If I had to select my favorite text by Lou Andreas-Salomé, I would choose this Lettre ouverte à Freud. In it, near the end of her life (she was seventy), in a tribute to Freud's thinking upon the event of his seventy-fifth birthday, she unexpectedly developed a veritable conception of limits. It is a conception that should inspire modern psychoanalytic theoreticians, not only by its content but also in its style. Her purity of language brings radiant overtones, subtle shading, and almost palpable texture to what she has to say.