The Power of Culture and Family
Some aspects of personality are inborn but a good portion of what a person becomes has to do with the family, culture, and time that one is born in. Because culture can be refined with the advent of mass market books, it takes a lot of reading to absorb a renaissance depth of influence to maximize a cultural environment in one lifetime. Who did you meet, and how did you imitate them? How did you also influence them? A lot culture is also built up from contributions from our ancestors.
Born in 1861, Lou von Salomé was from a very distinctive heritage going back to the French Huguenots, through Baltic Germany, Denmark, to the white summer nights of St. Petersburg. With cultural self-determination and a roaming spirit, Frau Lou, as she later liked to be called, roamed the intellectual salons of Europe through the end of the 1800s into the early 20th century, bumping into many notable people.
In Binion’s Frau Lou: Nietzsche’s wayward disciple, the author has the job of trying to analyze the sources to get at the likely truth of any of Lou’s encounters. Her generation was at an intersection between Western Enlightenment and Romanticism. Historical novels straddled realism and fantasy and often the romantic spirit was chosen instead because fantasy is usually more enjoyable than reality. Everyone has a story of their own lives, and there’s always a wish that it could be better, or at least the story could be told in a better way.
Quoting Nietzsche’s idea of redemption by “transforming every ‘so it was’ into a ‘so did I wish it,'” there was a struggle at that time, which still continues today, after the impact of Darwin, to reconcile a Christian upbringing with a full emotional human life. There’s always a need to alter the history to make it above reproach next to the dawning exploration at that time for authentic human impulses, and the messy romantic entanglements that ensued. The pressure of human passion against Christian harmony led to internal conflicts in all who lived at that time. In reality, answers could only come from a balanced and nuanced mixture between the two forces. One needs enough Christian awareness of scandal, entanglements, and miry situations to see how letting go can aid in human freedom, but a renunciate life of a priest is an ideal that doesn’t allow for sexual exploration, let alone the freedom to satisfy a certain array of desires that are blameless to those who recognize what is fully human. The demarcation between the religious class and the laity includes uneasy judgments. The religious class see the quagmires that the laity get caught in with their ridiculous desires, and petty jealousies, while at the same time the laity realize the necessity of sex and procreation for the continuance of the human race. There’s a judgment towards the religious class that they may harbor intense envy and low self-esteem behind their robes and ritual distractions. Being born in these generations led to experiences of hypocrisy, self-judgment, a need for redemption, and a feeling of being homeless internally, as well as externally as more people became well travelled.
Lou’s homeless and homesick milieu of St. Petersburg had its charms due to its ex-patriate nature and variety. “In 1844 the Wilms’ daughter, Louise, then twenty-one, married Gustav Ludwig Salomé, aged thirty-seven. Gustav who, after a military schooling in Petersburg, distinguished himself at twenty-four for valor in storming Warsaw. He soon rose to general, then turned state official. Louise was handsome, high-strung, and chilly. Gustav, still handsomer, was a suave and affectionate tyrant. The two were as one in their pietism. Pietism in fact (French, Dutch, German, English) bound the whole foreign colony of Petersburg together as a ‘city unto itself’…The Salomés moved seasonally between the General Staff Building (a majestic multiple dwelling across from the Winter Palace) and a private estate in nearby Peterhof (the Czar’s summer residence), with time out for trips [out] West. Seconded by a multinational liveried staff of domestics complete with French governess and Russian nurse, they raised four children under the scrutiny of an Evangelical god akin to Gustav: stern, with grace in reserve.”
Lou was the fourth child and only daughter. She grew up in a male dominated environment where male punishment led her to develop masochistic desires. “Her purest joy was pain at [her father’s] hands: she would cry or soil herself or otherwise misbehave so as to be spanked by him. She made excuses for him: he could spare little time from his high charges, and her mother saw to it that he spared still less affection…On embracing her once, Lou later recollected, he burnt her with a cigarette. She howled, he covered her with kisses, and the sight of ‘honest-to-goodness tears in his steel-blue eyes’ struck her dumb with delight. Fictionally she commented: ‘I would now gladly let my arm be burnt off if only he would kiss me that way again.’ Be the story true or false, the moral is the same.”
Typical of masochistic situations, the love for abuse has its limits mixed with desire for escape from an age of dependence on parents. “First she withdrew into a solitary playworld laid out alternatively on the Peterhof lawn or beneath the grand piano in the Petersburg salon.” Her father would appear tall and god-like, while having varieties of toys in his pockets. She was able to create a small world with him as “mistress over the whole visible world.” That’s the key in parenting in that what is not visible becomes something to challenge the child as she grows, and what is visible from an early age can have far reaching influences.
Far from living a life of a Russian peasant, Lou’s “rejection of parental standards was [her father’s]: he was a god who neither bids nor forbids, only condones.’ Thus patronized, she came to be at home in make-believe.” Make believe at the time of childhood is expected but the lines can blur between it and reality, and there’s a temptation to gaslight to control the perceptions of others, and to gain the feelings in reality that one longed to feel in fantasy, much like an actor in a play. Condoning can only go so far, and a knowing reader can notice the seeds of a narcissistic upbringing. “One of her later storybook accounts of her childhood reads: ‘When lying was in order—something no one and hence she alone could know—she went about it eagerly.’ Indeed, she was thrashed for it again and again. But her father’s rod was one of the few hard facts with whose hardness she had no quarrel; and if his strokes now felt punitive rather than voluptuous, she now had a father-god only too willing to commiserate over the sore spot.”
