Lou Andreas-Salomé — writer and psychoanalyst with roots in the Russian Empire
Lou Andreas-Salomé was born Louise von Salomé in St Petersburg on 12 February 1861, the youngest of six children and only daughter of Gustav Ludwig von Salomé, a German-born general in Russian service of French Huguenot descent, and Louise, née Wilm. Her father's dates are given as 1804-1879 or 1807-1878. The family belonged to the German-speaking Protestant community of the capital, and the tsar had allowed her father to found a German Reformed church there.
As a girl she was tutored by the Dutch pastor Hendrik Gillot, who introduced her to philosophy. After her father's death she went with her mother to Zurich in 1880 to study theology and the history of religion at the university. When her health suffered, they travelled to Rome, in 1882 according to most sources, and there, in the salon of the writer Malwida von Meysenbug, she met the philosophers Paul Rée and Friedrich Nietzsche. Her study Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken (1894) was the first book on him; according to Anna Freud, it anticipated psychoanalysis.
In 1887 she married the orientalist Friedrich Carl Andreas, who later became a professor at Göttingen, and she remained married to him until his death in 1930, while living largely independently and financing her travels by her writing. Her first novel, Im Kampf um Gott, appeared under the pen name Henry Lou, and she went on to publish novels, stories and essays. In 1899, with her husband and the young poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and in 1900 with Rilke alone, she travelled through Russia; she taught Rilke Russian, and together they read Tolstoy and Pushkin.
In 1911, aged fifty, she met Sigmund Freud at the psychoanalytic congress in Weimar. In 1912 and 1913 she attended his lectures in Vienna and was one of the few women admitted to the discussion evenings of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. She then practised as a psychoanalyst in Göttingen, and kept up long correspondences with both Sigmund and Anna Freud. In 1931 she published Mein Dank an Freud (My Thanks to Freud).
She died at her home in Göttingen on 5 February 1937, aged seventy-five.
Tracing the roots — St Petersburg (Russia)
Born in St Petersburg in 1861, the only daughter of a general of Huguenot descent in Russian service, she grew up in the city's German-speaking Protestant community; in 1899 and 1900 she travelled through Russia with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
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St Petersburg (Russia). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"Human life is a journey toward the knowledge that has always been contained within us."