I know now that psychoanalysis would make sense for me only if I were really serious about the strange possibility of no longer writing, which during the completion of Malte I often dangled in front of my nose as a kind of relief. Then one might let one’s devils be exorcised, since in daily life they are truly just disturbing and painful. And if it happened that the angels left too, one would have to understand this as a further simplification and tell oneself that in the new profession (which?), there would certainly be no use for them.
— Rilke, letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé (tr. S. Mitchell)
Notes from a Room 