LOU ANDREAS-SALOMÉ
Seeking the Muse in the Pool of Narcissus

JANE FELDMAN

One face looks out from all his canvasses,

One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans;

We found her hidden just behind those screens,

That mirror gave back all her loveliness.

A queen in opal or in ruby dress,

A nameless girl in freshest summer greens,

A saint, an angel-every canvass means

The same one meaning, neither more nor less.

He feeds upon her face by day and night,

And she with true kind eyes looks back on him

Fair as the moon and joyful as the light;

Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;

Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;

Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.

—Christina Rossetti, “In an Artist’s Studio”

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Étienne-Gaspard Robert entertained the people of Paris with an engaging “scientific” marvel: in the center of a totally empty room, suspended a large glass ball with four acoustic horns attached to it equidistantly apart; questions could be posed to the ball, and the voice of an Invisible Woman would answer as if she were standing among the spectators, watching along with them. This Invisible Woman, who could answer any question, was, as Jann Matlock describes, “a spectacle in which there was nothing to see except absence,” yet, as she conversed with those in the room with uncannily correct observations, “they learned that she could see them as perfectly as they failed to see her.” ¹

Lou Andreas Salomé, in the hands of many of those who have written about her, has likewise become a kind of “spectacle of absence.” Despite her prominence as an intellectual among the artistic, social, and political elite in fin-de-siècle Europe, and despite a prolific writing career (including fifteen novels, books on Nietzsche, Rilke, and Ibsen’s female characters, a journal of her studies with Freud, a personal memoir, over a hundred articles and monographs on theater, literature, feminine psychology, religion, creativity, narcissism, the erotic, and a number of essays for the psychoanalytic journal Imago), her personal identity and literary/ philosophical/psychological contributions have been subsumed by her friendships with Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Sigmund Freud. The very historical prominence of those men seems to guarantee an ongoing curiosity about her closeness to each and all three, yet such a focus has tended to erase Salomé the woman, making her of interest primarily in terms of what she can tell us about them.

She was, by late nineteenth century designation, a “New Woman”—self-supporting, intelligent, informed, educated, intent on experiencing the world on her own terms, determined to choose her own path, even if that meant challenging accepted standards. Such independence, however, was, more often than not, seen as “unwomanly,” and a slew of unflattering epithets, if not social notoriety, frequently accompanied any so-designated “New Woman.” In addition, her name itself was all too easily confused with that other, powerfully seductive Biblical Salome, so scandalously re-visioned by Oscar Wilde, erotically illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley, and painted by Gustav Klimt, Julius Klinger, and others as representative of the femme fatale, the era’s feared and bewitching version of the all-powerful, castrating woman. Moreover, the continual reproductions of Frank Wedekind’s play in Paris about a fearless, childlike, unself-conscious, sexually charged woman named Lulu, which was rumored to have been inspired by his friendship with Lou Andreas Salomé, contributed even more to the wild and varied associations that swirled around her.

Even today, curious, colorful, and frequently juxtaposed descriptors continue to confuse her identity. Depending on which authorial purpose is at work (the Nietzsche family members and scholars struggling with one agenda, for instance, and the “psychological biographers” of the 1960s presenting quite another), she has emerged as either sexless or a femme fatale; nurturing mother or Russian diva; a ruthless, manipulative beast or a woman of extraordinary modesty and discretion; an unoriginal dilettante or a brilliant, psychologically astute theorist. “Muse” was added to this string of characterizations only after her death, for throughout her life Salomé actively and consistently deflected such references, even when lovingly proffered. Yet it is the role of Muse that most doggedly persists, shifting the focus from Salomé, the accomplished intellect, to concentrate on her relationships with men and her perceived ability to please-inspire-manipulate-or-horrify them. Most recently, Francine Prose, in The Lives of the Muses, has lifted Salomé’s Muse status to new heights, insisting she was a Serial Muse—one who “operates serially, progressing from genius to genius.” ²

What is it about Salomé that prolongs this Muse identity—that so effectively silences this woman of words? It is particularly ironic that what is lost is not only her strong, personal sense of self-sufficiency but her lifelong interest in the creative process and the very sources and dynamics of artistic inspiration.

