1861-1937
A Russian writer and essayist, Louise Andreas-Salomé was one of the first practicing psychoanalysts. She was born on February 12, 1861, in St. Petersburg, Russia and died February 5, 1937, in Göttingen, Germany. Louise's father, Gustav von Salomé (57 years old at the time of her birth), of German-French origin, was a general in the service of the tsar. Her mother, Luise Wilm (38 years old at the time of Louise's birth), was from a family of Protestant merchants from Hamburg. Louise, the youngest of four children (she had three older brothers) was raised under feudal family conditions and turned out to be a very willful child. She took refuge in an imaginary world peopled with its own god and threw off the constraints imposed by her family. She refused confirmation and, at the time of her father's death in 1879, turned her back on religion. She shared her existential concerns with her first spiritual teacher, Hendrik Gillot (1836-1916), a fascinating preacher in the Dutch community. It was Gillot who gave Louise the diminutive "Lou." Together they read authors like Baruch Spinoza, whose philosophy helped structure her research in psychoanalysis. However, Gillot's proposal of marriage destroyed their relationship. Her break with Gillot was unequivocal. Lou von Salomé left for Zurich in 1880, where she studied philosophy, history, art, and theology. She outlined her approach to God in her Essays.
When she was 21 she met the philosophers Paul Rée and Friedrich Nietzsche in Rome, at the salon of Malwida von Meysenbug. They wanted to formalize their reciprocal fascination in a working and living community. She replied to Gillot's exhortations, "I am certainly going to shape my own life the way I see it, come what may. . . ." This belief led her to take up psychoanalysis at the age of fifty, after an extremely turbulent life.
Lou Andreas-Salomé's first foray into psychoanalysis was the Neue Quellen; she found new answers to old questions in her own life, which she had approached especially through literature, for there are a number of autobiographical traces in her writings. Shortly after participating in the 1911 International Psychoanalytic Congress in Weimar, she went to Vienna to become a student of Freud's. In her journal, In der Schule bei Freud (1912-1913), keen observations of social life and critical opinions and personal hypotheses on psychoanalysis appeared side by side. Aside from Freud she was very impressed by Sándor Ferenczi and Viktor Tausk. It was through Tausk that she was able to make her first practical observations at the clinic for nervous disorders in Vienna.
After Vienna, Lou Andreas-Salomé continued to write to Freud on a regular basis and appears to have accepted only Freud as the supervisor of her own cures. After her visit with Freud's family in 1912, she became close with Anna Freud, the focal points of their relationship being Freud the psychoanalyst and Freud the man. They worked together on a subject of common interest, the Tagtraum-Traumdichtung (daydream-dream poem). Anna Freud's presentation to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society for her admission to membership at the society, entitled "Schlagenphantasie und Tagtraum" ("Beating Fantasies and Daydreams"; 1922), was the result of their efforts together and also contributed to Andreas-Salomé's admission to the society. She died on February 5, 1937, in her home in Göttingen, Loufried, where she had lived since 1903 with the Oriental scholar Friedrich Carl Andreas.
Psychoanalysis marked a turning point in the life of Andreas-Salomé, who was immersed in contemporary philosophy, the philosophy of Spinoza, and deeply affected by the theory of the psychoanalytic unconscious and the libido theory. She devoted herself to the insoluble conflict of body and soul, the soma and the psyche, sexuality and the ego, masculine and feminine—subjects that appeared in all her psychoanalytic writing between 1911 and 1931. Her style, as exemplified in Narzissmus als Doppelrichtung (1921), was individualistic—capricious, expressive, and poetic. With her representation of a narcissism that was "happy to develop" as a "companion of life that renews being," she completed her work on primary narcissism as a developmental phase and narcissism as a pathological form of self-love. She emphasized the concept of "double direction" that was present in Freud's concept of the libido but which he had not developed further. The libido is in the service of the ego instinct and the "beyond-ego" (the death instinct). In this sense she was ahead of her time. Zum Typus Weib (On the Feminine Type; 1914) regroups her most important ideas on femininity and psychoanalysis. She introduced the feminine point of view into psychoanalytic discourse and focused her interest on the difference between the sexes, a difference that must be considered beyond individual differences. She emphasized the complementarity of relationships. For Andreas-Salomé an androgynous image signified a loss rather than a gain for both sexes. In her essay on femininity she introduced a utopia of feminine culture.
Bibliography
Andreas-Salome, Louise. (1964). The Freud journal of Lou Andreas-Salome (Stanley Leavy, Trans.). New York: Basic Books. (Original work published 1958) ——. (1990), Das "zweideutige" Lächeln der Erotik. Texte zur Psychoanalyse. Freiburg, Germany: Kore.
——. (1983). Open letter to Freud. Paris: Lieu Commun.
——. (1991). Looking back: memoirs (Ernst Pfeffer, Ed.; Breon Mitchell, Trans.). Memoirs, New York: Paragon House. (Original work published 1951)
Freud, Sigmund, and Andreas-Salomé, Lou. (1972). Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé: letters (Ernst Pfeffer, Ed.; William and Elaine Robson-Scott, Trans.). London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. (Original work published 1966)
Welsch, Ursula, and Wiesner, Michaela. (1988). Lou Andreas-Salomé. Vom Lebensurgrund zur Psychoanalyse. München-Wien-Leipzig: Internationaler psychoanalytischer Verlag.
—INGE WEBER
