Introduction to Die Erotik: Nietzsche, Lou Andreas-Salomé, and Psychoanalysis
Perhaps more than any of thinker of her time, Lou Andreas-Salomé was intent on drafting a psychological map of the differences between men and women. Later in her life, through a psychoanalytic lens where the locus of study was derived from Freud’s theories, she advanced a quite independent framework for articulating female sexuality. With the first English translation of Die Erotik (Andreas-Salomé 1910), it is possible to explore her proto-feminist stance prior to her contribution to psychoanalysis. Die Erotik was written around 1904, several years before she met Freud and offers us a sometimes controversial blueprint of ideas that she would revisit later. From the outset we see she was less concerned about the battle between the sexes, but instead more interested in carving out the essential psychic internality of womanhood. She was accused by feminist peers at the time of missing the point, of passivity and subservience to male oppression. She had already gained a reputation as a woman who traded on her sexuality, a femme fatale who had been intimate with Nietzsche. But it is fair to say that circumstances and bad press led to a precipitous dismissal by her peers, although it is a reputation that has followed her around too often. Die Erotik gives us a chance to re-appraise Lou’s thinking. In it we have a typically dense text, as is her way, that should keep scholars occupied for a while to come.
In order to offer a context to Die Erotik, the following introductory essay tallies Lou’s biography with the emergence of her ideas. The essay tracks back towards Lou’s legacy, to consider her beginnings with Nietzsche, and then to her relations with Adler and Jung, among others. Finally arriving at the dawn of Die Erotik, we see her thoughts on sexuality crystallizing, offering a prism through which new light begins to break through the male shadows that have too long obscured her.
At the High Noon of Culture, in the Shadows of Psychoanalysis
Louise Andreas-Salomé (b. 1861) was better known than Freud when they first met in 1911 and certainly a more prolific writer at the time. She was fifty, he fifty-five, but she was already renowned as an essayist, critic, journalist, and novelist. Freud was taken with her from the outset. She represented the outside world possessed the pedigree qualities of someone at ease in established intellectual communities, just the type of advocate that Freud needed for psychoanalysis as it struggled to breathe beyond the small cluster of male clinicians who were attempting to legitimize it as an accepted clinical method. Freud embraced Lou, and surely fell in love, and though there is no evidence at all that their encounters were anything other than platonic, their relationship became a matter of intrigue and hearsay. The cover of the collected correspondence between Lou and Freud (edited by Pfeiffer 1972) had two pictures; one of Lou as a twenty-something gazing away into the distance, and the other of a seventy-year-old wizard-like Freud looking sternly down the lens of the camera. Given that when they were both in their fifties when they met and began their correspondence, the cover of the book is a significant misrepresentation. She was not a whimsical youth who had come before the ageing Freud; she had spent nearly thirty years building her ideas, putting into practice the type of writer’s worldly “free thinking” that had been bequeathed to her by her first mentor Friedrich Nietzsche (Nietzsche to Lou, July 2, 1882: in Fuss and Shapiro 1971, p. 62). Even before she started seeing psychoanalytic clients she was writing psychological case studies in her novellas.
When she met Freud she was already best known for her rather controversial biography of Nietzsche in 1894, the first major study of his life (Andreas-Salomé 1894). She had cause to remind Freud of her output when, in 1917, he was trying to unpick her reluctance to publish her little book Die Briefe Einen Knaben (Three Letters To A Young Boy) which was a sort of psychoanalytic fairy tale about sexual enlightenment that Freud described as “exquisite.” Freud told her that her reluctance to publish was guarding a neurosis. She pointed out that she could hardly be accused of publishing neuroses given that she had already published at least ten books, several more than he at the time. Freud took his chastisement in good humor, and rightfully took his place.
Although her life and story has been covered in dedicated biographies; the three best known being Peter’s (1963), Binion’s (1968), and Livingstone’s (1984); when it comes to her own writings there is a significant lack of availability both in German and, especially, in English. She assigned herself to degrees of isolation; she would often travel alone; and she lived by herself for periods. And even in her closest relationships, like her marriage to Carl Andreas, one has the impression that she kept a significant slice of herself apart, not least the fact that she never consummated her marriage to Carl Andreas. She was the woman who might never be known. At the end of knowing Freud for twenty-five years, after numerous meetings, prolific correspondence, and he having entrusted her with the analysis of his own daughter, in his final letter to her in May 1936 Freud said, “I can only say—what I feel each time I get a letter from you—is that I know too little about you.” (Freud to Salomé, May 1936).
So what is this anonymity about? Leavy (1964), her first translator, said she was a great listener, but this:
… had its darker side. In the company of one or two she could speak with vigor and clarity, but she was oppressed in some way by larger groups. She tells us in the journal what she might have said in Freud’s circle but her silence was bred not solely of respect for the talents of the men in the room; she was far more talented than many of them. (introduction to Andreas-Salomé’s Freud Journal, 1964, p. 11)
David-Mennard (1989) has argued that her voice was hushed by the men around her because they could not bear the castration anxiety aroused by her intellectual presence, let alone the intrusion of her voice. Debailly (1992) likewise espouses a theory of the violent suppression of the feminine and cites Lou’s involvement with Freud’s early circle as an exemplar of this. It may be difficult to think of Lou as silent when one reads her. Her writings are free, discursive, at times unabashed in their flow of consciousness, favoring texture and prose rather than system and sense. We can also see from her correspondence with Freud that, when required, she was strident in voicing her opinions. But Freud took her to task about her silence when he became unusually frustrated with her after she had endured years of unceasing public vilification from the poisonous Elisabeth Nietzsche, Friedrich’s Nazi-sympathizing sister. Freud told her: “It has often annoyed me to find your relationship to Nietzsche mentioned in a way which is obviously hostile to you and which could not possibly correspond with the facts. You have been far too decent; I hope that now at last you will defend yourself” (Freud to Salomé, May 8, 1932). However, even with Freud’s bidding Lou never responded to Elisabeth Nietzsche’s attacks.
Perhaps this is how Lou came to lose herself; she became at best enigmatic, at worst retreated. She cultivated herself as a removed and still reflective figure, a female narcissus, a flower at the high noon of culture, cooling itself in its shadow lest it be singed before its time (from “Zum Typus Weib,” Andreas-Salomé 1914, cited in Binion 1968, p. 556). However, while resting in the shadows of psychoanalysis may have bred an aura of intrigue that spurred biography, it caused her also to run perilously close to becoming mute. One might have expected that Lou’s case would have been contested by some of the women who followed her, perhaps identifying with her oppression. Yet this appears not to have been the case. Either she has been abandoned by psychoanalytic feminists, those who have striven to confront the problematic of sexism in psychoanalytic theory, or perhaps not even discovered in the first place. Lou’s challenge to Freud and psychoanalysis did not lack zest, she said in 1921: “Let me not take Freud’s ideas on female libido—too seriously” (Andreas-Salomé 1921, p. 10), laying firm foundations for the challenge to patriarchal theory. Anyone else who was so critical of Freud would have been expelled from his inner circle; he instead took her closer to his bosom.
It is fair to say that her style of writing does not help her accessibility. Typically she was elliptical and dense, sometimes impenetrable. Her writings in some places are lush, even over indulgent, sometimes cryptic and laconic. She thought it better to be not understood rather than misunderstood, a stance that the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion would adopt later, referring to the idea of “beams of darkness,” which was a term that Freud had used in a letter to Lou when trying to describe the way in which the analyst tries to illuminates the client’s unconscious (Freud to Salomé, May 16, 1916). She never seems to have been interested in writing directly for a wide audience, rather she seems to have written as if she had specific people in mind; her early writings were addressed to Nietzsche and her final ones to Freud. There were other key addressees along the way: Gillot, Rée, Tolstoy, Strindberg, and Rodin among others. Perhaps above all it was the young poet Rainer Maria Rilke who was her most enduring addressee. In turn Rilke’s poetry seemed to breathe in her wake (Kleinbard 1993). This idea, that Lou had singular addressees, perhaps led to a sort of languor in her writing discipline born of the type of everyday communication held with someone you know well. Explanation is short-circuited, disciplined effort is curtailed by relative clarity, and the product is finally immersed in shorthand motifs and gestures.
