Friends and Acquaintances
Lou’s habit of mixing fiction with autobiography continued with Zemek and Beer-Hofmann appearing as composites in her characters. “That Zemek was a stand-in for Beer-Hofmann in Lou’s amorous experience down to her first pregnancy inclusive emerges graphically from her subsequent fiction, beginning with five short stories evidently all written within some two years of the real-life outcome. Three take off from her excursion to Schönberg im Stubaithal: ‘Mädchenreigen’ (Row of Girls), ‘Inkognito,’ and ‘Jutta.'” The same fears return of couples loving the ideal that the person represents as opposed to the real person. The vocations, clothing, names, ethnicity, family background, beauty and prospects, send symbolic information to candidates who assess whether if there is enough of an ideal relationship that can be formed. People are looking for a catch. This is another way of basking in the light of others where one assesses oneself in the company that one keeps, but it creates a debilitating insecurity in people. “[Jutta] should never learn what it meant to be loved without being loved not to be distinguished any more from beauty, from attractiveness—to have to fight with shame.”
Her ideas about relationships kept bringing her back to herself and what was a precursor to Freud’s sublimation. “On learning about endocrine glands from Zemek, she wondered ‘whether chastity (in the full, pure sense, with no playing around or fantasy indulgence) is not a treasure house for the strength which, even sexually active and constructive, pervades the body and nervous system. Chastity may likewise help heighten all of man’s nonsexual powers even in the intellectual sphere, in hard mental labor…'” This was what Lou was looking for and how she actually lived her life. Being a creative gives purpose, if there are no children, and this was a burgeoning template for modern life where many people would find that vocation was a priority for them for finding fulfillment. Once those talents and skills are developed there is a pressure to expand them. She once told Rainer “yes, even I could say of myself that I denied myself motherhood out of such austerity and modesty.”
Another woman she met, who also had creative talents, was Helene von Klot-Heydenfeldt, “a Livonian some four years younger than herself, who ‘had written a good book, Eine Frau, after reading Tolstoi’s Kreutzer Sonata’…Unlike Frieda, Helene was of ever-warm, ever-steady affection—and, to judge by her letters, utterly charming. Lou loved her very own fortitudinous self in ‘Helene with her wonderful blend of two rare qualities: fortitude in dreaming and fortitude in living.'” Helene eventually married an architect Otto Klingenberg and took his name. She understood the attraction that people had for Lou. “‘The sun rose when Lou entered a room.’ Her silver-blond hair, her little snub nose, but above all her soft, willful mouth, so articulate and so inviting, fascinated all who met her. So great was her personal charm that her presence aroused powerful creative forces in the men who were in love with her. As one of her admirers put it: ‘Lou would form a passionate attachment to a man and nine months later the man gave birth to a book.'”
Feminism was in its stride during this time at the turn of the century and Lou naturally wanted to write about them, including Ellen Key, who she eventually met. “Ellen took to Lou right away: as she wrote Lou the next day, she loved ‘odd people.’ Lou responded uncertainly at first: she promised Ellen a novella by mail, a new review of the essays on women, even a visit to Sweden—then went about her business. Ellen, though, prodded her into corresponding and in due course won her heart. Where Lou was by character both age-old and childlike, Ellen, eleven years her senior, was strictly youthful: big-hearted and openhearted, full of humor and sans-gêne, with an ungovernable penchant for friendship and sunshine such that she was most in her element when sun-bathing nude in good company. Herself on the odd side, she closed an early letter to Lou: ‘I stroke your lovely hair and am your devoted EK.’ Their written exchanges—in which, great travelers though they both were, their relationship mostly consisted—evidence an attraction of opposites, for Ellen rambled and scrawled in a German too outrageous not to have been intentionally so.”