Eros, Anima, and Narcissus: Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche

Freud would never have considered Salomé his Muse. And many of Freud’s supporters have tended to negate any influence she may have had on his work and continue to ignore her contributions to the field of psychoanalysis. Ernest Jones, in The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, downplayed her relationship with Freud, insisting that she was only one among several intellectual female students who managed to gain Freud’s attention from time to time. Yet others within that early circle have praised her deep and subtle grasp of psychoanalysis, and Freud himself acknowledged her influence upon, and contributions to, his work in a letter to her in 1917:

If I should be in a position to continue to develop my theories, you may perhaps recognize with satisfaction several new things as having been anticipated or even announced by yourself. ³

But influence and contributions do not dismiss or elevate her to Muse status. Salomé and Freud shared a long and mutually significant relationship—an ongoing exchange of equals, a deep and trusting friendship spanning the last two decades of their lives. Freud approached psychological thought with the objective focus and detached observation of a scientist, while Salomé added the broader, more subjective understanding and insights of a woman and a philosopher. She “had a talent,” he would say,

for going beyond what ha[d] been said, for completing it and making it converge at some distant point … a subtle way of indicating where gaps become visible … putting what ha[d] been isolated back into its proper context. ⁴

One offered balance to the other. She represented, for him, a genuine and harmonious presence, a woman without what he considered the usual female frailties. He confided in her, respected her ideas and perspective, and through her gained a deeper understanding of the feminine.

For Salomé, her studies with Freud initiated a turning point—she would all but give up her extensive traveling, her writing in other fields, and devote the rest of her life to psychoanalytic study and practice. From the beginning of their relationship, she expressed a strong, unwavering allegiance to Freud and became particularly attentive to and protective of him, most notably during the internal power struggles between him and his early followers. During the Munich Psychoanalytic Conference of 1913, for instance, as the tensions between Freud and Jung were dramatically mounting, she stayed near Freud, conscious that although he appeared to be the same as ever, in truth “it was only with difficulty that he restrained his deep emotion; and there was nowhere I would have preferred to sit than right by his side.” ⁵

It is fascinating that Jung dates his Siegfried dream and the subsequent imaginal appearances of the “Biblical” Salomé and Elijah figures in Memories, Dreams, Reflections as December, 1913, three months following that tension-filled Munich Conference. Jung describes being “staggered” by and “distinctly suspicious” of his imaginal Salomé but makes no reference to any “residue” events to which she might be related, the potential influence of the dramatic struggle with Freud going on at the time, or the well-known, accomplished, attractive woman at Freud’s side. Jung finally characterizes his Salomé as an erotic anima figure and groups her with other young women who accompany the wise old man archetype in literary representations. She was blind, he further and most intriguingly suggests, because she “does not see the meaning of things.” ⁶

Three decades earlier, Nietzsche had likewise needed to internalize, re-figure, and dismiss Lou Salomé. Eager to appropriate talented minds to help him in his work, he originally hoped to train her in his theories so she could inherit and carry on his thinking. Her easy grasp and deep understanding of the concepts that he would later develop in Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil impressed him immediately. Their uncanny philosophical alignment and the frank and open discussions that resulted suggested to Nietzsche a deep and meaningful relationship. He was enthralled—she was more than he had hoped for—and he eagerly anticipated refining her brilliance into the woman he had thought he would never find.

Salomé, twenty-one at the time of their meeting, was opposed to any subordination of one to another, and, like the women in her future novels, resisted his marriage proposals, his fantasized re-visionings of her, and turned away after only a few months from what was a deeply stimulating relationship for her as well. The loss of Salomé was devastating for Nietzsche, and never again would he attempt to engage in a close relationship with anyone. Nonetheless, after an agonizing spiral into chaos and suffering, he would emerge, in less than a year, with the first two parts of Zarathustra, through which he would eliminate his longing for her by reshaping the “slavish love … that idealizes and deceives itself” into a divine love “that despises and loves and elevates the beloved.” ⁷ He would effectively transform Salomé into “Life as a Woman,” pursue his discussions with her on imaginal turf, and thus re-turn to his own, internalized, inspirational Other.

