Warning: Suicide Themes
Lifework
With her last intellectual connection she made with another father figure Freud, it became a final home for Lou. “[She] felt herself ‘in such good company’ among the Freudians. She caroused with them in the Café Ronacher or the Alte Elster a few steps from her hotel. She attended a new elementary course on psychoanalysis offered by one of the five young men in the Wednesday group, Viktor Tausk, and by Tausk’s doing she got to try practicing psychoanalysis once at a neurological clinic.”
With a strong preference for synthesis, Lou found that libido, or craving, was a great place to introduce this feeling of oneness to patients, albeit a dualistic version of oneness. “She cherished the [craving] for its instinctual immediacy, for its ‘preserved affective identification with everything,’ for its ever-readiness to overwhelm the ego and restore the old unity. Her pet peeve was the ego, vehicle for ‘the original sin of individuation’ what with its competitive animus and fragmenting rationality. Grudgingly she allowed that the ego breaks off from [craving] only under duress and for the sake of their joint survival. She likewise acknowledged the ego’s mission of leading the individual to a knowing reunion with the all—and for that reunion’s sake she endorsed the historic progress of repression and sublimation away from the permanent proto-narcissism of animals and savages. Besides, to the ego’s credit it betrayed its narcissistic origin—and destination—in its dedication to the ‘world object,’ its universal labels such as ‘reality,’ its aims of total objectivity and integral consciousness, its sense of its experience as a solvent of otherness, its very pretension to judge of what is and what ought to be. Lou saw the aftereffects of proto-narcissism all around: in fantasies of noble birth and convictions of immortality; in the ‘man of destiny…so magically served by fate from without’; in sublimation, which was a sexualization of the ego and a displacement of [craving] from local onto universal objects; in the impassioned lover’s regarding his beloved as all of everything; in the high value we set on love; in ‘that huge, simple fact that there is nothing to which we are not native’; in any call for ‘unity’ and any calling things beautiful or sacred or lovable; in all art, prayer, creativity, sincerity, authenticity; in all neuroses even, these being bad bargains between ego and sex; indeed, in just about everything psychic that succeeds proto-narcissism except for its direct derivative, narcissism proper, which was her own instinctual fixation point.”
Being in the early days of psychoanalysis, students were not analyzed very often. This would be a procedure that was added later on with its own dangers and perils. Lou fumbled about anyways and began taking patients. “After Vienna, where she had proudly donned ‘the white doctor’s frock’ in the neurological clinic, she took on a first patient in Berlin three hours daily for one week late in October 1913. In the winter she rounded up a girl to treat at Loufried, in the spring a man, in the summer a lady. She kept her practice from Freud until she grew submissive in this imitation of him in turn and, beginning in November 1917, sought his guidance and approbation. She did have more than her share of outlandish cases even for those times before common knowledge of neurotic syndromes had normalized them. With one case she drove Freud to doubt he could ever make simple sense of emotional life—that of a girl who, after taking her father’s piles [on his butt] for a pregnancy, thought his penis a half-born baby and his anal wind the baby’s first cry, so that she grew up to be hysterically anxious lest she break off a lover’s penis and lest she break wind in public.’ Lou had a sharp eye for what held in her own case as well as the patient’s—or, if it held all too obviously in hers, a blind spot. She triumphantly solved the ‘riddle’ of a girl at once anxiety-ridden and orgastic when she noticed that the girl’s lovers were all father substitutes by contrast, but Freud had to drive it home to her that the girl’s regular turnover of lovers was likewise a defense against incest.”
Lou made plenty of suggestion mistakes and also got emotionally invested in her patients through projection. “To the psychoanalyst approaching a cure, ‘the depths of our common humanity open up as if to his own self-comprehension’ (a tacit avowal that she was reading her own mind in her patients’).” There were also points where Lou was intellectually dry and didn’t know how to proceed. “[Freud’s] first, faint rebuke concerned mock confessions designed by Lou to elicit real ones from a six-year-old: he assisted her in an easy cure along those lines, then deplored the bad pedagogical example she had set. Another time she cleared up a young man’s neurosis except that an ache at the heart of it lingered on in the form of a vague after-feeling, which baffled her until Freud suggested: ‘It is meant for you as transference mother.’ She made herself into Freud’s pet pupil somewhat in spite of him: he once called her a ‘problem-finder,’ and in time he told her bluntly: ‘Among the special advantages of the analyst’s trade is this one, that in it the consultant’s practice is hardly possible,’ whereupon she ceased reporting on cases interrogatively.”
She continued working, aiming to make steady progress. “The local trade being light, Lou solicited mobile neurotics far and wide. Freud sent her some beginning with an agoraphobic female, ‘the personification of plain, nasty lewdness,’ who was turning psychotic in his care—and whom she fondly cured. She would see patients at any hour and well beyond the hour: ‘New Year’s Eve, analysis till just before midnight,’ she once noted. She would charge as little as the traffic would bear. ‘The fairy band that surrounded your cradle seems to have withheld from you the art of calculating,’ remarked Freud upon summoning her in 1923 to raise her fees as the Mark fell. She would raise them ‘quite without scruples or ado,’ she replied, except that the inflation had ruined everyone! Another time Freud sent her a woman with a wealthy family.” Freud wanted Lou “to accept nothing under twenty gold Marks per hour: patient and family arrived first, and Lou took ten; Freud told the family she had thought them impoverished, so she got twenty after all. ‘I had to be glad you had not said five,’ he epilogued. And again, on a later occasion: ‘I hope this time you did not forget your own interest altogether. I shall not ask, so as not to be vexed.’ At least once she went as high as ten hours a day, as Freud learned ‘with horror’; only rarely, though, could she fill out a full schedule in her house Loufried. One slow season she took on a patient by mail. ‘Why not?’ deemed Freud. ‘It’s worth a try.’ The try failed…Perhaps her favorite patient was a hysterical girl who, upon realizing that virtually since babyhood she had imagined guilty hands to be concealed beneath the color of clothing, took to painting hands: within weeks she was cured—and an accomplished artist. Lou felt respect tending toward envy for every patient who dared reopen those oldest developmental options the very closure of which he called ‘I,’ and melancholy at every cure as at a development completed, even if for the best. And concern: once she worked up such passion over a woman’s ‘right’ to retain custody of her children (‘her lasting possession’) during treatment that Freud had to call her to order: ‘You are no legal friend or helpful aunt, but a therapist.’ Doing Freud’s own work after Freud’s own heart, she found herself. ‘I am one of the happy few who day after day rejoice to be doing just what they are doing,’ she once told him—’what more can one ask? What more can one ask?'”