Lou didn’t fit neatly in feminism and friends like Ellen were also idiosyncratic. “Against stock feminism Ellen Key argued that women could not help being feminine in their highest as well as their lowest functions, but also that in emulating men they risked impairing their femininity: Lou noted the inconsistency. For Ellen Key, woman’s natural vocation was maternal, while for the other big dissenting feminist of the day, Laura Marholm, it was erotic. Lou objected to both their conceptions for connoting passivity: erotically the female is not subordinate to the male, she retorted, just as in reproduction the female is no mere passive vessel but a progenitress in her own right, who rears the embryo to boot. Similarly, both tended wrongly to ‘displace woman’s center of gravity outside of herself, be it onto the man or the child.’ And both were too schematic: real women put all theoretical femininity to shame.” Woman’s highest end for Marholm was the man, and for Ellen it was the child. For Lou, a woman’s highest end was herself, regardless of the activity she was involved in.
Feminist Hedwig Dohm struggled with how women could develop fully, and similar to Binion’s critique of Lou’s financial supports, economic independence was the only way forward. Much of what freedom is for people is financial freedom, so she felt that institutions should take up some of the child rearing and housework. Lou’s independence was too dreamy for Hedwig. “I found in Frau Lou’s feminine ideal a subtle, sublimated touch of the harem (minus the sultan, to be sure), of self-infatuation and obesity of soul: her starry-eyed sluggards resemble Narcissus in their sentimental satiety. Her ideal hits up all too hard against reality. To actualize it would call for altering all extant social relations first, so as to assure woman of a state pension sufficient for her to round out soulfully in her castle unimpeded, in age-oldest, bluest-blooded femininity. And even then: would not man be something of a woman’s slave, waiting by the sweat of his brow for the girth of the glorious shade-dispensing tree of femininity to grow to intact harmony?” The difficulty in squaring the circle is being able to self-actualize while having familial duties. There’s also a view that young life is about children and middle age can open things up for both men and women in developing other aspects of themselves. Each woman would test things out and make their choices. Lou was to continue on the path of being childless despite sharing time with Andreas, Rilke, and Zemek.
Zemek’s time with Lou was “all sorts of overlapping walks and talks,” and he talked to her about Freud’s methods and how Rainer could be helped. They travelled together like Rainer, including the southern Balkans and Montenegro. She would then depart abruptly. “Lou returned home to the news that Frieda was gravely ill. By the new year Frieda was agonizing without hope: she died on March 10, 1909. All that winter long Lou argued spirit survival to her by mail—or rather release from the body (‘for we ‘are’ not bodies, but only ‘have’ bodies’) into a ‘finer corporeality. The process we call life is a death process and vice versa too,’ she asserted on the authority of ‘physics, chemistry, and the like,’ adding: ‘Truly as God lives, it is so.’ In her loveliest such letter she protested that, though the crest follows the pit of the wave for sure, ‘this does not console me for your being tormented now, now, now.’ Her death-bedside religion amounted to an amalgam of the ancient Egyptian doctrine of the somatic soul, the Socratic doctrine of the body as a prison, and Spinoza’s pantheism—with some science on the side. It was her esoteric faith, disguised by her as diarist and frowned upon by her as essayist.” She also speculated with Ellen Key on ways of committing suicide, possibly because of her experience of Frieda’s death. Lou wanted control over the dying process, and “just because her life was ‘fond rapture,’ its ‘every hour a jubilation,’ she deserved to dispose of it with serenity when the time came.”
The men that loved Lou would eventually have to love from afar, like old friends, for her to maintain her independence. Zemek was trying to live with Lou in his mother’s house, but it was considered bigamy by her and shameful. “She loved Zemek and wished with all her heart that he would find happiness. But she was sure he could not find it with Lou. No matter what Lou’s circumstances were, she was still a married woman and it was wrong for her to carry on as she did. It was not only socially wrong, old Mrs. Pineles found it morally reprehensible. If at first she had acquiesced in it, she had done so for her son’s sake, but she resented his bringing Lou to live with them in Oberwaltersdorf. She resented being made a party to the affair. She could not understand why her daughter [Broncia] encouraged it. Broncia was a happily married woman. She should realize that Lou’s behavior was an affront to her sex.”
