The Beginning of Terror

Front matter

The Beginning of Terror

A Psychological

Study of

Contents

Integration and Disintegration in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and Other Writings Illness and Creativity

Differentiation between Self and Others in The Notebooks and Rilke’s Letters

4. This Lost, Unreal Woman 68 Phia Rilke and the Maternal Figures in The Notebooks

Foreword

As New York University Press inaugurates a new series of books on literature and psychoanalysis, it seems appropriate to pause and reflect briefly upon the history of psychoanalytic literary criticism. For a century now it has struggled to define its relationship to its two contentious progenitors and to come of age. After glancing at its origins, we may be in a better position to speculate on its future.

Psychoanalytic literary criticism was conceived at the precise moment in which Freud, reflecting upon his self-analysis, made a connection to two plays and thus gave us a radically new approach to reading literature. Writing to his friend Wilhelm Fliess in 1897, Freud breathlessly advanced the idea that “love of the mother and jealousy of the father” are universal phenomena of early childhood (Origins, 223-24). He referred immediately to the gripping power of Oedipus Rex and Hamlet for confirmation of, and perhaps inspiration for, his compelling perception of family drama, naming his theory the “Oedipus complex” after Sophocles’ legendary fictional hero.

Freud acknowledged repeatedly his indebtedness to literature, mythology, and philosophy. There is no doubt that he was a great humanist, steeped in world literature, able to read several languages and range across disciplinary boundaries. He regarded creative writers as allies, investigating the same psychic terrain and intuiting similar human truths. “[P]sycho-analytic observation must concede priority of imaginative writers,” he declared in 1901 in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (SE 6:213), a concession he was generally happy to make. The only exxl xii FOREWORD ceptions were writers like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Schnitzler, whom he avoided reading because of the anxiety of influence. He quoted effortlessly from Sophocles, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Dostoevsky, and was himself a master prose stylist, the recipient of the coveted Goethe Prize in 1930. When he was considered for the Nobel Prize, it was not for medicine but for literature. Upon being greeted as the discoverer of the unconscious, he disclaimed the title and instead paid generous tribute to the poets and philosophers who preceded him.

And yet Freud’s forays into literary criticism have not been welcomed uniformly by creative writers, largely because of his allegiance to science rather than art. Despite his admiration for art, he viewed the artist as an introvert, not far removed from neurosis. The artist, he wrote in a well-known passage in the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1916- 17), “is oppressed by excessively powerful instinctual needs. He desires to win honour, power, wealth, fame and the love of women; but he lacks the means for achieving these satisfactions” (SE 16:376). Consequently, Freud argued, artists retreat from reality into the world of fantasy, where they attempt to make their dreams come true. While conceding that true artists manage to shape their daydreams in such a way as to find a path back to reality, thus fulfilling their wishes, Freud nevertheless theorized art as a substitute gratification. Little wonder, then, that few artists have been pleased with Freud’s pronouncements.

Nor have many artists been sympathetic to Freud’s preoccupation with sexuality and aggression; his deterministic vision of human life; his combative, polemical temperament; his self-fulfilling belief that psychoanalysis brings out the worst in people; and his imperialistic claim that psychoanalysis, which he regarded as his personal creation, would explore and conquer vast new territories. He chose as the epigraph for The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) a quotation from The Aeneid: “Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo” (“If I cannot bend the Higher Powers, I will move the Infernal Regions”). Although he denied that there was anything Promethean about his work, he regarded himself as one of the disturbers of the world’s sleep. The man who asserted that “psycho-analysis is in a position to speak the decisive word in all questions that touch upon the imaginative life of man” (SE 19:208) could hardly expect to win many converts among creative writers, who were no less familiar with the imaginative life of humankind and who resented his intrusion into their domain.