Her writings are therefore unreliable to some extent. And like Freud said, we still know too little of Lou. Binion’s (1968) incredibly dense book, although hugely erudite, did little to spur interest, not only because he treated Lou as a self-publicist, mythologizer, and occasional liar, he also managed to turn her fascinating life and ideas into something bordering on the mundane, like wine into water, so to speak. She was later given a terse reading by Juliet Mitchell (1974) who described her as a sort of slippery social chameleon. And then Roazen (1974) forensically interrogated her sexual relationship with the promising young psychoanalyst Victor Tausk claiming that Freud, Lou, and Tausk were locked into a destructive love triangle. Eissler (1978) contended that Roazen was incorrect in his supposition about the triad: Freud was not infatuated with Lou and even if he was jealous of Tausk’s relationship with her, he could not be held to account for Tausk’s suicide. Even if Roazen’s assertion about the virtual ménage-a-trios were misplaced, the supposed scandal served to fuel interest in Lou at a time when she might have slipped away. It is an intriguing conundrum for scholars, gossip has a place it seems; Roazen’s hearsay did more for Lou that Binion’s scholarliness! Perhaps best of all, Angela Livingstone (1984) revived Lou most affectionately and skillfully in another extensive study, which offered short readings and extracts for the first time of many of Lou’s hitherto unexamined and untranslated writings.
Appignanesi and Forrester (1992) did a good deal to situate Lou rightly at the fore of psychoanalysis in their collection of Freud’s Women, before Yalom (1993) ensured something of a popular pinnacle with his bestselling novel, When Nietzsche Wept, where Yalom gave Lou a starring role. In the novel Yalom created a montage of drama, mixing fact and fiction with psychoanalytic folklore in a tale of a fictitious analysis by Josef Breuer of an ailing Friedrich Nietzsche (cf. Winship 1995). Freud lurks in the background as a twenty-six-year-old student intern who becomes an eager protagonist prompting the reluctant Breuer to write up an account of his treatment. The young Freud is seen steering Breuer through the epigenic minefield of psychoanalysis. Lou’s cameo role is intriguing, and Yalom places her at the center of psychoanalytic history-in-the-making by giving her the job of introducing Nietzsche to Breuer. In linking the philosophies of Nietzsche and Freud, Yalom attends to a literal role that Lou had, of course, played out in reality.
So how are we to discover the real Lou Andreas-Salomé? It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that her relationships approximated more or less a who’s-who of twentieth-century central European intellectual life. Kurt Wolff said of her, “No woman has radiated a stronger or more direct influence in German-speaking lands in the last 150 years than this Lou Von Salomé from Petersburg” (cited in Livingstone 1984, p. 9). There can be no doubt that she was an epochal spirit and, against the grain, an inspiring woman of substance. In her mature years she settled at the elbow of Freud, finding in psychoanalysis like-minded thinkers and a way of studying that enabled her to conjoin her psychological and cultural worldliness with a previously unrealized precision. She became one of Freud’s most intimate companions, a member of the inner circle and a receiver of the “secret ring,” a fact that Grosskurth (1991) barely mentions. She held a correspondence with Freud that lasted over a quarter of a century until her death. However, despite her centrality to psychoanalytic history, beyond biographical study she has been the subject of only minimal scholarly consideration. Of the few translations of her work that are available to us, we can see that her style of psychoanalytic writing is compact, idiosyncratic, and occasionally impenetrable, making the pursuit of her thinking something of a problem. Importantly, she was central to the first wave of psychoanalytic feminism asserting the positive in the feminine, the first to demystify the clitoris, and the first to robustly challenge Freud about the primacy of the father in psychoanalytic theory, preceding the inchoate ideas of Helene Deutsch and Karen Horney.
In publishing a translation of Die Erotik (Andreas-Salomé 1910) we can begin to re-appraise Lou’s thinking as the first woman of psychoanalysis to speak of such matters. Perhaps her feminist nomenclature came to represent a threat to the men around her. As we shall see, Jung forcefully rejected her ideas and dismissed her as a mother goose with varicose veins. At worst, her own sexuality has suffered at the hands of those who derided her as a “femme fatale.” She is not often thought of as Freud’s most inspiring female psychoanalytic confidante and even less so as Anna Freud’s second analyst (after her father). Examination of some of her lesser known writings demonstrates that some of her ideas foreshadowed later developments in psychoanalytic theory; for example, in the symbolic complexities of the Narcissus myth, object cathexis, ego–object differentiation, and object relations theory where the overtones of mother’s love in Lou’s work anticipate the contributions of Melanie Klein and Ian D. Suttie (1935).
A central tenet of reading Salomé is that she articulated her own femininity and womanhood, and in doing so she not only made a unique contribution to the development of psychoanalytic theory, but also a new theory of sexual revolution. Die Erotik (1910) is important in this context as a pre-psychoanalytic book that reflects on her prior encounters with the men of her early adulthood: Gillot, Nietzsche, her husband, and Wedekind.
The Dominatrix?
Even before meeting her, based only on his correspondence with his friend Paul Rée and Rée’s description of the twenty-one-year-old Russian protégé Lou Salomé, Nietzsche was already exclaiming that he was prepared to circle the world to meet such a rare animal. Nietzsche fell in love with the concept of Lou even before he set eyes upon her. He already had imagined her fulfilling the role of muse, wife, perhaps a nursemaid and secretary who could replace his sister. He emptied himself into Lou, elevating her to the status of goddess to his own sense of intellectual godliness. When he met her “unexpectedly” in a church in Rome, although it was actually a neatly orchestrated ruse, Nietzsche said, “from what stars have we fallen to meet here” (Peters 1963). Though taken aback by this grandiose salutation she replied coolly that she’d “come from Zurich by train.” She was armed with plans too. Already she had proposed an unconventional cohabitation with Rée, a living-working accommodation of their joint writing activities. And now Nietzsche figured as well. It was an intellectual ménage à trois that was sure to raise a scandal. For his part, Nietzsche’s loftiness and reserve was suspended in his eagerness to have Lou. Their early meetings were closely chaperoned by Rée and Lou’s mother. But when the opportunity for a private walk presented itself, Nietzsche could barely wait. Whether or not she had famously kissed him on their “Orta” mountain walk was never clear; in conversation with her friend Ernst Pfeiffer when she was seventy, she said she could not recall. Either she was being discreet, or Nietzsche was a forgettable kisser.
It was Lou’s idea that they should form a “holy trinity” and that they be photographed, but it was Nietzsche who suggested that Lou kneel in a carriage holding the reigns, whipping the men along. The finishing touch was a sprig of lilacs fastened to the whip. The image suggested the type of sadomasochistic entanglement between the sexes that would so repel and yet fascinate her. It may have been a good idea at the time, provocative and striking, but it was to haunt her for the rest of her life. That she was cast as a dominatrix, unconventional even by the standards of Germanic bohemian life at the time, was transposed into the lasting image of Lou as a sort of pushy tease who would lead men on. At least this was how the gossip mongers of European society had her cast. When she finally dashed Nietzsche’s dream of marrying her because she was neither ready to be nurse maid or disciple, Nietzsche’s contempt manifested itself in forceful backlash; his Zarathustra was his love child with Lou. It was some riposte, and perhaps gives us some measure of the intellectual and sexual potency of the young Lou.
Paul Rée’s mother was without subtlety when it came to Lou, and did all she could to adopt her as a daughter-in-law for her son. Rée was besotted with Lou, and became anxious to camouflage his activities in daily letters to Nietzsche who had surely come to see Rée’s activities around Lou as some sign that he was trying to win her away from him. The tensions between Nietzsche and Rée came to a head eventually; it placed a lacuna between the two men that was never again bridged. However, Nietzsche, either in state of anticipatory compensation or safe knowledge that Rée wouldn’t win Lou over, suggested that Rée ought to make the ménage à trois respectable by doing the honorable thing and marrying Lou. It might have been a ruse however, because such a suggestion also allowed Nietzsche to bring to Lou’s attention that marriage with Rée would be suitably platonic—intimating that Rée actually found the idea of sexual intercourse repellent.
The breakup of the erotic imbroglio of the trinity followed a slow and painful sequence of death lurches. In the first place it was Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth, who having taken an exceedingly strong dislike to Lou, reported to her brother that Lou had been parading around showing the “Lucerne” photograph (of Lou whipping the men along) and that she had taken delight in vulgarity and ridiculing Nietzsche and Rée. Lou was outraged by Elisabeth’s accusations and initially Nietzsche was conciliatory in their correspondence. From Tautenburg, he wrote to Lou on August 4, 1881 to say: “I wanted to live alone. But then the dear bird Lou flew across my path and I thought it was an eagle. And I wanted to have the eagle near me. …” Nietzsche finished off the letter with a plea to Lou to come to him, telling her that they would be better able to endure their suffering together. He still held out hopes for his and Lou’s future plans together, and even though the odds seemed stacked against it, he carried on harboring his desires in that direction.
