Lou-Andreas Salome: The Freud Journal

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The Freud Journal

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Lou Andreas Salome

reface

Acknowledgments for assistance in preparing my translation of In der Schule bei Freud (Ztirich: Max Niehans Verlag, 1958) are especially due to three persons persons: First to the editor of the Ge r man text, Herr Ernst Pfeiffer of Gottinge Gottingen n , whose r e ding h s been used s it was originall originally y publi publisshed by him and whose explanatory ex planatory notes I have freely consulted. Second, I wish to ex  my

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press thanks Kessler has very carefully read Mrs. the text and in innumerableHaven, places has sug sug  gested a more graceful or more faithful translation. Third, I am indebted to Prof. Rudo lph Binion of Columbia University, who shared red with me his knowl in many letters and conversations h s sha edge of t h e life, work, and character of Lou Andreas-Sal Andreas-Salome. I have found D r. H . F. P eters eters'' recent biography, My Sister, My Spouse (New York: W . W . Norton, 196 1962 2), very helpful; it also contains an excellent bibliography of the writings of Lou

Copyright© 1964 by Basic Books, Inc.

Library of Congres Librar Congresss Catalog Card Number: 64-23 130 Manufactured Manufactur ed in the United States of America Design Desig ned by Ja Jacque cqueline line Schuman

Andreas-Salome. Miss AnnaofFreud kindly related to me some o f her personal recollections her and her father's friend. Mrs. Lottie M. Newman and Dr. Ha ns W . Loewa Loewalld have made v l uable suggestions. I am gratefu gratefull to Prof. Albert Ehrenzweig of the U niversity of California, Berkeley, for his translation of t he poem Narziss by Rainer M. Rilke. Mrs. Grete Heinemann expertly prepared the final manu script. T o my wife I am obligated for her interest and her patience in the l ong presence of this invisible but formidab formidablle guest. ew

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F r eud s School

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Journeys and Meetings

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  ntroduction

Lou Andreas-Sa Andreas-Sallome will probab probablly always be remembered best for her fr iends endsh hips, not not ably for t hose with Nietzsc Nietzsch h e Ri Rillke, and Freud. The sheer we igh t of t h e names ensures her vi cario cariou us immortality; w ho else co ul d h ave been even slightly acquainted phillosopher, the poet poet,, and with all three? The apposition of the phi the ps psychoanalyst in the lif e and memories of one woman sug gests her uniqueness of c haracter. Hers was no borrowed luster. There ex exiisted suc such h interaction between the w oman and each of t he three men that her spirit may be found to t o have ins insinuat inuateed it self into the writings of all of them. Hence we turn with interest to the first of her journal journals to be publi published shed and look in it for the fresh record of great meetings. E ven the most intimate of private journals seems to presup pose the eventua eventuall atte atten ntio tion n of a second reader. This one has about it the note of address to an au dience which imp impllies that i t w as de dessigned for pub publlicatio ication n, at least in part, and we must as  sum umee that the aut auth h or s cr c r itical eye attended it. It was k ep eptt in a li tt le red l oose oose-l -leaf eaf note noteb book which escaped the Nazis, who af ter h er dea eatt h in 193 7 pr preesumed to purge her libr library. ary. or the mosst part it is a record of her studies with re u d and hi mo hiss pupils, but the r em arkable fact of the r ecord is that the student ap pr o

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ache edriences teacher a r li pectful a never doubting t he ach experiences expe of herasown life fe coul couled serve as c riteria for the validit va lidity y of the findings of the great discoverer.

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The Freud Journal o f

ou Andreas Andreas  Salome

Ju t roduction

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when it turns from the circle of doctors around Fr e u d a n d from the rival rival circle newl newly started around A lfred Ad le r t o her other friend friendss. She was enough at ease in phi phill osophy to look shrewdly at Max Schel Scheler, and she felt confident enough of her

T o u Andreas-Salome was fifty years old when she came into j rs t -hand contact with psychoanalysis, although she had known Freeud's writings earlier. She brought with he r, first to the Weimar Fr Con Co ng ress in 9 and then to Vienna the following year, all she t hought and dreamed until t hen; for her the discovery of

insights in psychoana psychoanallys ysiis to investigate the dreams of Rilke, nar rated to her as they wa wallked together in t he mountains. She pro pounded theories of the function of the cinema in modem life, of the hero heroiic ballad in the pr imitive Sl Slavonic world, of the baroque in art. f we are not always con co nvinced, we are nonetheless im bol dness of the mental enterprise pr ess ed by the seriousness and bol and the imagin imaginativene ativeness ss which shakes off the bonds o f preconcep tion. journal, as might be expected from its focus on the In this journal

was a discovery of what she had always known o n l y known.. wa s Freud's Christ was Christmas mas present to her, as he remarked, ac co rding to her account here. The gift must have been a semantic b ridg dgee between the unconscious life of the emotions about which lt c had been writing all her life and the philosophical synthesis toward tow ard which she had aspired. She wrote of the meeting with Freud and his coll co lleagues eagues as the turning point of her life, and it had been a li li fe of dramatic cr ises and denouements. Objectively this was the turning point

work and person of Sigmund Freud, the psychoanal psychoanalytic atmos phere is everywhere everywhere.. T o the psychoanalyst the writings of Lou

in t hat she spent her rema remaiining twenty-fiv twenty-fivee years as a ps psy y c hoana lys yst, t, treating patients at h er home, home, Loufried, in Gottingen, and w riting a small number of papers about psychoanalysis. psychoanalysis. More im po rtant perhaps for her own life was the conviction she had g ained that she now understood many things which had hi h itherto o nl nly y aro used her sympathetic wonder, such as the extraordinary mind of Rainer Maria Rilke, so intimately a part of her own perso sonal nal experience, yet so incomprehensible in its heights and its lapses. T h e psychology o f religion also the subject of her

in dependence of thought is in the journal The same judicious in

Andreas-Salome are a strange wo rl d, where familiar words appear in the most unexpected connections and where familiar concepts have undergone a transformation that is often del delightful, often perplexing, and always surprising. In this ra re instance, the clinical observer and theorist was also a poet and noveli novelist, st, who alter nated between poetic ambiguity and psychological preciseness and someti sometimes mes mixed the tw o. Reading her for the firs first time, as

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Freud 's early follow Freud' followers. ers. Not that the poetic vi vission is rare among them. Perhaps it is only by a slight developmenta developmentall turn that an individual becomes a psycho psychoaanalyst and not a writer, and, in their besst writing, analy be analyssts often turn to living images to repre repressent their thoughts. But the clinical scientist speedily regains the up image is domesticated to the rigorous demands per hand, and the ima of logic. In the long run it is the business of psychoanalysis to

first psychoanalytic essay/ but of many earlier writings as w e l l see med to yield its secret to analysis; her own mysticism, di vest ed of traditiona traditionall religious faith when she was a girl, now had n firm intellectual basis in the theory of the unconscious. And no t least was her earning through psy psychoanalysis choanalysis (although she w as apparently never anal anal yzed herself) a higher degree of emo tio ti onal integration, an approach to the unity and serenity which Fr eud considered to be hers. She was born in S t. Petersburg in 8 and named Louise

interpret the dre dreams ams we are made of and not, like poetry, to in terpret life in the language of the dream. terpret

Salome. She was the sixth child and only daughter of a former general ge neral in the Imperial Russian Army. Both her parents were the

in this journal, we are frequently struck by how her psychoana lytic thinking differs in this respect from that of others among