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Rilke, in one of his characters, Malte Laurids Brigge, deals with his autobiography. He was born prematurely after his mother had been advised not to have any more children. A sister, one year older, died at the time of his birth. Given a girl's name, Rainer Maria, Rilke was brought up to believe that the family had an aristocratic background. He was reared as a girl, dressed in girl's clothing, his hair was braided, and he played only with dolls. The mother had literary spirations and barely took care of the boy who, in the first few years of his life, had twenty-four different nurses. He was allowed no friends. His father 'made him live like a soldier'; he was forced to sleep in a bare bed with only a light blanket even in winter. He eventually failed at the army school because of his inability to get along with people. After falling in love with Lou Andreas-Salomé, thirteen years his senior, Rilke changed his name for a more manly one and succeeded in re-creating a triumphant Oedipal fantasy when Andreas-Salomé turned down Nietzsche.
Throughout Rilke's work one finds the constant cry for mother and castration fear related to abandonment. His most significant neurotic conflict involved the mother imago with a dead child. Death became the final abandonment. He often wrote about his own death and the destruction of other people as a means of coping with his fear of disintegration.