Ideal versus the Real
As Nietzsche’s life at his end was eclipsing his ability to hold people to account for their misreading of his works, the many different strands of Nietzschean interpretation were beginning to deviate and move into different paths, both towards what would turn into modern psychology, but also dangerous stumbling blocks in politics. For example, Lisbeth’s adventure in Nueva Germania turned to a disaster. The farming methods didn’t work in the climate they were in and debts piled up leading to her husband Bernhard to suicide by poisoning himself. Lisbeth returned to Germany to never come back in 1893, but by then her brother’s famous mental breakdown had already occurred and he was already an invalid. He eventually died in 1900. She fought for the estate of Nietzsche’s books and made publications to live off the subscriptions.
During this period before Lou’s next book, she was undergoing criticism for her interpretation of Nietzsche’s works. Lisbeth also criticized Lou for insinuating herself too much in Nietzsche’s collection, which was partially fair, but Lisbeth later on was also accused of forging letters in Nietzsche’s name. “In 1900 the Archiv began publishing Nietzsche’s letters: forged ones to Lisbeth reviling Lou and Jews plugged untoward gaps. A year later The Will to Power appeared, a concatenation of Nietzsche scraps presented as Nietzsche’s supreme work—as if to render Lou’s study obsolete.” Camps on both sides of the argument between Lou and Lisbeth began to form where interpretations of the true Nietzsche developed and moved in their own direction. Regardless of theory, one has to live life as one does in practicality, with all the imperfections of interpretation and their consequences when treated as advice.
A running theme in Lou’s real relationships were the assessments of her situation in power differentials that pleased or displeased her. Again, like the Kuno character in Lou’s first book, she was not able to make her marriage into a satisfactory one. “The reason why she could not engage with her husband must be sought partly in the shock she suffered from his violent attempts to subdue her, and partly in the fact that she saw in him not so much a husband as a father. All her life she remained her father’s child. Andreas, fifteen years older than Lou, could indeed have been her father, and he perhaps shared other similarities in character and temperament with General von Salomé. In her intimate diaries Lou often refers to her husband as ‘Alterchen’ the ‘little old man,’ an expression that shows the ambivalence of her feelings. On the one hand, she was genuinely fond of him and did not want to hurt him, but on the other, his advances evoked in her something akin to the dread of incest. Her refusal to yield to him was not mere willfulness on her part. It was caused by a fear so deeply imbedded in her subconscious that it defied rational solution.”
Eventually, there had to be some compromise. Andreas refused to give Lou a divorce, and she consented to this “only on the condition that he would no longer exercise any control over her emotional life. She wanted to be free to follow the dictates of her heart. The only way to make such a ‘marriage’ work was for Andreas to find a ‘wife substitute’ and for Lou to leave their common household the moment she sensed danger. After months of struggle some sort of agreement was reached. It left Lou outwardly bound but inwardly free. These were the years of her long travels through Europe.”
Others could sense the lack of bond between the spouses as she and Andreas met and were introduced to others. For Lou, this happened when she met the writer-politician Georg Ledebour. He was a “strong and self-assured man. He threw her into an emotional vortex when, in confessing his love to her, he told her point-blank that her marriage was a fake, and not only because she did not wear a wedding ring. He sensed that she was still a virgin. Lou was startled and dismayed. How could anyone know? The painful secret of her marriage had been locked deep in her own and her husband’s hearts. Fascinated by Ledebour’s personality, sympathy and understanding, she wavered for a time as to whether she should accept his love. But she soon realized that her husband’s fierce temper ruled out any thought of an illicit affair. He would have killed them both if he had found out. As it was, he demanded that she stop seeing her friend.”
The leverage Andreas had over Lou slipped further because his private lessons and articles provided little more money than for one person. “Fortunately Lou still received some financial support from home, and her work for literary journals, to which she now applied herself seriously, brought in some money. But it must have been humiliating for Andreas to feel that he was partly supported by his wife.” Ledebour eventually went to jail for his political activities and when he was released, Lou returned to see him. “Now he was curt with her: he would talk to her divorced or else to Andreas alone.” Lou was stuck between two men, but eventually Georg lost patience and went his own way. “Ledebour married one of his pupils in 1895—one of approximately Lou’s own age and social standing whom he had known, like Lou, since 1892. She made him a tender companion through a stormy career and a long exile, following Hitler’s advent.”