In 1882 he published the Joyous Science in which, among other things, he tackled the question of the survival of the ruling classes in a new industrial era. It wasn’t so much that the ruling classes were exploitative, greedy, and oppressive, rather it was the manner in which they exercised their social position. It was the lack of nobility in the fat manufacturer, the uncouth businessman, or the industrial magnate that bothered Nietzsche most. Had they been noble in their oppression, he said, then socialism would have been superfluous. Nietzsche pictured himself as the righteous zenith of intellectualism and the heir to Wagner as the protector of German culture; however, as he cast aspersions on those that held disproportionate power over others, he seemed, at best, absent minded about his own situation. Even though Lou had made it clear that she had no intention to become his wife or mistress, indeed she had approached him in order to be his pupil, he continued to press her about his marital plans. The main objective was always matrimony, which he seemed to esteem as the culmination of dignity between the sexes. While he presented aphorisms in the Joyous Science about the exploitation of the masses that chimed with deference to Marx, in his own personal life he demonstrated that he had not grasped the essentials of Engels that women ought not to be commodified as the spoils of marriage. Nietzsche treated Lou as if she were property to be possessed, owned, and married off. Nietzsche appeared to preside over his young charge like a broker who might be wondering how best to deploy his pension.
Lou not only escaped with her virginity, but perhaps more importantly, with her civil status intact. She would discover later that it was entirely possible to be married and to not have sex, but had she married Nietzsche, she would have been trapped and possibly subject to grotesque conjugal duties; an intellectual as well as sexual slave to Nietzsche. Sex and marriage were positioned in some merry dance in the Joyous Science, section 71, where Nietzsche provided a critical account of female chastity. He was critical of a moral system that did not educate women in the way of eroticism and he was scathing about a society where “honor” could be equated with chaste women. He advocated sex before marriage so that a woman was not plunged into the unpleasant surprise of sex in domestic circumstances without the experience of foresight. According to Nietzsche’s biographer (Cate 2004), Nietzsche’s attitude in section 71 cannot possibly be described as the views of a misogynist (p. 363). It is debatable. Nietzsche’s interest, albeit under the guise of libertarianism, would seem to be self-serving in regard to Lou insofar as he approves of sex without marriage, so we assume he would have approved of sex with Lou without marriage if only she were more amenable and less up-tight about her honor.
Perhaps one is struck by the abiding presence of female chaperones, Rée’s mother, Lou’s mother, and Nietzsche’s sister. One might at least recognize some conspiracy of sisterhood that prevents the men from being alone with the women. The Trinitarian experiment went into collapse as Nietzsche became frustrated by the way in which the players could no longer communicate openly and honestly with each other. Rée was plunged into depression. But even with chaperones, there were a number of rumors in the academic circles in Basel about Nietzsche’s young “mistress.” Elisabeth Nietzsche shifted roles from being sister-protector of Lou, to lambasting her name again in public. The exchange of letters between Lou and Nietzsche became increasingly bad tempered as Nietzsche demanded an apology from Lou, which served only to cause her to entrench herself more deeply and distantly. There is an impression here of a lack of fondness, rather absence makes the heart go wander. One has the impression that in spite of Nietzsche’s efforts, the connections between Lou and he were always threadbare rather than elastic. Nietzsche’s attachment in the first place was problematic; it was not so much a case of separation anxiety, but rather a case of failed bonding. From the outset Nietzsche latched on to the concept of Lou, a super-woman of his own making, rather than the flesh and blood that she was.
In many renderings of the tangled narrative of Lou and Nietzsche, the teller seems to easily forget that Nietzsche was her senior by nearly two decades, old enough to be her father. By the end, Nietzsche behaves more like a lovesick puppy than a gentleman. That he rallies himself to write Thus Spake Zara-thustra is credit to his resilience. Zarathustra descends from his hermit-like life in the cave, much in the same way that Nietzsche had come down after his early exchanges with Lou. “God is dead,” so Zarathustra famously proclaims, and so was love dead in the water for Nietzsche. Zarathustra’s first follower dies in an allegorical allusion to the loss of Lou. As Zarathustra buries his disciple he looks up in the sky and sees an eagle soaring with a serpent coiled around his neck.
The eagle of course was the far sighted bird of prey to which Nietzsche liked to compare himself. But what of the serpent? Here the German text is unambiguously clear. The eagle’s friend Freundin) is specifically feminine (as in the word Schlange—snake or serpent) and is furthermore described as being “das klugste Tier unter der Sonne” (the cleverest animal under the sun). The word Klugste was the same superlative that Nietzsche had used when writing from Rapallo to his friend Franz Overbeck; he had written that just as Wagner was the most complete human being he had ever known, so Lou Salomé had been the cleverest. (Cate 2004, p. 406)
However praiseworthy Nietzsche’s attitude might have been at some point in relation to Lou, Zarathustra vents his spleen about women; they are a riddle solved by pregnancy, and when an old crone offers Zarathustra advice about going to women, the advice is “always take your whip.” In the end Nietzsche couldn’t let the Lucerne whip go.
Wedekind
Even if she was unfairly cast as a femme fatale by Nietzsche, she became nigh on frozen into the role by the German playwright Frank Wedekind who based his central character “Lulu” on her. Wedekind completed his first major play, The Awakening of Spring, in 1891, publishing it at his own expense. The play was a powerful and disturbing account that tackled a range of themes regarding adolescence with scenes of violent sexual perversion, including spanking, rape, and suicide. Wedekind asserted that the play addressed the effect of what he saw as the hypocritical and repressive sexual mores of the time. Although the play was briefly staged in 1891, it was censored, only re-appearing later in 1912. Having caused something of minor scandal with his play, Wedekind moved to Paris in 1891 and became part of a bohemian theatrical network of clowns, acrobats, weight lifters, musicians, and so on. And it was in Paris that Wedekind and Lou’s paths crossed in 1894. Wedekind later recounted that Paris had given him the life-experience and conceptual basis for his masterpiece, the Lulu tragedy. The central character Lulu, or Lou Lou as she was called on some occasions, was modeled on Lou after Wedekind made affectionate advances towards her. The account of Lou and Wedekind’s liaison is hazy in various biographies, though there is some congruence in regard to the facts inasmuch as Lou, having dated Wedekind or at least spent a great deal of time with him, ultimately refused to have sex with him. Livingstone (1984) described it as an “embarrassing misunderstanding when he mistakenly assumed that she would welcome him as a lover” (p. 72). Apparently Lou had exacted responsibility saying, “The fault is mine Mr. W, for I have never met an indecent man before” (p. 232). Wedekind was contrite and turned up the next day, in his best clothes with a kind of written apology: “Ich muss die Demutigung uber mich ergehen lassen” (I must submit to the mortification). They became good friends after this and spent time working on a play together (which has been lost).
Wedekind’s subsequent characterization of Lulu seems far more accusatory than the truce that was drawn. The question of Lou leading him on is irresolvable, but there can be less doubt that she was intrigued by the idea of a liaison with a young man who was artistically exploring sexuality. Wedekind was good looking, thirty years old, perhaps a little brash, but more sexually experienced than any of her other suitors. Though at thirty-three years old, and entering the full bloom of her sexual maturation, she was still a virgin. From Wedekind’s point-of-view Lou would have seemed fitted; she was worldly, beautiful, and, like him, infamous since her relationship with Nietzsche. What is clear is that his version of their date was different than hers. Lou’s refusal to receive Wedekind’s advances was recounted in her novel Fenitschka (Andreas-Salomé 1898). In the novel the suitor is portrayed as foolish and apologetic for his behavior having tried to seduce the heroine Fenitschka. To get his own back, Wedekind portrayed Lou as a teasing femme fatale called “Lulu.”
Intended as a single, gigantic play, Lulu was published in two parts: Earth Spirit (1895) and Pandora’s Box (1902). In contrast to The Awakening of Spring, the tragedy of Lulu had its source in sex itself rather than in the restrictions placed on sex by society. Earth Spirit seemed to illustrate some unavoidable clash between sexual instinct and civilization. The play might also be seen as a political piece insofar as sexual desire was stripped from its obedience to wealth and social position, thereby exposing a meaningless distinction between classes when it came to sexual relations, a sort of Germanic version of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In 1898 when Earth Spirit was first performed in Leipzig, Wedekind himself played the role of Dr. Schön. Earth Spirit was an unexpected success and the play moved on to other German cities. However, Wedekind’s publishing activities brought him to the attention of the authorities and he was charged with treason for a contribution to the magazine Simplizissimus made jointly with Thomas Heine. Wedekind fled to Zurich for a year though returned to stand trial later, and he and Heine spent a few months in Königstein prison. Wedekind’s imprisonment spawned an outcry from the German intelligentsia, and this notoriety in turn amplified interest in his work as a dramatist, beginning with Max Reinhardt’s production of Earth Spirit in Berlin in December 1902.
