Abstract

In a short essay, Freud describes a stroll through the countryside with two special friends: a young but already famous poet and a taciturn friend, who will become a fascinating psychoanalyst. The idyll was quickly disturbed: Freud's friends found themselves unable to feel pleasure in the beauty of the landscape. The poet «admired the beauty of the scene», but «felt no joy in it». Freud offers an interpretation of the poet's lack of joy: disturbed «by the thought that all this beauty was fated to extinction [...] all that he would otherwise have loved and admired seemed to him to be shorn of its worth by the transience which was its doom».