Word: freude
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Already having a reputation as a psychological writer, in 1911, at the age of 50, she turned to the study of psychoanalysis. In 1912, she wrote to Freud and promptly joined his circle, then in Vienna. Once under his influence, she never escaped. Till the end of her life (1937) she remained his singularly uncritical devotee, and supported him at every tug on the orthdox line throughout the squabbles with Jung, Adler, Rank and the others...
...introduction to the correspondence between Salome and Freud, Ernst Pfeiffer, the editor, frames Salome along orthdox lines himself. Her various relationships are said to stem from an initial disappointment, what Lou in her autobiography calls "The Experience of God." Pfeiffer writes: "The little Louise van Salome endowed her God with so intense a reality that His -- inevitable -- failure to appear when first challenged to do so cast the pall of being abandoned by God....over this child and her entire future." Accordingly Lou's successive mentors served the substitute function. From her childhood tutor, a pastor 25 years her elder...
These letters, spanning the years 1912 to 1936, punctuate a relationship evidently more than satisfying to its protagonists, but disturbing in the extreme to the non-partisan reader, and I would hope, to the partisan as well. Freud's egoism, his supreme indifference to anyone's work or to contributions other than his own, his condescendingly terse replies to Lou's "blithe optimism," as he terms it, suggest the reasons for the defections of Freud's less willing disciples. In the face of so little reception, of the glaring silences with which most of Salome's efforts to communicate...
...that Salome, objectively speaking, poses much of one. While she initially allows herself a few mild objections to Freud's titanic pessimism, Salome's case for a better, potentially more creative human nature than Freud would assent to dwindles through the train of her letters. Freud, of course, is not the only corrosive element at work on her optimism. There was after all the war, whose effects are very much present in both sides of the correspondence. And there is the matter of aging. In this respect, the later letters offer a warmer, more gentle, and sometimes whimsical picture...
...FREUD'S ADMIRATION, however, is confined to her virtues as a woman and friend. For her psychoanalytic writings, Freud acknowledges a more delicate and feminine approach than his own -- but an acknowledgment depreciated by his several warnings against the dangers of personalism. As for Salome's work with her patients, Freud's advice is again more that of concerned friend, than of a colleague: he insists that she not overwork herself, that she charge higher fees, and finally sends her money himself to alleviate her needs--for patients, one suspects, as well as for the more basic amenities that...