Letter from Lou Andreas-Salomé to Freud, January 30, 1919

Göttingen, 30.i.1919

Dear Professor,

The infantile neurosis (how vividly it reminds me of the 1913 lecture, where you first spoke of the dream with the wolves on the trees112) I have now read several times—indeed ‘read’ is hardly the word; for it is more than that: every detail is like a seed which grows and sprouts in earth and water. And how these details all coalesce, just because they were in the first place so fearlessly scattered about and strictly isolated! The more clearly one realizes this, the more it is a source of pleasure. Indeed when one is confronted by these primal experiences113 of the child, it is as though one were looking at a vast garden, whose paths have by no means all been explored, and a walk of this kind in your company is the best compensation available for geographical separation.

The question of primal experiences, which you have decided—in the most objective and cautious way possible—in favour of a kernel of reality behind all the phantasy work often presented itself to me so little in the form of a stark alternative that I was actually inclined to believe: the stronger the part played by phantasy subsequently, the more substance there often is in the underlying basis of fact. And vice versa, the less the primal experiences appeared to be the work of phantasy—in that they were directly transferred to later object libido—the less is actually left of them, for they have been discharged and dissolved in the process. For me, to be sure, this is closely connected with the consideration that where the original narcissistic libido is strong and persistent, it is for this very reason restricted to phantasy activity (whether this expresses itself in so-called creative work or whether it takes on morbid forms) and that on the other hand precisely this narcissistic libido preserves its sole and indestructible real kernel (its inexhaustible fountain of youth) in the primal experience. It is indeed very characteristic of narcissism