Lou also worked with Anna Freud in the 1920s. Freud was worried about a father-fixation Anna had. She wanted to follow in his footsteps, and Lou was able to help her with her first paper, Beating Fantasies and Daydreams. “She deemed Anna’s incestuous set-up more blissful than any alternative ‘within normalcy.’ Sistering and mothering his closest child for him, Lou made herself that much more of a daughter-wife to Freud. In 1925 she assured him, [and talked] to him in her imagination—as formerly to her god.: ‘I feel only too deeply how utterly utterly I am beside you, and with you, as if I were a piece of age-old Anna somehow also inseparably hanging on.’ She ‘ever again’ called him a joy-bringer as she ever newly affirmed the ‘grateful indebtedness’ of ‘your ever newly grateful Lou.’ And he pampered his anal daughter-wife, regularly heaping hard-won hard money upon her through the inflation years and beyond for all her assurances, exultantly given, that she neither needed nor deserved it.”
They continued to differ on philosophy which Freud was uninterested in. He felt he was a positive pessimist in that his low expectations kept disappointment at bay, especially during the Great War. “Freud inquired: ‘Do you still think all the big brothers are so good?’ ‘They have become devilish one and all,’ she avowed—'(but that is because States cannot be psychoanalyzed).’ ‘It is too foul,’ Freud returned; ‘and saddest of all is that men are behaving just as psychoanalysis might have led us to expect. This is why I could never join in on your jolly optimism.’ Pressed, Lou did her protonarcissistic best short of invoking original love: ‘I do still think: behind individual human activities, farther back than psychoanalysis can reach, the worthiest and nastiest impulses condition each other indistinguishably, making a final verdict impossible.” Lou experienced ambivalence around the Russian Revolution with lots of hope mixed with skepticism. The internal politicking over the years left her disappointed. She eventually lost her brother Sasha who served on the front. Her other brother Roba buried his youngest son.
Tausk
A certain pattern can be seen following Sigmund Freud as his method began to achieve wider notoriety. Starting with him, there was a pressure to be successful and famous by making a difference. All the other psychologists that found something in his work were also joining from different disciplines, but the pressure was always the highest on those who felt that they couldn’t go back to their old professions. Financial pressures to support a family were one reason, but many people were searching their entire lives for their own version of happiness through a change in vocation. They may have tried to do many things, but many would feel like the Benno character in Lou’s Deviations, who wanted more opportunities for exploration, creativity, and self-development, to replace the feelings of monotony and slavery. It took Lou until her 50s to find Freud, but for many others, they never found a solution.
Lou Andreas-Salomé Pt. 3: https://rumble.com/v5gpvpp-lou-andreas-salom-pt.-3.html
Once Freud dominated his profession, the fear of being a nobody changed into the fear of being superseded. Anyone following in his footsteps would find it difficult to be treated as an equal. For those dissatisfied with Freud, they found their calling by starting their own school, especially if they had enough differences from his theories and enough material to make it competitive to win over students. Many others would try to stay underneath his umbrella and make innovations to expand psychoanalysis, only to find that a career is lifelong and one has to wait for progenitors to die before the coast is clear. When you have people that need to earn money into their 80s, and youthful competitors that need money for a family, something has to give. People like to pick on Freud for this behavior, but its probably the most common attitude in all professions and especially in areas where originality is exalted. That kind of tension between master and understudy played out classically with Freud and Victor Tausk.
Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 8: https://rumble.com/v50nczb-object-relations-melanie-klein-pt.-8.html
Victor Tausk came from an Eastern European family with an authoritarian father, who was a successful journalist, and a warm hearted and devoted mother, to the point of masochism. Victor’s father was unfaithful to his mother, but demanded rigid morality from the children. Their family was non-practicing Jewish and German speaking. Victor took personality elements of both of his parents. At the turn of the century, he pursued being a lawyer because it seemed more accessible. He married Martha Frisch, despite his hostile relationship with her father. She was an intellectual Marxist activist and so she chose to dress plainly and avoid accentuating her beauty. She had a child with Victor, but it died at birth. They later had two sons, Marius, and Victor Hugo.
Victor become a successful defense lawyer and had the opportunity to make a good career of it, but the marriage failed and the two separated. He blamed her for the ending of the marriage, but he continued giving her money where possible and she worked as a bookkeeper for her father’s firm. A friend of Victor’s criticized his restlessness and ambition and charged that he should focus on providing for his family. He was still wondering where his real talents had lain while feeling the pressure to be a good provider. He got into autobiographical fiction where characters felt true impulses related to authentic vocations that were repressed, and there were also resentments over parents imposing careers where no passion lay. In the same vein, he resented Martha’s dependence and only felt comfortable in friendships where there was no obligation. “I want to work my way up in such a way as my nature requires, without fostering false ambitions and ambiguous feelings. Only in this way shall I be able to gain moral capital. The way I am living now is truly the best one for this intention: independent because nobody depends on me, not a slave because not a master.”