Rée’s death also confirmed it for the mother that this arrangement was intolerable and she would not want a repeat of that. “There was no room for Lou under her roof. She confronted her daughter with an ultimatum. Broncia was to tell Lou that she must leave Oberwaltersdorf within a week. At this point Zemek decided to go to Berlin, tell Andreas what had happened and ask for Lou’s divorce. He wanted to marry her. It was the only way to reconcile his family and to protect Lou’s and his own reputation.” Zemek wanted to confront Andreas, but Lou was scared of his temper and decided that she should be childless, or for at least as long as Andreas was alive. This is when the rumors arose of an abortion, as well as an accident where she fell underneath an apple tree causing a miscarriage instead. “The crisis passed but it left its mark on both Lou and Pineles. It forced Pineles to accept the insolubility of Lou’s bond to Andreas and meant that he had to bury his hopes of making her his legitimate wife, although he continued to live with her off and on for a number of years. And it made Lou realize that the joys of motherhood were not for her…She [also] knew that she was not an artist and that she found no real fulfillment in writing. One had to learn the art of living, she thought, and that meant involvement in the lives of others. Perhaps that was where her talents lay. She had tried to create fictional characters, puppets fed on her own life’s blood. But that had been a makeshift. Life was far more interesting, wonderful and exciting than fiction. She would turn more and more to study her own singular life and the lives of people around her. It was more rewarding to probe their problems and perhaps help solve them than to make paper dolls.” She was always interested in questions about human fate. “What made them act as they did? What forces pulled them up or tore them asunder?” Her writing would continue on a psychological path.
Die Erotik
As she starts in her book on the erotic, there is a disclaimer on how subjective mental impressions are compared to generalizations that are applicable to a great number of people and what readers expect of any self-help book. “This split, is even more apparent when it comes to the problem of eroticism, in that, more than any other problem, the erotic seems to resist immediate definition, suspended as it is between the physical and the spiritual.” Lou’s method is to try to be more exact and trace connections between different experiences of desire so as to expand understanding to include as much as possible. “Just as in that horizon line, which retreats from us step by step, ‘heaven and earth’ nevertheless merge continually into each other to form a single image: the primeval optical illusion and, at the same time, the ultimate symbol.” Her way of investigating sexuality presages Freud’s libido, or craving. “It is only in this way that the deeper essence and action of sexuality—which, like hunger, thirst or any other manifestation of bodily life, is a type of physical need—become accessible to insight.” Like Freud’s sublimation, Lou feels that fulfillment in projects is the pathway towards independence for women.
As humans develop intellectually more and more, there’s a risk of over intellectualizing while at the same time developing more independence. Sexual development is also something that can find a mismatch with the mind, and repeatedly make wrong object choices. “It is very rare that our physiological maturity coincides with equally exceptional psychical states—and almost as rare, moreover, that either of them coincide with maturity of intelligence and character in a man intending a lasting union with another being.” Mismatches in ideals happen continually when people compare the looks of the person with their romantic ideals. The educational aspects of coupling and utilitarian home economics can also conflict with emotional attachments. This is why people have different romantic profiles. Some are more somatic and some are more intellectual.
Even more challenging with relationships is the need for recreating the original excitement of first love. With repetition, there’s a common boredom that tempts partners to cheat. “However, the foundations upon which this ascending evolution of love takes place are constantly shifting: instead of something that permanently retains both its nature and its value, it is governed by that law of all animal existence which holds that the intensity of excitement diminishes with each repetition. The need to choose both the erotic object and the moment of love—so evident a proof of a higher love—is paid for by the exhaustion that is soon aroused by what was previously so violently desired, and therefore by the desire for the never repeated, for the undiminished force of excitement: the desire for change. It can be said that the natural erotic life, in all its forms and perhaps above all in its most clearly individuated forms, is based on the principle of infidelity.” In response to those who see the danger of unrestrained infidelity, there’s a comfort in habit and safety in familiarity, hence the word family, that can bring up a competitive desire for peace of mind and serenity. It is also countered with the love for a child and all the new ways of organizing life in the social sphere. Family activities that are unrelated to intense sexual release, provide some of the variety that is required so that sexuality is not overindulged in. This way, when there is a strong pent up sexual desire, the appreciation is stronger and longer lasting. Sublimation, doesn’t have to be an all or nothing gambit where people pursue hobbies at the expense of relationships, and partners don’t have to be constantly awaiting beck and call like a servant, so as to prevent tolerance and boredom from arising.