Idealization took over her mind where fantasy life competed with real events, and eventually the beautiful fantasy has to be protected from insipid reality. All the people in her life could have different life directions and fates in her imagination as she sussed out different combinations. Lou’s gradual expansion of her world began including her siblings. Eugene, three years her senior, was her main playmate. Roba and Sasha were nine and twelve years her senior and left home by the time Lou was ten, and therefore were more remote to her. This reinforced her need to resort to fantasy, much like many novelists, who need to fill in the gaps of what they are missing in life with their fiction. Lou’s way of perceiving led to a psychosis where her determination towards life remained ambivalent. “There were thenceforth two moments to her singular evening prayers: the moment of fact and the moment of fancy. Distinct, successive moments at first, the two eventually merged to the effect that she would recast her experiences even while scrupulously respecting their material constituents. She thus acquired a phenomenal grasp of reality in the service of a deep antagonism toward it—or in fact alienation from it, for her grudging acknowledgment of reality lacked all elementary inner conviction.’ She would stalk, shadow, and scrutinize the same Petersburg strangers day after day, intent on descrying the veriest truth about them even while concocting fates for them.”
Similar to how psychosis patients, including varieties of narcissism, try to make the world what they want it to be, there’s a need to fasten real details to the make-believe stories so they become tantalizingly closer and easier to recount in conversation, and logically put together, so as to be believable to others, and therefore most importantly, garner the pleasure of attention. The pleasure of course is that the storyteller is living in a more interesting world than in reality. Responses of admiration, warmth and inclusion then follow. Rejection must be avoided. The fictitious events and people then put on the clothing of reality with stretched metaphors. Then when you add the environment of St. Petersburg, including the class separations existing at the time, and the need to put yourself out there in the best light, by using stretched metaphors, lying by omission, and filling in gaps, it becomes a way of socializing successfully. “She could no longer believe in her personages except by virtue of their foothold in the ‘first world’—of ‘that fragment of reality through which I held firmly to sights actually seen’…Accordingly she reasoned that [those personages] followed her to Peterhof for the summer in the guise of flowers brought by Petersburg vendors—though again, ‘the imaginary people thereby grew only the more genuine, ‘real,’ whereas a shadow of suspicion fell upon the plants.'”
With her childhood free time “she would spend hours playing with masks before the mirror and mimicking others so as to become solid like them.” Her method of perceiving the world would include a father idealization, mixed with the need to embellish the people and world around her. Some advantages of this would be her improved storytelling as she envisioned different ways of living, even if those visions could conflict with one another. Predictable as it was, it isn’t so for the child who is discovering the world always anew before adulthood. Because reality is independent of the imagination, details that burst the imaginary bubble lead to disappointment and devaluation. “Hitherto latent, her resentment of [her fantasy father’s] immateriality now burst into the open, there to vie with her affection for him.”
As Lou grew up, the realistic details became more and more disappointing as her belief in a God vanished leaving her “self-abandoned, shut out of house and home.” She looked at her parents anew and confided in them more like human authorities with similar experiences of growing up. Without him “she had to bear alone the ‘whole earthly burden’ of spinning out the ‘numberless fates.'”
Lou stayed mostly to herself in adolescence. The few acquaintances and friends she had, played out their fates as she looked from afar. “Her one confidante her own age was her cousin Emma, who would daydream with her about true love. A ‘pert’ flouter of Petersburg-German mores, Emma opted for a Russian love life—only to fall in love with [Eugene], then marry a German lovelessly, whereupon her ‘life-line…sank into the banal.'” Lou’s aunt Caro identified with her and befriended her. Much to the chagrin of men who wonder “what are these women gossiping about?” where matriarch role models are powerful influences for the younger generation of girls. This influence was decisive in setting Lou on Caro’s philosophical path. “In Caro’s vocabulary, ‘freedom’ meant acting out of deep ‘unconscious’ ‘needs’ governing the mind and will. A woman’s innermost need was to ‘snuggle up’ to someone both physically and mentally. The rationale of mind, however, was to ‘stand alone.’ Thus a woman had to choose between ‘freedom’ and ‘independence’—between fulfilling her innermost need and having a mind of her own. A capable woman would choose ‘independence’ unless ‘confronted by a whole man’ so masterful and intelligent that to submit to him would mean not to ‘bow down and surrender’ but the opposite—in which case she would suffer in proportion to her strength of mind before accepting her ‘destiny’ and settling into ‘the sweetness of peace, of leaning on him and looking up to him.’ ‘Independence’ had won out with Caro, who felt ‘often drawn afar. I have such a sense of unfulfillment,’ she told [Lou], ‘that at times it drives me wild. Yet I am so old already. At my age others grow peaceful, but in me the wildness will not abate.'”
When Lou’s father died, her Oedipus hatred of her rival mother led her back to religion. Disappointed in Christian dogma and sectarian clashes between denominations Lou had “a Lutheran demand for direct access to a more personal god…’Often we suffer most for want of what we have no right to possess.'” When every sect wants to possess Jesus in their own way, “then it is most reasonable to belong to no sect. Why purposely put on distorting glasses when one—thank God!—has his two good eyes and his human reason?” Caro visited the family at the funeral, and later Lou in return, took council with her in Berlin. “That summer [Lou] opened her heart to Caro about God and her loneliness. Caro saw to the root of her malaise: [Lou] wanted her god here and now as well as on high and in eternity. Caro also saw which way the solution lay. She advised Lou to go hear a sermon by a preacher new to Petersburg: Henrik Gillot.”
Spiritual Exploration
For the people who tried the regular way of following Christianity in big tent denominations, and were disappointed, the pulpits filled with those who where more radical. In Gillot’s example, Christianity has to be brought to the mortal realm. Lou immediately confided her problems to him with her home life, failings at school, and loneliness. In return, he demanded that she confide in him her fantasies, and outside of his office she was made to study. “He meant also to separate fact from fancy on her agenda, and to tax her intellectually for admission to fairyland.” Despite a lot of resistance she surrendered to his tutelage. “He fast turned her into an impassioned student of religion and philosophy after his own manner. He also taught her to do tight [summaries] of whatever she read—and let her write diaries for his [criticism]. She read herself wan for him by daylight and candlelight. She learned Dutch so as to use his own copy of Kant. Belonging to him altogether, she ‘almost devoutly’ belonged to Spinoza, his own favorite, who was similarly a Dutch man of God—and through Spinoza to Spinoza’s god, in whom inner and outer experience converged like her own first and second worlds, and who, like her god of the Calvary, did not love back. ‘By its very meaning,’ she later remarked, ‘Spinozistic love of God, with God not loving in return, betrays a prodigiously dreamed union’—at the time, hers with Gillot.” An unattainable role model becomes the most desirable because one wants what one cannot get. In the possession of the idol, disappointment ensues.
