LOU ANDREAS SALOME

Lou Andreas Salome

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Lou Andreas Salome

Chapter 1: Introduction

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 wilful 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 (Binion, 1968).

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 (Coles, 1991).

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 ...