FOREWORD Xili

Freud viewed psychoanalysts as scientists, committed to the reality principle and to heroic self-renunciation. He perceived artists, by contrast—and women—as neurotic and highly narcissistic, devoted to the pleasure principle, intuiting mysterious truths which they could not rationally understand. “Kindly nature has given the artist the ability to express his most secret mental impulses, which are hidden even from himself,” he stated in Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood in 1910 (SE 11:107). The artist, in Freud’s judgment, creates beauty, but the psychoanalyst analyzes its meaning and “penetrates” it, with all the phallic implications thereof. As much as he admired artists, Freud did not want to give them credit for knowing what they are doing. Moreover, although he always referred to artists as male, he assumed that art itself was essentially female; and he was drawn to the “seductive” nature of art even as he resisted its embrace, lest he lose his masculine analytical power. He wanted to be called a scientist, not an artist.

From the beginning of his career, then, the marriage Freud envisioned between the artist and the analyst was distinctly unequal and patriarchal. For their part, most creative writers have remained wary of psychoanalysis. Franz Kafka, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence were fascinated by psychoanalytic theory and appropriated it, in varying degrees, in their stories, but they all remained skeptical of Freud’s therapeutic claims and declined to be analyzed.

Most artists do not want to be “cured,” fearing that their creativity will be imperiled, and they certainly do not want psychoanalysts to probe their work; they agree with Wordsworth that to dissect is to murder. Vladimir Nabokov’s sardonic reference to Freud as the “Viennese witch doctor” and his contemptuous dismissal of psychoanalysis as black magic are extreme examples of creative writer’s mistrust of psychoanalytic interpretations of literature. “[A]ll my books should be stamped Freudians Keep Out,” Nabokov writes in Bend Sinister (xii). Humbert Humbert speaks for his creator when he observes in Lolita that the difference between the rapist and therapist is but a matter of spacing (147).

Freud never lost faith that psychoanalysis could cast light upon a wide variety of academic subjects. In the short essay “On the Teaching of Psycho-Analysis in Universities” (1919), he maintained that his new science has a role not only in medical schools but also in the “solutions of problems” in art, philosophy, religion, literature, mythology, and history. “The fertilizing effects of psycho-analytic thought on these other xiv FOREWORD disciplines,” Freud wrote enthusiastically, “would certainly, contribute greatly towards forging a closer link, in the sense of a universitas literarum, between medical science and the branches of learning which lie within the sphere of philosophy and the arts” (SE 17:173). Regrettably, he did not envision in the same essay a cross-fertilization, a desire, that is, for other disciplines to pollinate psychoanalysis.

Elsewhere, though, Freud was willing to acknowledge a more reciprocal relationship between the analyst and the creative writer. He opened his first published essay on literary criticism, “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva” (1907), with the egalitarian statement that “creative writers are valued allies and their evidence is to be highly prized, for they are apt to know a whole host of things between heaven and earth of which our philosophy has not yet let us dream” (SE 9:8), an allusion to his beloved Hamlet’s affirmation of the mystery of all things. Conceding that literary artists have been, from time immemorial, precursors to scientist, Freud concluded that the “creative writer cannot evade the psychiatrist nor the psychiatrist the creative writer, and the poetic treatment of a psychiatric theme can turn out to be correct without any sacrifice of its beauty” (SE 9:44).

It is in the spirit of this equal partnership between literature and psychoanalysis that New York University Press launches the present series. We intend to publish books that are genuinely interdisciplinary, theoretically sophisticated, and clinically informed. The literary critic’s insights into psychoanalysis are no less valuable than the psychoanalyst’s insights into literature. Gone are the days when psychoanalytic critics assumed that Freud had a master key to unlock the secrets of literature. Instead of reading literature to confirm psychoanalytic theory, many critics are now reading Freud to discover how his understanding of literature shaped the evolution of his theory. In short, the master-slave relationship traditionally implicit in the marriage between the literary critic and the psychoanalyst has given way to a healthier dialogic relationship, in which each learns from and contributes to the other’s discipline.

Indeed, the prevailing ideas of the late twentieth century are strikingly different from those of the late nineteenth century, when literature and psychoanalysis were first allied. In contrast to Freud, who assumed he was discovering absolute truth, we now believe that knowledge, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, is relative and dependent upon cultural contexts. Freud’s classical drive theory, with its mechanistic

FOREWORD xv implications of cathectic energy, has given way to newer relational models, such as object relations, self psychology, and interpersonal psychoanalysis, affirming the importance of human interaction. Many early psychoanalytic ideas, such as the death instinct and the phylogenetic transmission of memories, have fallen by the wayside, and Freud’s theorizing on female psychology has been recognized as a reflection of his cultural bias.

