In this paper Freud's text Vergänglichkeit (1916) is looked at from a new perspective, namely, that it is our fleeting consciousness that carries out the important interchange between the ego and the world. Consciousness and its transitoriness, however, can become ill. In paranoia it becomes lost in a future so terrifying that it finds its greatest relief in delusional reality. In melancholia, it becomes lost in the past and exhausts itself in reconstituting an object of desire that cannot be taken as lost.
Consciousness; transitoriness; melancholia; paranoia