Lou wanted to be confirmed by Gillot in Holland and Caro thought that her mother should be supportive of this. Caro mediated with Lou’s mother and the response was skepticism. “You maintain that [Lou] feels sorry for me; I do not believe it;…you beg me to be loving toward her, but how is that possible toward someone so headstrong who always wants only her own way in everything? A wall has been raised between us; calm discussion is impossible given her vehemence, which she directs mainly at me…Her character has also been turned onto crooked paths, much through alien influence.” Despite her doubt, Lou’s mother eventually agreed to the arrangement. Caro also had some reservations and began to worry that Lou was going to overwork herself. Lou was mentally strained from the work but “gradually, Gillot did bring her interest round from his subjects as his to his subjects as such, then finally as hers: the following winter found her preparing to study comparative religion at the University of Zurich after her confirmation. Meanwhile, even as she was idealizing Gillot—unknowingly ‘creating him for myself’ in the image of her childhood god, and ‘by the same method’ at that—she suddenly realized that she had created his divine prototype long before. She forthwith took her initial ‘god-creation’ for the pure type of all ‘god-creations.’ Her religiosity went undiminished, since she was unable to discern the father-phantom haunting it from the first. She afterwards noted: ‘Disbelief struck my heart lightninglike—or rather my reason, which compelled my heart to give up the faith to which it clung with childlike ardor.’ But the renunciation never went that deep even after [studying] in Rongas, where her heart prompted a supplication in verse to the omnipresent god to show her where to find him again.’ This supplication bespoke the nostalgia for narcissism that was hers at the very height of her Gillot romance—a nostalgia already manifest in her ‘longing for solitude and peace’ while planning her summer’s studies beside Gillot.”
Still stuck in a father complex, Gillot was now the replacement, but before that “she needed first to establish herself as his virtual daughter-wife—all else and others be damned. Such was [that] the ‘instinctual must not [be] amenable to reason’ of her Gillot days, later dignified by her variously as an inner summons to knowledge or freedom or integrity.” What Lou would eventually learn again and again, was that the intellect is not completely without lust. “There is no avenue from sensual passion to an intellectual meeting of minds—but many avenues from the latter to the former…Gillot lent her encouragement. He embraced her freely, called her ‘my girl,’ took fondest pains with her. She caught an ‘undertone’ of restrained erotism in his conversation with her, and gave Caro to understand that ‘a conflict of feelings’ was ‘raging within him.'”
From Binion’s research he felt that the interests were mutual, whereas Lou was disappointed in Gillot, a married man of religion, when he proposed marriage to her. “At length, overstrained and overwrought, she recoiled before what she all at once took to be his low designs on her behind his ecclesiastical front. Actually she recoiled before her own designs on him. All reality briefly ‘sank back into the unreal.'” There’s always a difficulty in religious situations, or any situations involving professions, where an unconscious sexual connection is made between an authority and a disciple. But when the idealist finds human weakness, and that the God bleeds, there’s a need to find a new God. What is not seen in this pathology is the need to scaffold self-esteem by basking in the glow of others, and there’s also a habit being built up to worship an internal god-image that becomes the only trustworthy reference point in a world of flawed mortal beings, and this appears to others as snobbery. “There was a regressive motive to Lou’s insistence on being confirmed by Gillot: she would be restored to the holy spirit by its surrogate. There was also a [marital] symbolism to it, with Gillot himself as that holy spirit. But above all, as it turned out, there was her most progressive variety of narcissism.” She saw that she was idealizing Gillot and witnessed him transform “from a god to his priest, to him who consecrated me unto everything high and beautiful toward which I was striving.” She realized that she couldn’t rely on others like she thought and became “aware that I wished, and ought, to live for it alone, without him…Lou had become one with her father-god [through self-divination] at long last—nearly all of an instant, and more or less definitively.”
Narcissist Needs You to Fail Him, Let Go – Prof. Sam Vaknin: https://youtu.be/-bF2NyJ-ouI?si=91XWaw8dPIasyOCv
Despite her disappointment, it led her back to herself and a sense of life-affirmation. She had also learned some skills from Gillot. “Her ego’s crucial new assets were Gillot’s ethic of self-regard and his rationalistic bent. She turned each to extremest account. Of the first she made a sacred egoism—a licence to affirm herself before the world at large, even against it if need be. The second she applied to comprehending the world’s purposes in basic accord with her own. She was to theorize with a passion, continually and sublimely: in the whole history of thought there are few men and no women to match her on these counts. Her interest went first, like Gillot’s, to religion and philosophy; then behind these to psychology, and beside them to science and art, but never away from them for long.” Binion analyzed Lou as behaving afterwards as playing roles that appeared in her earlier experiences with all the people she met thereafter. She would learn from authoritative people, take their ideas, find flaws, reject their advances, and move on. “No less vital than Gillot’s legacy, the memory of him kept acting on her—and she on it. And such was the force of the precedent she set with him that for years to come she could love only ‘god-men’ like him and could indulge her love only in pseudoremembrance. She would alternate between her daughter-role and her father-role—between the girlish-submissive and the manly-masterful stance, between courting god-men and copying them, between outgoing and ingoing affectivity. As for her brother-men—[Eugene’s] breed—she would just play with them.”
Her ideals morphed into synonyms like “Life,” “Reality,” “Nature,” “Mind,” “Divine,” “Eternal,” “Creative,” “Primal,” or “quintessential.” Like other philosophers, culturally inherited words were not good enough. Only hyphenated ones could be comprehensive like “life-totality,” “the all-extant-and-inclusive,” and the “ever proto-initial.” The difficulty with abstract knowledge, and idealistic temperaments, is that nature and existence is too flawed to fulfill such expectations. Those expectations, as can be seen in many other psychoanalytic books, always lead to a need to be in “oneness,” to reconstruct the womb and find a heaven on earth with no drawbacks.
