Book
My Thanks to Freud: Open Letter to Professor Sigmund Freud on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday
Mein Dank an Freud: Offener Brief an Professor Sigm. Freud zu seinem 75. Geburtstag
An open letter written for Freud’s seventy-fifth birthday on 6 May 1931, in which Andreas-Salomé reviews psychoanalysis as she had come to know it: Freud’s self-analysis as its starting point, the analytic situation and transference, narcissism as a bond with the whole that is more than self-love, the infantile phases of sexuality and the Oedipus complex, and sublimation. She accepts Freud’s dualism of the drives but doubts that aggression and the death drive are autonomous. Freud replied that it was the finest thing of hers he had read.
What it shows
- 1912
Sigmund Freud influenced Lou Andreas-Salomé
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.