The Beginning of Terror. David Kleinbard
theory and pedagogy, and exploring the roles of resistance, transference, and countertransference in the classroom.
“In the end we depend/On the creatures we made,” Freud observed at the close of his life (Letters, 425), quoting from Goethe’s Faust; and in the end psychoanalytic literary criticism depends on the scholars who continue to shape it. All serious scholarship is an act of love and devotion, and for many of the authors in this series, including myself, psychoanalytic literary criticism has become a consuming passion, in some cases a lifelong one. Like other passions, there is an element of idealization here. For despite our criticisms of Freud, we stand in awe of his achievements; and even as we recognize the limitations of any single approach to literature, we find that psychoanalysis has profoundly illuminated the human condition and inspired countless artists. In the words of the fictional “Freud” in D. M. Thomas’s extraordinary novel The White Hotel (1981), “Long may poetry and psychoanalysis continue to highlight, from their different perspectives, the human face in all its nobility and sorrow” (143n.).
JEFFREY BERMAN
Professor of English
State University of New York at Albany
Works Cited
Freud, Sigmund. The Letters of Sigmund Freud. Ed. Ernst Freud. Trans. Tania and James Stern. New York: Basic Books, 1975.
———. The Origins of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, and Ernst Kris. Trans. Eric Mosbacher and James Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 1954; rpt. 1977.
———. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. 24 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Introduction, Bend Sinister. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974.
———. Lolita. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1959.
Thomas, D. M. The White Hotel. New York: Viking, 1981.
Preface
I am deeply grateful to Maureen Waters, my wife, and Fred Kaplan for all their useful criticisms and suggestions for the revision of The Beginning of Terror. I take this opportunity to thank the members of the History of Psychiatry Seminar at Cornell Medical Center, who were very helpful in their responses to my paper on the relationship between Rilke and Rodin, and especially Barbara Leavy, whose support and encouragement will stay with me as a model of generous friendship. I have benefited as an interpreter of literature from the discussions of the Columbia University Literature and Psychology Seminar. The warm and thoughtful responses of Jason Renker, my editor at New York University Press, Jeffrey Berman, the editor of the Literature and Psychoanalysis Series, and New York University Press’s final anonymous reader have played a creative role in revisions of my book.
For thirty-five years I have been studying Rilke’s work and translating it for my own pleasure, along with the works of other German writers. During this time I have been interested in translations of Rilke by others and am, no doubt, indebted to them in my own interpretations and translations of his poems.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the following: Random House, Inc., for permission to quote from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, by Rainer Maria Rilke, edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell. Copyright © 1982 by Stephen Mitchell; North Point Press for permission to quote portions of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke from New Poems (1907), by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Edward Snow. Translation and copyright © 1984 by Edward Snow; Random House, Inc., for permission to quote from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell. Copyright © 1982, 1983 by Stephen Mitchell; W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., for permission to quote from Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892-1926 (two volumes), translated by Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton. Copyright © 1945, 1947, and 1948, W. W. Norton & Company.
Abbreviations
The following abbreviations are used in parenthetical citations throughout The Beginning of Terror. Full information concerning these texts is given in the Notes and the Selected Bibliography.
ET Ewald Tragy
Letters 1 Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: 1892-1910
Letters 2 Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: 1910-1926
LYP Letters to a Young Poet
R&B: IC Rilke and Benvenuta: An Intimate Correspondence
SO The Sonnets to Orpheus (trans. Stephen Mitchell)
SP The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
WDB Werke in drei Banden
WSR Where Silence Reigns
The Beginning of Terror
CHAPTER 1 Introduction
I
This is a psychological study of Rainer Maria Rilke’s life and writings. Beginning with his novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, published in 1910, I explore the relationship between illness and genius in the poet and his work, a subject to which he returned time and again. His letters describing his experiences when he first came to Paris in 1902 reveal that the anxieties which bring Malte, the main character of the novel, close to psychosis, plagued Rilke himself. The letters and The Notebooks show that Rilke felt that he was losing his sanity. In the summer of 1903 he wrote to Lou Andreas-Salomé, his old friend, lover, and acknowledged surrogate mother, imploring her to help him, declaring that she alone knew who he was and could tell him what he need and need not fear. Salomé had cut off all communication when he decided to marry in February 1901, but she had also promised that she would help him if he should be in dire need at some time in the future. Answering his appeal, she expressed surprise at the maturity of the gifts and skills revealed by his descriptions of his frightening experiences in Paris. She assured him he was mistaken in believing that he would be destroyed by mental illness. The mastery, artistic cunning, and understanding which his letters disclosed clearly distinguished him from the helpless victims of illness with whom he was identifying himself. In the first few months of the following year, encouraged by her praise, Rilke began The Notebooks, drawing upon the experiences he had described in his letters to her. Some passages of this memorable novel differ but little from those anguished letters.
The Notebooks expresses the belief that it might be necessary for “every meaning” to “dissolve like a cloud and fall down like rain,” necessary, that is, to endure something like mental disintegration or dying to be able to “see everything differently.” A poet might have to risk undergoing a process of fragmentation closely resembling the onset of psychosis (we would say “schizophrenia,” but the term was not introduced until 1911, the year after Rilke completed his novel)1 before his hand would “write words that are not mine,” “that other interpretation.”2 Such experiences gave rise to “agony” and “disconsolations”; they were also sources of “most painful insights” and “a negative mold” from which the poet hoped to cast “real still things,” works of art, “that it is serenity and freedom to create and from which, when they exist, reassurance emanates.... ”3
Obviously these ideas raise questions for anyone writing a study of Rilke and his work, or interested in the psychology of his genius. With such questions in mind and with help from a number of psychologists and psychoanalysts, I attempt to define the nature of the emotional illness