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The correspondence of Lou Andreas-Salomé and Anna Freud comprises 433 documents in total and spans a 17-year period during which the two women met in person on no more than nine occasions. For Anna Freud, this period contains major events such as the start of her analytic career, Sigmund Freud's illness from cancer and her second analysis with him, as well as her decision to embark on a life related to her father and his work. With Andreas-Salomé, who was almost 35 years older and practised psychoanalysis since 1912-3, the further development of her work with patients can be traced, with what by today's standards is a sometimes adventurous ‘wild’ setting, and finally the encounter with age and illness and the associated separation processes. Both women also engage in their letters with the work of important analysts of their time such as Reik, Rank, Eitingon, Abraham, Ferenczi, Klein and many others.
Although Anna Freud, who is 26 years old at the beginning of the correspondence, initially comes across as a very uncertain ‘girl’ seeking support from a motherly and sisterly woman, she acquires a clearly more self-aware manner in the letters over the years. She develops her own ways of working and living, which from 1925 when D. Burlingham entered her life as a companion contributes to her writing less often and with greater reserve about personal matters.
Lou Andreas-Salomé, who seems to correspond very closely to Freud's description of the ‘purely feminine’ type of beautiful woman who develops a narcissistic self-sufficiency (cf. Young-Bruehl, 1988, p. 162), begins the very first