The Beginning of Terror. David Kleinbard
also cites two 1961 studies of disturbances in body image during experiments in sensory deprivation, comparing the disturbances reported in these studies with those of his schizophrenic patients. According to one of these reports, in the minds of several subjects “the arms seemed to be dissociated from the body.” In another experiment one of the subjects “feared that his body parts would disappear and disintegrate.”
In The Nonhuman Environment, Searles cites a 1955 study of “Variations in ego feeling induced by d-lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25),” which reports that persons taking LSD-25 felt that their skin and their hands and feet no longer belonged to their bodies. “The individual feels that his body is not his, that it functions automatically.” His hands seem to move autonomously. Searles observes that some schizophrenics go through this kind of experience for long periods of time.2 Ultimately, as this study suggests, the loss of integration involves a withdrawal of “ego feeling” not only from parts of the body and then the body as a whole, but also from mental phenomena, from emotions and thoughts, so that they too seem separate, independent, and alien.
In Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl, not a body but a face disintegrates into separate, independent parts, like a cubist painting, in the mind of the schizophrenic girl, who suspects that the “independence of each part” is the source of her fear and that it keeps her from recognizing the face, though she knows it belongs to her analyst, whom she calls “Mama.”3 Unconsciously she projects the psychic disintegration which she fears in herself onto “Mama.” Her unconscious confusion of Mama with herself reflects the pervasive weakness of her ability to differentiate between herself and others.
Of course, we can also read Malte’s story about the hand as an account of the supernatural, something concocted out of Rilke’s fascination with ghosts and kindred phenomena, which was encouraged by his visit to Scandinavia in 1904. And one can see in this story, as in the passage about faces, the influence of Rodin. In the first part of his book on the sculptor, written in 1902, Rilke argues that the unity of an artistic object, a painting or a sculpture, does not have to coincide with the unity of some other object in the world. The artist discovers new unities, drawing upon a number of things to make one of his own, creating “a world out of the smallest part of a thing.” Rilke’s chief examples are the hands sculpted by Rodin. Though they stand alone, separate, they are no less alive. A number of them seem as expressive as faces of emotions, states of mind, and personality types—anger, irritation, sleep, waking up, weariness, loss of desire, criminal tendencies, for example. “Hands have a history of their own, they have, indeed, their own civilization” (WSR, 104-5).
Rodin’s sculpture fostered Rilke’s development of ideas originating in fantasies and fantastical experiences remembered from the poet’s childhood, many of which returned in Paris, brought back by the illness portrayed in Malte. Conversely, accounts of psychic disintegration or fragmentation in The Notebooks, insofar as the novel is autobiographical, reveal at least part of the motivation for Rilke’s absorption in Rodin’s disintegrative and reintegrating sculpture.
In the second half of The Notebooks, Malte’s account of Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, obliquely echoes the story of the hand in Malte’s childhood. The duke’s hands seem to have a life and a will of their own. Malte compares them to “the heads of madmen, raging with fantasies.” But it is the duke’s blood which becomes the focus of Malte’s implicit belief that the essential weakness which defeated and destroyed this bold lord was a lack of integration. Malte imagines that the duke was “locked in” with his “foreign” blood, that it terrified him in the expectation “that it would attack him as he slept, and tear him to pieces.” In Malte’s fantasy this powerful noble, remembered as Charles the Bold, was completely subject to this alien, half-Portuguese blood, which he could not comprehend. He could not “persuade” it that he was emperor or that it should fear him. As Malte imagines Burgundy, eventually his blood, realizing that he was “a lost man,” “wanted to escape.” And, of course, it had its way when the duke died (192-93).
Rilke wrote to his Polish translator, Witold von Hulewicz, that the historical figures in The Notebooks should be seen as the “vocabula of [Malte’s] distress,” and that the “evocations and images” of these accounts of historical figures “are equated” with “his period of distress” (Letters 2:371). But the portrait of Charles the Bold shows Malte distancing himself, to some extent, from the fear of fragmentation, as his artistic mastery enables him to externalize and objectify his anxiety in this interpretation of the duke’s life.
In earlier sections of The Notebooks, Malte’s attempts to retrieve his childhood threaten to shatter whatever psychic wholeness he has been able to develop. The episode of the hands seems too distant to be dangerous, “an event that now lies far back in my childhood” (91). Not long before this, however, thirty pages earlier, Malte notes that, with the return of his childhood in memory, at the age of twenty-eight he is no less vulnerable and susceptible to his old anxieties.
Describing the recurrence of a childhood illness, Malte writes that it brings up out of the unconscious whole “lives” which he has never known about. Yet these strange “lives” have greater strength and a more powerful hold on his mind than familiar memories of what he once was and did. Amid the “tangle of confused memories” arises the terrifying childhood delusion of “the Big Thing.” As much as anything else in The Notebooks, this delusion, which comes back with all its original power, epitomizes Malte’s continuing lack of integration. He compares the Big Thing to a cancer, an alien hostile life in the body over which a person often has little or no control and which is likely to destroy him from within. His blood flowed through it. Like a dead limb it was a part of him but did not belong to him, which is to say, it did not respond to his will. He compares it to a second head. In its ambiguity it resembled an alien personality which emerges from the unconscious to engulf the individual. It swelled and grew over his face, “like a warm bluish boil,” covering his mouth, and then his eyes were “hidden by its shadow” (61-62).
The Big Thing calls to mind accounts of advanced schizoid and schizophrenic illness, in which an individual becomes increasingly anxious that he will be absorbed, ingested, and annihilated by the introjects (“distorted representations of people”), which are, as Searles explains, experienced “as foreign bodies in his personality.” These “infringe upon and diminish the area of what might be thought of as his own self” and often threaten to obliterate the self.4 The fantasy that the Big Thing covers Malte’s face, his mouth and eyes, suggests that it threatens to prevent him from eating, speaking, breathing, and seeing, as well as from being seen.
This account of the return of a childhood delusion follows descriptions of patients in a hospital. Among these are several images of partial or complete effacement. Bandages cover a head, except for one eye “that no longer belonged to anyone” (56). On his right is a large, unintelligible mass, which, Malte then realizes, has a face and a hand, but the face is empty of memories, of character, of will. The clothes look as if undertakers had put them on, and the hair as if it had been combed by members of that indispensable profession. All around him in the hospital Malte sees faces, heads, and bodies in which a person has been lost, obliterated. His fascination with these sights reflects his fear of being depersonalized or dehumanized. He imagines that the chair in which he is sitting must be the one he has been “destined for” and that he has come to “the place in my life where I would remain forever” (59-60).
Another closely related episode is one in which Malte, as a child, puts on a costume, then confronts himself masked in a mirror. The reflection of the masked figure destroys the child’s sense of self. Worse still, he feels that a “stranger” invades his body and takes it over. This experience, like the delusion of the Big Thing and the episode of the hands, reveals the weakness of differentiation in Malte. His sense of boundaries between himself and other people and objects is tenuous. He is apt to merge with them. Ambiguously, he is engulfed by the mirror (“I was the mirror”) and by the “monstrous reality” of the “stranger” in it. His account of his earlier vulnerability to annihilation and engulfment