Lou Andreas-Salomé

Works

• 1894Friedrich Nietzsche in His Works

  Study of Nietzsche’s personality and philosophy, published in 1894 by a woman who had known him in 1882.

Position

Lou Andreas-Salomé is on the map first for her own writing. Her book Friedrich Nietzsche in His Works (1894) is a study of Nietzsche’s personality and philosophy by a woman who had met him in 1882. She wrote on Ibsen’s female characters (1892), on Rilke (1928), stories and novels such as Ruth (1895), and essays that give independent interpretations of the writers she knew; the NDB sees in her work a reflective response to the central phenomena of her time and counts her late memoir Looking Back (published 1951) as her most significant work. After meeting Freud she turned to psychoanalysis and thanked him in an open letter on his 75th birthday in 1931 (My Gratitude to Freud). Her lines on the map run from Nietzsche and from Freud.

Life & context

Lou Andreas-Salomé was born on 12 February 1861 in St Petersburg, the daughter of a Russian general of French Huguenot and German-Baltic descent. She fought for the right to study and studied religious history and philosophy in Zurich under Alois Biedermann. At twenty-one, in Italy, she became a friend of Paul Rée through the circle of Malwida von Meysenbug, and through Rée she met Nietzsche in 1882; the relationship ended in October of that year in Leipzig, and she lived with Rée in Berlin until her marriage in 1887 to Friedrich Carl Andreas, with whom she moved to Göttingen in 1903. Her friendship with Rainer Maria Rilke began in Munich in 1897 and led to two Russian journeys in 1899 and 1900. At the psychoanalytic congress in Weimar in 1911 she met Freud, spent a study year in Vienna in 1912 and ran a psychoanalytic practice in Göttingen during and after the First World War. She died there on 5 February 1937.

Further main works

• Ibsen’s Female Characters (Henrik Ibsens Frauengestalten, 1892)
• Ruth (1895)
• Rainer Maria Rilke (1928)
• My Gratitude to Freud (Mein Dank an Freud, 1931)
• Looking Back (Lebensrückblick, published 1951)