"On Transience" was written by Freud in November, 1915, at the invitation of the Goethe Society of Berlin for a commemorative volume scheduled to appear the following year, Das Land Goethes 1914-1916. According to H. Lehmann (Schur, 1972), the characters referred to, that is the taciturn friend and the young poet, are respectively Lou Andreas-Salomé and Rainer Maria Rilke. This has not been confirmed, although Rilke visited Freud one month after the preparation of the text, in December, 1915 (letter to Sándor Ferenczi, December 24, 1915).

This short essay, over which hover the background of war and death that were prevalent at the time, was written the same year as Freud's "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death" (1915b) and Mourning and Melancholia (1917a [1915]). These three essays constitute a whole focused on the notion of mourning. The theme of the relationship between mourning and melancholia had already...