ABSTRACT
Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague in 1875, nineteen years later than Freud; both were German speaking citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but Rilke unlike Freud was Roman Catholic. Freud gave primacy to the ‘pleasure principle’ but then was confronted with the problem of the common occurrence of painful and terrifying events in dreams. The satisfaction imparted to the poet is of gaining or regaining knowledge and of encompassing even unpleasant facts. Rilke in his own terms discovers his dependence on external love to mask and deny the awful truth of his internal world. Later therefore he feels compelled to renounce the love he thinks compels him to live in a world in which he cannot be himself. Rilke’s first account of the beginning of a pilgrimage to find himself is in his novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, which was originally entitled The Journal of my other Self.
