[1] Freud frames the essay as a dialogue between him and Rainer Maria Rilke (referred to as "the poet" throughout).
[3] Freud refers to a discussion they had (possibly in September of that year) on the matter of transience of which they had differing perceptions.
[3] Rilke found the transience of life disheartening whereas Freud viewed it as engendering value and beauty.
[4] Written during the midst of World War I, Jonathan Lear interpreted the essay as a response to the war's upheaval, describing it as "the problem that haunts it from the beginning", as well as mediation upon "a phenomenon that marks the human condition"; Lear did consider Freud's psyche more salient to the essay's conception than the mediation itself, writing that "This is not a thoughtful engagement between two serious people about the meaning of transience in human life: it is a polarized stand-off between caricatured figures in Freud’s imagination", a by-product of recent disillusionment.
[2] The psychoanalyst Matthew Von Unwerth described the essay as a "portrait in miniature of the world of [Freud]".