In Berlin, Tausk indulged in creativity by writing poetry, playing the violin, drawing charcoal sketches, and directing plays. His Plan B profession to pay the bills was journalism, a profession to which he looked down upon. Martha didn’t cause any rancor by turning the kids against their father and she still loved him and kept all his letters. Later on, Tausk became ill and went to a sanitorium with complaints of catarrh in his lungs and he received useless general diagnoses of a “hereditary inclination towards the psychopathological side,” and neurasthenia. He eventually fell into depression because of his lack of an authentic profession and a sense of home. Even though he was beginning to move towards suicidality, by writing “I have had enough of this life,” he repeatedly found the courage to try new things. This time he was interested in Freud’s psychoanalysis. His hope came back when Freud assumed that Victor was a medical doctor and requested he come to Vienna to train. His studies were supported by his job at a Viennese newspaper. He had enough confidence then to finally go through with a complete divorce.
He was welcomed at first by the Vienna society and his manic-depressive personality allowed him to connect to many analysands. He was in great company with other analysts who also gave up on their old careers. “Freud encouraged both Sachs (a lawyer) and Reik (a scholar), for example, to give up their previous fields, and to practice psychoanalysis for the sake of understanding its theory.” The prospects for psychoanalysis grew in cities large enough to provide clients at the right time for these characters to land on a cushion. These were the more likely people to join Freud, because their personal struggles led to their sympathy with his theories. Freud also found it beneficial for psychoanalysts to study in medicine to improve its status. Being a doctor fostered networks with hospitals and led to referrals when neurologists couldn’t find signs of brain damage to explain psychological symptoms.
Tausk went on to be a psychiatrist. He bridged both sides of the rivalry between Freud and Wagner-Jauregg by working for Wagner-Jauregg at the University of Vienna. He was a sarcastic old colleague of Freud’s because he felt psychoanalysis had a very narrow patient group and he felt that Freud was too confident on what it could provide them. Freud respected Wagner-Jauregg, but he was resentful of his criticisms and he treated psychoanalysts who worked with him as suspicious. Despite the rivalry, Tausk became one of Freud’s best students, and Lou Andreas-Salomé viewed him as another suitor for mutual inspiration as she had the habit to do. He was thirty-three while she was fifty-one. Despite the age gap, Tausk didn’t feel that terrifying dependence and obligation a younger woman would have imposed upon him.
When working together, Tausk allowed Lou to observe cases in his clinic, and she tagged along with his visits to his sons. In a way, Freud, Tausk, and Lou became a new trinity and she became a mediator between the both of them to keep their petty jealousies in check. Freud would be jealous of Tausk’s sexual appeal for Lou and Tausk would be jealous of being second fiddle to Freud’s intellectual gravity. Most of Freud’s followers were expected to be a sounding board for his theories, but innovations could not be branded as a part of psychoanalysis without his assent, otherwise he was bound to feel that his position was being challenged. This led to followers feeling held back, because they all sought to have their day in the sun by finding something original, so clinical cases that brought up new material to analyze would get the attention of practitioners, even if they weren’t looking for them. If those innovations could stay under Freud’s umbrella of the Oedipus Complex, it was welcomed, because it was a confirmation that he was on the right track. Destructive innovations would require followers to start their own school. Tausk took the opportunity to defend Freud against Adler and Jung and wasn’t afraid to be polemical, which he must have felt would keep him in a secure position with Freud, though Lou could see that this could be a trap, because his career would again be in a contingency based on alignment with Freud.
That contingency didn’t take too long before Tausk’s venture into exploring the nature of sublimation and art drew criticisms. Freud felt Tausk was going too fast. “We should not dare to move so boldly into new territory leaving the rear so exposed, and confirmation of earlier discoveries needs to be made again and again.” The irony was that by narrowing the focus on research, Tausk was bright enough to anticipate ideas before Freud could get there, including his views on narcissism that Freud criticized, or there was a threat to complete what was already partially clarified. There was a fine line between plagiarism and originality. This situation would naturally create a rivalry where the originator of a theory would need to protect his position while the understudy would be impatient, waiting for their turn to become famous and celebrated. At the time, Otto Rank was a favorite of Freud’s, but he also embarked on a similar path of psychoanalyzing art and artistry, and received Tausk’s treatment.
Object Relations: Otto Rank Pt. 1: https://rumble.com/v1gvrq9-object-relations-otto-rank-pt.-1.html
Victor Tausk was stuck in another internal battle between his loyalty to Freud and his original contributions in psychiatry, especially in psychosis. This pressure was compounded by his need to finish medical studies and to provide for his sons. Lou eventually lost attractiveness for Tausk because of her perception that he needed analysis as much as any patient, and his initial attractiveness was in the end more of a pity towards the human struggle. “In the long run no helpful relationship is possible; there can be none when reality is cluttered by the wraiths of [unprocessed] primal reminiscences. An impure tone resonates through everything, buzzing as it were with murmurings from within. Yet from the very beginning I realized it was this very struggle in Tausk that most deeply moved me—the struggle of the human creature. Brother-animal. You.”
In these struggles, Tausk managed to complete his medical studies and he was achieving results in a growing practice. This was tragically destroyed by the Great War. His patient list dwindled and he was eventually called up. Victor was back to square one. In Lublin he was able to fill a role as an army psychiatrist along with his military duties. He worked to exhaustion, was depressed, but he developed a lot of his most important works in psychoanalysis, including topics of war psychoses and schizophrenia. Another irony was that he was able to use his legal experience as a defense lawyer to help deserters at the time who were ignorant of the regulations and punishment by firing squad. The people he helped never lost their gratitude for him.
There were a lot of expenditures after WWI in Austria and they were paid for by the printing press. The hyperinflation impoverished everyone. Freud couldn’t raise his fees as high as the rate so he almost depleted all of his savings. Tausk was middle aged and living like an impoverished student. Analysts at the time needed Freud’s referrals and if they weren’t American, many could not pay the fees or they paid in worthless local currency. Victor returned to writing and was thinking about re-entering psychiatry to gain a post. Despite his initial opposition to being analyzed he eventually requested Freud analyze him. He said no, knowing full well that the society would probably have more conflicts unleashed. He then offered Helene Deutsch as an alternative, but not without priming her with his difficulties with Tausk. Freud thought that Tausk’s running ahead would make him think that Freud was stealing his ideas when the foundations were all Freudian.