Pandora’s Box was premiered on February 1, 1904 in Nuremburg. The play offered a complex exploration of sexual psychology and the social decadence of Weimar society. The central character, Lulu, is irresistible and inscrutable; her demeanor is coupled with an innocent sexual allure and she is surrounded by lovers and admirers, all ruthless competitors for her affection. As with Lou herself, the heroine Lulu flees the attention and leaves Berlin for London. In London she falls into the arms of Jack the Ripper who, possibly executing Wedekind’s final revenge, kills Lulu with a knife. Pandora’s Box was staged for only five months before it was banned and Wedekind was charged with disseminating obscene material. It was decreed that all copies of the play should be destroyed and all performances of it ceased. The ban remained in place, although there were occasional performances by some theatre groups. Indeed Lou attended a dress rehearsal of a production in Vienna in February 1913 when she was staying in Vienna. The ban on the play was officially lifted in 1918, when censorship was abolished in Germany. Wedekind died in 1918, but his legacy was already significant in regard to the development of radical and absurd theatre, influencing Brecht and the development of expressionism.
His character Lulu became ingrained on the German psyche intriguingly as a favorite femme fatale, a character-type that became a nick name for a particular arc of the feminine, albeit stereotypical. Lulu was later played by Louise Brooks in the 1929 film version of Pandora’s Box (Büchse der Pandora, Die) directed by G. W. Pabst, who had already made the first serious film about Freud in 1926, Secrets of the Soul. Pabst’s primed psychological interest in Freudian sexuality produced, in Pandora’s Box, what is usually considered a cinematic masterpiece. In 2003, nigh on one hundred years after Wedekind and Lou’s tense sexual encounter in Paris, Pandora’s Box was screened at the Belfast Film Festival in March and in October at the 17th International Leeds Film Festival.
Lost Virginity
After Wedekind, her virginity still intact, Lou had a number of intimate though platonic relationships and two marriage proposals from admirers who were at rather more of a distance, both of whom were refused. The crucial landmark of Lou’s first sexual encounter seemed to beckon at this point in her life. The loss of her virginity, if we might refer to it in terms of a “loss,” is the subject of some disagreement. While Livingstone has Rilke as Lou’s first lover, Binion pins the event to Freidrich Pineles. Pineles or Zemek as he was known to his friends was eight years younger than Lou according to Binion (six years younger according to Livingstone) whom she met in 1895 over Christmas holidays in Vienna. He was a junior medical colleague of Arthur Schnitzler, whom Lou had come to know, specializing in nerves and glands. Pineles was also taking a seminar with Freud on neuroses when Lou first met Pineles in Vienna, and it is through Pineles that there is speculation that Lou might have met Freud at this time, or at least have come to hear about the up and coming young neurologist who had been developing some ideas about talking therapy in a book, Studies on Hysteria, with his colleague Josef Breuer. In her diary (December 31, 1895), Lou recorded that on Christmas Eve Pineles had taken her to the insane asylum for a “ceremony.” A couple of days later he brought her some mistletoe. She spent the next month traveling between Pineles’ rooms in the town, the public asylum where he worked, and Pineles’ artist sister Broncia’s studio. When she left Vienna on the train of February 11, 1896, on a “glorious starry night,” she felt “mused with much gratitude and joy.” Three months later she was back in Vienna where she spent another week with Pineles, visiting the asylum and hiking in the woodlands. At the end of this week Lou left for Vienna. At this point Binion notes the gap in her diary for the next four months and he declares that she may have been pregnant and “possibly underwent an abortion, arranged by her brother Jenia” (p. 199). The facts seem compelling given that there are coinciding accounts from friends years later where Lou had referred to her springtime engagement with Pineles and an accidentally-interrupted pregnancy (Binion 1968, p. 199). Livingstone (1984) concurs with Binion that Lou had at least one termination and that Pineles was the father, though Livingstone equivocates as to whether the termination was induced or whether it was as a result of a fall from an apple tree (p. 131).
Evidence of Lou’s relationship with Pineles makes it likely that it was he who was Lou’s first sexual partner. Her relationship with him endured and blossomed over subsequent years. She traveled and holidayed with him, spending whole months at a time together, even later during her stays in Vienna in Freud’s circle from 1910 to 1913, though there is no evidence that their relationship was a sexual one at this time. Lou did however find a new lover while in Vienna, this time in Victor Tausk, a young medical candidate in Freud’s circle. In the end Pineles remains enigmatic in her story inasmuch as he is not even mentioned in her memoirs, though it might be he that appears in her novella Deviations (published in 1896) where the central character, Adine, describes the loss of her virginity to a young asylum doctor; the “first intoxication and shudder of dependence on love,” as she calls it. The role of sex for Adine is essentially a self-subordination, a humiliation that is accepted uncompromisingly, a way of surviving marriage. In this case the character of Benno seems to be closer to Pineles than Lou’s husband, Andreas, with whom she never consummated her marriage.
At Freud’s Elbow in Turbulent Times—From “Son Jung” to “Daughter Anna"
Having accounted for Lou’s formative years and relationships along the way, we turn now to her last significant love, Sigmund Freud. In 1911, Lou arrived from St. Petersburg to attend the psychoanalytic congress at Weimar. She was fifty years old and according to a lyrically disposed Ernest Jones (1955), she still looked like a golden fairytale princess. Weimar was the third major psychoanalytic congress and the first that heralded just how international Freud had become. It was also the last congress where there was to be cohesion between Freud and Jung. Lou was welcomed warmly as a luminary guest of some pedigree; she was probably more famous than anyone else, and so had pride of place in the conference photograph seated directly to the front right of Freud and Ferenczi.
Following the conference Lou spent some time studying with Karl Abraham in Berlin. Abraham was quite taken by Lou and told Freud, “I have come to know her very well and must admit that I have never before met with such a deep and subtle understanding of analysis. She will visit Vienna this winter and would like to attend your meetings” (Abraham to Freud, April 28, 1912, in Abraham and Freud 1965, p. 115). In Vienna she attended Freud’s lectures at 19 Bergasse and also lectures at Adler’s newly formed breakaway group. Freud permitted her the unprecedented privilege of moving freely between the Viennese psychoanalytic circles of himself and Adler. Freud informed her of the tension between the two circles: “We found ourselves obliged to break off all contact between Adler’s splinter circle and our own, even our medical guests are asked to choose between one or the other. … I would never dream, dear lady, of imposing such a restriction on you. I would only ask you that you make no reference to your contact with us when with them, and vice versa” (Freud to Salomé, November 4, 1912, in Pfeiffer 1972, p. 8). But Freud was clearly keen to win her over to his side. One evening when she did not show for a lecture Freud was persuasive: “I missed you at the lecture yesterday and I am glad to hear that your visit to the camp of masculine protest played no part in your absence. I have adopted recently the bad habit of always directing my lecture to a definite member of the audience, and yesterday I fixed my gaze as if spellbound at the place which had been kept for you” (Freud to Salomé, December 10, 1911, in Pfeiffer 1972, p. 11). But Lou found Adler’s ideas invigorating, as she noted in her journal:
Conversing with Adler I was much enlightened by the history of his development as a student of Marx, primarily interested in economics and philosophic speculation. Just as with the proletariat, social utopianism is supported on the basis of envy and hate, so, in Adler’s view of the child, the exalted ideal of personality arises on the basis of social comparison. Hence his rationalistic milieu therapy—and between it the doctrine of organ inferiority based on physiology—the Freudian Ucs. falls to the ground. (Andreas-Salomé 1964, p. 42)
She found herself at times torn between Freudian and Adlerian theories, seeing differences and similarities between ideas but wondering if “the various schismatics almost all derive from the fact that they displace the core of the problem from its central position … and it is precisely this which they do for personal reasons.” (Lou to Freud, December 5, 1914, in Pfeiffer 1972, p. 18). She did, however, come to gracefully detach herself from Adler: “Said goodbye to Adler on Good Friday … I shall remember his book [on] Organ Inferiority as the best of his writings” (Andreas-Salomé 1964, pp. 126–7). Adler’s ideas, in Lou’s opinion, were based on conscious auxiliary constructs, not taking enough account of the unconscious. She had arrived in her own good time at Freud’s elbow, and her measured allegiance must have gained respect. For Freud, Lou became an “understander, par excellence” (Freud to Salomé, May 25, 1916, in Pfeiffer 1972, p. 45) and he allotted her the role of “problem discoverer” (Freud to Salomé, August 1, 1919, ibid., p. 98) sending her drafts of his texts, relying on her as a sounding board for his ideas. Even at the darkest times, for instance when his sons were sent to fight in the First World War, he found her to be a source of inspiration: “You are indomitable,” Freud told her, “you seem to escape the inhibition which has deprived all the rest of us of our creative energies in these days” (Freud to Salomé, January 31, 1915, ibid., p. 26). As an intimate and confidante, Freud candidly shared with her his aspirations and fears: “Have I already told you that I have been proposed for the Nobel Prize? … but I do not think I shall live to see the day” (Freud to Salomé, July 13, 1917, ibid., p. 61).
