Person
Lou Andreas-Salomé
Russian-born German writer and psychoanalyst, born in St Petersburg and known before psychoanalysis for her book on Nietzsche and her friendships with Nietzsche, Paul Rée and Rilke. She met Freud at the Weimar congress of 1911, studied with him in Vienna in 1912–13, opened the first psychoanalytic practice in Göttingen in 1915 and was admitted to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1922. Her papers in Imago, notably on anal erotism (1916) and on narcissism as a double movement of self-assertion and fusion with the whole (1921), gave the drive theory a philosophical and poetic turn that Freud valued.
- Born
- 1861
- Died
- 1937
- Influenced
- Sigmund Freud
influenced by
- Sigmund Freud 1912 After meeting Freud at the Weimar congress of 1911, Andreas-Salomé spent 1912–13 in Vienna attending his lectures and the Wednesday meetings, recorded in her diary In der Schule bei Freud; her open letter of 1931 for his seventy-fifth birthday sets out what she took from his work.
developed
- Anal erotism 1916 In »Anal« und »Sexual« (1916) Andreas-Salomé reads the training of excretion as the child’s first prohibition, through which the ego forms and the anal becomes the model of what is rejected and disgusting; she describes the female genital as ‘leased’ from the cloaca, a phrase Freud adopted in 1917.
disputed with
- Carl Gustav Jung 1916 In »Anal« und »Sexual« Andreas-Salomé criticises Jung’s desexualised libido: by placing the essence of sexuality outside sexuality itself, she argues, he lets the old dualism back in and sides with the older theory that condemned sex.
- Alfred Adler 1916 In »Anal« und »Sexual« Andreas-Salomé argues that Adler, like Jung, loses Freud’s conception of sexuality, so that for him neurosis becomes little more than an unfavourable course of the psyche itself, and holds that Freud and Adler must be kept apart even more firmly than Freud and Jung.