The Beginning of Terror. David Kleinbard
environment throughout one’s life. This is essential to the artist especially because he needs to be able to lapse into the strange and often frightening unintegrated, undifferentiated state of mind in which he is open to normally repressed ideas and feelings and to alien structures of thought. Rilke’s letters make it clear that he needed to be alone in order to fall into such a condition, to exist solitary in an imagined cocoon so that he could come apart before coming together again. In this raw, naked, fragmentary state of mind he felt both too vulnerable and too repulsive to be near anyone, except a servant. His attempts to live with mothering women—above all, Lou Andreas-Salomé—usually resulted in painful failure.
Chapter 9 brings to a conclusion my study of the ways in which Rilke attempted, in his fiction, his poetry, and a number of his relationships, to create the benevolent, supportive, protective, mirroring mother he felt Phia had not been for him. From the time that he wrote The Book of Hours (1899, 1901, and 1903, revised in 1905), with its prayer that he might be granted a hermaphroditic nature as a mothering male, his works and letters reveal a fascination with the idea that he might be both man and woman, mother and son, brother and sister, lover and beloved. The painful memories of his mother’s games during the first five years of his life, in which she had converted him into a little girl, a substitute for his sister, who had died before he was born, were put to good use in his fiction and poetry. In chapter 9 I consider the poems which, beginning with “Turning” (June 1914), show the evolution of an inner beloved woman or female presence. This process culminates in his transformation of Vera Knoop, a young dancer, artist, and musician, the daughter of friends, who had recently died at nineteen, into the inner woman, “almost a girl” (“fast ein Mádchen”), who inspired The Sonnets to Orpheus, as the poems, themselves, their dedication, and his letters about them tell us. In the second sonnet he imagines that she has made her bed within his ear and slept there and that her sleep within his “auditory imagination” included the world and brought it within him, allowing him at last to hear the Orphic lyre resounding in his ordinarily “unheard center.” (The “auditory imagination” is T. S. Eliot’s concept. “Unheard center” [“unerhórte mitte”] comes from the twenty-eighth sonnet of the second cycle, which is clearly about Vera, though she is not named, and which is dedicated to her.) With this figure in the Sonnets, with the silent, invisible female friend of the Seventh Duino Elegy, and with the beloved Earth in the Ninth Elegy, whom he imagines yearning to become invisible within him, Rilke brought to perfection his efforts to give vivid, compelling life and form to the loving, “mirroring” maternal figure, present in The Notebooks and in so many of his poems. In the young woman, “almost a girl,” of the Sonnets this mental presence found a disguise which concealed its real, felt meaning from the poet as well as his readers.
By giving such evocative, if disguised, forms of existence to the beloved maternal figure within him he was able to convert narcissistic illness into creative narcissism and to find in his isolation at Muzot the wholeness and fertile, potent self-sufficiency that made it possible for him to complete the Elegies and to write the Sonnets. The writing of the Sonnets and the final Elegies brought the psychological processes which I have described to completion.
Although a number of biographies have been published, only one earlier book has answered the need for a psychological study of this great poet—Erich Simenauer’s Rainer Maria Rilke: Legende und Mythos, published in 1953 and never translated into English. I am indebted to Simenauer for his perceptive readings of Rilke’s works and his letters. But his book is limited by its narrow reliance on early Freudian concepts. His “classical” analysis focuses on the consequences of a “fixation” in the “oedipal stage” with its murderous hatred of the father and incestuous longings for the mother. He is concerned with the largely unconscious roles which “id,” “ego,” and “superego” play in the poet’s “oedipus complex,” including the ego’s responses to the superego and its defenses against the id, such as “repression” and “reaction formation” (unconscious exaggeration of a feeling or wish in consciousness in order to reinforce repression of its opposite). For the most part, Simenauer classifies aspects of the poet’s psychology according to the taxonomy of primitive Freudian orthodoxy.
I draw upon the same set of concepts, but, as this introduction makes clear, I also move beyond them to psychological theory and knowledge concerned with the child’s pre-oedipal experience and its long-term effects. Discussions of narcissistic, borderline, schizoid, and schizophrenic forms of mental illness and their origins in this earlier period of childhood have been helpful in my study of Rilke’s life and writings. My interpretations reflect an interest in works concerned with the formation and development of ego and identity; the evolution of the sense of self, its separation and integration; the experience of “the non-human environment” (“Things” for Rilke) in mental health and illness; the fear of death and the variety of ways in which it may be mastered; the psychology of the creative process; comparisons and contrasts of language and thought in literature and schizophrenic speech and writing; and new conceptions of “identification,” “introjection,” and “incorporation” which have helped me to elucidate Rilke’s conception of relationships between the living and the dead, his notion of the woman within himself, and the ideas about internalization and transformation which form the central “argument” of the seventh and ninth Duino Elegies.
Much of the psychological theory and knowledge which I have found helpful postdates the publication of Simenauer’s study. I have also benefited from recent biographies of Rilke by Wolfgang Leppmann, Donald Prater, and J. F. Hendry, as well as a wealth of scholarship and commentary written since 1953.14
How would the poet, himself, have responded to the news that someone had written a psychoanalytic study of his life and work? His conflicting feelings about psychoanalysis are clearly expressed in his letters. Rejecting his wife’s advice that he go into analysis, on January 14, 1912, when the first Duino Elegy had just come to him, he wrote to the Freudian therapist, Emil Baron von Gebsattel, a friend of Lou Andreas-Salomé, expressing the fear that such a system of classification would disturb the “much higher order” of his imagination (Letters 2:43). Ten days later he wrote to Salomé and again to Gebsattel, saying that, with the exorcism of his devils, his angels too might leave. A January 20 letter to Salomé acknowledges that the idea of undergoing psychoanalysis occurred to him from time to time. If he found Freud’s writings “uncongenial,” nonetheless, he could “conceive of Gebsattel’s using it [psychoanalysis] with discretion and influence” (Letters 2:44). In this letter he gives a detailed account of his imprisoning, hypochondriacal misery. But his fear that analysis might result in “a disinfected soul,” “a monstrosity,” a mind like a student notebook page covered with corrections—a fantasy which he acknowledged was “silly” and “false”—kept him from entering treatment (Letters 2:44, 43). Repelled and fascinated by the new ideas and therapies of the depth psychologists, suffering often from uncontrollable anxieties and an inability to sustain a loving relationship, a recurrent inability to work, cruel depression, and a sense of his unreality, he sought explanations and therapeutic advice from Salomé, whose growing knowledge of Freudian theory and eccentric devotion to it after 1911 influenced her interpretations of his illness and his writings in her letters to him, their conversations, and her own books, including her study of Rilke (1928), The Freud Journal of Lou-Andreas Salomé, which she kept in 1912 and 1913 (Aus der Schule bei Freud), and her memoir, A Look Back at Life (Lebensrückblick).15
II
In a recent essay on Rilke, “Paris/Childhood: The Fragmented Body in Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” published in Modernity and the Text: Revisions of German Modernism (1989), Andreas Huyssen observes that “the insights of psychoanalysis have by and large been shunned by Rilke scholars as irrelevant for the literary and aesthetic assessment of the novel.”1 Most of my book was complete before I discovered Huyssen’s essay, but we draw upon some of the same psychological concepts and share a sense of the ways in which psychoanalytic