Lou’s involvement with Freud coincided with the particularly turbulent years of 1911–14 and the various fragmentations in the movement, most notably and painfully for Freud the dissension of Jung (Brome 1978; Donn 1988; Gay 1990; Grosskurth 1991). As the relations between Freud and Jung became increasingly strained, the tension was further compounded by an intriguing slip of the pen when Freud wrote to Jung in 1909 and said he was “tired of the Viennese” and “wished to tan their single hide with a cane.” However he misused the word “Ihnen”; saying yours instead of theirs (Gay 1990, p. 234). Some years later, in a telling letter of May 8, 1912, which Gay (1990) sees as a riposte to Freud’s previous slip, Jung challenged Freud’s chastisement and asked, “why does the son receive a caning when the daughter is allowed to sleep with the father?” Perhaps this might be read as Jung’s envy of Freud’s daughter Anna, but he goes on to berate the mother too, declaring that there comes a time when the son no longer desires the mother with “her sagging belly and varicose veins,” protesting that “the son is therefore no longer a threat to the father” (Jung to Freud, May 8, 1912). In the same crucial letter Jung goes on to describe how he has “rejected as worthless” an article about a female patient for the Jahrbuch journal: “The female patient it deals with is imbecilic and hopelessly sterile, and the authoress is a goose. The whole thing is a complete bore.” The next paragraph of Jung’s extraordinary outburst is telling, Jung adds: “Thank heavens Frau Lou Andreas-Salomé has suddenly been enlightened by a kindly spirit and has taken back her paper for an indefinite period. So we are rid of that worry” (Jung to Freud, May 8, 1912). Jung posits the fraying relations between himself and Freud in terms of the Oedipus complex and the daughter who not only escapes the battle with father but enjoys privileged access, albeit incestuously. Whether it was at the forefront of Jung’s mind or not, he nonetheless concludes his attack on Freud with reference to Lou. Lou was, after all, beginning to enjoy a close relationship with Freud, while Jung felt he was receiving Freud’s scorn. Was Jung referring to Lou, albeit unconsciously, as the goose authoress? Jung would have known of Lou’s (1892) work on Henrik Ibsen, Frauen-Gestalten, in which she had discussed Ibsen’s Wild Duck. In Jung’s eyes, was it Lou who was the mother with the varicose veins and a sagging belly, undesirable and sterile?
Freud’s response to Jung’s postulations was cursory. It was a step too far to be accused of engaging in incest. Who was Freud protecting: himself, Anna, or Lou? The cessation of correspondence with his heir apparent Jung was imminent. At the Munich conference of 1913 the cracks in Freud and Jung’s relationship would finally give way to an irreparable split. At the conference Freud complained that Jung had foreshortened an important paper by Lou and Tausk (Brome 1978, p. 152). Lou made a note in her journal about the tensions between Jung and Freud:
A single look at these two will reveal which of them is the more dogmatic, the more power loving. Where with Jung a kind of robust gaiety, abundant vitality, spoke through his booming laughter two years ago, his seriousness now holds pure aggressiveness, ambition and mental brutality. I have never felt so close to Freud as here; not only on account of this break with his ‘son’ Jung, whom he had loved and for whom he had practically transferred his cause to Zurich, but on account of the manner of the break. (Andreas-Salomé 1964, p. 168)
Lou was sitting at Freud’s side when Jung and the Swiss staged a walkout at the conference in protest over a decision that was taken in regard to journal editorial appointments. It was a walk-out waiting to happen. Psychoanalysis was plunged into crisis, Jung into a psychotic depression, and Freud had lost his Joshua. However, in those crucial and intense moments, his attachment to Lou was sealed and would last their remaining lifetimes.
Perhaps Freud’s most defining envelopment of his relationship with Lou would happen a few years later when he entrusted her with his daughter’s second analysis. “Freud worried over this youngest child of his because of her father fixation. He looked to Lou hopefully to help him tear her loose” (Binion 1968, p. 372). Binion’s (1968) account of the Freud–Lou correspondence here speculates more than is revealed in the letters edited by Pfeiffer (1972), who deleted certain sections. For example, in a letter (Freud to Salomé, March 13, 1922), Pfeiffer had deleted sections where Freud shares his concern with Lou about Anna’s father fixation, interpolating the dialogue with parentheses: “I have long felt sorry for her [Anna] still being at home with old folks […], but on the other hand …” (Pfeiffer 1972, p. 113). There are gaps in the truth here, but there does seem to be a formal process initiated whereby Lou begins analysis of Anna during visits to Berggasse in 1921. The analysis continued during the course of two visits that Anna made to Loufried (Lou’s home in Gottingen) over the following year (Appignanesi and Forrester 1992, pp. 265–6). When Anna returned from the second stay with Lou in 1922, Freud wrote to Lou commenting on a lecture that Anna gave, “your shadow was to be seen flitting across the stage in the shape of Anna’s really excellent lecture. I cannot find the words to express how pleased I am that you take such affectionate interest in her. She had wished for years to make your acquaintance” (Freud to Salomé, July 3, 1922). It is likely that the lecture Freud refers to here is “Beating Fantasies and Day Dreams” (Freud, A 1922). Indeed in a footnote Anna states, “This paper was written following several discussions with Lou Andreas-Salomé” (1922, p. 137). Freud would use the words “Daughter-Anna” in his correspondence to Lou (Freud to Salomé, March 13, 1922, in Pfeiffer 1972, p. 113), and later Lou repeated the term, perhaps implying that there was some sort of joint analytic parenting taking place. In later years, Freud said that Lou stood next in line of intimacy to his daughter (Appignanesi and Forrester 1992, p. 266). When Freud continued his analysis of his daughter after a lapse of two years, Lou received the equivalent of progress reports from both of them. The letters between Lou and Anna are still yet to be published and promise to offer a fascinating and fuller account of Anna’s analysis.
In Transition: From a Theory of Femininity to Psychoanalytic Feminism
The task of discovering Lou and determining her influence as a psychoanalytic thinker in her own right is a difficult one at best because most of her texts that plot her transition from philosophy and literary criticism to psychoanalysis, for example, Die Erotik (1910), Von frühem Gottesdienst (1913), Zum Typus Weib (1914), Anal und Sexual (1916), Drei Briefe an einen Knaben (1917a), and Psychosexualitat (1917b) are not easily available in German and have, at least until now in the case of Die Erotik, not been translated into English. Some of the works are available in French and are included in the French anthology L’Amour du narcissisme: textes psych-analytiques (Andreas-Salomé 1980). Lou’s writings prior to psychoanalysis were notable in their concern with the feminine, including her study of female characters in Henrik Ibsen (Andreas-Salomé 1892), but perhaps most tellingly in her novels Ruth (1895), Fenitschka (1898), (the novella which gave rise to a libretto for the Opera Lulu by Alban Berg, and later the opera based on Lou’s life by the Italian composer Guiseppe Sinopoli), and Deviations (1898). Lou’s novels are preoccupied with the torment of young love and womanhood characterized by subdued and unromantic entanglements. Restrained by convention, the moral seems to be that for women to fantasize about liberation is a heroic act, whereas to do more than dream of any freedom however, sexual or otherwise, is heretical. Oppression prevails and the tales spiral towards psychological studies of sadism and masochism. Hardly triumphant, the message is one of struggle, where the will to life and freedom is always cast as lurking in the shadows of the men who have the power. It would be difficult to claim that Lou’s writings of the 1890s are revolutionary feminist texts compared to the writings of some of her contemporaries. Hedwig Dohm (1833–1919), a senior feminist of Lou’s acquaintance, was fairly dubious at first about Lou’s contribution to the feminist movement seeing Lou as “elegantly grazing the most ticklish motifs in sex life” (cited in Binion 1968, p. 238). It is not difficult to spot the difference between Lou and Dohm; Dohm’s feminism involved publishing radical pamphlets, attacking the abysmal treatment of women by the clergy; she was also the first woman to call for German women to have the vote. However, in later years Dohm put aside overtly political writings in favor of comedies and short stories with a conciliatory tone, reflecting upon the process of growing old. Later, she became a rather ambiguous radical foremother of feminism (Duelli-Klein 1983), perhaps in later years developing a bearing that was closer to Lou’s own original forays.
The antipathy towards Lou among feminists perhaps can be rooted in the fact that she did not fit with a one-dimensional image of a political animal. Lou was more concerned with the politics of sexuality, and while Dohm might have seen this as “tickling sex motifs,” time has told that Lou was exploring an intellectual corrugation ahead of its time. As various sexual revolutions have come into and out of focus, Lou’s version of feminism—where difference matters most—has endured. Feminism derived from sexuality and psychosexual differentials, as we see in Die Erotik (1910), is at the nub of what Lou was about. Binion noted, not without some delight one detects, that Dohm and the Berlin feminists were skeptical about Lou’s “fairy land” of “dewy hazy womanhood” (Binion 1968, p. 238). The rebuttal of Lou by some of her contemporaries may have been for personal reasons, arising from envy of her contact with Nietzsche, rather than a theoretical disavowal.
