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This article continues the theme of the enigmatic aspects of unconscious identification. The author reviews certain puzzling aspects of Rimbaud's poetic career and his complete desertion of literature at the age of twenty. De Mijolla links
this desertion to Rimbaud's unconscious identification with his father. He reviews the available biographical material on the elder Rimbaud, whose military career kept him, or was used to keep him, on long absences from the Rimbaud household. De Mijolla links Rimbaud's flight from literature and from his mother's influence to an effort to repeat the father's behavior. The elder Rimbaud died in 1878, a turning point in Arthur's life. The former poet then made a complete break with his mother's household and began an enactment of his father's career. Many of the geographical, linguistic, and military repetitions which de Mijolla has uncovered are quite striking. There has been a curious silence about Rimbaud's father, beginning with the family but unfortunately maintained by subsequent biographers. De Mijolla suggests that there was probably a devaluation of the father in the family and a consequent inability on Arthur's part to "father" his own works and to cope with the oedipal conflict. These conflicts led him ultimately to reject his own work as disgusting and worthless and to embark on his unconscious fantasy quest for his father.