One might suggest that it was not Lou Salomé that Nietzsche so desired but always his idealized projection. Years later, Salomé would describe such projections as an object cathexis that came from a foundational experience of Eros—a primary, positive narcissism that was essential to the creative process. Behind the exaltation of the beloved, she felt, was the remembering of a primal, undifferentiated self: an original experience of a pre-verbal, pre-subject, all-embracing unity that continually manifested itself within the creative struggle between individuation and re-immersion and which influenced all of one’s deeper experiences. The vaguest approach to this memory, this first truth, stimulated a flood of passion, much like the joy of Plato’s soul returning to its origin, resulting, Salomé insisted, in an “unburdening of excess love—love belonging to [oneself], and not finding an outlet.” ⁸ Once this creative source was projected outward onto a flesh and blood object-recipient (i.e., a living “Muse”), she added, that temporary beloved, only a substitute to begin with, would then be

put on trial for its life to prove that it is more than a living thing, and … to offer its uniqueness, for which it supposedly was selected, as proof of its real universality. ⁹

Sadly, as the ideal became more and more entrenched, the real person shadowed by the projection would be gradually dismissed, no longer seen. Nietzsche would write to Salomé when there was no hope of a reconciliation, “Formerly I was inclined to take you for a vision, for the earthly apparition of my ideal: Observe, I have poor eyes.” ¹⁰

“Two become one,” she would insist, “only if they remain two.” ¹¹ She was willing to walk alongside—but she would fall prey to no man’s objectifying desires. She would be no man’s Muse.

The Melancholy of Narcissus

Salome’s concept of a primary, positive narcissism that was intrinsically related to creativity first appeared in 1900 in her article “Thoughts on the Problem of Love,” in which she suggested that Eros might serve as an initial trigger, but self-empowered pleasure was the true source of creativity. Narcissus, she felt, represented

our deepest entry into ourselves, a thousandfold solitude. But it is such as if this individuated solitude were surrounded by a thousand gleaming mirrors and thus appeared expanded, being vaulted into an all-embracing world. The loved object within this world is only the catalyst for it all: as if during an agitating dream at night a sound or a scent had brushed us and enraptured us to dream. ¹²

Unlike Freud, as she would note in The Freud Journal in 1913, she would continue to promote this one aspect of narcissism as an intuitive, deeply entrenched, life-affirming psychic energy that was always present, accompanying all levels of experience in which the self recognizes its reflection within a larger, natural, undifferentiated whole. What Narcissus sees in the water is a familiar place, long held within fragments of unconscious memory, a lost part of him-self that offers him an opportunity to access a deeper, creative potential through which he can mature. This was the creative Narcissus, the Narcissus who “gives birth to himself—[who] … does indeed come ‘from the water’ … Narcissus, the discoverer of himself, the self-knower.” ¹³

Although she acknowledged that there was little hope of recovering or documenting this theoretical memory through psychoanalysis, she nonetheless felt that its existence and influence could be recognized through philosophical argument and its symbolic meaning observed through mythological representation. Expanding these views even further in “The Dual Orientation of Narcissism” in 1921, she would again insist that there was an aspect of Narcissus that was not fatally entangled in self-love, but had rather discovered an entry into the unconscious it-self:

the Narcissus of legend gazed, not at a man-made mirror, but at the mirror of Nature. Perhaps it was not just himself that he beheld in the mirror, but himself as if he were still All … does not melancholy dwell next to enchantment upon his face? Only the poet can make a whole picture of this unity of joy and sorrow, departure from self and absorption in self, devotion and self-assertion. ¹⁴

Here, she felt, was the image of both the memory of and longing for that once-known, total harmony to which the artist, the poet (in all of us), is pulled. And here, perhaps, was a representation of the deepest experience of life: the blurring of that illusory boundary at the threshold of conscious and unconscious awareness, the sublime synthesis of pain and happiness, the first crack in the resistances that have heretofore held genius at bay.

