Lou Andreas-Salomé

Lou Andreas-Salomé (born February 12, 1861, St. Petersburg, Russia—died February 5, 1937, Göttingen, Germany) was a Russian-German writer who has been called “the mother of psychoanalysis.” Socially unconventional and possessing a brilliant intellect, she was the first female psychoanalyst and a figure of fascination and influence among other leading thinkers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Salomé’s works include poetry, novels, essays, and cultural criticism. Her writing and her published correspondence with German poet Rainer Maria Rilke and Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud are valuable for her views on such topics as creativity, gender, female sexuality, and narcissism.

Early life and education

Salomé was the daughter of Gustav von Salomé, a Russian army officer of French Huguenot descent, and Louise von Salomé (née Wilm), a woman of Danish and German heritage whose father was a well-to-do sugar manufacturer. The youngest of six children (two of whom died young), she was her parents’ only daughter. Salomé was raised in a pious Lutheran household, but she began questioning her belief in God as a teenager and confided in her aunt about her loss of faith.

When she was 17, her aunt introduced her to Hendrik Gillot, a preacher in the Dutch Reformed Church in St. Petersburg. Without her parents’ knowledge, he tutored Salomé in theology, philosophy, world religions, and French and German literature. He also allowed her to write some of his sermons, though he put an end to this generosity after she inserted a passage from Goethe’s Faust (1808 and 1832) that drew reproach from one of Gillot’s esteemed congregants.

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In 1879 Salomé’s father died and her mother learned of her private lessons with Gillot. With some discussion, Salomé was allowed to continue lessons with him. However, much to her shock, Gillot proposed marriage to her during one of their lessons, though he was already married and was 23 years older than she was. She refused, but the incident stayed with her; she included it in one of her later novellas, Eine Ausschweifung (1898; Deviations, trans. 1990).

Salomé was confirmed in the Dutch Reformed Church in 1879 or 1880 in a ceremony performed by Gillot. She consented to the ceremony so that she could study outside the country. (In order to secure a Russian passport, she was required to be confirmed in a faith.) In 1880 she and her mother left Russia for Switzerland, where Salomé audited classes on religion, logic, and metaphysics at the University of Zürich.

Influence on Friedrich Nietzsche and Salomé’s first novel

Health problems led Salomé to leave Zürich after a year and travel with her mother to Italy. In 1882, while visiting German writer Malwida von Meysenbug’s salon in Rome, Salomé met the German philosophers Paul Rée and Friedrich Nietzsche. Both men fell in love with her, but she rejected their proposals of marriage. Instead, she suggested that the three of them (plus an older female chaperone) live together in a communal arrangement in which they could enjoy one another’s company and discuss philosophy and other topics of mutual interest. This plan did not materialize (for one, it scandalized Nietzsche’s sister) except for three weeks spent sharing an apartment in Leipzig, Germany.

Nonetheless, Salomé had a profound influence on Nietzsche. Her poem “Lebensgebet” (1892; “Hymn to Life,” also called “Prayer to Life”) so impressed him that he composed music for it. Their relationship inspired his philosophical treatise Also sprach Zarathustra (1883 and 1885; Thus Spoke Zarathustra). The influence was reciprocal. Using the pseudonym Henri Lou, Salomé published her first book, Im Kampf um Gott (1885; “A Struggle for God”), an autobiographical novel that drew from her relationship with Nietzsche and her earlier wrangling with faith.

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Marriage, Ibsen’s Heroines, Ruth, and first short stories

In 1887 she entered into a celibate marriage with Friedrich Carl Andreas, a professor of Persian at the University of Göttingen, Germany. They remained married until his death in 1930. In 1892 she published Henrik Ibsens Frauengestalten (Ibsen’s Heroines, trans. in 1985), an analysis of the female characters in the Norwegian playwright’s works. Three years later she published her second novel, Ruth, which was based on her relationship with Gillot. That same year she began a relationship with the Austrian psychoanalyst Friedrich Pineles, who some biographers believe was her first sexual partner. She also began writing a number of short stories that explored love, sex, and eroticism as experienced by the stories’ female protagonists. These were collected in Menschenkinder (1899; “Children of Man”).

Influence on Rainer Maria Rilke

In 1896 she published an essay “Jesus der Jude” (“Jesus the Jew”) in the Neue Deutsche Rundschau (“New German Roundtable”) that argued that Christ was among history’s great unbelievers, even though his death had paradoxically inspired a new religion:

Religion in its whole truth and its whole illusion, embodied in a human being, bled away to death here on the cross, which, since then, strangely enough, has become the symbol of religion.

The essay impressed the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who was 14 years younger than she and was writing a poem-cycle, Christus-Visionen (completed in 1898 and published in 1959; Visions of Christ, trans. in 1967), that expressed themes similar to those in “Jesus the Jew.” They met for the first time one year later in Munich, introduced by the German novelist Jakob Wassermann. Rilke fell in love with her, and they began an affair.

Salomé became one of the formative influences on his life and remained his trusted confidante years after their affair ended (at her behest). At her suggestion, he changed his first name from René to Rainer, because she believed it to sound more “masculine.” His poem-cycle Das Stunden-Buch (1905; The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God; trans. in 1997), which he began writing after visiting Russia with Salomé and her husband in 1899, is dedicated to her.

Fenitschka, Ma, and The Erotic

Salomé’s works during this period with Rilke include the novella Fenitschka (1898), a fictionalized account of her relationship with the German actor and playwright Frank Wedekind, whom she had rejected as a potential lover; and Ma: Ein Portrait (1901; “Ma: A Portrait”), a novel about a widowed mother who is thrown into a crisis when she is given the chance to remarry just as her younger daughter prepares to leave home. Ma rejects the proposal and asserts her most essential identity is as a mother. Salomé’s essays “Der Mensch als Weib” (1899; “The Human Being as Woman”) and her book Die Erotik (1910; The Erotic, trans. in 2013) were among her works that saw her shift her focus even more to the topics of gender and psychology. 

Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis practice

In 1911 Salomé attended a congress of psychoanalysts in Weimar, Germany, and afterward became associated with the Vienna circle of psychoanalysts. At the congress, she met Sigmund Freud, though some biographers believe that she may have met him as early as 1895. Salomé attended Freud’s lectures (the only woman he allowed to do so), and they began a friendship that would last to the end of her life. Now in her fifties, she set up a practice in Göttingen and continued to write. Meanwhile, she and Freud frequently corresponded, trading thoughts on everything from narcissism to anxiety to their patients and papers.

Other works and legacy

Salomé’s other works include Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken (1894; “Friedrich Nietzsche in His Works”); her sole play, Der Teufel und seine Grossmutter (1915; “The Devil and His Grandmother”), an allegorical work that mixes theology with psychoanalysis; Die Stunde ohne Gott und andere Kindergeschichten (1922; “The Hour Without God and Other Children’s Stories”); Rainer Maria Rilke (1928); and Mein Dank an Freud (1931; “My Thanks to Freud”). Her correspondence with Rilke was published in 1952, and her letters with Freud were published in 1985. Her memoir, Lebensrückblick, was published posthumously in 1951 and translated into English under the title Looking Back in 1991.

Salomé’s life has been the subject of many biographies and films. Fittingly for a woman who lived an unconventional life, she was portrayed by four different actresses in the biopic The Audacity to Be Free (2016).