May 7, 2019. The following is an article I just submitted for a book on the history of psychohistory.

Rudolph’s Binion’s Psychohistory Workshop: Frau Lou: Nietzsche’s Wayward Disciple

I:  The Discovery of Traumatic Reliving and Psychohistory

When Rudolph Binion was thirty-two years old in the spring of 1959, he began a study of Lou Salomé, an “irresistible biographical subject,” for a summer grant from Columbia. As a historian, Rudy set out to write a chronological biography of Lou (1861-1937) in the cultural context of Western European history during a period he defined as stretching from Nietzsche to Freud.

Lou captivated him with her “grand inner life that showed through her essays on art and letters, on religion, philosophy, and psychology, on women and love; her novels and stories and dramatic verse; her published letters and diaries; and finally, that seeming last word in self-disclosure, her autobiography.” With his wife Alice, Rudy traveled to Germany where Lou’s papers were kept under the under the watchful eye of her executor, Ernst Pfeiffer. At night they secretly photocopied pages. Rudy completed a draft – a massive document of fused notes, which “numbered grotesque thousands upon thousands in their helter-skelter heaps.”

To Rudy, who considered himself “an out and out Freudian,” one of Lou’s most appealing aspects as a subject was that beginning in 1911, she was an intimate friend and colleague of Freud—and she wrote articles on aspects of psychoanalysis, in particular narcissism. She studied with Freud to become a lay analyst, and even analyzed herself using her childhood diary. In the sections on her childhood, Rudy quotes her dense Freudian jargon. He set out to psychoanalyze her, based on his observation and his interpretation of her own self-analysis. Lengthy analysis of her published fictional work found it to be thinly-veiled autobiography.

Here Rudy ran into a dilemma. In defining what he considered to be her neuroses, and looking for an antecedent in her early childhood according to the Freudian model, he found instead that over and over she appeared to be reliving Nietzsche’s violent rejection of her in December 1882. She repeated this traumatic experience not only in her relationships and her fiction, but also in her own analysis of her childhood adulation of and rejection by her father.

If at first Rudy had not planned to rehash “the stale Lou-Nietzsche story,” this big discovery refocused him on the events of 1882. This adult trauma, relived consciously and unconsciously, forward and backward, became a key theme of Frau Lou-- hence the subtitle, Nietzsche’s Wayward Disciple. 

By the time he had completed his biography, he had rejected Freud’s basic theory that all neurosis has an origin in childhood in favor of a theory of unconscious repetition of adult trauma. Frau Lou can be seen as a workshop that begins with Rudy as a Freudian and ends with him as a psychohistorian. It was the working through of psychological aspects of Lou’s life that led to him becoming one of the founders of this new discipline.

II   Rewriting and Publishing Frau Lou

In the often-repeated story of Lou and Nietzsche, he falls in love with her, proposes marriage, and sinks into suicidal depression when she rejects him. In her memoir Lou wrote that Nietzsche had proposed marriage, but Rudy discovered documents that led him to believe that she had lied about that. If she lied there, he asked himself, what else had she said that was untrue? In a scholarly frenzy, he began to revisit and question everything she wrote, working out of a growing anger at what he found to be on-going errors, omissions and fabrications in Lou’s self-told story, correcting as he went on his massive typed first draft.  “For two days and nights and then another two I pursued Lou’s latent associations as if driven at dizzying speed in all directions at once.” Rudy took Lou’s misrepresentations personally; she had betrayed him, her biographer-to-be, turning his neat text topsy-turvy.

When Lou met Nietzsche, she was twenty-one, traveling for her education and her health with her chaperoning mother. Nietzsche’s stated goal with Lou was “to acquire a pupil in her and, if my life should not last much longer, an heir and one who will develop my thoughts.” He was clear that there was nothing of the erotic in his attraction to her; he wrote to his friend Peter Gast, “You’ll surely do us both the honor of keeping the notion of a love affair far removed from our relationship.  We are friends and I intend to hold this girl and her trust in me sacred.” 

Nietzsche spent three weeks with Lou in Tautenberg, sometimes talking ten hours a day, like “two devils conversing.” Then in October, Nietzsche suddenly blamed Lou for dangerous gossip that had originated at the first performance of Wagner’s Parsifal in Bayreuth. He wrote to her: “If I banish you from me now, it is a frightful censure of your whole being….You have caused damage, you have done harm—and not only to me but to all the people who have loved me: this sword hangs over you.” He dismissed her protests and they never spoke again. 

Nietzsche initially praised Lou, calling her courageous, high-minded, sharp as an eagle, brave as a lion. She was uniquely ready for his philosophy. Rudy similarly praised her: “She was to theorize with a passion, continually and sublimely: in the whole history of thought there are few men and no women to match her on these counts.” At the end Nietzsche’s rejection of her was vicious. He called her “this thin, dirty, evil-smelling little monkey with false breasts—a fate!”  She was a monstrosity, a brain with only the rudiments of a soul. In the second pass on his text, Rudy called her a moral monstrosity, a distraught fabler and a sick fraud. The spell she cast over her friends kept them from seeing the warped side of her. His summary: “At all odds, every autobiographical formulation of Lou’s was misleading in some way or other, if not outright false.”  Nietzsche had felt betrayed and responded with excessive anger; Rudy did the same.

Rudy wrote a draft of a classic biography but then rewrote it when he questioned so many of Lou’s self-representations. The entire text had to be retyped, a substantial task for an assistant. In an article published in The Historian’s Workshop, “My Life with Frau Lou,” Rudy wrote an overview of his experience writing and publishing Frau Lou, a roadmap for those frustrated with this palimpsest of a text.