The creative venture, then, as both a return to self and a metaphorical birth of oneself, offers the man (gender intended) a direct means of accessing that subject/object unity otherwise physically denied to him. “Corresponding to penis envy in women,” Salomé notes,

we frequently find in men the wish to give birth to themselves (which is to be distinguished from the desire to return into the beloved mother … as well as from the incestuous desire to be one’s own father). ¹⁵

As Zarathustra had proclaimed, “… from the depths one loves only one’s child and work; and where there is great love of oneself it is the sign of pregnancy.” ¹⁶ This self-pregnancy is a way of honoring that deeply hidden Other-self that calls one to descend, to enter the water—an internal voice that speaks to Salomé’s Narcissus through his experience of a deeper reflection—a self-contained product of Memory.

And so here, then, is both the irony and the question: could it be that the woman whom so many wish to label a Muse would herself suggest that if one were to look closely at the mythopoetic morphing of Muse as Goddess into Muse as Woman, one might actually find Narcissus at play? Has man (gender intended), somewhere in the course of history, shifted the voice of the Muse that spoke from within to an external woman in the hopes of either acquiring a guide or at least an Ariadne with a ball of string to rescue him from the pond—and thus managed to mix several metaphors? And to what effect?

Skirt-ing the Dark Abyss

When Hesiod’s Muses, the daughters of Memory who could tell the truth when and if they wished, breathed poetic voice into him, he was filled with a mysterious Otherness—to be a poet was, from Hesiod’s perspective, to be inspired by the Divine Feminine Other. After Plato, however, the soul became the mysterious, internal Other, and the philosopher’s recovery of Truth, or the soul’s origins, became the stimulus for a flush of passion that was felt to be the sign of purest inspiration. The Courtly Tradition in the twelfth century would conflate the passion of Plato’s joyous soul with human desire and move the source of inspiration beyond the Divine and the soul to the poet’s beloved and quite mortal lady. By the fifteenth century, the Courtly Tradition would acquire enough broad cultural acceptance for two keepers of the Christian Divine to step forward and write the Malleus Maleficarum, a text on witchcraft, as a means of possibly controlling this mystery, now removed from the Divine and entrusted to Eve. This combination of artist, soul, inspiration, the divine, and mortal woman in the creative formula would shift and re-combine in the next five centuries in attempts to find the right balance of Eros, seduction, and original sin, reason and imagination—while always maintaining masculine control over Nature, Truth, Beauty, and the sometimes divine, sometimes demonic, sometimes maternal, but always feminine and mysteriously troublesome Other.

Although ultimately it may be impossible to define “inspiration” or even to truly understand it, the emotional intensity the creative experience tends to generate, its uncanniness, the accompanying sense of being overpowered or enthralled by something transcendent, primordial, and unfathomable, defines it as archetypal. It has the power, Jung has suggested, to

rend from top to bottom the curtain upon which is painted the picture of an ordered world, and allow a glimpse into the unfathomable abyss of the unborn and of things yet to be. ¹⁷

Salomé would further describe it as a descent into ego abandonment, an “incomprehensible rapport with the most repressed and primal part of [one|self.” ¹⁸ It is, she would add, as dangerous as it is alluring:

If a man slips and falls out of the creative situation, he finds himself fearfully suspended between nothingness and nothingness: he is protected neither by his work nor by the real world. ¹⁹

