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Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1936) is better known as a friend of great men—especially Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud—than as a contributor to psychoanalysis. She was nevertheless a practicing psychoanalyst for the last third of her life and published a number of papers on psychoanalytic subjects. None of these works has been translated into English, and their German originals have been accorded rather little notice. This fate is not so strange, considering the enormous volume of the literature, and the fact that Lou Andreas-Salomé wrote in a style which even to Germans is turgid and cumbersome. Attention is again being called to her by the recent edition by Ernst Pfeiffer of the journal which she kept during her days in Vienna as a pupil of Freud, in 1912-1913, and which is only now appearing under the title In der Schule bei Freud. One discovers in the book not only the masterly touch of the writer in the glimpses it provides of Freud, Tausk, Jung, Adler, Rank, and others in the group then around or recently separated from Freud, but also the response of an intuitive and articulate artist to the freudian revolution.
In the journal, and later in a long essay published on the occasion of Freud's seventy-fifth birthday, Mein Dank an Freud, she made clear how psychoanalysis seemed to her to illuminate creative experience, her own and that of others. She saw, as Freud and all analysts since him have seen, the source of creativity in the unconscious streams hidden and yet also revealed by the ego, but only in a few individuals manifested in art. In the present paper she tried to show how in the unconscious the creative source persists and finds its manifestations not only in art but in the two other spheres of especial interest to her as a woman and a thinker, namely object-love and ethical behavior.
For Lou Andreas-Salomé, the unifying element in these varied