While history seems to have emphasized Lou’s rejection by feminism, it is possible to locate evidence to the contrary. For instance, in Berlin women like Helene Stocker and Adel Schreiber in the early 1900s regarded the evolution of the German “Idea of Motherhood” (Allen 1990) or “Bund für Mutterschultz” (The Bond for Motherhood), which looked to the essence of woman as grounds for political enfranchisement, new rights for women, sexual freedom rather than subordination, economic self-sufficiency rather than dependence, and a redefinition of the role of the father. What Lou had written in the decade before the Bund für Mutterschultz offered something of a new model army of womanhood if not motherhood. When Helene Stocker reviewed Lou’s (1898) Fenitschka she described it as a “mine of psychological discoveries … a small feast for the select circle of those able to enjoy her art” (cited in Binion 1968, p. 220). Lou’s influence on Berliners like Stocker and others like Ellen Key was crucial and indubitable. Ellen Key became a progenitor of modem feminism, instrumental in the development of the growing movement in Berlin of a “new sexual morality … where light will radiate from the child” (Key 1911, cited in Allen 1990, p. 94).
When Lou published Die Erotik in 1910 it was extolled by Martin Buber as a “powerful and essential piece of writing.” It was admired by the conservative feminist writer Gertrude Baumer who described it as a “joyfully acknowledged urge to life” (Livingstone 1984, p. 140). At the time Lou occupied a position as a thinker whose philosophy of femininity contributed to the struggles and aspirations of a European woman: “Having been among the very first women who studied at European universities, she demanded full equality in the intellectual sphere. But at the same time she held that women’s responsibilities were special and needed to be recognized” (Krahn 1990, p. iii). Die Erotik was probably written between 1900 and 1904 and can be situated as a forerunner to Lou’s later writings that developed the sexual themes from a psychoanalytic perspective. Die Erotik is notable, therefore, in helping to trace the trajectory of not only Lou’s pre-psychoanalytic ideas and how they coalesce and emerge with her later writings, but also as a text that throws light on the culture and context from which Freud began to be pre-occupied with matters of sexuality. In other words, Die Erotik can be viewed as part of the Freudian psychoanalytic corpus where ideas emerge from a cultural swathe of like-mindedness.
Die Erotik begins with Lou mapping out the scope and problem of the study. She tells us that in approaching the problem of the erotic we aspire to move beyond the realms of logic because the sphere of the “mental” or the “psychical” calls for different pathways of explanation than philosophy ordinarily suggests. She posits that language and symbols may at first appear to convey some method of understanding the erotic, but ultimately these only serve to create what she calls the “primeval optical illusion” (p. 2). However, with recourse to a biological or Darwinian imperative, she locates the first base of the study in the physiology of eroticism in the glandular imperative of the womb or the testes, the place where “sexual secretions” originate and are required for the perpetuation of the species. She posits an erotic instinct as an anatomical thirst or hunger, but then she suggests that we also need to make sense of the urge to abstain. She frames this abstinence as “sexual continence.” This was an intriguing departure perhaps, but one which was autobiographically extant insofar as she carried a number of sexual partners across her life, but never consummated her own marriage; thus sexual thirst and sexual continence are the lived motifs of her relationships. Various Lou scholars have speculated as to why she refused to have sex with her husband. She never acquiesced, despite Carl Andreas’ attempts to have sexual intercourse with her. In Die Erotik the idea of female sexual continence is recast as a political act that she describes as “erotic freedom” (p. 4) where energies restrained from sexual thirst can be reabsorbed or transmuted into creativity.
Sexual freedom was therefore set as a political act of sexual continence. The idea of civilization achieving degrees of sexual restraint was of course one of the central strands in Freud’s (1930) later theory about Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud argued that civilized, or at least domesticated man, was discontented, neurotic, and burdened with the continual harnessing of his instinctual aggressive and sexual urges. But here’s the rub of Lou’s radically different marker—woman, she says, is contented in her discipline of abstinence, in the end its an anthem that might sound something like “civilization and its female contents.” While the Freudian man is keeping his civility in check against his foraging sexual urge, the female pathology in Lou’s mind is concerned with undirected sexual instincts and the failure to alleviate the urge. This failure might manifest itself, for instance, in an overly hasty marriage succumbing to the narrow philistine orthodoxy of women’s position.
Overcoming the worst oppressive ills of eroticism and escaping the destiny of being politically subsumed by sex and men, Lou introduced a new dimension of what might be described as a new basis for love, a sort of mental eroticism. This shift, from what was otherwise a theory of female auto-eroticism (and remember at this stage Lou is unfamiliar with Freud’s theories), was replaced by a psychological or social theory of the erotic. Eroticism therefore was dually orientated, the object of eroticism, the other person was not secondary in fulfilling an urge but was rather intrinsic to the erotic. This urge was therefore object directed and anticipated concepts that later appeared in psychoanalytic theory framed as “object relations theory.” As Fairbairn focused his disagreement with Freud on the specific count that libido was not pleasure seeking but object seeking, and the point of libidinal energy was not pleasure, as Freud believed, but rather relations with another, so Lou was likewise inclined towards an object-related theory of the erotic. If we repeat Lou’s assertion and replace libido for love and ego for I, her statement becomes a virtual representation of Fairbairn’s argument. The point of the erotic is not some interior pleasure, but rather the channel for establishing relations, says Lou. This idea of a dual-orientated eroticism of course anticipates her own seminal paper on the dual orientation of narcissism (Andreas-Salomé 1916). Memorably in her dual narcissism paper, she nudged forward Freud’s theory of objectless narcissism towards a more sophisticated object-related conception positing the idea of womb envy and the role of the castrated clitoris in advancing a theory of female sexuality distinct from Freud’s phallocentric theoretical propositions.
So in Die Erotik here we have evidence of a pre-Freudian interactionist model of female libido that turns Freud on his head. Salomé unfolds love’s interaction or the dual orientation of eroticism through various layers from the merging of the sex cells—the sperm and the egg—the sexual act, and then the love of the mother and child. This base animalistic theory is elevated to a spiritual plain, not only is “God dead” as her teacher Nietzsche had proclaimed, but rather a mother god is alive. She arrives at a universal ecclesiastical theory of motherhood: she is heaven and earth, her body is both the slave and the temple of exchange. Everything emanates from and into mother and Lou posits the imagos of the Madonna and the Whore as revealing dimensions of the receptacle of mother-god.
It becomes harder to track the model of erotic freedom here as she transposes her thoughts onto a higher plane, but as the discourse drifts from an esoteric to a theological debate, one can see at the very least the type of deconstruction of religion that Freud and other psychoanalytic colleagues would undertake later. Perhaps most controversially she pathologizes the unbridled sexual activities of women when she quotes from August Forel’s visit to an asylum where he compared the sexual behavior of male and female inmates:
Forel’s work, The Question of Sexuality, shows that sexuality, which in men affects the lower centers of the brain, appears in women to be situated in the encephalon, “the seat of mental disturbances”. “When one visits”, he says, “even in female company, the men’s section in an asylum of the insane, one is surprised by the lethargy and the sexual indifference of almost all the male inmates”, while amongst the women, “even the most modest and the most sexually cold can, when suffering from mental alienation, fall into the most unbridled eroticism, and behave for a certain time like prostitutes. (p. 32)
It seems notable, if rather idiosyncratic, that she accepts with little disagreement that female sexual promiscuity is equated with sickness. It should be said that a benign model of sexual interaction is not necessarily forthcoming in Lou’s book. She elevates the mother-feminine to an almost universal explanatory level at one point saying that it is woman who defines man, and the centralization of mother-woman seems to lead to a total eviction of the concept of father all together. The erotic, it might be said, in Lou’s hands becomes a theory of the immaculate conception. Some of these assertions, controversial as they are, have intriguing resonances in many contemporary debates about marriage, test tube babies, single mothers, teenage pregnancy, sexual promiscuity, and so forth.