To hang the responsibility for this potentially annihilating experience on the shoulders of a woman suggests a longing for something vital and perceived missing in the male psyche, a sense of vulnerability as a result of that “missing piece” and the need to both control and hold the female accountable. From Homer on, for male poets and artists, the journey to an “inspired knowing” has often been mysteriously connected to the Underworld, darkness, and woman—the place, shade, and shape of Other. However painful, the darkness held answers requiring a descent to places where the Muses, those Divine but feminine Others, were on closer observation not so different from, and might even be confused with, Sirens. And those removed, female Dionysian rites, though secret, nonetheless established a disconcerting association between Mothers and Maenads. Thus, without much effort, Muses and Sirens, Mothers and Maenads, all owning a knowledge of hidden things, could slip imaginally into one powerful, potentially lethal, female figure holding a secret, protective ability that seemed capable of absorbing darkness and mystery and whatever else man most dreaded. Both desirous of this power and leery of the monster guarding the treasure, the man-poet needed a guide: the woman-muse, under the control of the male artist, became both a protective amulet and a backstage pass.

Angels and the Indifferent Muse

From their first meeting, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke continually appealed to Salomé to serve as just such a protective guide through his own unconscious minefield, turning to her in moments of difficulty:

… I will sometimes raise myself to you, as to the saint of that far-off home that I cannot reach, deeply moved that you, bright star that that you are, stand right over the place where I am darkest and most fearful. ²⁰

Salomé would repeatedly resist this role, as she did in all relationships, avoiding the erasure of self into a male fantasy, resisting the danger of subordination of self to other. And yet, at the same time, she experienced a deep sense of kinship with Rilke as she did with no one else—as if he were someone long anticipated, someone related to her soul and essential to her existence, a connection that felt exquisitely real. She was particularly drawn to this gentle man who struggled with a profound darkness that stayed with him always. Here was her Narcissus, drawn to the pool, seeing something both beyond and intrinsically part of him-self in the still water.

Rilke’s greatest angst came from an overwhelming fear of being annihilated by that pool, a fear that any ultimate re-union would in truth be revealed as its opposite: a chaotic state of immeasurable loss in which everything—the poet, the inspired moment, and the world around him—would be swallowed into nothingness. “Art is the dark wish of all things,” he would write in 1898, a year after they met; “they want to be the images of our secrets … concealed and revealed at once:—Depth, unknown connections, not even fathomed by the artist.” ²¹ And yet, like every poet, he relished the moments of success when he felt connected to something greater, more real, and more essential than any other experiences could provide:

… where I create, I am true, and I would like to find the strength to base my life entirely on this truth, on this infinite simplicity and joy that is sometimes given to me. ²²

Therefore, despite the possible self-sacrifice that might be implicit in such an undertaking, Rilke approached the angels of his Duino Elegies, Salomé felt, as one to duty—only to find they offered no entry, rising as autonomous beings beyond the poetry, beyond the poet himself. Here was the most dangerous abyss—the terrible, unreachable indifference of a higher reality. “The angel of the elegies,” Rilke would write,

is the Being who sees in the Invisible a higher order of reality: terrible, therefore for us, because we, who love and are transformed by him, still cling to the visible. ²³

Able to offer only the pleasures and “things” of the earth, Rilke was left holding the corporeal residue of an experience that had moved through and beyond him. Like Caravaggio’s “Narcissus,” Rilke dared to stick his hand into the pool, disturbing the calm reflection, only to discover, as he feared, that one

… would be consumed

in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing but

the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,

and we are so awed because it serenely disdains

to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying. ²⁴

The true Muse, the source of inspiration, he felt, was an internal Other who “knew nothing of him. It didn’t need him: he alone needed it, in order to even know himself.” ²⁵

And so …

Although women artists and writers have historically struggled with culturally imposed and essentially male definitions of the Muse, unsure as to “how it all fits” within the female psyche, there has been, nonetheless, an awareness among women of an internal but clearly autonomous, transforming, powerful, predominately female voice that brings a kind of inspirational fusion to the creative moment. Having experienced a less irreparable separation from the mother, Salomé has suggested, the female has not needed the same degree of oppositional definition (inner/outer, rational/irrational, Self/Other, etc.) to secure her identity, and so remains less differentiated, more intuitively in contact with and defined by the primal sense of unity. She thus experiences a kind of creative self-sufficiency that eludes the man and is, therefore, less conflicted by, and more attuned to, an internal, interrelated Muse.