On Narcissism – Sigmund Freud (Narcissism 1 of 4): https://rumble.com/v1gtgdl-on-narcissism-sigmund-freud-narcissism-1-of-4.html
Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 7: https://rumble.com/v4z6p3u-object-relations-melanie-klein-pt.-7.html
One gets the sense that when industrialization arose and people moved from farms to cities, which relieved a lot of poverty, people missed the hours spent in nature, even if that meant more wear and tear. Nature gets you to relax your thoughts and focus on action to get things done, which was meditative in its own way. Technology on the other hand mastered nature to such an extent that its dangers were reduced compared to the days of the stone age, but being indoors, especially without electricity, meant dark nights with candlelight and a lack of sunlight if work and study was to be done inside throughout the daylight time.
Naturally, when people have a long hike in nature, their tiredness lures them back to the modern abundance of the city which has now returned to appreciation. The busyness of the city turns into busyness in the mind as a form of unrest, because the mind hasn’t learned meditative repose as of yet, and maybe prayers haven’t done the trick, or one is stuck in a work and chore routine that leaves no time for nature, contemplation and rest. With cultured manners and mannerisms of the times, there was also a stuffiness that prevented people from speaking candidly. Freedom would only come in the form of laughter and playfulness that would break the routine of criticism and commandments. That longing for freedom and independence is attractive and sympathetic for most people. Though in most people’s cases, they find it sufficient to add variety to life so that one wants to move from one activity to another with periods of rest in between. Each routine has its purpose and time, but no particular experience can be held as an ideal for fear of boredom and disappointment. One can work, exercise, rest, and achieve goals while filling out a life.
Lou was instead looking for that ideal and her imitation powers allowed her to behave like different people or to be inspired by objects. “Spinoza aiding, ‘Nature’ was already hugely significant for Lou when, in her twenties, she learned to love scenic beauty, then animals, then natural history. At length she would bare her feet on entering a meadow or forest ‘the way a Moslem does on entering a temple,’ and would enter as if for ‘a short stroll into childhood.’ Once inside, she would feel bound to ‘every living thing,’ ‘identical with everything,’ ‘thrust into that summit of unity…an unio mystica‘—and this in ‘rapturous gratitude, as for a gift of God containing everything straight off’ or else (without the as) for a reminder of original intimacy, of ‘something superhumanly true.’ By then she was responsive to the signs of the seasons—especially of spring, which she would meet ‘frolicsome and silly as a calf.’ She would record the weather just as, to her ‘consolation,’ she learned that Tolstoi did: ‘perpetually, as if he quite personally were raining, blowing, or shining.’ And she opened her diary ever and again to beast and bush, and took counsel with them at big reunions about whether her experience away from them ‘had not been too petty or jumbled measured against the fate of the seasons.’ Despite some motherly, even grandmotherly, tenderness for the human breed specifically, she professed indiscriminate love for ‘the creature, who, unbanal, need come in no special edition to inform us about Being, [with a capital B] which is the same for all of us.’ Likewise, sharply as she might tell men apart, she insisted that she could not love a man for anything personal about him—could not love him, that is, according to the ‘creative…divine…mode of affection,’ which she saved for herself.” This “herself” of course could expand to include anyone and anything in her environment, and maybe the universe as well.
For Binion, her spirituality was a background father-ideal, which behind the elevated experiences of life, that cannot be held onto permanently, kept her chasing. Tellingly, whatever abstract ideal she was after, “she warranted that behind the scenes it really lived us.” Typical of idealization, Lou indulged in denial with the drawbacks of the world, the imperfections, and the knowledge of inevitable death. “Her clearest post-infantile cry for her father was most clearly a cry for life eternal as well. It sounded first as a self-ashamed whisper in womanhood about absorption of and by the cosmos, then as the ecstatic undertone to her late-life message of an indefeasible bond among all living things. Correspondingly, she lent coition a ‘primal religious sense: that we wed ourselves to reality’ and considered that religious parlance expresses, perforce symbolically, a forefeeling of cosmic fulfillment.” Lou was using words and symbols to communicate with others but she elevated the experience over the symbol. Following these principles she began idealizing childhood and the lack of self-consciousness that happens in childhood play and exploration. There’s also an underlying need for independence so that the freedom can be more secured, otherwise another false-god like Gillot or some other philanderer will exploit the situation. “She continually spoke of her private god, rather than of her belief in him, as having come and gone—and this with slight saving irony, if any…Mental symptoms are all in the mood of wishing or fearing; her childhood ones were post-elaborated in the same mood. She never once dared look behind them; indeed, what she was nostalgic for in childhood was just that uninhibited consorting with a god who was not.” She was chasing a father-god in her childhood playroom superimposed onto the world as a plaything.
Lou’s literature became a mishmash of fiction and autobiography to try to get behind the veil of unknowing, which was a failure. “Her master medium for self-disclosure was literature. Seen from close up, her literary production was of three sorts: fiction, nonfiction, and—in between—false self-accounting. Seen through, it was all one distorted journal intime, with the distortions largely wishful—as in her old reports to her god. Gillot had induced her to separate fable from fact again except on her subject of subjects: herself. Anything she told about herself as fiction was eligible for retelling as nonfiction, only not right away.”
As time passed, her forgetfulness and desire to stretch the truth with equivocations, moved her from autobiography into fiction. “Her self-accounting was a running fusion of desire and reality, of fiction and nonfiction, of art and life, at the same time as it was a continual expulsion of unpleasant truths from consciousness into unconsciousness and admission of pleasant untruths by way of return.” These real life details were especially guarded because letters and biographies happen to find their way into the hands of publishers after one dies. “Lou did not care much for her fiction, perhaps rightly on the balance; or even for her essays, utterly wrongly. Her self-accounts, though, mattered vitally to her. For all her would-be spontaneity, she lived her life as a memoir-to-be, with due reluctance to break it off before she could round it out. She was readying it for reception by a new eternal judge and lover predesignate: posterity. And she spared no cosmetic pains on what were to be her documental remains, periodically emending old diaries and even letters received, besides just cutting out passages or pasting them over, or else effacing them—some transparently, others stroke by stroke with awesome finality.”