Andreas on the other hand was beginning to make some of his own moves towards an open marriage. “[He] would occasionally accompany her. But for the most part he stayed behind in their Berlin apartment with a housekeeper to take care of him. This woman, Marie, a simple and uncomplicated creature, was Andreas’ ‘wife substitute.’ She became so much a part of the household that to all intents and purposes she took over Lou’s duties. When in 1903 Andreas finally found the academic berth for which he was suited, the chair of West Asiatic Languages at the University of Gottingen, Marie went with them and took charge of their house on the Hainberg. She had two illegitimate children. One of them died young, leaving Andreas grief-stricken; the other, Mariechen, grew up and married but continued to live with Lou even after the death of Marie and Andreas. She took care of Lou in her old age and inherited Andreas’ house when Lou died. In the eyes of the world she was an illegitimate child, but she always considered Andreas her father.”
Back at the turn of the century, Lou’s aim was still that one of moving beyond the chalk circle of a woman’s destiny. “To attain [freedom] she had to work. Her economic freedom depended, in part at least, on what she earned. And work she did. Article after article came from her busy pen, and book after book. In 1892 her book on Ibsen appeared, two years later her book on Nietzsche, the following year her novel Ruth, a year later From a Troubled Soul, followed in quick succession by Fenitschka, Children of Man, Ma, and in The Land Between).”
Her book Ruth, was in the same autobiographical vein of Struggle For God, but this time it was about her youthful experience with Gillot. “It abounds in psychological observations about the various forms of love: the aggressiveness of the male, the female’s longing for surrender, the adoration of the child.” The character of Erik symoblizes Gillot, but the eventual transformation from being a tutor that Ruth idealizes, to a common suitor, dispels the illusion of his superiority. To the Ruth character, to divorce his wife in this fictional account, and to debase himself by falling in love with her, he loses his holy aura. “Quietly she tells him that she must leave him now because she wants to remain his child. She does not want him to step down from the pedestal upon which her love has placed him. Her refusal to submit to him does not mean she is afraid for herself: he had to stay up there where she had placed him, his life had to remain what it had always been. Everything depended on him. Otherwise was he still Erik?…She realizes, of course, that she is not being realistic, that she closes her eyes to life as it actually is and that some day she will have to face it. But not now, not yet. For the present she prefers to remain in the world of her childhood…Offended, Ruth departs with the ideal Erik in her heart, leaving the real one behind on his knees. This final option for unreality shows Ruth to have been imperfectly cured—and herein the story was true to life again.” There’s the symbol of God in her ideal, but she also wants to trade places with the ideal as well and alternate with it. “She tells Erik that she would rather be the gardener than the gardener’s tree.” The book was popular with the current audiences at the time, even if some of her Nietzschean friends found the book less clear. “It ran several editions while the controversy raged as to whether Ruth was to blame for tempting Erik half knowingly or Erik for acting like a child.”
In a way, From a Troubled Soul, ended up being the third in the trilogy of dashed ideals. In this book a foster-son of a pastor looks to him as an ideal, and like in the running theme of Lou’s struggle, is how the follower is connecting with the ideal that the leader has. They both share the same ideal, but a double disappointment occurs when the human never lives up to the ideal, as no human does completely, but then the pastor’s unbelief in God becomes discovered leading to even more disappointment, where even the idol loses their ideal. Putting people on a pedestal puts unwanted pressure on an idol, and human imperfection guarantees criticism and scandal. Idol-worship already has a form of aggression from the outset, which celebrities attempt to avoid experiencing at the hands of their most critical audiences. René Girard called this horizontal transcendence, where people want to escape themselves by imitating, which is a form of worship regardless of religious belief, that will always be destined for conflict and disappointment. When following a religion, when you are imitating God, and following principles that go above human standards, there’s less conflict in renunciation, but from the nascent modern view of enjoying the discharge of as many intensities as possible, renunciation as suppression is considered an emotional dead end.
