ABSTRACT
Rainer Maria Rilke was born in 1875, nineteen years later than Freud; both were German-speaking citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but Rilke, unlike Freud, was Roman Catholic. I discussed in the Chapter 11 Wordsworth’s theory of the relationship of infantile experience to poetic sensibility. Rilke, like Wordsworth, sought understanding of himself and his poetry in his childhood origins, but his subjective account of his early experience and its psychic sequelae is very different. Wordsworth described himself as ‘the blessed bab’, because at the breast he gathered passion from his mother’s eye; Rilke came to view himself as ‘the unblessed bab’ who felt annihilated by his mother’s unseeing eyes.
