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Professor Peters has written a beautiful and convincing book about a most distinguished woman who devoted her mature years to the study and practice of psycho-analysis. My advice to all analysts would be to take their copies along as a guide on their holidays in Europe, 'the Europe that Was' and—we hope—always will be, however much its political and economic face may change. Can anyone doubt that Lou Andreas-Salomé (of French-German-Russian descent) presents a true image of Germany's eternal East-West split? In looks and temperament, in her vitality and egocentricity she belonged to the East. In her wisdom, clarity of mind and relentless search for improvement she was a child of Western civilization at its best. The author opens a window through which the reader may view without prejudice and with never-flagging interest, the pageant of Lou's life.
It adds much to Professor Peters' credit and to our enjoyment that he refrains from analytical interpretations or reconstructions of the motivations of her strange life history. He must rightly have felt that her younger years, in which so much happened that seemed inexplicable, were best left to speak their own language. So much so that when he speaks of unconscious processes, he calls them 'the sub -conscious', a word he would not find in our analytic vocabulary. But this does not matter. What he conveys is a climate in which people were individuals and had a destiny. This destiny we are wont today to call a 'neurosis'. Lou's biographer captures her image just on the borderland between the old and new concept of life, the ethical versus the aesthetic. When, through Freud, this cultural re-orientation occurred, our destiny became our own responsibility.
How Freud must have enjoyed Lou's love of life, how often he must have been tempted to see things as she did: 'the beauty of pain', the innocence of her destructiveness when she hurt those who loved her, but for whom she had ceased to care.
A special quality of