Despite the insult of not being analyzed by Freud, in a way he was, because Helene was being analyzed at the same time. What she learned through Freud was being applied on him, even if Tausk was more accomplished than her at the time. Freud could also monitor Tausk from afar. In the end, these were Victor’s personal problems, despite what topics he mastered and published about other people. The analysis as expected revolved around Freud. He was sad that Freud didn’t recognize his pioneering contributions and he felt that Freud was dependent on him. Tausk used Freud’s framework, but he felt his discoveries were not taken directly from Freud.
Freud didn’t like hearing innovations in his theories because he wanted to get there on his own, which would slow down these new theorists. “I do not find it easy to feel my way into unfamiliar trains of thought, and generally have to wait until I have found a point of contact with them by way of my own complicated paths.” Yet if Freud did come around to the same conclusions, it would be easy for new theorists to feel like they were stolen from and not given credit where credit was due. Freud in turn would feel that people used his framework to get to conclusions that they would not have arrived at without him. By giving people the framework, they could follow it, and sometimes get to Freud’s inevitable conclusions faster than him, because he wanted to take the time for case studies to define more clearly what he had discovered already. But when you compound each theorist’s skills in other arenas, like psychiatry or scholasticism, innovations were likely to happen. This slowed Tausk’s work even further, because he needed to reference Freud’s papers more and more to avoid plagarism. This of course continued throughout the history of psychoanalysis and is always a challenge in scientific endeavors. Once researchers have mastered the current frameworks, it’s easy to anticipate parallel discoveries and it becomes a race against time if one is seeking fame and fortune. Fame for being at the cutting edge was what brought the clientele, and they would take no less than the newest and most advanced treatments.
All these absorbing topics from Tausk’s free associations ruined Helene’s analysis with Freud. She formally ended it with Tausk. It was a similar situation where Lou was a confidant for Freud against Tausk and now Helene was just another one. All of his jealousies were now known to Freud. He later on refused requests to analyze Tausk’s son Marius, and was completely done with him. Freud was also beginning to become world famous and patients were starting to lineup again. He could now dispense with Tausk because many new fresh and naïve students were ready to follow in his footsteps.
Tausk was again back to square one looking for a way out. One day he saved a Serbian woman from arrest and he eventually moved in with her while she fell in love with him. Despite being illiterate, she was a member of the Serbian aristocracy and could provide him with prospects. This fed again into his fear of being dependent on another person and he still harbored dreams of being a lecturer in Vienna. Earlier on he was in love with a successful actress who was very interested in him, but he was afraid of engulfment and broke the relationship with her leaving her shattered. He again went through the same process with a female doctor. A different woman cheated on Tausk with one of his patients, and he ironically decided later on to marry a patient of his who was a concert pianist.
Tausk was complicated because he depended on leaders for a post in life, but he also wanted independence. Because he couldn’t secure a career without interruptions from the war or from his own desire for independence, it made him a financial risk for women. If the woman was demanding, like Martha because of her children, then his uncertainty with his job would kill the relationship. If the woman had more wealth, then he was worried about being dependent on her. If the woman loved him too much, there could be a lack of independence with engulfment. Paul Roazen had his theories that one must go back to the parents to see their templates. Did he fear he would become like his father? Did he fear that the woman would be like his mother? His sister was in a happy marriage, was she an ideal type that none of the women could match? Was marrying a patient an affront to a father figure like Freud? Did he feel any other forms of shame? For whatever reason, he could not commit with any of these women who he legitimately loved. Tausk was twisted into a pretzel and it was beginning to dawn on him that his life was a complete failure.
When he last spoke to his son Marius, the tried to separate himself from him by suggesting that he become more independent and to not be slavish to the commands of his mother. He also suggested the same about himself. “Don’t worry about me.” He later sent a thank you note to his sister Nada who regularly provided him with cigarettes and bacon. He told about his upcoming wedding, but as he was getting closer to his commitment, suicidal thoughts were rising. He then wrote his will and two letters, one to Freud and to his fiancée Hilde. “While completing this writing he sipped Slivovitz, the Yugoslav national drink. Then he tied a curtain cord around his neck, put his army pistol to his right temple, and pulled the trigger. Here was a man utterly determined to put an end to his life. Besides blowing off part of his head, as he fell he strangled himself.”
When the news filtered out, Victor’s son Marius demanded to see Freud to find out what happened. Freud was formal and Marius eventually was given the suicide letter he received, either from Anna or from Freud himself. Marius cherished the letter, because despite all the rancor between Tausk and Freud, Tausk was unexpectedly thankful and grateful to Freud and only asked that his fiancée and his kids were looked after. The emotional reversal of the suicide letter was suspect, because of the obvious fact that his inside knowledge of Freud’s theories did not save him. He even analyzed his fiancée in the suicide letter and hoped Freud could help because “she tends toward compulsive symptoms and identifications. She is noble, pure and kind, it is worth the trouble to give her good advice.” The typical reasoning, of choosing death over life, because there would be less pain, also appeared in the letter. “I have no melancholy, my suicide is the healthiest, most decent deed of my unsuccessful life. I have no accusations against anyone, my heart is without resentment, I am only dying somewhat earlier than I would have died naturally.”