Despite the massive rewrite, Frau Lou remained full of unanswered questions and contradictions. Rudy wrote, “My inclination was to redo it altogether during my coming sabbatical, but there was no telling where that could lead. So I decided to inventory the loose ends in a conclusion and move on.” He left the text “discontinuous and inconsistent just so as to underscore its inconclusiveness” and he summarized it all in a final wrap-up chapter, “Beyond Frau Lou,” concluding, “So it is as well that I drew the line where I did: I am in enough of a methodological mess as it is.”

After submitting the manuscript with its unwieldy thousands of complexly coded footnotes and endnotes to several publishing houses (at one the editors “went plain hysterical” and a colleague dismissed it as fit only for scrap), Frau Lou finally found a home at Princeton University Press and was published in 1968— at 587 compressed pages of small print. Walter Kaufmann wrote a foreword and Frau Lou was released to mixed reviews. The historian Norman F. Cantor called it “one of the dozen best history books ever written.” Paul Elowitz, who questioned Rudy’s ability to perform a retrospective psychoanalysis because of the impossibility of establishing any transference, especially since he had never been analyzed himself, called it brilliant—but flawed.

Having put Lou behind him—or so he thought—Rudy’s next projects involved applying his theory of traumatic reliving to new subjects, both historical and literary, from Leopold III of Belgium to Pirandello’s characters and finally to Adolf Hitler. His final explication of the theory, the basis of his work as a psychohistorian, was Traumatic Reliving in History, Literature, and Film (2011).

A chapter on Freud summarized his reasons for rejecting Freud’s adherence to childhood antecedents of neurosis in favor of his own hypothesis about traumatic reliving of adult trauma. Rudy described the mechanism of traumatic reliving: “All too simply put, it is the occasional felt need to repeat, to re-enact, to relive an unbearable experience . . . What needs adding is that the repetition is unconscious.”

Frau Lou was an experiment, one that succeeded grandly in many ways while failing as well, that failure leaving Rudy with one summary thought, the concept of adult trauma, and a new way of looking at historical biography.

After Frau Lou

In 1992 I found a dusty copy of Frau Lou in the back shelves of my county library. A generous librarian gave it to me since it hadn’t been checked out for more than twenty years. Reading and rereading this fascinating yet frustratingly dense text, I wanted to know more about the questions Rudy left open. Why did Lou refuse to talk about Nietzsche, especially to the Freud group—other than to Freud himself? She wrote that Nietzsche was like a ghost among them. She carried his letters with her everywhere. Did he propose marriage? If so, was it marriage for reputation only? Nietzsche wrote that at most he could marry for two years. What was “the offense” that made him so angry?

I tracked down Lloyd deMause to find out where Rudolph Binion was, so many years after Frau Lou was published, and he surprised me by saying, “Rudy’s in Paris. He would love to hear from you.” And so I wrote to Rudy, who was teaching at Brandeis and then I flew to Boston to talk to him. The first disarming thing he said to me was, “I was much too hard on Lou.” He gave me his essay, “My Life with Frau Lou” which answered many questions and we talked for hours.

When I returned to California, we began a correspondence, at first by mail, and soon by email, thousands and thousands of emails, that lasted until Rudy’s death in 2011. We picked up where he left off with the open questions about Lou. He was still as obsessed with her. I focused on seeing what I could add to the story from the archives of people on the periphery of Lou’s life, beginning with the gay young men in Wagner’s circle in Bayreuth. When I looked into the question of whether or not Nietzsche had syphilis, I studied what was known about the disease at that time and eventually published a book – Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis.

Rudy was an amazing stylist who wrote long, complex sentences and paragraphs that stretched for more than a page. When I first read Frau Lou, I wished there had been an editor. I got my wish when Rudy started sending me everything he was writing, emailing impatiently if I didn’t get back to him immediately. My addition to his already perfect texts was to point out where he left his reader in the dust. We sometimes argued by email for days over a single sentence. And he read everything I wrote—covering pages with tiny red squiggly comments and corrections. A student told me Rudy could spot a misplaced comma across the room.

What was most exhilarating about our correspondence was what Rudy called our “e-swirls”- fanciful digressive emails that went on for pages. One long weekend we sent over one hundred emails to figure out the source of a key document. When he found it in his basement archive, he emailed that he would not reveal what he found until I went out a bought a bottle of champagne.

Here I am, more than fifty years after I first heard about Lou in a college Nietzsche class, still thinking about her. “Lou’s impress on history, such as it was, came of her traumatic wrestling with Nietzsche’s ghost,” Rudy wrote. And so we wrestled with Lou’s ghost, as it appears I am still doing. Rudy was a mentor, friend, and persistent inspiration. I miss him.

Binion, Rudolph. Frau Lou: Nietzsche Wayward Disciple (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968)

Binion, Rudolph. Traumatic Reliving in History, Literature, and Film (London: Karnac, 2011)

Elovitz, Paul H. The Making of Psychohistory: Origins, Controversies, and Pioneering Contributors (New York: Routledge, 2018)

Hayden, Deborah. “Nietzsche’s Secrets,”Jacob Golumb et al. in Nietzsche and Depth Psychology (New York, SUNY Press, 1999)

Hayden, Deborah. Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis (New York: Basic Books, 2003)

Hayden, Deborah. “Rudolph Binion’s Traumatic Encounter with Frau Lou,” in Clio’s Psyche, p 209-215, Vol 18, Number 2, September 2011