value of time scarcity, there is a beauty in transience that compiles eternity into a moment. Time, our time, becomes yet another vertex of potential creative inspiration.

In these times of coming and going, ending and starting all over again, how do we think and feel transience today? What do we understand and how do we deal with these insights and experiences? How our psychoanalytical practice and our theoretical thinking converse with, acknowledge, or are nourished by our transience? And would repudiation, splitting, and outpouring point to the limits of consideration of our transience?