Remembering Rudy

“I was too hard on Lou,” was the first thing Rudy said to me when I showed up at his office at Brandeis in 1992. Since my friendship with Rudy began, and ended as well, with our mutual fascination with Lou Salome, I thought readers of Clio's Psyche might like to review with me how Rudy’s theory of traumatic reliving grew out of research for his biography, Frau Lou, and developed over a half a century.

In the Spring of 1959 when he was thirty-two years old, Rudolph Binion chose Lou Salome as an "irresistible biographical subject" for a summer grant from Columbia. 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." And Lou had close relationships with so many of the cultural elite of the time, in particular Nietzsche, Rilke and Freud. Rudy wrote, "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."  Lou’s life, both outwardly and inwardly, was among the richest on record.

With a year's fellowship Rudy traveled with his wife Alice to Gottingen where Lou's papers were kept under the stern eye of her literary executor, Ernst Pfeiffer. Returning home with a partial teaching load, he fused his notes, which "numbered grotesque thousands upon thousands in their helter-skelter heaps," into a massive first draft. 

That Rudy was then "an out and out Freudian" and Lou "had psychoanalysed herself in print to boot" added to her appeal. In 1913 Lou used her own childhood diaries as material for a Freudian self-analysis. But in working with her papers Rudy discovered something that made him question his own Freudian orientation: he came to believe that a traumatic event--Nietzsche's vicious rejection of Lou in 1882-- was the pivotal experience she not only relived in her later relationships and fiction, but also in her own analysis of her childhood adulation of and rejection by her father. This adult trauma, relived consciously and unconsciously, forward and backward, became the theme of Frau Lou—hence the subtitle—Nietzsche’s Wayward Disciple. 

And then Rudy experienced a shock. Lou had said that before the breakup of their friendship, Nietzsche had proposed marriage. Rudy discovered documents that led him to believe that she lied about that. And if she lied there, he asked himself, what else that she said 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." 

If at first Rudy had wanted to focus on Lou's Freud years and not rehash "the stale Lou-Nietzsche story," his big discovery refocused him on the events of 1882. Briefly this is the story:

In 1882 Lou, a twenty-one year old woman from Russia traveling for her education with her chaperoning mother, met Nietzsche, who was thirty-seven at the time, in Rome. 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." He called her courageous, high-minded, sharp as an eagle, brave as a lion. 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 called her "this thin, dirty, evil-smelling little monkey with false breasts -- a fate!"  He dismissed her protests and they never spoke again. Lou went on to become close personal friends with Freud and to spend her last years as an analyst.

To his early praise, which remained intact, Rudy added a layer of pejoratives about Lou’s untruthfulness and pathology. He called her a moral monstrosity, a distraught fabler and a sick fraud. He said that she was even unreliable in her rituals. 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.” If Nietzsche had felt betrayed and responded with excessive vitriol, Rudy now did the same.

Despite the massive rewrite, the text of Frau Louremained full of questions and contradictions. "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 footnotes 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--587 pages. Rudy painstakingly reduced the footnotes by moving thousands of citations to abbreviated endnotes--with three appendices to translate the sources. Walter Kaufmann wrote a foreword and Frau Louwas released to mixed reviews. Norman F. Cantor called it "one of the dozen best history books ever written."

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 application of the theory was Traumatic Reliving in History, Literature, and Film (2011).

In the "Binion Symposium on Traumatic Reliving with Freud," (June-September 2010 issue of Clio's Psyche), Paul Elovitz reflected on Rudy's obsession with traumatic reliving: "To me, the great unanswered question is what in his own psyche and life experience brings my friend Rudy Binion to devote his powerful intellect and enormous erudition to the issue of traumatic reliving in individuals and groups? In the spirit of the Viennese master, it would be good if he tackled this question directly."

Rudy provided a tantalizing partial answer to Paul's question in the foreword to Traumatic Reliving in History, Literature, and Film. The first case of traumatic reliving he encountered in his historic researches, he writes, was Lou Andreas Salome's "routinized rehash in life and letters of her traumatic breakup with Friedrich Nietzsche. Ever since this first encounter with traumatic reliving in history I have been prone to hit up against it repeatedly whether on the individual or the group level." He continues, "My own repetitive pattern was not, then, itself trauma-induced--or did Lou's trauma set it going?" He ends, "So I finally resolved to consolidate my finding on traumatic living in fact and fancy-- for the prospective benefit of learning, to be sure, but also in the hopes of finally kicking the curse."

Kicking the curse. Curse: plague, scourge, fate. Rudy wrote, "Felt fatality is therefore arguably integral to traumatic living, even its defining feature, for its course is indeed preset.” 

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.”

It rings true when Rudy suggests that his own repetitive pattern began with encountering Lou’s trauma—but not when he wonders if he was merely piggybacking on Lou's trauma. What about his own very real anger at her? Young Rudy, the historian, obsessed with getting every detail of Lou's life correct, was foiled by her at every step. Young Rudy, the perfectionist, had to publish a methodological mess of a text full of unanswered questions and contradictions, inconsistencies and possible inaccuracies. (Rudy was such a perfectionist that he recalled his book Sounding the Classics when he discovered that the publisher had added an extra “s” to all his possessives.) And he resigned his job at Columbia over Frau Lou, no small decision for someone beginning an academic career. 

Lou’s Nietzsche trauma did not affect Rudy emotionally: if anything he agreed with Nietzsche in his denunciation of Lou rather than sympathizing with her. His own carefully catalogued traumatic experience, in the chapter “Beyond Frau Lou” and in the essay “My Life with Frau Lou,” was that Lou betrayed him, lied to him—her loyal biographer-to-be and in so doing turned his neat biography topsy-turvy.

Could it be that Rudy was not aware of –or had forgotten about -- the trauma that set him off on a life-long search for examples that fit his theory and kept him fascinated by Lou’s story -- right up until his last days? For a traumatic reliving to qualify for Rudy’s model, it must be without conscious knowledge. If so, is Rudy not illustrating the very basis of his theory of unconscious traumatic reliving in missing how much Lou’s perceived betrayal affected him? "Lou's impress on history, such as it was, came of her traumatic wrestling with Nietzsche's ghost," Rudy wrote. Did Rudy wrestle traumatically with Lou’s ghost? To accept the premise that Rudy could have experienced a life-changing adult trauma with Lou that played out for the rest of his life depends on believing that a biographer can have a posthumous relationship that is in some ways more real, more intense and interactive, than with living people. 

Once his traumatic reliving manuscript had found a publisher,feeling he had wrapped up his scholarly contribution on the topic, Rudy turned to fiction. He experienced having a Muse who dictated delightful complete stories, some autobiographical, and sonnets which he called his Flights of Fancy, the title of a book he published this year through an Italian press, Aracne Editrice.

 In Rudy's last months his philosophical sonnets turned even more fanciful. 

I am my own identical twin

Faithful in sameness through thick and thin,

Loyally standing by my side,

Nay, closer still, astride my hide;

Alike in all extrinsics; more,

Intrinsically to the core

Mistakable for my true self;

Retrieved from a redundants’ shelf,

A pinch hit for the real McCoy,

Which claims an exclusivity

Though stitch for stitch, son of a bitch,

There’s just no telling which is which.

In sum, I know not which is me

And which myself in effigy.

When I told the sad news about Rudy to my literary agent, Rosalie Siegel, who was also Rudy's agent, she responded, "Rudy was a gentleman scholar of the old school. It is indeed the end of an era." Sadly, so it is.