You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Nietzsche called Lou Andreas-Salomé “by far the cleverest person I have met” and “the most intelligent of all women.” When he knew her in 1882 she was only twenty-one. Years later Rainer Maria Rilke said, “my whole development could not have taken the course it did … but for the influence of this extraordinary woman,” referring to his love affair with Lou at the turn of the century and the letters they exchanged for many years. In 1931 it was Freud's turn to express his admiration. Responding enthusiastically to one of her many Freudian works, Mein Dank an Freud, he wrote to tell her that it was “an unintentional proof of your superiority over us all … a genuine synthesis … that can be depended upon to turn those assorted nerves, sinews, and arteries, to which the analytical knife has reduced the body, back into a live organism again.”
According to Rudolph Binion this extravagant praise affords only a one-sided view of Lou. After years of careful detective work, Professor Binion has come to the conclusion that this “near-mad near-genius of a woman” was nothing less than a “moral monstrosity.” With an icy Freudian scalpel Binion dissects Lou's numerous autobiographical works, attempting to distinguish the facts of her life from her rampant if brilliant distortions of them. Lou's fertility as a writer made this a gigantic task. The writings which Binion probes include many of her tales, her studies of Rilke and Nietzsche, her essays on philosophy, religion, and the arts, her psychoanalytic publications, her memoirs, and her correspondence with men of genius. Binion traces Lou's career of “‘lovely lying’” to her unusual fantasy life as a child and subsequently to her volatile encounters as a young woman with Nietzsche.
Born in 1861, Lou Andreas-Salomé was the daughter of a Russian general descended from the Huguenots. She grew up in old Russian splendor next door to the Czar's palace in Petersburg. Neglected in her earliest years by a preoccupied father and a jealous mot