The consequence of having not enough variety in life is the endless need for grooming and entertainment to prevent relationships from ending. “It is not unusual for the behavior of lovers, in their relations, to express something of the vague intuition that they must only show themselves to the other transfigured, veiled, and that they must—without the slightest pretence or intention—conform, as if under a spell, to their dream image. The fact is that certain things, the most beautiful things, can, as it were, live only in stylized form, and not purely realistically, in the fullness of their being, as if that fantastically poetic exuberance could only be apprehended in a more controlled form.” Love can also turn into a nostalgic memory, as found in popular love songs, and create a fake golden age that one always wants to return to. Partners can even create myths about their lovers so as to accentuate the positive and try to leave some mystery. “That is why lovers are right to fear that knowing each other too well will put an end to the rapture of love; that is why every true rapture begins with a sort of creative jolt that unsettles both the senses and the mind. Which is why, however absorbed lovers are by one another, there is so little desire to know who the other ‘really is,’ and why, even if the reality of the other greatly exceeds expectations, to the extent that the union is in every way reinforced and deepened, there is that intense disappointment which sometimes comes from no longer having enough space to maintain a creative, poetic, ‘playful’ relation.”
For Lou, artistic intuition is prey to the boredom and stress of relationships in that inspiration can only appear when it does. One has to wait for the craving to arise. Offspring are the result of the sexual act and artistic intuitions lead to offspring in the form of the artistic work. Both forms of love create values that guide our lives through organizing principles to facilitate inspiration. The confrontation between the world and the self in the consciousness necessitates the need for advancement and learning. “It progresses until such undoubtedly important opposites of being have been dominated, until they are assimilated into a unity so fertile that it is as if the coming into being of the world and the birth of the self were being relived, re-experienced—which alone gives our creations their core of autonomous life, instead of merely a derivative pseudo-existence and superficial being.”
Relationships connect or founder on common values that agree on wisdom that promises to bring those feelings of “creation, adoration, and joy.” These values can then extend to communities in the form of philosophy and religion. Our lives also take on the sense of birth in death in that we have peaks of mastery and unity with the environment. Like an offspring that goes on after us, our contributions to society can be a form of childbirth and career peaks go beyond us like a form of immortality in great works. Religion becomes so important because it houses all the important feelings connected to situations that are life and death for us. Religion is about sexuality and adaptation to life and therefore it requires codes and rituals that promise to increase harmony and creativity in one’s life. The struggle with art and religion is to making idealistic and ecstatic images come to life in the physical realm, with all their imperfections. This struggle can lead to idealistic stubbornness and a need to create a fantastical world to live in as rejection of the real. The real can also look more inanimate compared to ideals and there’s always a need for new creations and change to avoid harkening back to old thoughts and inspirations.
“For this reason, the illusory nature of mental images is not in itself a fatal defect, either for religion, or for eroticism, but rather confirms their vitality. With this distinction: that the exuberance of lovers, with its physiological causes, in a way anticipates the full experience of the mind, by projecting the images that it begets: bizarre, funny, touching, edifying, a set of confusing and fleeting reflections;—while the believer, wishing to give form to an extreme experience of the mind, is obliged to draw from that which is less spiritualized, and therefore never grasps anything other than a past that is permanently lost: in truth, a massive, granite world, projected into a fatally petrified material by the immense vitality of internal impetus! And, for this very reason, a permanent asylum for the use of those who seek shelter and protection from the tribulations of existence. For it is true that every religion possesses the following two characteristics: it is one thing for the ardor of the person who lives it and another for the misery of the person who believes in it, different when it serves as an asylum than when it serves as a crutch.”
No matter the angle of attack, there’s only one angle left, which is to accept reality as it is. “Here, however, is the great lesson that emerges, both for religious experience and for erotic experience: that at this point their path must deviate to return to life itself. That, for the living being, the other path, that which leads to intellectual proofs and confirmations, becomes, after a short distance, a cul-de-sac, inexorably barred, since only life can totally reflect life. Which implies, for religious behavior, an adhesion without limit to everything that is—for what could exist that does not become for religion a throne and a stepping stone, as is the universe for God? For love, this implies that it should find its fulfillment in social life.”
