The Beginning of Terror. David Kleinbard
and the still more urgent need not to be found” which Winnicott observed in artists.10
Rilke’s illness also became creative in another way. As the hard reality of things around him invades his body and drives him out of it, Malte tries to defend himself by passing his fingers over his face in an effort to reestablish his sense of his boundaries. Malte is overwhelmed particularly by the multitude of unbearable phenomena that seem to press in on him. External realities invade, overflow, drown, and suffocate him. Driven out of himself, he is squashed like “a beetle” underfoot (The Notebooks, 74). But Rilke’s bouts of boundary loss evolved into an ability to release himself from the trap of separateness and opposition between subject and object in which most of us find ourselves caught by rigid defensiveness. In 1913 he went through an experience in which the boundaries between “inner” and “outer” dissolved as he felt “within him the gentle presence of the stars” (“An Experience,” WSR, 36). On this occasion Rilke closed his eyes to keep out of mind the contours of his body, a response which seems to be the opposite of Malte’s reaction to the threat of invasion. At other times he experienced the “inviolable presentness and simultaneity” of everything which in ordinary consciousness comes to us as “mere ‘sequence’ ” (Letters 2:342). Distinctions between past, present, and future faded. So did the common sense opposition between the living and the dead, for the dead continue to exist for us and “we are incessantly flowing over and over to those who preceded us, to our origins” (Letters 2:373). Such experiences of what Rilke called “das Offne” (“the open”) seem to have grown out of the kinds of fragmentation and boundary loss described in his letters and fiction. Yet they make “normal” ideas and perceptions of time, space, self, and world seem fragmentary in comparison. They must have occurred during intervals of ego strength and health (wholeness, integration) between stretches of barrenness, emotional illness, and depression.
They prepared for and shaped the thinking and imagery of the Duino Elegies, and The Sonnets to Orpheus. They seemed to the poet to bring an interchange of being between him and the surrounding world, in which metamorphosing world and self were continually re-created, as he tells us, quietly rejoicing, in the first and last sonnets of the second cycle.
Fantasies of engulfment, impingement, and depersonalization, which we find in Rilke’s letters and The Notebooks, often lead to defensive isolation. The Notebooks demonstrates the dangers of isolation such as Malte’s, which feeds the demons of disease it is meant to defend against. Malte’s solitude is extreme. He has no relationships in the present time of the novel. This was not true of Rilke. But the poet was almost obsessively devoted to an ideal of solitude, as his letters, fiction, and poetry show. If psychological infirmities were an acknowledged source of his need to be alone, nineteenth-century thinkers, such as Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, strongly supported his belief that solitude was a necessary condition for creative work. His contemporary and fellow native of Prague, Franz Kafka, equally influenced by these philosophers, emphasized the same theme in his diaries and letters.
Rilke was often with other people. He complained that being with them did him little good and much harm, shutting off the sources of his poetry. Beginning with the “boundlessly frightful pains of childhood,” solitude had given him “all that was greatest” (Letters 2:106-7). Yet the severe anxieties which isolation fostered often led him to seek company and to lose the poet in himself among friends and acquaintances. His relationships with Lou Andreas-Salomé and Auguste Rodin, which I interpret in chapters 5 and 8, reveal the psychodynamics of his dependence on others in its most extreme forms.
The insights of Harold Searles, Heinz Kohut, R. D. Laing, D. W. Winnicott, and Arnold Modell have helped me to elucidate Rilke’s dependence on Salomé and Rodin and his extravagant idealization of these two surrogate parents.11 If we can trust his memory, his extreme neediness in both relationships was due largely to his mother’s and father’s failings, which are amply described in his letters, fiction, and poetry. He feared that he had inherited his mother’s disconnectedness and unreality. He complained bitterly about Phia Rilke’s dishonesty with herself, narcissistic self-absorption, blindness to his real qualities, and inability to love him for what he was. His father’s failure to fulfill his aspirations to a career as an army officer weighed heavily on René during his childhood. The poet was haunted by Josef’s emotional constriction, his expectation that his son would vicariously fulfill his own frustrated ambitions, his disappointment at René’s leaving military school and rejecting a military career, and his anxiety about the poet’s unwillingness to find a job which would protect him, his wife, and daughter from shameful poverty and give them a respectable place in society. But Rilke was able to see or imagine generosity and an inclination to love in his father, struggling against such narrow-minded anxiety and rigidity.
Psychoanalysts who have studied narcissistic illness theorize that the kinds of failures in mothering and fathering which Rilke attributed to his parents often leave the psyche severely impaired. As an adult a child of such parents may look for surrogates who will provide the empathetically responsive maternal “mirroring” required to strengthen a sense of self which remains weak because the individual did not receive adequate “mirroring” in early childhood. He may also seek a surrogate who can be invested with the fantastical omnipotence ascribed to parents by small children, because of their need, in their sense of their own helplessness and fragility, to participate, through identification, in such power. Having failed as a child to internalize idealized parents who calm anxiety, foster the tolerance of unsatisfied cravings, provide models and guidance, distinguish reality from fantasy, make possible accommodations with environmental realities, and offer love and admiration, an adult suffering from narcissistic illness may seek such parents in other people, idealizing them so that they can supply these needs, which persist with an infantile intensity. My chapters on Salomé and Rodin show how they fulfilled such needs in Rilke.
Analysts have also written about the ways in which the impairments and injuries characteristic of narcissistic illness can be repaired and healed. This is an important part of my subject. My chapters on Salomé, Clara Rilke, the poet’s father, and Rodin show how, through his relationships with them and through his work, which he called “nothing but a self-treatment of the same sort” as analysis, he mastered the severest forms of his anxieties and developed a remarkable ability to move, sometimes swiftly, sometimes gradually, from fear, despair, and near mental paralysis to the writing of his greatest poems (Letters 2:42).
Writing to his wife in April 1903, Rilke defended the distance between them with the argument that his work was the center of his life, which he must find again if he was to be able to make progress toward the realization of his gifts. To do this he said, he must be alone, unwatched, unselfconscious. He must be solitary long enough to enable his loneliness to become “firm and secure again like an untrodden wood that is not afraid of footsteps.” The worst thing that could happen to him was “to become unaccustomed to loneliness” (Letters 1:105-6). Though the poet did rediscover the center of his life in his work recurrently (the long period of sustained creativity between 1906 and 1910, when he wrote many of the New Poems and completed The Notebooks, was especially gratifying), the problem that he defined in this letter remained very much alive for him until the completion of the Elegies and the writing of the Sonnets at Muzot in February 1922.
D. W. Winnicott’s observations about “the capacity to be alone” seem especially relevant to Rilke. Winnicott sees this capacity as “one of the most important signs of maturity in emotional development.” He argues that from “this position everything is creative.”12 In chapter 9 I take a close look at Winnicott’s ideas on this subject as I discuss Rilke’s attainment of his long-sought home in isolation during the winter of 1921-22.
Winnicott suggests that we achieve “the ability to be truly alone” by internalizing an “ego-supportive mother.” Such a mother, empathetically responsive to her infant’s needs, creates a sense of a “protective