Endnotes: From Orta Onward

The Journal of Analytical Psychology is to be heartily congratulated for organizing its latest conference at Lago D'Orta, Italy. This charming, magnificent venue also has an illustrious history, a tradition of creativity. Robert Browning penned his poem By the Fire-Side here, describing a local mountain walk; Balzac likened Orta's enchanting qualities to the music of creativity. But perhaps most famously and importantly for the analytic community is that this is where Nietzsche came with Lou Salome in May 1882. They had an extended hike on Sacro Monte (the Holy Mountain), apparently of longer duration than propriety would allow. What exactly transpired between them remains a mystery (like Freud and his sister-in-law, Minna), though Nietzsche wrote her a letter in which he states: ‘I owe to you the most beautiful dream of my life’. But when he went on to ask her to marry him (yet again) and she rejected the proposal (fictionally presented in a recent film, When Nietzsche Wept, based on the novel written by Irvin Yalom) which crushed and embittered him, he wrote ‘The Lou of Orta was a different being’. Soon after he was to go on to write Thus Spake Zarathustra in 1883(-5) in retreat at the Lake here; this contains the famous pronouncement when Zarathustra declares ‘all gods are dead’. Nietzsche dated the book: ‘von Orta an’, i.e., from Orta Onward.

Thus this conference was held at a place charged with tradition and creativity, a place of Eros, longing and suffering. It holds the story of an ecstatic, if painful encounter between figures who became icons of philosophical and analytic attitudes (Lou Salome went on to become a psychoanalyst in the last third of her life). Despite their failure to permanently unite, we have had the good fortune to experience a union of these disciplines, ably presented by the opening speakers. Professor Galimberti located our suffering in the daimonic shadows of techne, with the dangers of mechanization which dehumanize and leave no place