Life is so full of opposites and it requires balancing so as to continue self-preservation, but not at the expense of social connection, which also has its risks. “Eroticism occupies an intermediate position between the two great categories of feeling: egoism and altruism. Or to put it less equivocally, on the one hand, the shrinking, the contraction of our individual will to the point of secession, hostility; on the other hand, the dilation by which the Other, that which is outside, is incorporated as if it were a part of the self. Over time, the two categories themselves modify their reciprocal positions, and the esteem in which human beings hold them and the manner in which they settle their differences, determines the specific character of an époque. Each of the groups always needs to be completed by the other; every man participates in both, and, if he gives himself too exclusively to one, can only run the gravest of risks, for in order to give oneself one must be able to possess oneself, and in order to possess one must first be able to receive from things and from people that which cannot be acquired by force, that which can only be accepted as a gift, with an open soul. These two opposed principles are in fact—although superficially their incompatibilities would seem to keep them eternally separate—united, at their roots, by the most profound solidarity, a mutual interaction: ‘I want to be everything!,’ prodigality of being, and ‘I want to have everything!,’ insatiable greed, contain, elevated to the level of a supreme desire for communion with the Whole, the same meaning.” Here we have the inspiration for Freud’s To Be or To Have, with the former loosely connected with executive masculinity, and the latter with supportive femininity. Then you have to accept that both men and women have struggles between those two impulses inside themselves and a need to balance them in a way that feels ego syntonic with individual goals.
Psychoanalysis – Sigmund Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gvgq7-psychoanalysis-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html
We all have individual desires, and each person has to help the other achieve their goals, and as those goals match up well or not, so goes the relationship. The inspiration, values, and religion can take us out of the animal world because of the complexity of the rituals to create that feeling of oneness and a lack of separation. Separation and individuality points towards individual death. Oneness hints at divine help and energy that came before us and goes beyond us. Contributions with children and or works of art are a form of immortality and ways to be to create products for others to have and therefore connect with the wider population in trade. Focusing on compatibility, as opposed to more superficial judgments, leads to better object choices. Relationships become more about loving activities as opposed to possession. Possession can have a form of stasis and boredom, and a lack of appreciation can take for granted harmonies that cannot be found with others, so cheating has a price in that a person may be imagining and projecting goals into people who are not compatible. The freshness of long-term relationships comes from the creation of new goals. Different partners have different skills and can fill in each other’s gaps. Religions then provide guidance when people still feel alone in a crowd of disharmony. In the end, when our desires conflict with the goals of others we have to take a second look instead of being totally unrepressed. Some desires are not thought through enough to prevent feelings of regret.
U2 | Book of your heart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0xui8-Zsws
U2 & Kygo – You’re The Best Thing About Me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4TvIu1Q5pk
Landlady – U2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RdjtnQpPfk
U2 – Country Mile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVW-xthPZSE
She DESTROYS 24-YEAR Marriage Because She Was Bored, Ends Up REGRETTING: https://youtu.be/aH6LskokNA4?si=gDb4suhA1u1pwGdo
Motherhood with the love of the child is the continuance of romantic love but in service of childhood development. Love becomes a form of therapy and support for self-esteem. “Maternal love in itself is nothing but a sort of brooding instinct, an extended procreation, one might say, nothing but a warmth directed to and enveloping the seed, a warmth that enables its virtualities to be realized, which interprets the seed as a promise—a promise that the woman makes to herself in the seed. It is to this end that her effort of idealization is as closely and as authentically related to the creative act as its original and supreme meaning requires; to this end that acts and prayers are contained even in the little endearments with which she caresses her child in order to encourage him, day by day, to enter evermore deeply into life.” There are illusions allowed in this love with all the ideals, hopes and dreams, just like when projecting onto a partner when one is feeling more intensity. You see beyond the flaws of the person and enhance their potentials. In later psychoanalysis, that kind of love becomes the most desirable thing beyond worldly attainments. “In all those ideal images that she projects upon him, with, it would seem, simultaneously so much arrogance and so much humility, all she does is to give him access to that immense warmth in which the individual, if he has but once tasted its repose, finds the ending of his original solitude, as if he were once again enclosed within that world of motherhood which surrounded him before he came into being…Thus, for a few moments, it is somewhat as if she were restoring him to the center of the world, in his value as a unique being which, being given to every man, cannot for that very reason be considered the prerogative of any individual, and which nevertheless survives in every creature, in the form of that feeling that only a love ‘with all her heart and all her strength’ can do justice to the smallest of beings. She thus exercises for him, by so loving him, that form of higher justice, alongside the justice based on social or practical considerations—but without harming anyone, because hers is the only sky that suits him, one that for others would be nothing more than a little patch of blue above the terrestrial sphere.”
Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 4: https://rumble.com/v4qswdt-object-relations-melanie-klein-pt.-4.html
Lou also compares the similarity of the Madonna and the whore in that sexuality has an element of control and how prized a woman’s love is. There is a need for control of the power to create a new generation, and also a need control to gain access to sexual pleasure. Here the control isn’t totally despotic because men are under pressure to be providers and therefore have a need to sublimate their sexual desires into work so as to become more attractive to women in the first place. It also leads to women not developing that side of themselves to specialize in love making of various kinds beyond the overt. Masculinity and femininity achieve oneness by duality, specialization, and cooperation. She also saw that the oneness and completeness of artistic works often come from bisexuality readily observed in artists where engendering appears in the works so as to appear holistic and satisfy varieties of audiences trying to identify themselves in those works. Those who want to develop all aspects of themselves can then find inner conflict in that their masculinity and femininity doesn’t achieve specialization leading to disharmonies with people who expect more distinctiveness and complementariness. This is why Lou determines that humans are less monogamous than other animals precisely because of this inner conflict.
The boredom experienced by those who need constant intensity requires intellectual capacities to sublimate, and failures to do so lead to ruination when goals turn into disharmony and conflict, yet when goals are more successful, Lou feels that greatness can be achieved. “Quite the opposite happens to the intellect when it sublimates sex: here, as it becomes conscious of itself, it pushes to the extreme the intensification of an evermore animate mental life, first imprinting thereon its own spiritual criteria, as yet adapted to no place and leading to illusions. As for actual behavior, such sublimation gives rise to a considerable frivolity of judgment. For, in fact, the sexual instincts are subject to the same laws of desire and satiety, of excitement diminished by repetition, and of the resulting need for change, as the whole sphere of animal life. It is no objection that all this is altered by the individuation and refinement of the instincts: it is only the sequence of emotions that are individuated and refined. While in the past, it was easy for a husband on his travels to find a substitute wife, being content with the fact that she belonged to the same category as his own: dark or blonde, thin or fat; nowadays we make the most meticulous distinctions, but in compensation, we—or at least a part of us—are much more often ‘on our travels,’ absent, solitary, seeking! It is precisely this differentiation that revives the need for so many different sensations, a variety of moments and beings, and which therefore sometimes increases, sometimes attenuates the urgency of variety. So let us be ready to concede to eroticism that which makes it beautiful and perilous! The life of erotic desires, which moves rapidly, which quickly find fulfillment, has by natural necessity nothing to do with duration, even where it has been enriched, reinforced, refined by the intelligence and by the soul in a festival of the entire being; the natural necessity is that it should imagine on every new occasion that it will never have to awake from that festival. And it this conviction alone that ennobles its frivolity, that can, in some cases, even make it a companion to greatness.”
Predicting Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow, Lou cherishes these moments of being “in the zone,” but she’s talking about situations that naturally fall into concentration as opposed to active development of focus, which makes these states too unreliable and open to disappointment. It’s reliant on an unconscious to arise these inspirations and a hope that they become regular occurrences. Those rare states also get put on a pedestal and cause resistance in the mind for normal states of being. “States of mind that greatly exceed the average intensity of mental life extinguish the awareness of time, the sense of continuing possibilities, by virtue of their power of harmonious and intense concentration; it is precisely such states—those that, more than others, create a sudden conflagration by their very violence and are therefore the most transitory—which are for this very reason as if ringed with deepest eternity—and it is only this inseparable coloring, acting almost mystically beneath all the other contents of consciousness, which makes their happiness seem blessed, and their suffering seem tragic. Two beings who seriously believe in this high eternity in the transitory, who take it as the sole criterion for their actions and behavior, who wish for no other fidelity than the blessedness that they find in one another, are living for a time-honored folly—although it is often as humanly beautiful as many long and authentic fidelities motivated, perhaps unknowingly, solely by a fear of loss or a fear of life, by greed or weakness of the soul. However much they exhibit the colors of their ardor, they can do no more than sketch the faint outlines of love, but more profound virtuosity and perfection may be expressed in this half-failure than by many a lavishly detailed painting of existence. In such cases, one might even say that around the genuine frivolity of love, often attracted by its self-confident audacity, may crystallize every grandeur, every spirit of tenderness and sincerity—which now has only one fear: that it may violate its own ethic, for all that is outside it is beneath it.”