Yet to recognize this interior power has been a challenge for women in a culture burdened with such a long history of masculine dominance in the arts. Jung would identify and attend to this internal-feminine-Other voice, describe it as the guardian of the threshold and guide to the unconscious, the personifying, image-producing aspect of psyche, name it “anima,” and assign it to man. He would further describe certain women as anima types: sphinx-like, equivocal, elusive, indefinite, bloodless, empty, and unconscious, made by nature to “suck up all masculine projections,” a characteristic that ultimately “pleases men enormously.” ²⁶ Not unlike the muse-projection, such a designation unfortunately again erases the woman, reducing her reality to an appendage of male experience.

James Hillman has questioned the masculine exclusivity of the anima, however, insisting that woman is just as responsible for “anima cultivation” as man, ultimately maintaining that within the wider notion of psyche, anima is not in us, we are very much within her. ²⁷ Continuing a bit further in this direction, if she is providing images of this greater psyche and if, as Jung suggests, “we would want to recognize them as they play through that mirror in which the unconscious becomes aware of its own face,” ²⁸ then it follows that she has captured Salomé’s Narcissus at the edge of the pool. What Narcissus sees, what Salomé would consider the memory trace of an undifferentiated existence, a unified harmony of self, is therefore that “missing piece” of anima behind all the masculine discomfort—which, as Salomé originally insisted, was never really missing.

But we have lost the Muse. Re-figured as flesh and blood, veiled by the artist’s projections, she is no longer Divine, nor Soul-full, nor aligned with Truth. She is not “unassailable” or “the best possible expression of the prevailing worldview;” she is not “an unsurpassed container of meaning,” nor does her “aesthetic form … appeal so convincingly to our feelings that no arguments can be raised against it,” as Jung has defined a true symbol. ²⁹ Muse and Beloved, in the final analysis, are not the same. The fear of what lives in the pool of Narcissus has, since the twelfth century, contributed to the abduction of the female in the form of a woman-guide dressed as Lady Muse, in the hopes of protecting the male artist from that sublime, internal Otherness.

Moreover, the persistent conflation of that internal Otherness with the Muse as Woman demonstrates the extent to which the acceptance of the mortal muse-woman concept has been embedded within the language and the easy willingness with which western culture continues to strip certain creative women of their own personal identity, accomplishments, talent, influence, or historical significance by relocating their work within the agency and authority of the men with whom they once associated—effectively grounding them as decorative, if not titillating, attachments to what has been unquestionably assumed as a man’s more important contribution. Even as recently as spring 2003, for example, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles chose to present a collection of Lee Miller’s inventive World War II photographs under the banner of “Surrealist Muse: Lee Miller, Roland Penrose and Man Ray,” evidently assuming that her relationships with Man Ray and Roland Penrose provided the necessary frame and justification for exhibiting her work. As Zeus persists in swallowing Metis again and again, absorbing her creative power in order to protect his own position from overthrow, perhaps it is time to wonder aloud about those dangers that make any such targeted woman so threatening that she must be safely contained by her relationships with men to render her own contributions viable.

Lou Andreas Salomé was fiercely independent, intelligent, and self-directed. She was able to effectively hold her own in the world of ideas and move successfully within male artistic and intellectual circles. She continuously resisted the surrender of one-self to any other and insistently avoided the role of woman-muse during her lifetime. Yet after her death, when others took up her story, her personal life was sensationalized; she was quickly labeled a Muse and safely tucked away within the protective shadow of the men she had known; and her vast body of work was minimized.

It is time to reevaluate the vernacular muse and to better attend to the intentions, conscious or not, behind the identification of any woman as a Muse, to more carefully examine the resistance and fear that often accompanies contact with the true, reflective, internal voice of the Daughter of Memory, and seriously consider the psychological dysfunction and personal loss inherent in the Artist/Beloved/ Muse triad. And it is well past time to release Lou Andreas Salomé from the Muse label, to set aside the prurient need for tidbits from her personal relationships, and to re-view her life work. And what better place to start than the edge of that reflective pond, reexamining the mysteries within the pool through the eyes of an-other Narcissus—life-affirming, essential, creative—who sees himself reflected from within a greater Psyche and becomes “the discoverer of himself, the self-knower.”

