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In the epilogue to the diary ‘In der Schule bei Freud’,* which Lou Andreas-Salomé kept during her psycho-analytic study year 1912/13, it is stated that she very probably made the acquaintance of Sigmund Freud for the first time, not—as one must assume from her autobiography Lebensrückblick—at the beginning of the Weimar Psycho-Analytical Congress on 21 September 1911, but a good decade and a half earlier in spring 1895.
The editor's attention was first drawn to this point by Lucia Morawitz after the appearance of Lebensrückblick in 1951. A sentence of the latter runs: ‘When I stood before Freud at the Weimar Psycho-Analytical Congress in autumn 1911.’ On this Lucia Morawitz remarked: ‘LAS first met Freud in 1911? But I remember distinctly that a conversation I had with her in Vienna in spring 1895 was interrupted by her having to go and see Freud, with whom she had an appointment. I can still hear in memory the very words and intonation with which she announced this to me.’
Is there any possibility of a misunderstanding here which would entitle one to doubt the fact of the visit or at least the intention to make the visit? In spring 1895 Lou A.-S. was staying in Vienna ‘for the first time back again’, inspired thereto by her correspondence with Arthur Schnitzler. She soon got to know Richard Beer-Hofmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and others. Lucia Morawitz, according to her own account, was ‘on the fringe of the Hofmannsthal, Bahr, Karl Kraus, Eckstein circle’. So these circles crossed. And in the middle of May 1895, during Lou A.-S.'s stay in Vienna, there appeared the Studies on Hysteria by Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer; the last and most important chapter, by Freud, deals with the psychotherapy of hysteria. It might well be that Lou A.-S., after the mysterious experiences of her life together with the ‘friend of her youth’ Paul Rée, and with her friend Frieda Freiin von Bülow (who had accompanied her to Vienna), had been attracted by the theme of the book and by