Significant developments have also taken place in psychoanalytic literary theory. An extraordinary variety and synthesis of competing approaches have emerged, including post-Freudian, Jungian, Lacanian, Horneyan, feminist, deconstructive, psycholinguistic, and reader response. Interest in psychoanalytic literary criticism is at an all-time high, not just in the handful of journals devoted to psychological criticism, but in dozens of mainstream journals that have traditionally avoided psychological approaches to literature. Scholars are working on identity theory, narcissism, gender theory, mourning and loss, and creativity. Additionally, they are investigating new areas, such as composition 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 xvi FOREWORD

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

. 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.

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.

XVII

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.

XiX

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

XXi

The Beginning of Terror

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)’ before his hand would “write words that are not mine,” “that other interpretation.”? 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 which often preoccupied the poet, its complex relation to his genius, its origins in his childhood, and its development.

Studies of creativity have made me wary of the old myth that has “great wits ... to madness near allied” and poets “mad as the mist and snow.’ Artists often reveal exceptionally strong capacities for organization and control which are absent or weak in insanity. But psychological analyses of the creative process also suggest that there are significant affinities between certain kinds of mental illness and talent or genius in art and science. In subsequent chapters I refer to a number of these findings, for example, Anton Ehrenzweig’s argument in The Hidden Order of Art concerning the striking similarities and essential differences between Picasso’s painting and Joyce’s writing and schizophrenic art and language. His comparative analysis applies, as well, to The Notebooks, with its fragmentary form, its dreamlike scenes and images, and its portrayal of a breakdown in mental integration and in the ability to differentiate self from world and fantasy from reality.’

Writing to Lou in the summer of 1903, Rilke expressed the fear that he “would belong irretrievably to the lost if some passer-by merely looked at me and half unconsciously counted me with them” (Letters

1:111). He felt that a stranger’s unspoken judgment could change him into an outcast, a dehumanized, broken thing, empty of mind and feeling, living on dust. Imagining that he was in danger of becoming one of “those who no longer hear their wills going in the noise” of the city, he thought he understood the fear that seemed to have “grown” “over” Parisians who were “beginning to read things differently from the way they were meant” (Letters 1:110-11). As his sense of self, distinctive identity, and autonomy became painfully uncertain and the “noise” of the city threatened to engulf him, he began to doubt his ability to distinguish fantasy from objective reality.

Writing the novel for which these experiences provided raw material helped the poet to master them and thus to defend himself against the illness that was threatening to destroy his sanity. In retrospect he believed the book was “something like an underpinning” for all the work that followed. It had opened up “a whole octave” of poetry in him. As a result of his writing The Notebooks, “everything reaches farther up” and “almost all songs are possible” (Letters 1:361).

Having received a commission to write a monograph on Auguste Rodin, Rilke came to Paris late in August 1902 to meet the sculptor. His two essays on the Frenchman (published in 1903 and 1907 as parts 1 and 2 of a book entitled Rodin) study Rodin’s decompositions and reconstructions of the physical world and illuminate his fascination with Rodin’s art at the time he was having the fantasies of disintegration described in the letters and in The Notebooks. In this sculpture he discovered that the “artist has the right to make one thing out of many and a world out of the smallest part of a thing.” This model licensed, inspired, and shaped his fictional evocations of the fantasies which had been so frightening to him. Thus, a sculptor became his “master” during the years in which his writing matured and established his place among leading modern writers with the completion of the New Poems (1907 and 1908) and The Notebooks (1910), though Rodin’s personal hold on Rilke began to decline after a temporary rupture in the relationship in May 1906. This part of the story is told in chapter 8.