How to gain Flow in 7 steps: https://rumble.com/v1gvked-how-to-gain-flow-in-7-steps.html
The Jhanas: https://rumble.com/v1gqznl-the-jhanas.html
Even worse than failure to achieve goals is the unexpected disappointment that follows achievement. That sense of immortality that is unconsciously motivating goal seeking keeps finding mortality everywhere. “However, it is understandable how humans in the grip of the rapture of love, and, with them, those who are hypersensitive in any way, can nevertheless experience contact with external life as a disappointment; this is true not only when they see a failure of their dreams in life, but also when they succeed, for the simple reason that they are thereby forced to come to grips with the coarseness of matter itself. For the very fact of their coming to life is like the destruction of what they were…”
Goals then take on a coloring where a sense of duty and contribution comes to the forefront to add meaning and reduce the tendency to hedonism. Love can also become more deliberate as a way to increase the sense of flow by applying it in sub-goals that make up the complete goal. “For the mind, which itself had elevated love from pure sexual instinct to a festival and splendor of the soul, also remains loyal when it incorporates it into its everyday labor: the most remote from love of all its acts, but the only agent of its desires that it can find. And its protector also: for the fidelity that it retains, which is no longer that unique, exaggerated good, is found, in compensation, to be bound to all the fidelities required by the conduct of life, and also because when it is violated, it is no longer love alone that is offended: one damages that living coexistence which two beings have created together, and one commits a sort of offence against a life in the seed.” She continues to look at sublimation as a way to making partnered life more long-lasting with gardening metaphors, along with “blooming” sensations, “rooted” habits, to keep the plants alive.
The sense of love in a relationship can take on more roles than just an intimate partner. “To be a spouse to one another can mean everything at the same time: lovers, brother and sister, refuges, goals, fences, judges, angels, friends, children, and more: to have the right to stand in each other’s presence in all the nakedness and all the misery of creaturehood.” Appreciation can also be aroused by cultivating a sense of wonder of existence. “For all life exists only as miracle that constantly renounces its miraculousness.”
The Presocratics: Heraclitus: https://rumble.com/v1gst93-the-presocratics-heraclitus.html
In summation, Lou wants the erotic exploration, including libido’s sublimated aspects, to not just be an intellectual exercise as the cul-de-sac that she described above. “These very words, with their inevitably superficial grasp on reality, can only grope in pursuit of a psychical process, as if it were the coarsest of external objects, hoping that, despite all, something of what this process contains may be perceived, symbolically, behind them.”
Lou’s move towards psychology led her to meet a psychotherapist through a friendship. “Lou left with a distant cousin of Ellen Key’s, the psychotherapist Poul Bjerre, who took her to a psychoanalytical congress in Weimar for three days beginning September 21, 1911. He had briefed her on the subject beforehand: evidently it sounded all new to her. Through him she made Freud’s acquaintance…’Psychoanalysis—with ever increasing admiration for Freud’s unreservedness, rectitude, objectivity. I am getting deeper into it than through Bjerre, see where he stops short. If one avoids, surmounts that, founts gush up.’ Lou continued studying psychoanalysis at home most of 1912 with few diversions. One such was a springtime stay in Berlin during which she impressed Freud’s disciple Karl Abraham with her uniquely ‘deep and subtle understanding of analysis.'”
Frau Lou: Nietzsche’s Wayward Disciple – Rudolph Binion: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780691618609/
The Erotic – Lou Andreas-Salomé: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781412853842/
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/