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The heaviness of lifeis heavier than theheaviness of all things.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Freud's short essay ‘On transience’ (1916) was written as part of a Festschrift to celebrate the work of his great inspiration, Goethe. In it, he explores the concept of creativity and mortality through the prism of an imaginary meeting with some erudite travelling companions on a walking holiday in the mountains. While together, they discuss the perennial problem of ‘where there is life there is also death’. The two walking companions were in all likelihood supposed to represent Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘a young but already famous poet’, and Lou Andreas-Salomé, his ‘taciturn friend’ and Rilke's former lover and mentor. It is known that these three did meet together around this time and these conversations may have occurred, but that Freud, to protect his protagonists’ confidentiality, altered the circumstances of their meeting.
Rilke was a replacement child for a sister who had died in childbirth. His mother dealt with her death by insisting that he wore girls’ clothing until he was 5 years old. His parents’ marriage later failed when he was 9 years old. This early experience of the finite nature of relationships and the problem of mourning are evident in much of his future writings. His abstract definition of his own marriage, was of ‘a love like two solitudes greeting and saluting each other’ (Rilke, 1992).
In comparison, Freud, the older man at 57 years of age, who was about to write ‘Mourning and melancholia’ (1917), understood that the transformation of lost objects that once existed in the external world could occur through a painful renunciation or mourning process. In this way, they can continue to exist in the psychological afterlife of the internal world, or memory, allowing us to reconnect with life instead of an identification with death. This understanding of the nature of loss and its vicissitudes was probably deepened at this time by Freud's growing awareness of his own mortal