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It is difficult to introduce Lou Andreas-Salomé to the psychoanalytic reader in America: the problem of her position has to be stated before an attempt can be made to understand her and her role in psychoanalysis. It is fortunate that her two latest friends, H. F. Peters and Stanley Leavy, give an outstanding, scholarly, careful, and loving, even though sketchy, portrayal of her.
Lou Andreas-Salomé was a famous novelist, poet, essayist, and friend and interviewer of many great men at the turn of the century. She was respected, admired, and befriended by Freud, who considered her 'superior to us all'. She was fifty years of age when she came to Vienna and to Freud, who warned her not to see in him and psychoanalysis 'a Santa Claus loaded with presents to give'. She was an incorrigible romanticist in the best German tradition. It was said of her that she thought with her heart and felt with her brain. She took it upon herself to rescue lonely men from their loneliness—often with disastrous result. After her therapeutic and human encounter with Freud she settled down to a quiet life and became a practicing psychoanalyst in Göttengen, where she died two years before Freud (1937).
The Journal of her study of psychoanalysis in Vienna does not solve the problem of who this woman was and why she was admired by so many men. Actually her life and thought were opposite to Freud's, who lived like a Victorian and interpreted dreams in the language of rational life. Andreas-Salomé lived like an emancipated woman of the Twentieth Century and interpreted life in the language of dreams. Perhaps her charm to Freud and to almost all analysts of these early years (1912-1913) was her capacity for unlimited listening and asking understanding questions—almost as an analyst does. Freud addressed his lectures to her or to her empty chair when she could not be present. At the Wednesday evening seminars at Freud's house she never spoke. This Journal contains one speech she planned