The clue as to why he put Freud on a pedestal, like when he said “your work is genuine and great, I shall take leave of this life knowing that I was one of those who witnessed the triumph of one of the greatest ideas of mankind,” was found instead in his last will. “I am taking leave of my life, which I have systematically disintegrated ever since my childhood and which has now completely lost its sense since I can no longer enjoy it. My talent is too little to support me. The recognition that I cannot gladly enter into a new marriage, that I can only keep myself and my beloved fiancée in conflicts and torments, is the true conscious motive of my suicide…I have deceived you all by living a role to which I was not equal.” It was a sad end, because he put all his hopes in Psychoanalysis for solving his life problems, which no modality can possibly guarantee, and he held onto an ego-ideal that was so perfectionistic and unrealistic that it meant that he was in competition with Freud to prove his worth. He needed symbols and signs of his success to be worthy of love in his own mind. Freud had his own theories about aggression against oneself as a way to avoid committing murder towards a rival and as a way to escape life circumstances. One also succeeds in killing the tormenting object-relation that lives rent free in the mind.
Freud worked with a committee to make an official statement on Tausk, and he blamed the war as being a last straw that ended any possibility of success to be a breadwinner for his family and to achieve a successful marriage at last. Tausk was getting more visibly sick at meetings and felt that time was running out for his contributions. Freud didn’t mention their rivalry and accepted without question Tausk’s lauding of Psychoanalysis as a historical milestone. In a letter to Lou, Freud was more candid and brutal. He suggested that Tausk’s father was the influence, and heaped some blame on Lou. His comments matched his fears of analyzing Tausk, and one could guess that his experiences with other men, like Adler, would make it easy to predict that any new analyst entering the fold could one day ask for their place in the sun and rival directly with him. The suicide only left Freud with a sense of relief that now the rival was out of the way. “So he fought out his day of life with the father ghost. I confess I do not really miss him; I had long taken him to be useless, indeed a threat to the future. I had a chance to cast a few glances into the substructure on which his proud sublimations rested; and would long since have dropped him had you not so boosted him in my esteem. Of course I was ready anyhow to do what I could for him, only I have been quite powerless of late given the degeneration of all relations in Vienna. I never failed to recognize his significant gift, but it was prevented from being translated into correspondingly valuable achievements.” Lou’s responding letter was more generous to Tausk, but she carefully avoided irritating Freud by agreeing that Tausk was a danger to the future of Psychoanalysis. She still felt bad about her abandonment when Tausk asked her to meet him in Munich. “No one will sit down at the same table with a wretch; not even you have done so.” Helene Deutsch also felt guilty because she ended the analysis too soon. She thought that she could have saved his life by continuing it. Freud responded “but you made the right choice, you chose for yourself.” This is never mind the fact Helene was a new pupil and she was essentially getting distracted by Tausk’s rivalry with Freud and was naïvely fueling it by giving that information to Freud. As Freud mellowed out in old age, he admitted “when a man is endowed with power it is hard for him not to misuse it.”
Psychologist Paul Federn wrote quickly after the suicide with fresh insights. Being more of a socialist, he felt that Tausk “could not ascend…by an interest in the common welfare…He was not kind…Whenever I approached him in a friendly way I found only vanity, envy, and lack of interest…I am certain that being destitute and unable to borrow money for enough to eat was but the last push. The motivation was Freud’s turning away from him…Freud possesses so much love for people that he can be kind, but in his old age he became increasingly harder—and this is understandable with Freud because he, too, had to live a life unworthy of his greatness.” It also appeared that Tausk’s hatred of his lack of skills and his resentment of Freud presented more outwardly than suspected. “He made enemies for himself everywhere and always; at the end he drove his psychological patients away, apparently in order to demonstrate the uselessness of the method, out of rancour against Freud. The methodological rigor which Freud teaches makes people hard and alienates them from their fellow men; he who cannot love is defenseless against failure.”
Federn wasn’t entirely against suicide. Tausk may have done this out of pride, or narcissism, but Federn had his own breaking point as well. In old age, after his wife had already died, he was suffering from cancer, and after a scary psychosis following a surgery, he was set to go back for another procedure, and that was more than enough for him. He transferred all his patients and shot himself in his analytical chair. The suicide note also championed psychoanalysis.
Looking Back
Lou continued her ideal lifestyle of publishing autobiographical fiction that expounded her more settled beliefs as well as receiving patients for analysis. “Patients were recommended to her by Freud and others, and soon she could not imagine her life without at least one current analysis. At home she saw few people apart from patients but lived quietly, enjoying her house and garden and surrounding woods, her dog, and the seasons.”
As can be expected in old age, Lou’s thoughts focused more on her past. Her book Rodinka, was dedicated to Anna Freud. It was “like a gathering of places, atmospheres, characters, conflicts, fates and ideas, which could have been shaped and sharpened into a novel, but with no sign that the author wished to do so. It seems written for herself alone, a homage and reminiscence; or perhaps it was also for friends whom she wished to remind of shared experience, like a discursive and very full diary, or even like a rough, large painting, for it is all visual and still, scene after scene.” For example, the character Vitaly understands “the way women need men as brothers.” He confides in Musya, who is “Lou’s image of herself…She is the only one he tells of his dangerous activities, but he also assures her that he and she ‘have the same relation to life—one without deception.'” Lou wanted freedom for herself and the irresponsibility to follow her intuitive delving amidst the traditional way others lived. “[She] thought of herself: stable, settled and domiciled, yet romantically free, with the whole world hers to roam.”
What was considered in the culture of her time important values, duty and cleanliness was something Lou rebelled against in her The Devil and his Grandmother. “The animal world, with all its slimy, ugly creatures (not only spiders, snails, rats and frogs, but also the life going on in the human belly, gut and womb), is worthy of endless admiration; Freud had furthered this work of release by showing how one could look with unflinching interest at the most ghastly preoccupations of the mind. Some of the materials liberated for decent consideration by Freud’s theories are the subject matter, the stuff—it is extremely physical—of this play. The importance of their liberation is its message; the theme is the redemption of the body, especially of anality and physical sexuality.”