If there is no concept of a “father” in Lou’s thesis, then the idea of a husband is given much greater air. And again this would appear deeply autobiographical insofar as Lou never had any children and yet remained faithfully wedded to Carl Andreas. It is however, a somewhat unconventional model inasmuch as she endorses her husband’s infidelities or “sexual travels” as she calls it where a surrogate sexual object is instantiated. It is slightly obtuse at this point given that it was Lou and not Carl Andreas who had “traveling lovers” as far as we know, however, ultimately the marital union for life is based on countenance of an erotic mind she asserts, where sentimentality, habit, and tolerance are key. She uses the English marriage vow for better or for worse as typical illustration for the necessary staying power in the long-term marital union. It is finally a state of psychic matrimony which replaces the physiognomic earlier state of the erotic relations where everything is brought together in the minds of the partners. It is an everyday state she confides that is totally divine:
For the supreme and rarest achievement is not to discover the unknown, to proclaim the incredible, but to explore day-to-day existence. … (pp. 46–47)
It is not entirely clear to us how Die Erotik can be billed as a “joyfully acknowledged urge to life.” Perhaps it is an urge to mind more like, an everyday mindfulness. I’m reminded of Freud’s comments that his love life had shifted from being a lyrical one to an epic one. Perhaps it is a story of aging, contemporaneously bold in shadowing and then foretelling some important psychoanalytic ideas about psychosexual development across the lifespan, a sort of third-age sexuality.
Lou: The First Wave of Psychoanalytic Feminism
Lou’s writing, then, has been absorbed by questions about the nature and psychology of femininity for more than twenty years when she came to psychoanalysis, culminating in Die Erotik. It was always likely therefore that these matters of female sexuality would be issues that would continue to preoccupy her as a psychoanalyst. Indeed, she was quick to acquaint herself with the position of women in psychoanalysis during her first visit to Vienna and she respectfully criticized Adler’s concept of “masculine protest,” asking him politely to construe the “concept of the feminine more positively” (Andreas-Salomé 1964, p. 160). For Lou, woman was centered, receptive, not needing to pursue the unattainable goal because she is the goal, “das Ewig-Weibliche” (Leavy 1962, p. 23). Meanwhile, man was destined to search and prospect for his fulfillment. Later in “Zum Typus Weib” she used Freudian terminology to ponder the nature of woman and the difference between the sexes. She described woman as happy in her egoism, “a sovereign indolence, like an egg, which has no need to be needlessly active” (Appignanesi and Forrester 1992, p. 264).
While the foundation for her feminism was fundamentally a theory of difference, she postulated that there was a shared basis from which sexual identity would emerge, the common basis that could be seen in the act of sexual intercourse where the experience was one of “defeminizing the stamp of womanhood and effeminizing the man” (Andreas-Salomé 1964, p. 189). However, rather controversially, Lou saw sexuality as secondary to the experience of sensuality. On this count mother-woman was the first authority: the “firmest union of masculinity and femininity is compromised by motherliness” (1964, p. 189). In the beginning Lou saw the infant as all-loving. “His loving is still his living itself, his innocence is so grandiose just because he does not have, but is ‘sensuality’” (diary, 1922, cited in Binion 1968, p. 340). And in her most—cited psychoanalytic text, Anal und Sexual (1916), she outlined what was essentially a theory of sensuality. In a lengthy footnote, added to later editions of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud said, referring to Anal und Sexual, “Lou Andreas-Salomé, in a paper which has given us a very much deeper understanding of the significance of anal eroticism, has shown how the history of the first prohibition which the child comes across—the prohibition against pleasure from anal activity and its products—has a decisive effect on his whole development” (Freud 1905, p. 187). Lou described phases of anal development where the first phase was, as Freud described, a lesson in disgust, the original “Pfui” or “Ugh,” an emergent prohibition that would be a memory that would last a lifetime.
However, Lou’s emphasis was not so much on the pleasure-versus-unpleasure experience but on the child’s initial experience of being catapulted from the blissful unity with mother. She postulated that the heavenly experience of unity with the breast at this stage, which she saw as the prototype for religious ideas, artistic creativity, and the like, arose from the basic experience of the child, whereas the experience of hatred and disunity during the anal phase was the basis for destructiveness. She saw the development of excretory self-control as an experience where the disunited world could be reclaimed by the infant in the forming of his own excremental products—a biological process that had a psychical equivalent. This reclamation heralded another stage in the foundation of the creative capacity for artistic and, therefore, cultural production. The second half of the essay related the anal experience to the genital experience both in terms of the proximity of the anus and the genitals and in terms of the similarity of physical experience. She drew a parallel between the pleasure in controlling the anal impulse and the pleasure in the control of the genital impulse. She kept anal and sexual separate while linking them; thus, “she showed how virtually everything sexual was anal first—hence non-sexual” (Binion 1968, p. 351). By staying within the conventions of known psychoanalytic theory, Lou had achieved hearty approval for her theories and the subtlety of her assertion of pre-sexual sensuality seemed to escape Freud.
Drei Briefe an einen Knaben
The year following the publication of her narcissism paper, Lou published Drei Briefe an einen Knaben (Three Letters to a Young Boy) (1917a). It was a short story that she had begun prior to her contact with psychoanalysis. It was a unique text that, without precursor in psychoanalytic history, juxtaposed Lou’s psychoanalytic and artistic writing. In a letter to Freud in April 1931, Lou reminded him about the book that he’d agitated to get published:
Perhaps you remember a slim volume I sent to you before the war, Drei Briefe an einen Knaben? The beginning of the book dates back to my pre-analytic days, but it was continued and completed during my happy six months in Vienna in 1912 and was intended to serve the sexual enlightenment of some children who were friends of mine. (Lou to Freud, April 1931, p. 191)
Begun in 1907, the first letter or epistle tells the story of Father Christmas, or more accurately a disappearing Father Christmas. Lou says that many babies have been born since Jesus so Christmas is now all about them too. Storks have long been dismissed because babies now grow under the mother’s breast. In the second essay-letter, Lou describes how fish eggs are dispersed by the mother before being fertilized by the father; for mammals the same thing happens inside the mother’s body. She describes how the mother is a special bodily space where a man can push the precious juices of life from his two containers, and a place where a child can germinate and grow. She also describes the sexual behavior of plants. The third letter is written to the boy when he is an adolescent and speaks explicitly of sexual feelings and more worldly things. It contains a philosophy of bodily desires and the meaning of existence.
As a thesis about sexual enlightenment and psychic development, Three Letters contains some absorbing material. In terms of psychoanalytic historiography it is interesting to note that Lou’s coverage of the Father Christmas story as the means to sexual enlightenment was a forerunner to the same choice of subject matter in Klein’s (1921) first publication; indeed, the similarities in material are striking inasmuch as Klein also begins with an analysis of the story and symbolism of Father Christmas. Although Klein may not have been conversant with Lou’s book, it is possible that Abraham, Klein’s mentor and analyst, would have known about it after Lou had spent time working with Abraham in Berlin during 1913. Klein may also have been conversant with some of Lou’s ideas through Ferenczi (cf. Likierman 1993), who was also in close contact with Lou during this time (cf. Andreas-Salomé 1964, pp. 135–7). It may be unfair to suggest that Klein had lifted some ideas from Lou, but the intervening four years between Lou’s Father Christmas and Klein’s would have been enough time for Klein to get up on what had already been written in her native German. All in all, Lou’s Three Letters is important as a piece of writing in itself, but also as template for others afterwards. Lou was not usually given to concern about the fate of her writings, but with this text she confessed to Freud in 1931 that she was worried about it being lost:
The firm that published it wrote to me recently to say that it had gone bankrupt and was being liquidated with it. I should not really consider it any great misfortune to see my book liquidated with it, but I must confess that it would give some pleasure if I could see it resurrected in the psychoanalytic Verlag, provided that this—in view of its brevity and small amount of paper and print involved—were to prove feasible. (Pfeiffer 1972, p. 191)
Perhaps Lou was attached to this work because it signaled her emancipation as a psychoanalytic feminist thinker. She was confident in offering a motherly touch to psychoanalytic theory and some years later Freud at last recognized this when he re-read the text.
For the first time I have been struck by something exquisitely feminine in your intellectual approach. (Freud to Salomé, May 9, 1931)
Although the book was not theoretical, it was a statement about her position as a woman in psychoanalysis and, arguably, a reintegration of her use of language as an expression of the philosophic feminine. A few years after the book was published, Lou took up the question of the primacy of motherhood in psychoanalysis, challenging Freud directly. Freud believed that the fear of woman was rooted in the act of sexual intercourse, where the penis is transformed from its erect state to a flaccid state. But Lou was incisive with regard to his short essay on the “Taboo of Virginity,” she told Freud:
… it occurred to me that this taboo may have been intensified by the fact that at one time (in matriarchal society) the woman may have been the dominant partner. In this way, like the defeated deities, she acquired demonic properties, and was feared as an agent of retribution. Also her defloration by deity, priests, etc. points back to a time when she was not the ‘private property’ of the male, and in order to achieve this she had to shake off the shackles of her impressive past—which may still play its part as the earliest positive basis for the precautionary measures of the male. (Lou to Freud, January 30, 1919)
Lou was persuasive but careful about broaching the thorny topic of sexual politics with Freud. In referring to the predominance of motherhood as the basis of (male) anxiety, she speculated about pre-oedipal events. However by referring to the events as a sociocultural artifact, she did not overtly imply that this may have any implications for Freudian psychoanalytic theory. However, in his next letter to Lou, Freud felt it necessary to restate the position of the primacy of the father with regards to the Oedipus complex:
Your comments on the infantile neurosis have renewed my admiration for the skill with which you carry further and synthesize what has gone before … I have long had unexpressed ideas on matriarchy. Where is one to place it? I think on the basis of the totem-taboo hypothesis, in the period after the fall of the primal father, the period in which the male had not yet brought himself to the point of founding a secondary family, in which therefore the dominant now fell upon the shoulders of the woman who had lost her master. (Freud to Salomé, February 9, 1919, p. 90)
Despite Freud’s lordly reassertion of the primacy of the father, Lou was persistent in her next two letters when she went further in positing the role of the mother. She described a case of a young female patient whose presenting symptoms were that of homosexual fantasies, a clinical illustration that enabled Lou to restate her thoughts on motherly love. Her next challenge to Freud was her most sustained: “The Dual Orientation of Narcissism,” 1921.