Lou wrote her literature via small musings put together that are then elaborated on afterwards, so ideas were built up to a level of finality. Her changes were based on removing words that took away from emotional authenticity, even if it was only ideal and not found in real events. “The diary was the generic form of Lou’s literary output. Into her regular or special diaries went self-depictions, characterizations of close acquaintances, philosophical musings, miniature book and play reviews, an occasional poem or fable, travel notes, and personal chronicles.” This of course meant that she had to remove words about her sex life, which was not as abundant as she wrote about. What was different about her compared to other women was how her financial support could allow an alternative lifestyle. “She construed life for her sex in her Aunt Caro’s terms, as a perpetual forced option between being a person and being a woman, between self-assertion and dedication, between an aspiration to self-development and an atavistic [desire] to be brutalized by men…Her having grown up an alien grandee’s daughter contributed to her sovereign detachment and self-assurance; but of the Salomés’ cultural anomalism, their social status, and their secure fortune, she drew the greatest spiritual capital from this last. Her strict autonomy took subsidizing for granted; what was real about her ‘life-confidence’ was negotiable against her father’s estate; her ideal of personal authenticity meant owing no one anything; her clean conscience was a solvent conscience.” Despite her shortcomings, her works were successful. The narcissistic play-hard-to-get persona along with her decent enough looks only added to the mystique of her books that described a new “authenticity” that a public was looking to explore. By witnessing the desires and designs men had on Lou, she would gain a lot of experience with them so she could read them more easily, and sometimes she could know them better than they knew themselves.
European Salons
Lou von Salomé continued her education in the University of Zurich. Theologian Alois Biedermann used the symbol X to denote spiritual experiences and taught how inner laws lead one to different religious conclusions via the vehicle of desire for transcendence and a supernatural wonder of existence. She wrote poems to Gottfried Kinkel with little result and then found a connection with Malwida von Meysenbug, a fellow idealist. Like with Gillot, Lou found another parental figure. In her informal talks, presentations and soirées, Lou also encountered Paul Rée. He was steeped in philosophies from Schopenhauer, Positivism, Utilitarianism, and Darwinism. These materialist views led him to ethics via human practicality, as opposed to divine inspiration. He suffered bouts of depression with his deterministic views towards happiness and a low self-esteem for his Jewish ancestry. Lou very quickly, and to the disappointment from Malwida, became converted to Paul’s view of things. Lou and Paul eventually setup their own salon, where Lou was interested in more intellectual exploration, while Paul already was becoming infatuated.
He enlisted his help from his friend Friedrich Nietzsche, who like Paul, tried to surmount the influence of Schopenhauer. Despite providing friendly comments for Rée’s writings, Nietzsche was moving in a different direction. Rée was interested in how a conscience arose from harm done to others, whereas Nietzsche was focused more on power differentials. Values only exist if they can be defended, so there could be some relativism in the values a particular culture takes on, because the powerless have no recourse to reform. Predating Freud’s conclusions, a conscience for Nietzsche was internalized anticipation of punishment from parents and eventually a fear of authorities. The development and fight for improved intellectual values was between a herd mentality that simply imitates tradition and individuals who were more free thinkers, which matched up well with Nietzsche’s studies of the pre-Socratics who wrote about the same struggles against religious superstition. Becoming this kind of revolutionary Nietzschean hero, one can see the origination of the self-improvement movement that is still with us today. There’s a desire to go beyond self-limitation.
The Presocratics: Anaximander: https://rumble.com/v1gsppb-the-presocratics-anaximander.html
Nietzsche also had a tug of war with his own individualism and the lonely need to join the collective while working with Paul Rée. He at times would welcome Paul and at other times he had to turn him away. Nietzsche was also haunted by his father’s mental deterioration and worried it was congenital. He suffered from headaches, eye aches, and nausea, which only added more of a sense of fate for the philosopher. His solitude retreats in Sils Maria gave him the needed rest and energy to continue his work independently. There was a hidden snobbishness behind their friendship where Rée was more like a friend and admirer than a legitimate rival. Nietzsche was listening less to the outside world at this time and came up with his concepts of the overman, eternal recurrence, and the transvaluation of values. In letters Rée wrote about Lou, who peaked Nietzsche’s interest, and her interest in him because of how others, like Malwida, described him as another idealist-positivist. These new connections stirred up jealousy in Gillot who was skeptical, but Lou was still moving in the same pattern of searching for new gods, and if her mother was against these acquaintances, she became even more convinced to follow her instincts. Lou was initially treated as a pupil before all three were able to be gathered together, and at that time she was shocked by Nietzsche’s mild manner, softness, inconspicuous countenance. A man of solitude. “His eyes were to her ‘like the custodians and preservers of personal treasures, of mute secrets meant for no intruding glance. His defective eyesight lent his features a quite special magic in that they did not reflect varying outer impressions but only what was passing through him internally. They looked inwards, yet at the same time into the distance, well beyond the objects round about him—or better, inwards as if into the distance.'”
Despite the menage a trois being merely intellectual, Nietzsche had to visit Lou’s mother for permission. She “warned him that Lou’s self-accounting was strictly fantastical; he listened with one sharp ear.” The group eventually met in Orta. “The next day Nietzsche and Lou climbed a nearby mountain sacred to Franciscans, the monte sacro. There for the first time Nietzsche thrilled to Lou’s responsive intelligence. He spoke to her of the ‘eternal recurrence,’ which made self-denial eternally foolish, and of his ‘son’-to-be, Zarathustra, due to transcend the slave morality of good-and-evil as the historic Zarathustra had transcended the master morality of good-and-bad. Just a few hours on the holy mount and he had dimly conceived the grand design of fashioning her according to his philosophical ideal—of schooling her to be his ‘heiress’ and ‘successor.’ Beneath this pedagogical project lay the erotic one of engendering a bride in his own image: thence his constant combination of passion and vagueness about his purpose. The erotism was strictly underlying: Lou was just not his buxom type, a few gallant compliments to come from him notwithstanding. Lou for her part told Rée grandiloquently after her tardy return with Nietzsche: ‘His very laughter is a deed.’ And to Malwida she wrote excitedly that his was in truth ‘a religious nature’—which it was, just like her own, even down to his own self-identification with Jesus. She rejoiced as did he in their uncanny affinity, which was the more piquant for her complementary erotism, manifest in her craving for his tutelage. To compound the compatibility, he attracted her sensually. Only there was a catch: her ego was organized against just such intellectual and erotic temptation. Its strongest outside defense was Rée, whose tutorial ideal was her self-development at his side, where she ran no emotional risk. But only well out of Nietzsche’s gigantic presence was she ever able to take exception to his proud design on her.”