In The Hour Without God, it recounts Lou’s own loss of faith, through failed prayers and the perennial question of why evil exists in the world. The characters gradually came to the reconciliation that they had to instead look to each other for love that was originally demanded from religion. Her message bleeded into her book on Rilke, where he went in the direction of being anti the body. “So the physical, because it is the sign of ‘not belonging to the angel realm,’ is for him ‘the last word for the horrible.” The Christian hatred of the earthly ugly animal side of humans inevitably leads to self-hatred for Lou. “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure, and while we stand in wonder it coolly disdains to destroy us. Every Angel is terrifying.”
The First Elegy By Rainer Maria Rilke: https://poetrysociety.org/poems/the-first-elegy
Oh Berlin – U2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAtsgk02oYI
The Weeknd – Every Angel Is Terrifying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMXs99tPkcg
In Rilke’s poetry, man cannot be like the animals, happy in their acceptance of nature, because of intelligence. Yet the intelligence wants to escape, leading to fragmentation away from reality. Lovers can ward off this need to escape the lowly animal feeling for a time, but love too is impermanent. Lovers will eventually struggle with concentration for each other and become distracted. The oneness of love eventually deflates back to the individual self-preservation again and again. This also happens with parents. For example, Rilke loved his mother, but felt judged by his father who had higher expectations for his future. Similar to Victor Tausk, Rilke didn’t feel successful enough. In the Duino Elegies, intelligence offered humans the ability to explore, but no life pattern could be agreed upon, and hence a lack of harmony continues to follow the human experience. Love for Rilke had to be more real and include the acceptance of death. “Art cannot be helpful through our trying to keep concerning ourselves with the distresses of others, but in so far as we bear our own distresses more passionately, give, now and then, a perhaps clearer meaning to endurance, and develop for ourselves the means of expressing the suffering within us and its conquest more precisely and clearly than is possible to those who have to apply their powers to something else.”
The Great War was devastating for Rilke and the generations that went through it, and they all agreed that something had to change. “Only through one of the greatest and innermost renovations it has ever gone through will the world be able to save and maintain itself.” Through sympathy and catharsis, which isn’t as far away from Freud’s “abreaction,” art could express feelings of the maker of the art and allow others to imitate that resilience. This endurance could spread and lead to a better world where peace and serenity could be reproduced. “The task of the intellectual in the post-war world would be ‘to prepare in men’s hearts the way for those gentle, mysterious, trembling transformations, from which alone the understandings and harmonies of a serener future will proceed.'”
For Lou, Rilke’s meaning of life was still too full of resistance to reality, which she was also bothered by in the same way when she read other “depth” psychologists. Art “has its proper limits, it is ‘nothing but’ communication, even when its motive is not the wish to convey but the desire to disburden. At the furthest point to which it ought to go, art is still only a bridge: between the sayable and the unsayable. As a bridge it can go a long way, all the way, towards the unknown, but it may not lose touch with the known. If it tries to do more, to be the path in the unknown (which it can only lead to), art will take the place of reality and steal away the ground of the human. This happened to Rilke…She knew the remedy for Rilke’s malaise and boldly prescribed it, as she had done in his lifetime: it was, or would have been, the ‘unrestrained giving up of himself to his most forgotten memories.’ Because he would not do this, she considered, he lost the rapport with what was deepest in himself, and instead of reaching the ‘primal ground’ he ended up in the ‘unfathomable’ from which nothing could rescue him…”
In My Thanks To Freud, Lou described this very angelic psychosis. “The Angel devalues man to the extent that it strips him even of his reality. This devaluing not only deprives man of all but his deepest roots from which rises a pleasing, yeasty smell, the smell of the wine of life itself, and to draw it in, as it were to satisfy the angel’s least claim to reality, thereby denying the reality of the whole of mankind, whose instincts had been nurtured in a warmer place which, for its part had every appearance of having been emptied, forced to mimic after a fashion a restrained, spiritual manner towards the angel—of whom the poet complained at the top of his voice as being a ‘spiritual monkey’ that sat on his shoulders and would be removed only by the laws of physics which forces everything to the ground. All its devotion is offered to the reality-usurping angel, who, conceived and fathered, in that order, in the mother’s body in the centre of love, which is where it stays, all tangled up, and where the angel becomes a love partner.” For most people, there needs to be a balance. Too much purity, leads to inhumanity, as Lou pointed out, but not enough control over one’s impulses leads to conflict with others. Each person has to find a balance they find agreeable.
Clarifying views
Despite her youthfulness, Lou was weakening by the 1930s. “[She] was frequently ill. Hospitalized with diabetes in the fall of 1929, she would receive her patients in her sick room after 4:00—and after her husband. ‘As my husband spoke to me day by day at the pre-appointed hour from the armchair by my bedside,’ she related to Freud, ‘we two old people noticed how much we had to tell each other for which we had really never found the time.’ On her release at the winter’s end, Andreas applied his exotic salves to her, which did her soul good. That summer he took her place at the hospital with cancer. For three months she kept the secret with his doctor, dreading ‘day and night’ lest heightened pains arouse his suspicions: ‘as on his last night he…sweetly dozed off,’ she related to Freud again, ‘I felt unmixed gladness.'”
