Returning to San Francisco—letter to Rudy January 24, 1993
Since I returned from Boston, I’ve been fiddling with an idea that what you called Lou’s “Nietzsche complex” motivated not only Lou afterward, but a whole century of scholars, who have found the incomplete nature of their relationship problematic, whether you define it as Nietzsche’s rejection of Lou, or his betrayal of her, or her rejection or betrayal of him.
I’m calling it “TheEternally Recurring Tale,” told in many voices, tracing where and how a certain mythology has been passed from scholar to scholar. Your advice to be skeptical of the syphilis theories is much to the point: I have so far found 13 (!!) different theories of if, where, and how Nietzsche may or may not have gotten it. [Note from 2019—and look where that led!]
So far so good. But recently I’ve been tracking down something that leaves me on less firm ground That is—I’m wondering if some of the Nietzsche scholars may have repeated the Eternally Recurring Tale in their lives as well as their writing, consciously or unconsciously — and with this leap I’m in the field of psychohistory, am I not? Unholy Trinities everywhere.
I’m finding that Freud, and the entire Freud circle, was much more influenced by (obsessed by) Nietzsche—than perhaps either the philosophical or the psychological literature usually reveals. So my question is— how did the disaster with Lou in December 1882 affect the group of psychoanalyst/philosophers who learned from Nietzsche and Lou (Sister Brain) that philosophy comes from a philosopher’s experience?
Hunch so far is that the answer to your question when I visited you — “How could it be that Freud was so taken in by Lou? might be that he was succeeding where his primary mentor failed: that is, in making Lou his disciple.
Freud the philosopher/theoretician felt himself to be in Nietzsche’s shadow—scooped everywhere. But Freud the clinician (and well-adjusted healthy progenitor) had the upper hand in observing, and diagnosing Nietzsche’s character and medical condition. Finally, Freud the man could succeed as Lou’s friend.
And he succeeded magnificently with her by encouraging her independent thought, where Nietzsche had tried to control her and make her his heir. Nietzsche to Lou: “I never thought about asking you first about your willingness: “You weren’t supposed to notice how yu came to this task. I trusted those higher impulses which I believed you to have. I thought of you as my heir.” Major mistake because Lou from the beginning (as stated so well in her letter to Gillot about her independence never liked to be told what to think or do. So you ponder “Even in her rituals she was unreliable: to be self-consistent she should, for instance, have defied him more drastically” —and I wonder if she didn’t defy (though she frequently disagreed with) Freud because she was, with him, completing, and healing, her own Nietzsche myth?
Federn says of Nietzsche: is there anywhere that he did not anticipate us? Lou says: All my life I’ve been waiting for psychoanalysis. To bring these two quotes together, does Lou mean that she has been waiting for a structure (psychoanalysis) and an activity in the world (being an analyst) and a friendship (the reliability of Freud as consistent friend and mentor) to live out the Nietzschean philosophy (her own Nietzschean quest) that had previously not found expression?
So there are two Lous in the Freudian group mind: the 21 year-old from the gossip and mythology of 1882, and the 50+ year-old real woman who showed up on their doorstep, the companion of Freud who always had some special mother status, was never part of the competitive fray of the sons.
Freud’s pleasure in this success seems straight-forward. But with the sons, the repetitive tale becomes interesting— and problematic.
What do you make of this — Sabina Spielrein comes to Jung as a patient. She is a young, beautiful, very intelligent Russian woman, in terrible health, traveling to the West for a cure, to study, and to be free from the chaperoning of her mother. She becomes Jung’s patient and his disciple; they talk and write, developing ideas that are remarkably Nietzschean (the shadow, animus-anima, the metaphysical historical unconscious, on and on). There is a nasty rejection-betrayal involving a jealous woman (probably Emma playing the Elisabeth role here), and a horrendous letter to the mother in Russia. Sabina, who never gets over Jung, goes on to become an analyst, and friend, colleague and disciple of Freud. She attends the Wednesday meetings. I sketched out three pages of parallels with Lou. Strangely specific things—like giving Jung a poem about pain that is meant to be set to music.
Jung traipsed around Basel gathering all the scuttlebutt he could about Nietzsche, attended Nietzsche’s university, knew Overbeck, knew Nietzsche’s syphilis doctor, read Rohde, knew Wagner’s milliner. Tat was a very small circle, and Jung knew them all; they all gossiped
On theme runs trough the literature — the wish on the part of scholars for some kind of sexual success between Lou and Nietzsche. Of course it didn’t happen. Nietzsche is clear about this over and over; this is a love that would only makes the gods jealous.
So what to make of the fact that the relationship between his patient-disciple-friend Russian Sabina was definitely sexual? Was Jung completing he myth, was any connection with the young Lou conscious, is there no connection? Am I seeing something that is not there?
Later on of course there were hostilities with Lou herself because she sat at Freud’s table during the break-up between Freud and Jung. She writes specifically of Jung’s hostility. And she’s barely mentioned in the Zarathustra lectures— 15,00 pages. Jung merely alludes to a “bird of prey” and Toni Woolf pipes in for the record, “That would be Lou Salome.”
And when Jung dreams of “Salome”right after his break-up with Freud, as an erotic young woman who follows a prophet, when he hears a voice that tells him if he doesn’t analyze this dream he must shoot himself with his bedside revolver, Jung sees no Lou association. Odd?
And then there’s Rank and his passionate sexual involvement with Anais Nin, his patient, wayward disciple-candidate, who trained with him to be an analyst. Was Anais Rank’s Nietzschean quest?
Rank’s parallels with Nietzsche from an early age, including fear of hereditary brain softening, are quite remarkable. The love affair between Rank and Anais was just published in the latest volume of her diaries, Incest. Rank, according to her executor Rupert Pole, encouraged Anais to become her father’s lover and abandon him as a way of completing her relatioship. Rand and Freud at that time were just figuring out the implications of Oedipus. Anais takes Lou as her mentor. Lawrence Durrell wrote to Anais, “I have always thought of you as a sort of incarnation of Lou Solome.: (Anais, who glorified Lu, was of course not too wild about you!)
I found two others that fit the pattern, ajor Nietzsche scholar, love affair with young woman disciple, nasty betrayal, she goes on to find another major Nietzschean as a mentor and life-long friend.
So many questions. Did Nietzsche ever live out any of his sado-masochistic fantasies on trips to the South? What exactly did Lou do in Bayreuth that irritated him so much? How did Nietzsche feel about Wagner’s relationship with Ludwig? How much did she tell Freud—everything, right? Imagine saying to Papa Freud “I’d rather not talk about it.” ! What was Elisabeth hiding, and what did she know about her brother’s syphilis? (She’s the one who commissioned the report that he got it from a cigar.) What is in the restricted Jung letters, or in Sabina’s restricted file at the Burgholzli?
Well.
Thank you again for all the time you spent with me, especially when you were in the midst of major warfare with the French. A friend sent me an article, “Blood Sin, Syphilis and the Construction of the Jewish Identity,” which maybe of interest to you as part of your study of Nazi disease metaphor. It’s a nasty article; let me know if I should send it.
I continue to apply my technicolor scholarship to Frau Lou with good success, constantly amazed at the amount of information you captured