Nietzsche’s mood elevated after his responsive encounter with Lou. “His climb with Lou left Nietzsche an eager party to the plan of working a year at close quarters—if not in shared quarters—with her and Rée.” Ida Overbeck, the wife of historian Franz Overbeck, talked of the hopefulness and excitement Nietzsche had “of having found his alter ego in Miss Salomé—of working with her, and through her help, toward his goals.” Despite the typical expectation of scandal his project was meant to be a “mentally passionate nonmarital relationship [which] was an ideal always dear to him. Passion there was, but also the desire not to let himself be carried away by it. It reassured him that Rée should be the third in the party, and from Rée’s serviceable, selfless nature he expected much.” When they met again, Nietzsche was worried that his proposal to Lou was to be assumed to be a marital proposal which she was already against. They moved beyond the misunderstanding and Lou urged, the “trinity” she called them, to make their famous photograph.
At the time Nietzsche was reading Lou’s poems and encouraged her to live in a discreet way while strangely he also suggested that she live to the fullest. The discreetness that he was suggesting was also an admission of his need for secrecy of these meetings from his mother and sister who always liked to meddle in his affairs. “His sister, still his childhood sweetheart, had since Human, All Too Human, come to idolize his life as against his books, and he cherished her idolatry at heart even as he dreaded her jealousy.” Why a threesome of any kind is disruptive is in the comparison of one dyad to another. Rée enjoyed Lou’s company much more because of how depressing Nietzsche was in comparison, and this increased jealousy in him. “Even fraternally he craved Lou’s exclusive affection.” There was also a comfort that Rée had in the presence of Lou due to that fact that she wasn’t a rival philosopher like Nietzsche was. Rée did admit in his letters his feelings for Lou and felt duplicitous, while at the same time trying to remain in the sphere of friendship. Nietzsche’s letters were more magnanimous towards Rée and upheld a desire for independence towards Lou. Malwida warned Lou that “this Trinity! Firmly as I am convinced of your neutrality, just as surely does the experience of a long lifetime tell me that it will not work without a heart’s cruelly suffering in the noblest case, otherwise a friendship’s being destroyed…Nature will not be mocked, and before you know it the fetters are there…I wish only to protect you from nearly unavoidable sorrow such as you have experienced once already.”
Letters moved back and forth and Nietzsche was not able to have Lou meet with him. She eventually was assuming that “his intentions toward her, which—with Ree’s help—she now took to be secretarial use and sexual abuse.” On the other hand, Lou trusted Nietzsche’s sister Lisbeth from the impressions that others had of her while Nietzsche was also now beginning to trust. “[My sister] has, I find, come so far along over our long separation—is so much more grown up, deserving of all trust, and very loving toward me…I believe, in sum, that you may give it a try with her and us.” There was always the worry that Nietzsche was not just trying to make his likeness into Lou as a protégé, but with predictable non-Christian designs of making her into a “daughter-bride.” Despite Nietzsche’s sister intervening and gossiping as a way to stop the all important meeting, he and Lou eventually met again in Tautenburg. To Rée’s jealousy Lou described their conversation “in the quiet, dark pine forest alone with the sunshine and squirrels…Conversing with Nietzsche is uncommonly lovely…but there is quite special charm in the meeting of like thoughts and like emotions; we can almost communicate with half words…Only because we are so kindred could he take the difference between us, or what seemed to him such, so violently and painfully…The content of a conversation of ours really consists in what is not quite spoken but emerges of its own from our each approaching the other half way.”
How Narcissist Makes YOU His Love Object: Narcissistic Transferences, in Shared Fantasy, Anaclisis – Prof. Sam Vaknin: https://youtu.be/0Yl7RMgLq90?si=91wM3lUZVGgRabqW
Nietzsche at the time was projecting his own ill health onto the much more robust Lou. “He gave me his hand and said earnestly and with feeling: ‘Never forget that it would be a calamity if you did not carve a memorial to your full innermost mind in the time left to you’…But is it good for him to spend the whole day from morning to night in conversation with me, hence away from his work? When I asked him this today, he nodded and replied: ‘But I do it so seldom and am enjoying it like a child.’ The same evening, though, he said: Ί ought not to live long in your vicinity.’ We often recollect our time together in Italy and…he said softly: ‘monte sacro—I have you to thank for the most bewitching dream of my life.'” The mutual love was again just intimated but never consummated. The mental connection continued on as his sister surveilled their candid and blasphemous talk. “Morning, noon, and night the two talked—in the pine forest, on an inn terrace beneath lindens, along precipitous chamois paths, in her room and in his. They talked of unholy things…More academically, he argued the original ascendancy of the ‘herd instinct’ over Rée’s constant: egoism.” Lou and Fritz connected on their original religiosity and lost faith, and Nietzsche concluded “piety as [a] lame will to power, penitence as the wages of impotence, salvation and damnation as weaklings’ dreams of getting overeven.” Regardless, they had hopes for his Zarathustra and Nietzsche felt these talks were of the most profitable and he described Lou as “the most intelligent of all women.” His excitement increased. “Our mentalities and tastes are most deeply akin—and yet there are so many contrasts too that we are for each other the most instructive of subjects…I should like to know whether there has ever before been such philosophical openness as between the two of us.” Lou felt simpatico. “How alike we think and feel!…and how we do take the thoughts and words out of each other’s mouth!”