NOTES

1. Jann Matlock, “The Invisible Woman and Her Secrets Unveiled,” Yale Journal of Criticism 9, no. 2 (1996): 175–76.

2. Francine Prose, The Lives of the Muses (New York: HarperCollins,2002), 19. See also Rudolph Binion’s Frau Lou: Nietzsche’s Wayward Disciple (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968) for a treatment of Salomé that Prose ironically suggests, “provides the horrific fascination of watching a posthumous mugging” (14). Prose’s treatment, both negatively biased and inaccurate, is not too far afield. Binion’s access to Salomé’s literary estate and his meticulous research makes his work a frequent reference source; however, his extremely personal, negative bias is often transferred along with his questionably “objective” interpretations.

3. Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas Salomé: Letters, translated by William and Elaine Robson-Scott (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 13 July 1917.

4. Ibid., 30 July 1915, 9 November 1915, 25 May 1916, in that order.

5. Lou Andreas Salomé, The Freud Journal, translated by Stanley A. Leavy (London: Quartet Books, 1987), 169.

6. C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, edited by Aniela Jaffé; translated by Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Vintage, 1989), 181 and 182.

7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power, quoted in Leslie Paul Thiele, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul: A Study of Heroic Individualism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 155.

8. Lou Andreas Salomé, “The Dual Orientation of Narcissism” (“Narzissmus als Doppelrichtung”), Imago 7 (1921); translated by Stanley A. Leavy, in Psychoanalytic Quarterly 31 (1962): 9.

9. Salomé, “Narcissism,” 12.

10. Nietzsche, Letter to Salomé, possibly December 1882, in Binion, Frau Lou, 99.

11. Lou Andreas Salomé, “Thoughts on the Problem of Love” (“Gedanken über das Liebesproblem”); quoted in Karla Schultz, “In Defense of Narcissus: Lou Andreas-Salomé and Julia Kristeva,” The German Quarterly 67, no. 2 (1994): 186.

12. Salomé, “Thoughts on Love,” 186–87.

13. Salomé, Freud Journal, 111.

14. Salomé, “Narcissism,” 9.

15. Salomé, “Narcissism,” 12.

16. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Involuntary Bliss,” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin/Viking, 1978), 161.

17. C. G. Jung, “Psychology and Literature,” in CW 15: 141.

18. Lou Andreas Salomé, You Alone are Real to Me, translated by Angela von der Lippe (Rochester, N.Y.: BOT Editions, 2003), 79.

19. Salomé, “Narcissism,” 27.

20. Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892–1910, translated by Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1945), 133 (Letter to Lou Andreas Salomé, 15 August 1903)

21. Rainer Maria Rilke, Personal notes, in Salomé, You Alone, 95.

22. Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 121 (Letter to Lou Andreas Salomé, 8 August 1903).

23. Angela von der Lippe, “The Young Poet Meets His Muse: An Introduction,” in Salomé, You Alone, 21.

24. Rainer Maria Rilke, “The First Elegy,” in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage, 1989), 151.

25. Lou Andreas Salomé, Looking Back: Memoirs, edited by Ernst Pfeiffer; translated by Breon Mitchell (New York: Marlowe, 1995), 81.

26. Jung, CW 9.1: 169, quoted in James Hillman, Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion (Woodstock, Conn.: Spring Publications, 1985), 54.

27. See Hillman, Anima, 57–81.

28. Jung, CW 14: 129; quoted in ibid., 95.

29. Jung, Psychological Reflections: A New Anthology of His Writings, 1905–1961, edited by Jolande Jacobi with R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 47.

Spring: An Journal of Archetype and Culture 70 (2004): 23–38
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