Sigmund Freud's First Lady

IN TERMS OF whom she knew, Lou Andreas-Salome was Germany's Gertrude Stein. The roll call of her associates is virtually a Who's Who of post-Bismarckian literary and intellectual history, and the succession of men in her life sounds like one of H. Stuart Hughes's reading lists.

Of Russian origins, Salome was educated at home in Saint Petersburg and at the University of Zurich. In the course of her many travels she became a friend of Nietzsche, a companion, guide and confessor to Rilke (it was she who first introduced him to Russia), and a favorite pupil of Freud. She knew Wedekind, Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, and Hauptman. She met Stringberg and the great stage director Max Reinhardt, and Martin Buber encouraged her writing.

For Salome was more than a lady of splendid connections. She was also a novelist, critic, and thinker in her own right, figuring among the leading authoresses of her day. She write several novels, a play, a critical work on Ibsen's heroines, an exposition of Neitzsche, and an autobiography, Lebensruckblick, which along with her Freud Journal, is her best known work today.

Already having a reputation as a psychological writer, in 1911, at the age of 50, she turned to the study of psychoanalysis. In 1912, she wrote to Freud and promptly joined his circle, then in Vienna. Once under his influence, she never escaped. Till the end of her life (1937) she remained his singularly uncritical devotee, and supported him at every tug on the orthdox line throughout the squabbles with Jung, Adler, Rank and the others.

IN HIS introduction to the correspondence between Salome and Freud, Ernst Pfeiffer, the editor, frames Salome along orthdox lines himself. Her various relationships are said to stem from an initial disappointment, what Lou in her autobiography calls "The Experience of God." Pfeiffer writes: "The little Louise van Salome endowed her God with so intense a reality that His -- inevitable -- failure to appear when first challenged to do so cast the pall of being abandoned by God....over this child and her entire future." Accordingly Lou's successive mentors served the substitute function. From her childhood tutor, a pastor 25 years her elder, to her husband, who was "never her husband in the accepted sense of the word," to the Ur-father of the psychoanalytic movement, each took his turn in the position of the revered and remote paternal divine. As the correspondance itself testifies, the last and greatest of Lou's holy men seems to have fulfilled his post to perfection.

These letters, spanning the years 1912 to 1936, punctuate a relationship evidently more than satisfying to its protagonists, but disturbing in the extreme to the non-partisan reader, and I would hope, to the partisan as well. Freud's egoism, his supreme indifference to anyone's work or to contributions other than his own, his condescendingly terse replies to Lou's "blithe optimism," as he terms it, suggest the reasons for the defections of Freud's less willing disciples. In the face of so little reception, of the glaring silences with which most of Salome's efforts to communicate her observations and ideas are met, her exuberance and unkillable gratitude to Freud are hard to understand. And yet Freud does evince genuine affection for his eager pupil, perhaps because, refusing to take her seriously intellectually, Freud can in no way interpret her as a threat.

Not that Salome, objectively speaking, poses much of one. While she initially allows herself a few mild objections to Freud's titanic pessimism, Salome's case for a better, potentially more creative human nature than Freud would assent to dwindles through the train of her letters. Freud, of course, is not the only corrosive element at work on her optimism. There was after all the war, whose effects are very much present in both sides of the correspondence. And there is the matter of aging. In this respect, the later letters offer a warmer, more gentle, and sometimes whimsical picture of the aging giant and his aging devotee, extending their sympathies from each other's sick beds by courier post. By this time, moreover, Salome is slightly more hesitant in offering her intellectual opinions, or at least more apologetic about what she repeatedly calls her "babbling." And the more eagerly she plays a flattering fifth fiddle, the more Freud seems able to afford an occasional word of advice, encouragement, or admiration for her.

FREUD'S ADMIRATION, however, is confined to her virtues as a woman and friend. For her psychoanalytic writings, Freud acknowledges a more delicate and feminine approach than his own -- but an acknowledgment depreciated by his several warnings against the dangers of personalism. As for Salome's work with her patients, Freud's advice is again more that of concerned friend, than of a colleague: he insists that she not overwork herself, that she charge higher fees, and finally sends her money himself to alleviate her needs--for patients, one suspects, as well as for the more basic amenities that Lou and her husband, like so many others, were lacking in the post-war depression.

While these letters are probably not of much interest to students of Freudian thought, since Freud, from his side, has fairly effectively kept their intellectual content to a minimum, they are valuable as documents to the man's working personality. Though the correspondence also does not add information that is new, its tenor is further evidence to the fact that inspiring thinkers do not necessarily conduct inspirational private lives. Salome also emerges to her disadvantage: While she expresses herself well, and with considerably more poetry than her more prosaically-minded master, she remains more ladylike than profound. That she was a true lady, and a very gifted one at that, there can be no doubt. But from her performance in this correspondence, the temptation to explore her other dimensions is resistable, albeit any one versus Freud is not a fair match.