This essay engages with Kaes’ fraternal complex to interrogate the figure of the Angel in Rilke’s Duino Elegies. It proposes that the Angel trope gives literary form to the poet’s childhood preoccupation with the dead sister and dead mother, who became depressed after her little girl’s death. It traces the transfiguration of the Angel, paralleled by the elaboration of trauma and work of memory.

Famously, Rilke inspired Freud’s essay on Transience after the encounter instigated by Lou Andreas-Salomè, Rainer’s lover, friend, mother, sister and muse. Journeying through Russia with Lou, Rilke was captivated by the philosophical discipline of Angelology. I argue that the Angel of the Elegies draws on Plato’s Symposium, where Eros rather than a god, is a daemon, functioning as ambassador between humans and gods (Angelos means ambassador). Analogously, Rilke’s phantasmatic dead sister brokers the relationship with the mother, whose gaze focused on the memorialized girl, impervious to her replacement child. In the Elegies the Angel/Eros binds, unbinds and revitalizes Rilke’s creativity, which oscillates between feverish inspiration and despondent sterility, in keeping with the intermittences of unconscious contents.

This essay employs literature as “ambassador of the unconscious” , a discursive practise to investigate subjectivities alongside psychoanalysis. Through a close reading of the texts and André-Salome’s memoir, it hypothesises that Rilke’s merger yearning is sourced by an unconscious fantasy of sibling incest and inflects the mystical pleasure of his poetic creation. (Rabaté, 2014)