"The neighbours stick swastikas on the windowpanes. You can only have a sensible conversation with the nutria." It was March 1933, and the nutria were large south American rats. Freud had sent Lou Andreas-Salomé, who had contributed a lot to his thought, 10% of his Goethe Prize money; the born St Petersburger had invested it in a small fur farm, though the animals were allowed to outlive her. The Nazi ban on printing books by this "lady of dangerous intelligence" (Freud) before they had been translated may explain why in the English-speaking world this woman who achieved so much tends to be seen a marginal figure. The authors of the Wikipedia article on "Healthy Narcissism" don't even know that she invented the idea: is the discipline of psychoanalysis siloed by its practitioners' ignorance of the language of its founder? English translations of her novels and scientific works are appearing only lately and rarely, and her German is hard-going.
Dr. Kerstin Decker's book about her which I have found so disturbing is made of up extensive quotations from her work and correspondence, and shorter ones from her correspondents, woven together with German prose which, for its 2010 publication date, is itself very "literary". After her affair with René Maria Rilke, 14 years her junior, Lou remained his closest confidante. He was brought up in a feminine way by parents who wanted a girl, and since he was uncomfortable that René can be a girl's name, Lou changed his name to Rainer Maria Rilke. He was one of a procession of men who, since her teens, were desperate to marry that clever daddy's girl from a privileged protestant Russian home. Nietzsche, entranced by her as a female Übermensch, despite finding her careless of her appearance and smelly, was not the first. Her rejection of him triggered the composition of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, after which he went mad, a condition probably attributable more to von Salomé's rejection than to unsubstantiated rumours of syphilis. By 21 she had overawed several other clever men, such as Ferdinand Tönnies, whom she found the second most vibrant conversationalist she had met. The only man she did marry was Persian- and Zarathustra-expert Carl Andreas, on condition that they never sleep together, a condition she held him to.
Lou von Salomé, now Lou Andreas-Salomé, had conducted more or less serious relationships with other men, notably a cultured doctor, Pineles, while her husband had become professor, and they had settled in the German university town of Göttingen. She had attended the psychoanalytic congress in Weimar in 1911 as the companion of a man friend, Poul Bjerre, got hold of some of Freud's writings, and in 1912 was the first woman to submit a paper to Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen, to the initial consternation of its editor Jung. She went to Vienna to attend Freud's Wednesday Club for psychoanalysis, took a course with analyst Tausk, and set herself up as an analyst.
Anna Freud, something of a problem daughter for Sigmund Freud, adored the work of Rilke, the anti-psychoanalytic prince of 20th century German language poetry, so partly on account of the personal connection Anna was pleased to befriend Lou, and knitted warm clothes for Lou as she sat by her father's sickbed: Lou's husband insisted on a cold house. This connection created a further bond between Andreas-Salomé and Sigmund Freud, and brought Rilke a little into Freud's world.
As a practicing psychoanalyst, Lou Andreas-Salomé tried out her advance copy of Rilke's masterwork, the Duino Elegies, on her non-poetry-reading patients, and found they had a wonderful power to heal. Despite her highly individual approach to psychoanalysis, Freud continued to have the greatest respect for her work. In turn, and although she immediately grasped the incoherence of Freud's thinking from a philosophical--Nietzschean--point of view, and vibed with Rilke's profound non-confessional religiosity, she continued to take a close interest in Freud's work. Anna Freud told Lou that she knew what people meant to say better than they knew themselves, and this may have been true of her understanding of Freud.
It is easy to read Freud's writings as describing a series of tools for diagnosing (perhaps unscientifically) and relieving (perhaps ineffectively) emotional suffering and civilisational malaise. Lou Andreas-Salomé, author of the first book about Nietzsche, had a profound grasp of Nietzsche's thought and yet, as the psychoanalytic movement splintered into Freudians and Jungians, she stuck with Freud who did not appreciate Nietzsche, rather than Jung who did. Mutual attraction played a part in this preference, but in the case of two such uncompromising thinkers as Freud and Andreas-Salomé it cannot have been the whole story. One can read Freud, as one can read Nietzsche, through a Lou Andreas-Salomé lens, and it is illuminating and for me disturbing to do so.
Seen through the eyes of the self-possessed, self-obsessed genius Lou, Freud's inward turn, so different than that of Nietzsche or of Rilke, must be taken seriously in the development of European thought, and not just viewed as a set of problematic tools in the armouries of expensive psychiatrists and therapists. Do the hostility of the Nazis, and the achievements of the pyschologizing 'American Century', prove the beneficence of this inwardness, of this 'positive narcissism', for humankind? An inwardness comparable with, yet different than, that of Rilke? That rather depends on one's view of history. Lou would have said 'yes', and without her here to advance her case, I dare not pronounce her view indefensible.
The 2016 film Lou Andreas-Salomé by Cordula Kablitz-Post, available on some streaming platforms, is a pleasant way to gather the outlines of Lou's biography. It does not have space to develop several delicate themes, for example skirting over how much Lou the feminist annoyed other progressives by refusing to parrot the then-current orthodoxy about the nature of gender. Neither does it mention her later fascination with, and unfulfilled wish to psychoanalyse, the celebrated (in Germany) graphologist, anti-Semite and pioneer of critical theory, Ludwig Klages, who like almost everyone was influenced by his understanding or misunderstanding of Nietzsche. Nietzsche's persecuting, misrepresenting sister, who hated Lou (and without truth would denounce her as a Finnish Jew) has much to answer for!
There appears also to be a lot of interesting material omitted from Dr. Decker's book itself, though to have included more would have made it less manageable to read. Little point, if one cannot know, to speculate on whether Lou had an affair with Freud. The book does leave one with a--possibly horrified--fascination with a woman who deserves more attention than she has received in the English-speaking world. The situation is better in the francophone and German-speaking spheres. She triangulated, understood, and inspired some of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, and produced a signifcant oeuvre herself.