Lisbeth at the time was jealous and worried that Lou would demand credit for Nietzsche’s work. “Odd—how in our talks, without meaning to, we always wind up on the precipice; anyone listening to us would think two devils were conferring.” The spying Lisbeth overheard their unrepressed musings. “What horrid talk the two carried on together! What was a lie? Nothing! What was breach of confidence? Nothing! What was doing one’s duty? Silliness. What was the most derisive talk about true friends? Right judgment. What was compassion? Contemptible. Never have I seen my brother together with his philosophy so mean, so paltry.” He read Lou’s work and was dismissive at first, but felt that “she could learn to write in ‘one day.'” She most wanted his direction to launch herself into being an author. She began taking notes about Nietzsche and felt that he was using philosophy to bridge his malcontent from one development to the next to stave off “instinctual discord.” She described him as “‘the egoist in the grand manner,’ yet saw his character as unified about its ‘heroic trait’: the ‘drive toward self-sacrifice to a great end,'” but “this goal of knowledge would need to have moral value.” Self-overcoming was not for the weak. “In that power which voluntarily takes the pain of living upon itself because it ever newly feels within itself the creative strength to turn the pain into a means to an end in which it feels itself borne beyond pain…in that creative power for which even the hardest, toughest materials are not too hard or tough, because it is nevertheless superior to them, nevertheless capable of chiseling its god-figures out of them.” After putting Gillot on a pedestal, and failing to put Rée there, she found a new statue to worship, but with idealization runs the risk of subsequent devaluation. “The same worshipful free disciple tempted to go unfree, only this time as wary of the temptation itself as of its erotic undercurrent, hence the readier to project the erotism and demonize her idol. Her intellectual resistance was to turn on the difference she asserted between his shifting purposes and her single, steady purpose.” The narcissistic desire to ironically self-overcome beyond her idol was the next logical event. “Strange, the notion recently struck me with sudden force that we could someday even confront each other as enemies.”
Lisbeth was disgusted. “You can imagine with what zeal the Russian girl took up his philosophy: for her it was the finery in which her evil egoistic and immoral nature looked most passable…How adroitly she now so to say uses Fritz’s maxims to tie his hands is remarkably clever, but I despise her for this cleverness…She is really, I cannot deny it, my brother’s philosophy personified: that raging egoism which knocks down anything in its way and that utter want of morality…I had to face it, Fritz has changed, he is just like his books.” Regardless Nietzsche wanted to continue the “friends” Trinity in Paris. He took Lou’s Life Prayer poem and put it to music from his teenage years in the hopes “that would be, then, one small path by which the two of us would reach posterity together—other paths remaining open.” Lisbeth at this time was starting to part with Nietzsche philosophically and wanted to take it over as something she needed to correct. His mother also “called [him] a disgrace to [his] father’s grave.”
Three Poems by Lou Andreas-Salomé – Circumference: https://circumferencemag.com/my-lips-and-all-youd-loved-them-for/
Hymn to Life by Friedrich Nietzsche: https://youtu.be/aOfNaVnFmU8?si=_NGh_8ZA40lHr575
Nietzsche gave encouragement for Lou to “become yourself!” She later returned to Rée and looked at him with a downward comparison and convinced him of “Nietzsche’s view that egoism had been celebrated before coming to be reviled.” Rée moved to a second fiddle status and stated of Lou that “[she] grew a few inches taller in Tautenburg.” She started reading with inspiration a found “a goal” for herself and criticized Rée’s untidiness, but then apologized to keep the friendship going. Rée was also stuck in low self-esteem shown in his relapse into gambling addiction while Lou was cavorting with her idol. Nietzsche’s loneliness in his family feud led him to reconnect with Rée to remain on good terms. Lou was judging men by seeing how their armor was defending against their low self-esteem and insecurity. For Rée, Lou was “the greatest loss that I ever in my life suffered or can suffer. That is just why I, a pessimist, believe you will not long remain with me.” She responded “now you are mine.'” She realized, as can be readily seen in biographies of psychologists, that philosophers and their philosophies are often “[reduced] to personal dossiers.” Nietzsche responded to Lou’s insight as “truly a thought from the ‘sister brain,'” without including himself in the list. Regardless, she read his books, and Human, All Too Human, became a lifelong favorite. She wrote aphorisms based on their Tautenburg conversations, which Nietzsche had to edit and select for quality.
In one aphorism, Lou described her idea of authenticity. “‘The optimistic nature finds joy in the very feeling for life; the pessimistic nature finds a feeling for life only in joy.’ Nietzsche cut this one down to size: ‘Some get a feeling for life only from joy, others get joy from a feeling for life.’ More equanimous all around was her allegation that ‘what does not engage our feelings does not long engage our thoughts either,’ which Nietzsche could [only blandly recast as] ‘what neither pleases nor pains us gets little welcome in our heads.’; she recurred to it in so many words twenty years after.” The trinity also diagnosed each other in turn with early psychologisms. Of Lou: “woman does not die of love, but wastes away for want of it.” Of Rée: “the greatest pain is self-hate.” Of Nietzsche: “[his] weakness: supersubtlety.” Of the whole, they knowingly agreed that “two friends are most easily separated by a third.” On intimacy, and maybe a precursor to object-relations, Lou said that “the closer two people stand to each other inwardly, the more readily they become for each other the condition under which alone their two beings find expression.” When describing how love gathers in people beyond a short-term emptying of lust it was through “great, life-filling common interest,” or when two people “forget themselves in a common interest.” Nietzsche further asserted that “friendship rests on knowledge, love on faith.” To Lou’s consternation, he wrote in her notebook cover “Sister—brother. Father—child,” which put her on the short leg with Rée in the triangle. This was the beginning of the end of the ménage. For example, Rée was contemptable to Lou because of his lack of superiority in her mind, but the advantage was that he was more reliable than Nietzsche.
