Volume 4, Number 1 · February 11, 1965
Friend to Freud
By Stuart Hampshire
The Freud Journal of Lou Andreas-Salome
translated by Stanley A. Leavy
Basic Books, 211 pp., $4.95
Lou Andreas-Salomé was the mistress of Nietzsche and of Rilke, and a pupil, friend, and confidante of Freud. She was a sentimental tourist, and she had a flair for finding those points of interest which, in any guide book to her times, would be marked with the words 'vaut bien le détour.' She can be seen as one of the 'free spirits' of late romanticism, a voracious adorer, a Rebecca West who urged men of intellect to assert their powers, and particularly their powers of intellectual destruction. Shaw, converting the heroines of Ibsen into figures of high comedy, would have been delighted by her. Her writings on the then fashionable topics of femininity and narcissism are often murky and tiresome, as romanticized biology is apt to be; they fall into a half-world of new thought, which is neither literature nor science. But the evidence of this book shows that the picture of her we have had so far has been incomplete.
Review, 2028 words
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