Beginning of Terror: A Psychological Study of Rainer Maria Rilke's Life and Work

Beginning with Rilke's novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, published in 1910, The Beginning of Terror examines the ways in which the poet mastered the illness that is so frightening and crippling in Malte and made the illness a resource for his art. Kleinbard goes on to explore Rilke's poetry, letters, and nonfiction prose, his childhood, marriage, and the relationship between illness and genius in the poet and his work, a subject to which Rilke returned time and again. This psychoanalytic study also defines the complex connections between Malte's and Rilke's fantasies of mental and physical fragmentation and the poet's response to Rodin's disintegrative and re-integrative sculpture during the writing of The Notebooks and New Poems. One point of departure is the poet's sense of the origins of his illness in his childhood and, particularly, in his mother's blind, narcissistic self-absorption and his father's emotional constriction and mental limitations. Kleinbard examines the poet's struggle to purge himself of his deeply felt identification with the "ghostly" and "unreal" Phia Rilke, whose hopes that her son would be a major poet he was fulfilling. The book also elucidates Rilke's attempt to convert his father, Josef Rilke, before he died, to confidence and satisfaction in his son's alien achievements, and contains chapters on Rilke's relationships with Lou Andreas-Salome and Auguste Rodin, who served as parental surrogates for Rilke.