Lou was left with reconciliation between her philosophy background and psychoanalysis. Many philosophers, including Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, and Martin Heidegger, were trying to escape sterile philosophical principles devoid of immediate reality and human feeling. Psychoanalysis was another kind of phenomenology and existentialism trying to free people from intellectual cages. Lou entertained Sigmund with her synthesis of his views and her own. Her freedom was that of the Ego from the Super-ego where the Ego takes the lead and the Super-ego rests in the backseat. Despite being 70, her writing style was polemical, energetic, and vibrant. She believed that a healthy narcissism would use the omnipotent energy in adulthood that gave children their boldness to adventure. Timidity, inhibition, and repression are a form of sickness, and health is learning for oneself through self-development. “The more fully we enter into the ‘challenge of the hour’, into the present factual moment, into the conditions that hold from one case to another, instead of being trammelled by prescriptions and directives (written by human beings!), the more connectedly do we act in accord with the whole…And what does that matter if one’s tentative thoughts are encompassed by all manner of possible errors and mistakes? If some people choose to call that immoral, arrogant, arbitrary, then all the more reason to point out to them that what they are doing is using convenient pronouncements to keep people at a comfortable infantile level, which, morally speaking, is a disgrace. At the same time, what are others doing by first and foremost daring to make up their own minds, daring to choose, to seek true worth? One is at one’s most committed when acting on one’s own accord, relying on a flood of inspiration and accepting every risk. It’s an action that is legitimised by its own transcendence and is saying: This is where I belong—I’m not simply making a stand in a struggle against a foe.—Am I being overbold?—Yes, because overboldness is what we humans have invented; it’s what comes of being human and exercising [one’s own] judgement; exercising [one’s own] judgement is the most sublime adventure life has to offer.”
For those like me who have studied Jungian Myers-Briggs, we can see screaming out to the reader a preference for subjectivity, like an ENTP, who loves Extroverted Intuition, which is exploration and brainstorming, and Thinking Introversion, which subjective logic. The opposite functions of an ENTP, the functions she normally disliked, would be an ISFJ, who likes using memory in Sensing Introversion, to make procedures and harmonizing with others with Feeling Extraversion. Lou had a distaste for sterile wisdom taken from others, because they could be misleading. She developed her demonically weak Sensing Extraversion in her life by enjoying oneness through sensation and took in all the details that were considered earthy, dirty and irrelevant to Sensing Introversion. She wanted to do things herself and didn’t fear inefficiencies and mistakes that go along with “reinventing the wheel.” An opposite personality for Lou, the ISFJ, would want a smoother and more peaceful world where all the trap doors would have already been mapped out by prior generations, saving all that effort and time. For Lou, this would be sterile and it would lose the sense of aliveness and adventure, like being a robot. Lou’s adventures included experimentations that led to unexpected surprises pointing to new ways of being and different lifestyles, including the lifestyle that suited her best, which was focusing on a vocation that one likes and making friends into family, to keep engulfment at bay. Finally, where she did find agreement with Freud, was that the Id, or for Lou, narcissism, was the foundation of energy, and was the “creative aspect of being alive…This umbilical cord goes on working indestructibly in the background of our conscious urges—one cannot fail to recognise the deep-seated root of our [body], our individual, undetachable ‘exterior.'”
This is what Lou didn’t want to be held back. The intuitive cravings would naturally arise and then the ego’s personal logic could use that fuel to take a stab at solving a problem. This was where her narcissism went into the secondary kind because of her distrust of others and their repressions against her activity. She wanted to act on impulses when she wanted to and how she wanted to, regardless of how it affected others. Too much concern for people would be depleting for her. “On the other hand this state of affairs most likely calls to mind the erotic problem and the question as to why we don’t reserve our narcissism entirely for ourselves, thus avoiding, for the sake of one’s object, pouring it away down the sink, love’s drain, or offering it in gushes of endearment: the individual is divesting himself of too much, as if bent on isolating himself, which at the same time and in the same sense finds expression in the now opposing constraint that, so to speak, embraces him and assimilates him…But in general its simply a matter of individuals keeping themselves to themselves and having no relationship with another human being. What they want is to be left in peace and to live out their lives free from hate. For whenever our individuality sees itself being forced into a love relationship with another individuality it straightway puts at risk its struggle to develop the ‘I’, a struggle that is every bit as pressing and fundamental as are the passion and exclusiveness that threaten it.” This worldview is similar to that of a hunter-gatherer who only spends so much time in the village, but is instead allowed to roam and explore for sustenance and satisfaction for most of the day. In her more romantic village, free exchanges were to be made without excessive conformity. Skill development would also be prioritized, so that women wouldn’t only focus on traditional female pursuits and skills. The best way to look at this lifestyle is one in which you made decisions without feeling like an authority figure is about to punish you or control you at any time.
Lou also wanted shame against the animal side of the human to decrease so the narcissistic Id could become omnipotent enough to approach goals and not run away from normal obstacles. Now a problem-solving mentality to satisfy our craving-intuitions could arise with as little repression as possible. As each successive tension-craving was satisfied, a peaceful release would be realized. Also, some situations are permanently solved in a way that they don’t reappear in the mind as a sense of lack anymore. A mental burden is released off some of the branches in the mind, and these experiences can be used for societal reform. Societies attentive to this wisdom of release could design revolutionary social structures and exchanges so as to improve the mental health of their citizens. “When moral imperatives that are far too rigorous and impractical disregard our impulsive nature, then that self-same nature, being of sound health will take issue even with the prevailing authoritative beliefs…”
Regardless of personal philosophy, Lou still was moving ever closer towards the “undiscovered country” like all people do, and a fear grips when those around you are dying and the final stage of life becomes tangible and unavoidable. At the time, she had temptations toward suicide, but she held on to her optimism. In the awareness of those who prioritize phenomenology, perceptions, recognitions, experiences, stories, and lessons learned she said that “human life—indeed all life—is poetry. We live it unconsciously day by day, piece by piece, but in its inviolable wholeness it lives us.”
