Lou Andreas-Salomé

Info: Russian born psychoanalyst and author, who befriended western luminaries, including Nietzsche, Wagner, Freud, and Rilke. She was attacked by Nazis at a young age for begin a “Finnish Jewess.” At Seventeen she convinced Hendrik Gillot to teach her theology, philosophy, world religions, and French and German literature. Gillot planned on divorcing his wife because of his romantic feelings towards her. She left for Rome, Italy with her mother at 21 and became partners with Paul Reé, and she proposed living in an academic commune. She met Reé’s friend Nietzsche and the three planned on setting up their “Winterplan Commune.” Salomé believed that Nietzsche was completely in love with her, which lead to a discrepancy that prompted their separation. She had an opposition to marriage and had open relationships with many men, yet she married Friedrich Carl Andreas in 1887. Throughout her marriage she had affairs with Rilke, Freud, Georg Lebedour, Viktor Tausk, and others. She urged Rilke to change his name from René to Rainer, because it was more forceful, masculine and Germanic. Her volume Lebensrückblick depicts these affairs. She was one of the first female psychoanalysts and one of the first women to write psychoanalytically on female sexuality.

Intellectual, Seductress, Psychoanalyst. 

This was written by Robert Greene in The Art of Seduction about one of my favorite women in history, Lou Andreas-Salomé, “People were intoxicated by her strange mix of the masculine and the feminine; she was beautiful, with a radiant smile and a graceful, flirtatious manner, but her independence and her in- tensely analytical nature made her seem oddly male. It was con- fusion that kept men interested and curious: no other woman was like this. They wanted to know more. The excitement stemmed from her ability to stir up repressed desires.”