Libido and transience *

2002, February 9

* Translated by Constance Stradling - Peluffo

From the 28th of June to the 4th of August 1914, Europe caught fire and went wild. It is the beginning of the first world war, the great war.
In 1913 the Master had passed part of his summer holiday at San Martino di Castrozza, that was still part of a territory more or less of Italian tongue, included in the Austrian-Hungarian empire.
In 1915, one year of war had already made the illusions on the perpetuity of the human conquest in any field fall, from art, science and the morality. Even the wonders of nature became relative and all that happened, also the occurrences inside the international psychoanalytic movement, contributed to confirm the transience of natural forms and human cultures.
It is exactly with a brief article on the transience (Vergänglichkeit) that Freud offers his contribution for the miscellaneous celebrative volume “DAS LAND GOETHES” pubblicated by the initiative of the Goethian Association of Berlin.
In this brief writing of 1915 he takes the cue from an episode and notes from a happening in August 1913 at San Martino of Castrozza, in which in a conversation during a walk with two friends, he used the theme of the transience of the phenomen, also of those which appear to be firmly universal.
The theme was introduced by a friend that He defined as “ the poet “ who insisted on the transience and uselessness of “beauty” in the general sense of the brief duration of the phenomen. Freud sustained that this fact was undeniable but it did not lessen the value of beauty and said: “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.”
These two friends were left indifferent by these comments and Freud decided that the operation of depreciation was due to an anticipated elaboration of mourning, for example the inevitable loss of beauty of the youth. The human being tries to minimize the pleasure of beauty in order to avoid the displeasure given at its loss. In this way it passes by in life without being realized. The thought of transience is perturbing.
It is at this point that a definition of libido very simple but exemplary is introduced. Here are His words: “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. 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 ... (omissis) ... We only see that libido clings to its objects and will not renounce those that are lost even when a substitute lies ready at hand. Such then is mourning.”
We must not forget that this note on the transience was written in 1915 after one year of war. ”A year later the war broke out and robbed the world of its beauties".
  After some considerations on mourning and on the support of the investment on the remained objects the Master writes: ”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 (in so far as we are still young and active) to replace the lost objects by fresh ones equally or still more precious.”
Referring to the contingency of the war he expresses a wish: “ 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”.
We are in 1915 and the Master has not yet discovered the compulsion to repeat, and formulated the theory of the death instinct; therefore from this point of view he still has a “consolatory” attitude. In 1938, unfortunately for him, he was obliged to take act that the losses never come to an end and also Bergasse enters into the category of transient entities that can (and must be) substituted to continue to live.
“Forty years have elapsed since these pages were written, and here I am to translate them on the morrow of a second war more ferocious than the first and in the terror of a third conflict, the atomic era in which we are now, that would make it even more devastating”.
M. Bonaparte declares: “One day, he told me, - everything will die, the human thought, as man. The thought survives twenty or thirty years and then, in its turn dies - I replied that after three thousand years Omero was still being read! Therefore, Omero would disappear! After our culture, humanity and the earth? and Freud imperturbable - For what reason, something that proceeds from man should last when all in the Universe perishes? - Struck by the greatness of Freud's philosophical phrase, she says once again, - what you say is beautiful, but sad! - and he replied - Why sad? This is life. It is exactly the eternal flow which makes life so beautiful -".
I am dealing with this argument, because it appears actual, it has been examined in a passionate article, by Marie Bonaparte in 1955. It was publicated in the Revue française de psychanalyse (P.U.F., N° 3, Juillet - Septembre 1956) with the title “Deux penseurs devant l’abime”.
In the first section M. Bonaparte resumes Freud's note “Verganglichkeit”, in the second makes her considerations on the argument of transience which she translated in french with the word, “Fugivité”.
M. Bonaparte declares to be in disagreement with what Freud had told the poet during the walk and to emphasize his negative point of view declares her opposition to that which Freud had said during an analytical session.
The subsequent considerations of Bonaparte are very interesting but in my opinion what she does not completely perceive it is the true significance of the necessity of loss of objects.
I think what the Master intends to say, if the objects did not perish, the libido would never be free. Consequently for the subjects nothing new would ever exist.
The loss of objects is necessary in order to give the possibility to free the libido. The libido, once free, can invest other objects (perhaps invent them) create “other music” (relationships) whose marginal resonances escaped from the vortex of the compulsion to repeat.
The loss creates that which renders life beautiful; the loss opens the synapse in which we can grasp the instant of the creation. The rest is static and waits to disappear.
The problem of the viscosity of libido and of its hanging on to the object enters into the nature of the mind(psyche); which is an organ of conservation, and it is the functional and structural expression of death instinct (drive).
It is the failure of the destiny of the death drive, which permits the expansion of the energy of movement in those forms that constitutes the matter and, as in the case of man, they auto maintain themselves through sexual reproduction.
This qualified energy, which produces and maintains the phases that flow into sexual reproduction, is the libido. The libido not only invests the objects but it creates them, just as it creates new human beings. The libido materializes itself in sexual intercourse, from which are born new children, and also other human productions: art, religion, language writing, science , and all the other creations. Also psychoanalysis.
Certainly they are transient for their intrinsic nature. Some however, have a longer duration because they contain inside themselves an enormous quantity of degrees of liberty which makes it possible for them to have a continuous adaptation to the changing of the situation until they are eliminated by a tremendous catastrophe.
In this case the “live sensibility” of human beings could not be present anymore to enjoy the new structural forms. If we follow the micropsychoanalytic theory, those forms, as they are manifestations of the neutral dynamism of the void it would exist the same, even if different, and so for the trials. What could lack would be the sensibility which percepts them, except, later on, the proper psychobiological organ reforms to register and conserve the traces. For the mechanism of the compulsion to repeat this phenomenon is very probable.
However this is a metapsychological and speculative way, also if fascinating, it is beyond the psychoanalytic practice. Sometimes to mix the indications of different systems of explanations can produce metaphors useful to the progress of science, more often however, give origin to chimeras.

© Nicola Peluffo