Ernst Pfeiffer, a veteran from the Great War, was disillusioned with the loss and what happened to Germany during the Weimar Republic. Lost as he was, he had consulted her earlier on behalf of a friend, and their friendship continued on an intellectual plane. “‘I find it nice of life to have sent me something so select in companionship even this late.’ She talked Kleist with him, psychoanalyzed him to the extent of eliciting a colossal transference, and initiated him into her paper world. By the end of 1934 the estate was his ‘to own and administer’ after her death on the understanding that he would make it available ‘to posterity.’ A man so constituted must have watched the rise of the Nazi movement with mixed emotions. On the one hand, he could not help but be moved by the rebirth of patriotism, especially among Germany’s youth, which was so marked in the early thirties. On the other, he must surely have wondered about the aims of those who made use of it…Lou sensed at once that here was a human being lost in the confusion and turmoil of a world that offered him no place. She taught him how to relax, made him lie on her couch and encouraged him to tell her the story of his life. ‘She was such a quiet listener that I sometimes thought she had fallen asleep. But when I stopped and waited, her gentle voice, coming as from far away, said: ‘Go on.’ By relating his life to Lou, Pfeiffer became more and more dependent on her. She gave him what he had been seeking in vain until he met her: a goal and a purpose in life. Repaying his frankness with an equal frankness of her own, she told him the story of her life.”
Regardless of how fulfilled a person is towards the end of their life, regrets naturally come up. There’s always a desire to go back over life and change things based on an understanding of how little time there is, like a deathbed philosophy, but living with the thought that there’s still more years left to go makes one relax and slow down nonetheless. It’s hard to live with your hair on fire trying to experience everything that life has to offer. “During the last months of her life, when she was rapidly growing weaker as a result of uremic poisoning, Pfeiffer visited her almost daily. Like a faithful paladin he sat by her bedside, ministered to her needs and read to her from her memoirs. Sometimes she would interrupt him quietly and say: ‘Yes, that is how I would say it today, too.’ Once she looked up suddenly and said in a surprised tone of voice: ‘I have really done nothing but work all my life, work…why?” And then toward the end, her eyes closed and, as if talking to herself, she murmured: ‘If I let my thoughts roam I find no one. The best, after all, is death.’ Lou’s wish was to be cremated, then scattered about her garden; the police forbade the scattering, so the urn containing her ashes was set into her husband’s grave—to which, being terrified of cemeteries, she had not returned since his burial. The epitaphs on her all bore out the apt one by Andreas’s stepsister-in-law: ‘Whoever came close to her succumbed to the magic of her personality.'”
Freud was still alive and saw her life full circle. From her childhood dreams to fears of restriction and limitation, she found her home. “It was in Vienna that long ago the most moving episode of her feminine fortunes had been played out. In 1912 she returned to Vienna in order to be initiated into psycho-analysis. My daughter, who was her close friend, once heard her regret that she had not known psycho-analysis in her youth. But, after all, in those days there was no such thing.”
The threats of repression were alive and well during this Nazi period before WWII. A person as well travelled as Lou made it difficult to pin down her nationality so the Nazis provisionally “called her a ‘Finnish Jewess,'” and gossip mongers called her “‘the Witch of Hainberg’…A few days after Lou’s death a police truck, led by a Gestapo official, stopped in front of the recently vacated house, carted away Lou’s library, and dumped it in the basement of the city hall. The reason given by the Gestapo officials for this confiscatory act was that Lou had been a psychoanalyst, a practitioner of what the Nazis called ‘Jewish Science’ that she had been a collaborator and close personal friend of Sigmund Freud and that her library had been stacked with books by Jewish authors.”
Lou was a recluse in Göttingen, and was mostly left alone due to her advanced age. This didn’t stop her from being an inspiration for rumors coming from the town’s nosy moralists about her history of exploits with different men. Like Nietzsche’s sister attempted to do to his philosophy, it also was being twisted in self-serving ways by the Nazis, and the effects where surrounding Lou at the end of her life. Lots of questions could be asked about the importance of letting go of repression, and opening up the lizard brain of Pandora’s Box. Freud supported an ego that was free to act, but with a healthy super-ego conscience, yet what if there was a misunderstanding about this balance? What happens if aggressive impulses are given complete license? One person’s freedom can be another person’s repression. A common theme around this time was a world in which people struggled with their low self-esteem, because of their identities or vocations, and unfortunately many aimed for suicide: A sadism against oneself.
Pilgrimage – Nine Inch Nails: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdTeX8gGPC4
After the Nazi period, researchers wondered if followers of the movement were more psychopathic than regular people, or they were just led by psychopaths, but in a Rorschach inkblot test, it was found that “unlike most previous studies, variance in type and degree of psychopathology precluded the application of a mental disorder, character structure, or trait to all, or to the majority, of Nuremberg war criminals. Nevertheless, common features, such as avoidance of responsibility, low self-esteem, and capacity for affection, were revealed.” So people who needed affection, and tried to imitate role models that influenced their ego-ideal, but instead felt low self-esteem due to their own perceived, or actual weaknesses, what if they could regulate their emotions outwardly when they didn’t want to commit suicide? What would happen if the roaring, vengeful imagoes found in free association were allowed to possess the bodies of their hosts? If they had a group of people they could transfer blame to for the world they experienced, and scapegoat, there might be some catharsis, but at the expense of innocents. After the influence of Darwin, Nietzsche, and secularism, the debate about the true scope of freedom raged on.
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/
Brother Animal: The Story Of Freud And Tausk – Paul Roazen: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780713901269/
Sexuality, War, and Schizophrenia – Victor Tausk: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781138514508/
Salomé, her life and work – Livingstone, Angela: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780918825049/
The Freud Journal – Lou Andreas-Salomé: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780704300224/
Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé letters: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393302615/
Looking Back – Lou Andreas-Salomé: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781569248485/
Duino Elegies – Rainer Maria Rilke, J.B. Leishman, Stephen Spender (Translators): https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780701121631/
Philosophical Note in Rilke’s Duino Elegies: A Critical Analysis by Jayadev Kar Research Scholar, The Criterion: An International Journal In English G.M. Autonomous College, Sambalpur, Vol. 6, Issue II April 2015.
The Great Austrian Inflation – FEE: https://fee.org/articles/the-great-austrian-inflation/
Greiner N, Nunno VJ. Psychopaths at Nuremberg? A Rorschach analysis of the records of the Nazi war criminals. J Clin Psychol. 1994 May;50(3):415-29.
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/