The Beginning of Terror. David Kleinbard
to mean something deeper, more inclusive, a sense of self, a sense of oneself as a person, for whom the inner life has or seems to have the unity given it by a viewpoint, by the feeling that there is someone experiencing, desiring, fearing, choosing, not just a flux of experiences, desires, fears, choices. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche, like Hume before him, argues that this is an illusion, a fiction. But many psychoanalysts, beginning with Freud, have observed that such a sense of self does have a basis in the unifying organization of an “ego” and in the unity and separateness of the body. The sense of self has a number of sources. The privacy of the mind suggests its separateness and autonomy. Action following upon choice suggests that there is an agent who makes decisions and acts upon them. Consistent patterns of feeling and thought and consistency in the way things are viewed suggest that someone is there (where?) who experiences these feelings and has this viewpoint. The description of the woman whose face comes off in her hands reflects the fear that this someone, this person or self who Malte feels he is, may be lost.
A number of clinician-observers and theorists have discussed the origins of the association of face with self and person. One of the most highly respected observers of early infant behavior, R. A. Spitz, tells us, “The inception of the reality principle is evident at the three-months level, when the hungry infant becomes able to suspend the urge for the immediate gratification of his oral need. He does so for the time necessary to perceive the mother’s face and to react to it. This is the developmental step in which the ‘I’ is differentiated from the ‘non-I.’ ”6 D. W. Winnicott and other analytic theorists have concluded that an infant experiences a responsive mother’s face as a reflection and thus a confirmation of his own existence. Watching an empathetic mother’s face, an infant also gets to know a great deal about what he is like. Her face is a mirror in which her baby finds himself.7
Phyllis Greenacre points out that we never see our own face in the flesh, only in a pane of glass or water or some other mirroring surface, only as a reflected image or as an image in a photograph or a painting, which is felt to be unreal and disconnected, not the living thing itself. (This truth brings to mind Plato’s cave and the myth of Narcissus, who cannot find adequate confirmation of his existence and reality in his mirror image. His death can be read as a metaphor for the dissolution of the isolated or solipsistic self. Narcissus fascinated Rilke, who valued solitude. In Malte he portrays the ways in which isolation strengthens the imagination but also fosters narcissistic illness.) As the reflected image in a pane of glass or in water is felt to be unreal, Greenacre argues, a child needs someone else, whose face responsively mirrors his, to support his sense of the living reality of his own distinctive self.8 In Collected Papers on Schizophrenia and Related Subjects, Harold Searles observes that for the patient whose sense of self is weak the analyst’s face often performs the maternal function of mirroring.9 I shall return to this subject in subsequent chapters when I focus upon Rilke’s relationships with his mother and other women.
This preliminary discussion of mirrors and mirroring will make some readers think of Jacques Lacan’s well-known essay “The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in the psychoanalytic experience.” Lacan calls “the mirror stage,” lasting from six to eighteen months of age, “a drama ... which manufactures for the subject... the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic—and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity.”10 For Lacan the child’s experience of his mirror reflection at approximately six months results in his assumption of an image. This early “identification,” however, is at odds with the infant’s experience of its own body at that time as fragmented and uncoordinated and with the closely related lack of any developed sense of psychic coherence and integration. The image offered the child in the mirror foreshadows the gradual development of an integrated sense of self and ego. But it also helps to lay the foundation for enduring, if often unconscious, alienation from oneself and others. The mirror image is, obviously, external, inverted, reflected, and its physical unity is sharply out of sync with the infant’s other experiences of psycheandbody. The child’s identification of himself (herself) with the image in the mirror, a misperception, anticipates the mediation of his (her) relationships with self and others by such images and, hence, that underlying, often unconscious sense of alienation. Eventually, Lacan argues, language and other kinds of symbols, too, will mediate these relationships and play a large part in the creation of the sense of a unified self. I have interpreted mirrors and mirroring in Rilke’s life and work with the help of other psychoanalytic theorists (among them, Searles, Spitz, Winnicott, R. D. Laing, and Heinz Kohut) rather than Lacan, because I have found their insights and the matrices of clinical experience which support and substantiate them more illuminating than his writings.
II
The image of the woman’s face coming off in her hands, frightening, horrifying as it is, obliquely suggests Malte’s dread of mental disintegration, which a number of passages in The Notebooks reveal. If Malte were a real person giving us a report of an experience, we might say that he has unconsciously projected the psychic disintegration which he fears in himself onto the woman, embodying it in a fantasy of a face coming off. Is this a hallucination? Is it imaginative perception? Perhaps, Rilke would have wanted us to retain our negative capability in reading this Notebooks entry, and to refrain from forcing it into one category, excluding the other.
Malte’s fantasies of physical and mental fragmentation and of the dissolution of boundaries between himself and his world originate in his childhood. In a subsequent entry he recalls an episode, from that time in his life, which clearly represents a lapse in the integrity of body, mind, and will. While drawing, he lets a crayon fall under the table. Kneeling on an armchair has made his legs so numb that “I didn’t know what belonged to me and what was the chair’s.” Boundaries between the self and the external world have dissolved. In the child’s mind differentiation and integration break down at the same time. Under the table Malte sees his own hand as a separate creature with a mind and will of its own:
[A]bove all I recognized my own outspread hand moving down there all alone, like some strange crab, exploring the ground. I watched it ... almost with curiosity; it seemed to know things I had never taught it, as it groped down there so completely on its own, with movements I had never noticed before ... it interested me. I was ready for all kinds of adventures. (94) Then the boy sees another hand come “out of the wall.” The two hands grope blindly toward each other.
The boy is horrified. “I felt that one of the hands belonged to me and that it was about to enter into something it could never return from. With all the authority that I had over it, I stopped it, held it flat, and slowly pulled it back to me without taking my eyes off the other one, which kept on groping. I realized that it wouldn’t stop, and I don’t know how I got up again” (94).
This delusion expresses the child’s sense that the integrity of body and self has broken down. What he has long thought was a part of himself is threatening to cross the boundaries which separate him from everything and everyone else and to become a part of the world of resistant objects and opposing wills. There is an implicit danger that, if this can happen, perhaps any part of body or psyche can separate itself from the child and cross that line into the alien, threatening other. For a little while Malte does not think he has the power to stop his hand from joining that strange other hand and thus entering “into something it could never return from” (94).
In The Ego and the Id (1923), Freud observed that the sense of a separate, unified ego develops with the gradual discovery that the body is a separate entity. Psychiatrists and psychologists working with schizophrenics often find that the disintegration of the self is reflected in the decomposition of the body image. Harold Searles describes the fantasy of a schizophrenic patient “that the building in which she was housed consisted, in actuality, of the disjointed fragments of a human female body.” The same patient expressed her belief that Searles was “anatomically unintegrated.” Searles says that these fantasies “had to do with her coming closer