Girardian Primers:
Totem and Taboo – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gsmvn-totem-and-taboo-sigmund-freud.html
The Origin of Envy & Narcissism – René Girard: https://rumble.com/v1gsnwv-the-origin-of-envy-and-narcissism-ren-girard.html
Case Studies: Dora and Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gu2dt-case-studies-dora-and-freud.html
Stalking: World Narcissistic Abuse Awareness Day: https://rumble.com/v1gvhk1-stalking-world-narcissistic-abuse-awareness-day.html
Love – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gv5pd-love-freud-and-beyond.html
Psychoanalysis – Sigmund Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gvgq7-psychoanalysis-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html
Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 2: https://rumble.com/v1gvuql-object-relations-fear-of-success-pt.-2.html
Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 7: https://rumble.com/v3ub2sa-object-relations-fear-of-success-pt.-7.html
Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 8: https://rumble.com/v50nczb-object-relations-melanie-klein-pt.-8.html
Fenitschka moves along the same lines of narcissistic intensity as in Ruth. There’s a playing hard to get that adds to the intensity, but instead of there being just criticism of men, there are some lessons for them to learn. In the story, a man takes notice of a woman who appears to be “pure” in some way that makes him start to fall in love with her. There’s a theme in the book where cities and buildings are like a bunch of boxes where men try to trap their women by wooing them in the guise of a hero, but then dominating them afterwards. In traditional relationships, it’s not entirely unexpected. After being rebuffed for his imposition towards Fenia, some time passes and he finds her later with another man, but somehow “she has not become less pure, for in her self-confidence, in the freedom she arrogates to herself, in her contempt for the conventional, there is ‘an icy undoubtable purity.'” Her expressions of emotion are more authentic, but less idealistic, yet still free in the sense of self-acceptance and self-assuredness. By dropping the ideal, and the intensity that goes along with it, Fenia can roll with the hot and cold of passion. This ever moving emotion and lust cannot be caged, otherwise its resurgence may never return. “Passion is nobler than intellect, because [it’s] uncalculating and indivisible. The other half is that this is only so while passion remains undivided and whole, which it cannot be in the framework of marriage. ‘Love and marriage are just not the same thing.’ When her lover insists on marrying her, her feelings disappear, she gives him up…”
A lot of critics see the beginning of modern relationships in Lou’s work. Because Fenia is altering her behavior towards this man, he is unconsciously forced to adapt, which allows him to see things in a different way. “He puts himself in her place, becomes part of her space and interior, rather than trying to make her a feature of male rooms and spaces. It is in her space, as well, that he strikes poses quite at odds with those of the dominant male and conquering hero that he has tended to favor…With his critical reflections and unheroic postures alike he represents a nascent parallel to Fenia. She is at the window, free and on the threshold of a future yet to be told, perhaps untellable. He abdicates his stance as dominant hero to know her position, while nursing private insights yet to be articulated,” but “articulating—for the reader perhaps more so than for himself—the possibility of new male insights and stances.”