Rodin’s example may have helped Rilke to discover, or at least to accept, the fragmentary form of his novel, the fractured personality of his central character, and the apparent incoherence of a life presented “as if one found disordered papers in a drawer” (Letters 1:362). A similar influence on The Notebooks was Paul Cézanne, whose painting also provided inspiration and guidance for some of the New Poems. In 1924 Rilke wrote that “from 1906 on” Cézanne’s painting was his “most forceful model” (Letters 2:334). The precise nature of this influence is delineated in a number of letters, including the eloquent ones written to the poet’s wife, Clara, in October 1907 when Rilke saw the Cézannes on exhibition in the Salon d’Automne. Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907, and Braque was doing cubist landscapes in 1908. But I have not seen any evidence that Rilke was aware of their work that early. He may have known about some of the new ideas in science and psychology which were inspiring a revolution in painting and sculpture as they radically changed conceptions of nature and the mind—relativity theory, quantum physics, non-Euclidean geometry, and the psychology of the unconscious. All made it necessary to “learn to see” (Malte’s phrase) the world and self as they had never been seen or dreamt of in earlier times. These new ideas dismembered nature, converted solid matter into volatile, moving energy, demolished the old Newtonian assumption that the behavior of individual entities was as predictable as clockwork, formulated new relationships between space and time and between the spectator and what he or she sees, and proposed that a large part of the mind was a mass of seemingly chaotic unconscious energies, emotions, and ideas, shaping conscious thought and precariously restrained by fragile defenses from engulfing it. A number of passages in The Notebooks raise the possibility that Rilke had a vague awareness of some of the new theories in physics, mathematics, and psychology when he wrote his novel. But I know of no compelling evidence from his letters, from biographies, or from recollections of friends and acquaintances which shows that at this time he had any precise knowledge of the revolutionary ideas in these disciplines.”

It would be absurd to classify Rilke as a schizophrenic, but the anxieties and fantasies we find in his writings about his first year in Paris closely resemble some of those characteristic of this disease. According to Harold Searles, a widely respected authority on this form of mental illness, the schizophrenic “feels that his body is not his.” è Parts of it separate themselves and act autonomously. Alien personalities and objects invade him and are experienced as “foreign bodies within his personality,” which threaten to devour or to annihilate him.? He may be sucked in, enveloped, or obliterated by the personality, mind, or will of another person, or by some animated part of his environment. (In a similar experience, as a boy, looking at himself in a mirror, Malte feels engulfed by a suffocating, inescapable mask and costume.) Relationships with other people threaten to obliterate all traces of his own face and to replace it with one responsive to their needs, closely resembling theirs. In this fantasy the face is felt to be synonymous with the sense of self. In The Nonhuman Environment, Searles analyzes the motives for the desire to turn oneself into a dehumanized object and the inclination to turn other people into such objects, tendencies which appear frequently in The Notebooks.

Studies of closely related forms of narcissistic and borderline illness by Heinz Kohut, R. D. Laing, and D. W. Winnicott have enlarged my understanding of what Rilke was going through when he first came to Paris. Like the poet at this time, like Malte, their patients felt so illdefined and uncertain of their differentiation from the world and from other people that mere contact with others often threatened to transform them into helpless responses or imitations. Sustained relationships could be engulfing. The contours of the body, the basis gradually discovered in infancy for one’s sense of one’s separate self, failed to hold against an impinging, invading, or “imploding” world. One defense against engulfment or invasion is “schizoid,” splitting into a “true” inner core of the self and a false, compliant, imitative outer self or selves, which shield the inner self against the dangers of alteration or annihilation by others or by an impinging environment.

In Rilke such defenses were crippling, but they also became creative. In subsequent chapters I discuss the self-protective, self-concealing personas which Rilke developed and consider their origins in his childhood. In this part of my commentary I refer to Winnicott’s and Laing’s concepts of the false self in schizoid illness and Winnicott’s argument that this has a healthy counterpart, the socially compliant facades which protect the inner core of the self in the experience of most mentally healthy people. Rilke’s conceptions of face and mask seem to have evolved out of intervals of illness. But Rilke, like Nietzsche, was convinced that masking protects the gifted artist’s cultivation and nurturing of his or her depth, power, and art from intrusion, distraction, and adulteration. The poet’s writings, like Nietzsche’s and Kierkegaard’s, may be seen as masks which conceal as much as they reveal. They fulfilled “the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found”’ which Winnicott observed in artists.'°

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.'' 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.