“You’re a wanker!”
The trinity fell apart initially on good terms. Nietzsche accepted that Lou was Rée’s find in Rome and that he was right in feeling jealous, and of Lou he suggested that “Mind? What is mind to me! What is knowledge to me! I esteem nothing but impulses—and I would swear we have something in common here. Do look through this phase in which I have lived a few years—look behind it! Don’t you be fooled about me: you surely don’t believe that ‘the free mind’ is my ideal?! I am—Excuse me! Dearest Lou, be what you must be. F.N.” He may have been referring to Lou’s criticism of Nietzche’s egoism. He took it as a consequence of envy and admiration. “The greater the intimacy between two people, the firmer bounds it requires. Lack of magnanimity may well be lack of strength. The weakness that seldom knows victory feeds on others’ defeats. Magnanimity is the expression of great conquering power.” He wanted an apology but got none.
His despair over Lou’s comments led to his own devaluation of her in his draft letters. “How stunted your humanity looks alongside of friend Rée’s! How poor you are in respect, in gratitude, in piety, in courtesy, in admiration, shame—not to speak of higher things.” To him she was “giving free rein to everything contemptible, [a] sacred self-seeking.” His philosophy was perverted to “its opposite: the predatory pleasure-lust of a cat.” Insulting Lou he called her a “Monstrosity!…Ά brain with only a rudiment of soul.’ A cat’s character: that of a beast of prey posing as a domestic animal. Nobleness as reminiscence about association with noble people; strong will, but with no great object; without diligence or cleanliness, without civil probity; cruelly misplaced sensuality.” Ironically, a narcissistic philosophy that Nietzsche espoused went in the direction he did not intend. If he only knew what Hitler was going to do with his philosophy? “Capable of enthusiasm for people without love for them, yet love for God: need for [outpouring]; shrewd and fully self-controlled in respect of men’s sensuality; heartless and incapable of loving; emotionally always sickly and close to madness.” He saw her inability to truly love another, and that it was really just a love for knowledge and power: A “cat-egoism.” He was most offended by “the caricature of my ideal.” Lou was spreading bad rumors that were causing a dark cloud in Nietzche’s life. It all fed back into his sisters judgements towards Lou, who suggested to Malwida that she is “a poisonous reptile to be destroyed at all costs.” This righteousness did not enamor her to Nietzsche. “Souls such as yours, my dear sister, I do not like: and I like them least when they are morally bloated.”
The classic narcissistic devaluation and smear campaign was hovering around Nietzsche. She “now treats me like a low-minded fellow, and one who deals [secretively] to boot.” It was a narcissistic wounding that the one who was to carry on his legacy would do this to him. Rée joined in on the pile-on where they accused Nietzsche of “delusions of grandeur” and “wounded vanity.” To compensate Nietzsche was taking larger doses of opium. He wanted Lou to worship him like a God and she needed to bask in his light to worship herself.
Narcissist: Private God, Missionary Religion, Global Faith – Prof. Sam Vaknin: https://youtu.be/UR6RyG-TQLA?si=Icz2rgWJGdKhpY-E
In a letter to Rée he bashed him for his bad taste in continuing to be close to Lou. Nietzsche became estranged from both family and friends. He realized that his philosophy was too perfectionist for regular people and it made him accept that his loneliness would continue. Like many who are bitten by narcissist snakes, he continued on trying to teach her and save her from herself. Seeing her problem he predicted later therapies that give up on narcissists and accept that “only a high purpose can make people of your sort bearable to others.” He eventually accepted that he could not forgive her and let her go. His Zarathustra became a rebuke of wrong interpretations and alternatives espoused by Lou, Rée, and Richard Wagner. He was beginning to fight back and treat his philosophy with an aggressive evangelism that argues against the age. In devaluation of Lou, he resorted to descriptions of her as a “scraggy dirty smelly she-monkey with her false breasts.” Their betrayal of Nietzsche was similar to that of Wagner’s as described by Rüdiger Safranski. “Behind the scenes, Wagner often spread rumors and gossip. Even before then, the rumor was circulating that Nietzsche was an effeminate man and chronic masturbator, and it is quite possible that he had already caught wind of these rumors during the bittersweet summer he spent with Lou Salomé in Tautenburg.” Richard Wagner was mistrustful of solo men without women and did not feel that a man could be fully a man without a woman. “The Wagners were not the only ones on the hunt for a bride for Nietzsche. His mother and Malwida von Meysenbug went to great lengths to get him married off, and he did not always resent their interference. Sometimes he even sought help in finding a wife.” With a solitary vocation of writing, that requires time for people to come around to it, to gain enough traction and popularity, assuming that there will be any, it means being in the shadows for a long time, alone, and that meant that the author of modern heroism ended up being a pale shadow of the action required to successfully be an “overman,” to be observed as such, and confirmed by others who witness those heroic deeds.
Friedrich Nietzsche – Piano Music – Heldenklage (Hero’s Lament) Alex Alguacil, piano: https://youtu.be/r_xIvlUYyPc?si=NfOiDYJK9DQnCVml
In Nietzsche’s remaining letters to his friends, he followed through on the, “what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger” kick, where he was able to partially forgive the betrayal because of what he was able to learn about the situation. He accepted that he was initially warned about Lou by her mother. Lisbeth on the other hand was still lost in aggression and madness. “[She] had found ‘something absolutely distracting’: anti-Semitism, the highest lesson she had drawn from the Trinity fiasco. In that month Naumburg celebrated her engagement to Bernhard Forster, who was laying plans for an Aryan colony in Paraguay.” Nietzsche had enough of the “vengeful anti-Semitic goose…Conciliation is impossible.”
Frau Lou: Nietzsche’s Wayward Disciple – Rudolph Binion: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780691618609/
Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography – Rudiger Safranski: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393050080/
Lou von Salomé – Julia Vickers: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780786436064/
Lou Andreas- Salomé, The Audacity To Be Free | Trailer | Cinema Libre: https://youtu.be/e722D0mnxnw?si=hSsHUO2xrhv5F65K
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/