The new possibilities enter in when Max is able to see himself into Fenia as opposed to her just serving a social utility. There’s also an understanding that some of the traditional typologies of a woman do apply, but there are varieties of women who want to pursue careers much more, as well as their intense exploration of hobbies, so that more can be included in a woman’s life beyond traditional marriage and childrearing, even if Max feels that women could suffer more than a man if they pursue this avenue independent of traditional culture. “Initially, he sees only two alternatives for women: enduring love on the one hand, and superficial sensual pleasure on the other, beloved wife or whore. Because his schematic perceptions of women have been undermined by his conversations with Fenia, however, it gradually occurs to him that given Fenia’s independent life, similar to that of a man, she should not be judged in terms of the traditional categories applied to women. By conventional standards, Max reflects, an inferior woman, perhaps, but surely not one of higher standing, would lack the depth and commitment of love to devote her entire existence to the beloved man. Yet he now senses that Fenia, having taken her life into her own hands, must, like any independent man, likewise set boundaries between her love and other parts of her life, placing her love ‘beside’ but not ‘above’ her other ‘interests in life.’ Here Max transcends the tendency to apprehend woman in Manichean categories: as either pure or tainted, devoted or frivolous, Madonna or whore. Yet he remains able to reflect on Fenia’s predicament only by considering it analogous to a man’s…”
Lou is able to convert religious fervor into a life-fervor. “Though the absence of the previous religious sensuality is just what makes this book refreshing, the heroine retains her nun-quality to the very end, giving herself first to intellect and then to sex with exactly the same fierce religiousness.” By letting go of suppression and rejecting cultural repression, the intensity of experience can flow more easily and be allowed to change objects, by including more activities, and maybe even more partners. The catch with this style of relationship is it would require a man who has a similar attitude. Anyone more traditional that likes routine would find this repulsive. Conversely, those who hate routine would find traditional marriages stifling. For example, in Children of Man, the character Irene does become one with the environment, only when she is allowed freedom to control. She is a misanthrope, but because harmless landscapes, assuming there are no major predators where Irene is frequenting, they provide peace and escape from social control, and therefore love cannot be trusted to make one free, which predicts Freud’s death drive and nirvana principle. “‘I shall find what I need in every blade of grass, in every cloud.’ She admits that she has something deathly in her and believes the feminists recognise this and are therefore drawn to her, since they too have in themselves the smell of death.” Ella is not judged in the story and her viewpoint is simply a different preference but one should be allowed to choose. Again, the choice to support the life drive against death has to be made by each person right away, to prevent compulsion from tainting the spontaneity found in free choice. The choice has to be deliberated and made before compulsion acts on an individual rendering their feelings dull under such compulsion.
So for a woman who engages in the world, there needs to be a space to rest and time for deliberation so that action is considered to prevent exploitation, which thrives on people who can’t make good decisions for themselves and choose in haste. A traditionalist may see value in customs and choose it without a feeling of being stifled, whereas a person who seeks variety, has at some point in life, made the choice to explore worldliness. If there is to be a switch between one type or another, it has to be an authentic exploration to sample and tryout another path as opposed to a choice done under pressure, and therefore made into a chore. To act without compulsion, or realistically, with less compulsion, is to be closer to an animal that is one with the instincts and satisfies them without being caged in a human hierarchy. In Ma, love is seen to be something that doesn’t always have to extend to a man. There is that respect from a distance, but if relationships construct love to be only towards the man and not allowed to extend to other areas of life, it turns into an inner and external conflict coming from unsatisfied preferences, as seen in the following Deviations. In The Land Between, maturity is increasing as Lou herself is now accepting the pain between daydreaming and reality. Reality must be faced so that personal goals are acted on to finally make the dream a reality.
The Pleasure Principle – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gurqv-the-pleasure-principle-sigmund-freud.html
Beyond the Pleasure Principle – Freud & Beyond – War Pt. (2/3): https://rumble.com/v1gv855-beyond-the-pleasure-principle-freud-and-beyond-war-pt.-23.html
Now the danger with permissiveness is the fact that intense pleasure has an end. Boredom is a consequence of it, and Lou is moving into a more mature phase in her writing where she understands this. “These first novels present a torrid dream-world of dire sexuality, full of an inescapable desire for things that scarcely exist.” Wanting what you don’t have is what intensifies envy and jealousy, and it can make the consummation more pleasurable at first, but consumption always leads to tolerance, boredom and the common place. The search continues ad infinitum.
