Lou Andreas-Salome 1861 – 1937

Lou Andreas-Salome was a Russian-born German writer, philosopher, and psychoanalyst, whose intimate intellectual companionship with Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Ree, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Sigmund Freud placed her at the center of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century European thought. Her early Friedrich Nietzsche in His Works gave the first sustained interpretation of Nietzsche by a thinker who had known him personally, while The Erotic and her late writings on female psychology in the Freud circle developed an original philosophy of love, narcissism, and the religious feeling, midway between continental philosophy and depth psychology.

Louise von Salomé, known as Lou Andreas-Salomé, was born at Saint Petersburg in February 1861, the youngest child and only daughter of a general of Huguenot Russian background. She studied theology, philosophy, and history of religion at Zurich, met Friedrich Nietzsche and Paul Rée in Rome in 1882 and lived briefly with them in a celebrated philosophical ménage à trois, married the Iranist Friedrich Carl Andreas in 1887 in a chaste marriage that lasted until his death, and lived in Göttingen, Munich, and Vienna at the centre of Continental letters. She had a long love affair with the young Rainer Maria Rilke from 1897 and from 1911 was the friend, correspondent, and analysand of Sigmund Freud.

Her writings include the philosophical novel Im Kampf um Gott (In Struggle for God, 1885), Henrik Ibsen's Frauen-Gestalten (1892), the early monograph Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken (1894), Die Erotik (1910), the long psychoanalytic study Mein Dank an Freud (1931), and the posthumous Lebensrückblick.

Andreas-Salomé's Nietzsche book remains one of the earliest and most acute studies of his thought from personal acquaintance, and from 1915 onward she practised as one of the first women lay psychoanalysts in Vienna, writing extensively on narcissism, the feminine, and religious experience. She died at Göttingen in February 1937, two weeks before the Gestapo confiscated her library.