The following is, for the first time translated and brought to print, the written correspondence between Sigmund Freud and Rainer Maria Rilke. The record was only completed in late 2022, when the German Literature Archive (GLA) acquired Rilke’s entire literary estate from his descendants. Letters between the two went unnoticed by scholarship; the GLA itself didn’t seem aware at the time of acquisition that Freud was one of Rilke’s correspondents. Over a century after they were written, the German literary review Sinn und Form corrected that astonishing oversight, and through their publication granted us the two writers’ reflections on psychoanalysis and war.
Freud and Rilke had a strong (albeit indirect) relationship through their close friendships with Lou-Andreas Salomé. Salomé was a pupil of Sigmund Freud (she is often labeled the first female psychoanalyst), and a sometime lover of Rilke. The epistolary exchanges between Rilke and Salomé lasted until his death, and formed the contact surface between him and psychoanalysis, a subject which terrified and allured him. Analysis and poetry brawl throughout their letters for mastery of the soul. Rilke likened it to an exorcism, a ritual that would drive out the demons underneath both his hypochondria and his sensitivity to nature. Salomé agreed, at last warning him: “Never let yourself be analyzed. Your creativity will die.”