Deviations
Found in the short story Deviations, Lou described her early imprint that led to her searching and exploring personality style, starting from her parenting and continuing with her experiences with Gillot. Those early experiences prevented her from having the enlightened modern relationship that Fenitschka pointed to. In a way, this early description of modern narcissism injects the influence of sadomasochism into it from the get go. The character Adine views different women and their experiences of more or less intensity, via imitation, and this starts all the way at the beginning of her life. “‘On a hot summer’s day, ‘way back at the frontier between Germany and Galicia, where my father was stationed at the time, my old nurse was holding me in her arms. I was a very little girl still, and I watched as her husband hit her hard across the neck while she looked at him with an expression of enamoured submissiveness. Her strong and sun-tanned back, bare because of the heat, broke out in deep red welts. I started to cry at the shocking sight, but my Galician nurse turned to me with a serene, happy laugh. My poor little girl’s heart must have got the impression that undoubtedly such a brutal blow was one of the particular blessings of her life. And maybe this was indeed the case: She had nursed me for nine months with her own milk; and afterwards, with the dog-like loyalty common to some Slavic women, she had refused to leave our employ. Now she lived in constant fear that her husband would stop visiting and have neither love nor anger left for her. However, he hit her a lot when he came over, and the folk tunes she sang never sounded lighter and brighter than after such a festive reunion…[Furthermore] my parents’ marriage seemed exemplary to me, one of those marriages that exist quite rarely, where the child grows up in an intimate and harmonious environment without upsetting experiences. But the facts behind this harmony were these: my dear little mother did everything as my father wanted, and he in turn did everything that I wanted…”
Sexuality Pt 4: Masochism – Sigmund Freud & Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gtrq1-sexuality-pt-4-masochism-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html
Sexuality Pt 5: Sadism – Sigmund Freud & Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gtssd-sexuality-pt-5-sadism-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html
Narcissistic Supply – Freud and Beyond – WNAAD: https://rumble.com/v1gveop-narcissistic-supply-freud-and-beyond-wnaad.html
In her shared home later in life, a woman, Gabriele, appeared to be this idol of a modern woman who fearlessly carves out a life for herself. She was doing sewing work that she didn’t particularly like, but instead with a purpose that it would lead to more independent work. She seemed to have something that Adine only had when she pursued her art, which was her ability to put either love or meaning into her daily activities. Yet Adine’s past experiences tilted toward a priority for intensity over and against her personality potentials, which the author Lou at that time was beginning to understand the limits of intensity. There was a conflict between developing her personal gifts against the intensity of masochism from her past, which was “the result of a long, passionate affair that has left me impervious to a serious and all-embracing love…I found joy in [art], suffered for it; but even long before I knew that I would wholly devote my life to art, my sensations and experiences prepared me for it, and I lived on its fringes…It occurs to me with surprise that our lives depend only to a minor extent on what we do and experience consciously. Secret and uncontrollable impressions on our nerves, which have no direct bearing on our development, play a much larger part…Thousands of coincidences must strike our innermost existence with secret violence and leave the hidden imprint of an early, very early, tremor with which they touched our nerves and our dreams…Habits and traditions of centuries long past, and the joys of slave women, long since dead, still murmur and echo in us in a language not our own, which we only understand in dreams and in the shivering of our nerves.”
The entry way into intensity for Adine, was being able to put a powerful man on a pedestal. In this case it was her romantic interest in Benno. Part of the sadistic attitude of the male is to look severe, like there’s a demand for respect and that one can be without neediness and withdraw love and attention at any time. Benno was a respected intern at the mental institution, where they lived close by, but the location became a symbol for the feeling of being trapped for the artistic part of Adine’s personality. His respect was only interesting based on the tyrannical aspect of his vocation. “…He observed everybody silently through his glasses, to see if [others around him] did not really belong in his madhouse also…All those qualities, for which he had been praised so much, left only a vague impression on me…[though] Benno was very good looking.”
Typical of hastily pledged relationships, couples conflict on what duties to attend to, where to live, and how to develop their skills together. Adine’s character began feeling torn between Gabriele’s freedom to pursue self-development and the intensity of submission to be controlled and the co-dependent need for approval from someone who has the ability to withdraw that approval at just the right moment to maintain this intensity. “Gabriele remarked disparagingly. ‘A man—ha! I could run. Why, for goodness’ sake, do you do everything he wants?'” She responded, “‘I would like to grow into the person he expects me to be,’ I answered nervously. But suddenly I became distinctly aware of the fact that I was not that person at all and that Gabriele impressed me greatly.” Gabriele advised to “do your painting secretly too! And draw secretly! Did he forbid it?”
