Lou Andreas-Salomé: Google Doodle celebrates Russian-German psychoanalyst’s 161st birthday

Google Doodle celebrates the 161st birthday of a Russian-born psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé, the first woman in history to become a psychoanalyst and a well-traveled writer, storyteller, and writer from a Russian-German family, on February 12, 2022.

Who was Lou Andreas-Salomé?

Lou Andreas-Salomé born either Louise von Salomé or Luíza Gustavovna Salomé or Lioulia von Salomé (Луиза Густавовна Саломе) on 12th February 1861 in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Born into a stringently Protestant family, Lou Andreas-Salomé developed to disdain the Reformed church and Hermann Dalton, the Orthodox Protestant pastor. She studied theology at the University of Zürich.

Both French and German were broadly spoken among the Russian privileged at the time, and Andreas-Salomé was raised speaking those languages. She talked some Russian too, yet when she revolted about studying that language in school, her dad agreed to study anything she loved.

Lou Andreas-Salomé, nonetheless, kept on suffering the impacts of a deteriorating lung disease that doctors had warned could cost her life. She started coughing up blood. Her mom, alarmed, decided that a warmer environment could help, and the pair continued to Rome, Italy, in 1882. The new location was useful both physically and intellectually, for Rome was brimming with writers and thinkers from everywhere Europe.

Russian-born German writer Lou Andreas-Salomé has been referred to generally as the lover of and inspiration to a few of the most conspicuous male German writers of her time, including philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and psychoanalytic pioneer Sigmund Freud.

In 1882 the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche fell in love with her, yet she dismissed his proposal of marriage. In 1887 she married the Orientalist Friedrich C. Andreas, a teacher at the University of Göttingen. In 1897 she met the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who was 14 years more youthful than she and who likewise fell in love with her; she became one of the developmental impacts on his life. In 1911 she became related with the Vienna circle of psychoanalysts and was a friend and follower of Sigmund Freud.

Other than novels, Lou Andreas-Salomé’s works include Friedrich Nietzsche for seinen Werken (1894; “Friedrich Nietzsche in His Works”), Im Zwischenland: Fünf Geschichten aus dem Seelenleben halbwüchsiger Mädchen (In-Between Land: Five Stories from the Inner Life of a Half-Grown Girl, 1902), the nonfiction Die Erotik (The Erotic, 1910), Rainer Maria Rilke (1928), and Mein Dank a Freud (1931; “My Thanks to Freud”). Her correspondence with Rilke was published in 1952.

Getting back to writing during the 1920s, Lou Andreas-Salomé wrote a play, Der Teufel und seine Großmutter (The Devil and His Grandmother, 1922). The vast majority of her later books, be that as it may, were nonfiction studies of the writers she had known well: Rainer Maria Rilke (interpreted as You Alone Are Real to Me) showed up in 1928, and Mein Dank a Freud (My Thanks to Freud) in 1931.

In her last years, Lou Andreas-Salomé composed a Grundriß einiger Lebenserinnerungen (Outline of Some Life Reminscences, 1933) and a more broad Lebensrückblick (Life Retrospective), not published until 1951.

Andreas-Salomé underwent cancer surgery in 1935 however died of uremia on February 5, 1937, in Göttingen, Germany.

Lou Andreas-Salomé’s writings were notable during that time, however, at that point were generally neglected. Indeed, even with the enormous recovery of interest in writings by women at the finish of the 20th century, studies of Andreas-Salomé as a creative figure by her own doing stay intriguing. As of the mid-2000s, in any case, there were signs that scholars were starting to reevaluate Andreas-Salomés work.

Lou Andreas-Salomé was one of the first female psychoanalysts and one of the first women to write psychoanalytically on female sexuality, before Helene Deutsch, for example in her essay on the anal-erotic (1916), an essay admired by Freud.

On February 12, 2022, Google featured a Google Doodle on its homepage for celebrating Lou Andreas-Salomé’s 161st birthday.