For Freud, narcissism tended to mean something regressive and pathological that did not account for the development of love. Lou, however, proposed that the myth of Narcissus suggested something more benign insofar as the boy Narcissus gazed into the unbounded beauty of nature as much as he gazed at himself (the dual direction), a positive view of narcissism that she first noted in her journal in 1913. “It seems to me therefore to be dangerous not to emphasize the essential duality of the concept … and to leave the problem unresolved by allowing narcissism to stand only for self love. I should like to bring to the fore the other less obvious aspect; the persistent feeling of identification with the totality” (Andreas-Salomé 1964, pp. 108–11). The concept of totality is the key to the paper and I would suggest that the totality that Lou refers to might be read as “(m)other environment.” Total states are essentially the experience of a womb-like oneness, the embryonic membrane that envelops the child and thus a primitive sensuality that the ego later seeks to revitalize or recover (1921, pp. 7–11). In the paper Lou then presents an account of the “feminine libido” (Ibid., p. 11) in which she describes how clitoral ecstasy reconnects with the persistent vestige of narcissism, a passive inward experience of tenderness and generalized bodily contact, culminating in what is described as the “climactic experience of femininity … the image of the mother who procreates herself, and holds herself at her breast” (1921, pp. 11–12). The quality of her language here arguably conveys something fundamentally feminine and concerned not so much with object cathexis, the investment of energy, but more with the ecstatic object-relating capacity in a narcissistic gaze between mother and infant at the breast. Lou quite churlishly challenged Freud’s male view: “Let me not take too seriously Freud’s account of the feminine libido, a view which emphasizes the deflection of the clitoral sexuality to the passivity of the vagina” (1921, pp. 10–11). We can only wonder at the deftness and ease with which she challenges her master here (her challenge was not met defensively by Freud; his response was instead an acquiescence of the highest order as he asked Lou to analyze his daughter because he wished Anna to be put in touch with her femininity). In the paper Lou did not stop there as she moved on to turn the theory of penis envy on its head and noted its feminine counterpart: “Corresponding to penis envy in women, we frequently find in men the wish to give birth … a desire which is to be distinguished from the desire to return into the beloved mother” (Ibid., p. 12). She differentiated this desire for mother from the oedipal desire to overthrow the father to possess the mother. This axiom, the desire for the beloved mother (a pre-oedipal dyad that had all the qualities of an outward object relation, rather than simply the boundless immersion inward as Freud posited), represented a new psychoanalytic beginning. Lou said that there was a blissful state in infancy without the sexual tension or drive of the oedipal triangle. Indeed, Lou asserted that there were types of love that were asexual and detached from the goal of sexual possession—a love bond—stronger than personal eroticism, arising from a “confusion of self and world, experienced a deux” (Ibid., p. 13). (Binion [1968 p. 551] reads this as “sociable self-world confusion a deux.”) The total body preoccupation of the mother–infant bond harks back to Lou’s contention that in the beginning the infant’s world is one of sensuality. The absorption and connectedness with the (m)other is not considered in terms of drive or pleasure; rather, it is seen as an outward as well as inward-folding (dual) experience of love and sociality.
Discussion: Lou, Feminism, and Mothering Psychoanalysis
There are six references in total to Lou’s work in the Standard Edition of Freud’s collected works. They are as follows: 7:187, 10:8, 16:135, 17:133, 19:175, 22:101, plus Freud’s (1937) obituary of Lou. However, discussions of her work are few and far between. Apart from the biographical sketches mentioned earlier, notable contributions are Inge Weber’s (1989) comparison of Lou’s theory of narcissism with the relevant passages in Freud, and Richard’s (1987) examination of Lou’s dual-orientation theory in terms of the interchange between analyst and analysand, and comparing it to Mahler’s (1972) theory of separation–individuation. Also notable is a recent article by Pines (1995) examining shame and the role of gaze in psychotherapy in which he mentions Lou’s ideas. Pines describes himself as someone who has been indirectly influenced by Lou (1995, personal communication). Pines’s (1984) theory of mirroring is implicitly in agreement with Lou’s dual-orientation theory: “attention and love have to reach outwards and not inwards and … for the narcissistic mirror that reflects only sameness there must substitute the mirroring that comes from the active contemplation, recognition and exchange between two centers of autonomy and psychic life” (Pines 1984, p. 33). Pines also asserts that there is a great deal of therapeutic potential in the benign mirroring process that happens in the group where there is “a juxtaposition … combining insight and outsight, and a new unity out of diversity” (1984, p. 36). The inward/outward potential described by Pines suggests that there is therapeutic potential in the deconstructive social experience of a positive dual-orientation group experience.
The texture of Lou’s theory of dual narcissism is arguably comparable here with object relations theory, where there is a preponderant discourse of mothering and its impact on the developing sociality of the infant. Compare the texture of Lou’s thinking here with that of Suttie in his founding object relations text, The Origins of Love and Hate (1935; cf. Barnes-Gutteridge 1989). Suttie noted the dual (active and passive) orientation of narcissism, which he contrasted with Freud’s view:
Baby Mother bond … intuitively appreciated by the former as mutual absorption (Suttie 1935, p. 32). Freud considers that [the infant] develops the power to love, it first loves itself—Narcissism. As I would have it, the elements or isolated precepts from which the ‘mother idea’ is finally integrated are loved (cathected) from the beginning (in the solipsist phase) so that object-love is coeval with object perceptive. I thus regard love as social rather than sexual in its biological function … and seeking any state of responsiveness with others as its goal. (Suttie 1935, p. 36)
In the context of the history of object relations theory, Lou’s dual orientation theory would seem to be worthy of acknowledgement as a foundation for Suttie. Furthermore, Lou’s theory of the feminine in psychoanalytic theory is fundamentally a theory of sexual difference and while this standpoint has been criticized in the past, it carries much currency today (cf. Elliot and Frosh 1995). So why has Lou not been embraced by radical-thinking psychoanalytic feminists, particularly as Lou’s life-project seemed to be one of developing a theory of the feminine? The hiatus appears to begin with Mitchell (1974), who reduced Lou’s contribution to a few lines in the appendix of her pivotal feminist text. Although acknowledging that Lou was one of the first women allowed into Freud’s inner circle meetings, Mitchell dismissed Lou thus: “what she achieved was a glorious parody of the masculine vision of women … Lou was a woman who believed so fully in the meaning of the physiological differences between the sexes that she constructed a profound and independent psychology thereon … she could only fashion herself within the terms of the choir this male vision offered. She was superwoman to Nietzsche’s superman, the goddess of a misogynist society.” (1974, p. 430).
Lou’s theoretical contribution to psychoanalysis has been appraised all too briefly (Colin-Rothberg 1981; Binion 1986; Richard 1987; Sprengnether 1990; Pines 1995), and in the end her writings remain overlooked. It should be of concern that a whole crop of literature about the emergence of the concept of the feminine in psychoanalytic theory has a referential lacuna that is dislocated from Lou. Rich (1976), Hirsch (1990), Hermann (1992), and Wright (1992), to name a few, are some who have failed to examine Lou’s contribution to the discourse of womanhood and motherhood in psychoanalysis. Chodorow (1989) is another who managed to not even mention Lou. Sayers (1992), likewise, in Mothering Psychoanalysis examined the work of Helene Deutsch, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and Karen Horney but made no reference to Lou’s work. Even Binion, one of Lou’s most disparaging and fierce critics, posits Lou’s utter centrality to psychoanalysis: “As Lou’s daughterly defiance of Freud came to a head, so did deepest daughterly delight at recognizing psychoanalysis as her own baby” (Binion 1968, p. 362). It is time for Lou’s work to step out of the modest shadow of its creator to take up its own place in illuminating the history of ideas in psychoanalysis.
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