Adine continued in the same vein as before. “The consequences were inevitable: I grew pale and thin; I developed morbid feelings of insecurity and an ever increasing irritability. Benno’s view of normal and healthy behavior was somewhat limited anyway; and though he had acquired an immense store of knowledge, he did not yet possess the necessary practical experience…In this forced submissiveness to him my most delightful feelings of passion became mixed with the most painful, even with horror. That is certainly not usually the case since women are already subordinate to their men. But it can add such enormous excitement to their love that all inner peace and balance of mind are lost.”
The resistances ended the engagement leading to a life where personal development was more possible. “When I parted from Benno, I felt as if he had stamped on me and crushed me into miserable fragments. For a long time I suffered in semi-consciousness. But then my good fortune prevailed and turned it all into triumph, in that I began to live for my art. This happiness finally became stronger than the passion of my youth…I arranged a little studio of my own here, in Paris. That came to be a wonderful experience, the first truly successful and trouble-free period of my life. I started to breathe freely for the first time, and I learned to enjoy the lighter side of things.”
She eventually received a letter from Benno that confirmed his moralist attitude and also the echoes of opinion throughout the community for her objectionable lifestyle. “His letter contained many bourgeois thoughts and worries which made me smile, and also much ignorance about life in a metropolis and among artists. His experiences had all been confined to his own special field and to life in a small provincial town.” Yet this desire to control her managed to stir her nerves when she saw “Klinger’s well known etching Time Annihilating Glory. I had frequently looked at the armed youth before, with his brazen expression of omnipotence, as he pitilessly kicks the poor woman prostrate before him…All of a sudden it awakened in me an association of ideas; suddenly it touched on something, and a long, long forgotten sensation from my own existence started to stir in me darkly.”
As the town developed and removed it’s charming older buildings with utilitarian constructions, Lou connected the demands for efficiency with the pressure to efface individuality as a means to that end. When returning to the town, she saw Benno again and both of their old attractions became charged up. She also realized the sacrifices her friends and her mother did for her in order help with her artistic career. If you read between the lines, the demands for efficiency also come from the protagonist who is looking for enough power to guide her life at the expense of others, for as long as they agree to it. Only those who have independent wealth, or enough customers for their business, can pursue their dreams more directly. Anyone else, which includes most of the population, have to make due with a certain amount of acceptance of subordination that a patient of Benno’s, for example, demonstrated for Adine. This comparison of intensity with Benno began to overshadow her artistic inclinations again. “Maybe I will remain weak and limp for a long time yet from the strong and intoxicating wine you once gave me to drink. In comparison, all other drinks have left me sober…It really is not my fault that I cannot even fall in love properly. It is most peculiar.”
Like a Freudian sublimation, Adine was still able to transfer some intensity of love to her painting, but the children in the end were still only paintings. With tension and release, there’s always a need to find more tension to find more experiences of release, ad infinitum. That release that is a background of awareness, like found in meditation, would later factor in theories of a primary narcissism and oneness that all babies start with. The background of love and rest is covered over with effort in daily life. “Anyone who paints is always a little in love. You always paint something from inside, something with which you are in love, it seems.—But it is all so fleeting and strange, and you cannot marry it either. So how do I get you a little grandchild [mother]?” Yet, there are positive outcomes from her vocation when Benno notices “how well and healthy and happy you look—and how beautiful.” To Adine’s surprise, she found that her struggles were mirrored in Benno’s. His study contained more books than related to his profession, including that of Schiller’s.
Sublimation – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gv2fr-sublimation-sigmund-freud.html
There seems to be a lack of understanding in both Benno and Adine of the pleasure and release of mental peace that Gabriele was able to contain within herself and use as a guide for her life. She viewed the men of the town as “arrogant, still, and conceited and backward in their opinions. It starts with the lowest officials and continues right through the officers’ ranks. Only the form varies, depending on their social class; the essence is the same. Can you imagine that any one of them would understand that our attitudes are no longer the same as those of our mothers and grandmothers? That we are no longer meek little Susies who grovel and whimper ‘Your highness’, but that we have become masters of our own lives? In short, that we are casting off the idea of subservience?” Gabriele was able to find meaning in what others viewed as “chores.” Everything in her life was treated as emancipation and self-development even if she had an end goal in mind. Contrary to Adine, the means and the end were the same. “Meanwhile, I do not mind staying here and looking after the household. I can explain it to you. But you may be sure I am not doing it against my will.”
