Transience: Its Beauty and Danger

The author argues that what he terms transition and what he will call transience to together quite often, but that analysts usually discuss transition rather than transience. In the first half of this paper, he examines Ukiyo-e and Japanese myths and folk tales, so as to introduce the Japanese concept of transience and its pathological connotation. In the second half, he quotes two treatments of self-destructive patients to show the importance of understanding the negative and positive aspects of transience in psychoanalytical terms. He concludes that masochistic identification with the transitory figure(s) can take place along with limitless accumulation of debt, causing everything, including one's own self, to be felt as transient. He points out that a Japanese word ‘Arigatou’, which is almost equivalent to ‘thank you’ in English, literally means ‘difficult to exist’, and thus the importance in Japan of appreciating the transience of valuable things. He considers that while readers may be reminded of Winnicott's discussion of transitional objects, transition is a phenomenological description of movement, while transience is mainly an emotional state, or one of painful feeling. Transience, he believes, is not only a feature of Japanese clinical phenomena but also universal.