One could only guess as to Gabriele’s upbringing, and what her past experiences did to setup her emotions in such a fashion. Adine was still holding on to a different past. “I knew also that my life could never be truly linked with Benno’s, and that it was not love for him which held me here. No, not love, something darker, some instinct, something eerie. Like lightning—a warning and at once a symbol—the etching by Klinger appeared to my inner eye. No, I could not leave…’Our poor great-grandmothers!’ I said with a laugh. ‘They had not the least idea about such innovations. The only form of love they knew was subservience. And into this mold they put all their tenderness. Some of this must also have been passed on to us. And why should we not use their valued inheritance?”
Men also have pressure to behave under compulsion, including Benno. “‘It is for me to apologize,’ he replied without looking at me. ‘The trouble is that everyone keeps to this routine for my sake, [to allow me to stay up late studying]. But that is the way with slave labor. Slavery from morning to night and never a chance to breathe freely like a human being…A person goes to rack and ruin if he gets stuck in a one-sided, narrow professional track, and that his full development becomes arrested. Eventually you see the professional as representing the whole person…In order to achieve more one has to have time and money, and therefore only a few can do it. What do you think happens to growth that is non-professional, personal, when one lives under so much pressure and lack of time as I have been doing? It seems to me that as far back as I can remember, even in my schooldays, I never had time for anything; and that was the reason for the worst mistakes of my life.”
With a bookmark on Wallenstein’s Death by Schiller, Benno betrayed the mourning of his loss of youth and wonder. “One remains a dilettante in whatever is not directly related to one’s profession. I can only say it is a shame. Even in my own profession people would be more efficient if they combined with it a better grasp on life and the world…Gradually I understood why I had lost you, through the lack of insight in what was important for you, the inability to understand what was strong and healthy in you. You appeared to become ill, and I did not realize it was only because you were stifled in your development, because you were prevented from expressing yourself through your art…Instead of trying to control you and confine you within the limits imposed by my lack of experience, I should have let you guide me out of them and open them up through your wider knowledge. Just the way it happened after our separation.”
Benno also blamed Adine for being so codependent and allowing him to keep on with his old ways, but unfortunately, she had to admit that the attraction to that old intensity would have fizzled and no relationship could be struck in the new fashion. She also accepted that Gabriele would have been a better match for his new temperament. Adine eventually was hit with the intensity of Benno’s advances and furious kisses, which stirred up intensity in her, but the inner conflict continued. She could not let go of the freedom she desired, but on the other hand she was still attracted to the intensity. Even worse, the pleasurable intensity was diminished by Benno’s last attempt on her, since he lost authority by the very fact that he needed her affection. Like a game that requires intensity to never decrease, unless Benno is able to be a player that stays on the pedestal long enough for Adine to bite, the sexual desire in her vanished. Ultimately, the reader has to project her destiny after the story ended. I felt that Adine would continue looking for new partners, but always making the decision to preserve her freedom, and thereby exiting any relationship before the sadomasochistic intensity fizzled.
Frau Lou: Nietzsche’s Wayward Disciple – Rudolph Binion: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780691618609/
My Sister, My Spouse – H.F. Peters: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393007480/
Salomé, her life and work – Livingstone, Angela: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780918825049/
The Will to Power – Friedrich Nietzsche: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780141195353/
Aus fremder Seele – Lou Andreas-Salomé: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780366012435/
Ruth – Lou Andreas-Salomé: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9783847838708/
Fenitschka and “Deviations” – Lou Andreas-Salomé: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780819176493/
Whitinger, R., & Andreas-Salomé, L. (1999). Lou Andreas-Salomé’s “Fenitschka” and the Tradition of the “Bildungsroman.” Monatshefte, 91(4), 464–480.
The Human Family – Lou Andreas-Salomé: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780803259522/
Im Zwischenland – Lou Andreas-Salomé: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9783937211527/
Ma – Lou Andreas-Salomé: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780656565306/
The Death of Wallenstein – Friedrich Von Schiller: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781714326785/
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/