[A German-born English poet, translator and critic, Hamburger has been widely praised for his translations of such poets as Friedrich Hoelderlin and Georg TrakL In the following mixed review of The Freud Journal of Lou Andreas-Salomé, he asserts that Andreas-Salomé incisively confronts the central issues in Freud's psychology.]

Of the many kinds of readers who will be interested in [The Freud Journal of Lou Andreas-Slomé], my kind may well be the most peripheral, since I am not a psychologist or even a literary Freudian. It is to such as these that Lou Andreas-Salomés record of the psychoanalytic inner circle's transactions in 1912 and 1913 will prove indispensable for what is revealed, not only about Freud's personality and opinions, but also about the schisms of those years, the secession of men like Adler, Jung and Stekel.

Lou Andreas-Salomé, novelist, poet, essayist, and great friend of the poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, and of Nietzsche, took an active interest in psychoanalysis at the age of 50 and was a practicing analyst in her later years. In the beginning, as a privileged member of the inner circle—Freud would address his remarks to her and twice commented on the disturbing effect upon him of her empty chair—she was allowed to attend the lectures and discussions in Adler's group, and indeed she testifies repeatedly to Freud's tolerance and openness to correction even in these critical years. Her summaries of the papers read and discussed in both groups are crucial to the history of psychoanalysis; but as Stanley A. Leavy observes in his introduction, they lack the lucidity of Freud's own writings, and this will limit their appeal to non-specialists.

Lou came to psychology from literature and philosophy, not from clinical research or medical practice; it is ideas that continued to fascinate her, for all her interest in specific cases and her skepticism towards the "premature synthesis" of which she accuses revisionists like Jung. Her fervent admiration for Freud—whom she calls "heroic" and contrasts with Jung, whose "earnestness is composed of pure aggression, ambition, and intellectual brutality"—owes much not only to Freud's fitness as a father-figure, but to the attraction of opposites. It is in almost mystical terms that Lou sums up her debt to Freud and psychoanalysis in the brief Conclusion to her journal; her tone and style are the very opposite of Freud's.

Yet it is the continuity and consistency of Lou's preoccupations that strike and interest a non-Freudian reader like myself. As Lou makes quite clear, Freud's "heroism" lay in his honesty, in an intellectual radicalism that braved every kind of opposition; that same honesty in Nietzsche had attracted her some 30 years earlier, even if Nietzsche's honesty came to grief through insufficient self-knowledge. Only Freud made this self-knowledge possible, though Nietzsche's intuitions and insights had come close to it at times. Freud, therefore, held the key both to Lou's self-knowledge and to her understanding of a whole succession of personal relationships, including that with Nietzsche, as well as then current relationships with Rilke, her husband and other men. That is why she could write in the Conclusion that, thanks to psychoanalysis, "all the vanished persons of the past arise anew, whom one has sinned against by letting them go; they are there as from all eternity, marked by eternity—peaceful, monumental, and [at] one with being itself…"

It is the non-Freudian in me, however, that feels uncomfortable when Nietzsche is described as "that sadomasochist unto himself"—as though Nietzsche's internal quarrel could be explained by that neat and stereotyped label—or when Rilke, who is still Lou's friend, if not her lover, is described as "a typical hysteric" and compared with another of her lovers, "a no less typical obsessional neurotic bound up in a thousand reproaches and fixations." This kind of "detachment" points not so much to her self-knowledge—she is somewhat more discreet about her own neuroses—as to her narcissistic exploitation of men from the very beginning, whether for intellectual stimulus, physical satisfaction, or psychological investigation, as in these instances.

Lou's interest in narcissism comes out not in self-analyses, but in general and theoretical speculations scattered through the journal. Somehow it seems to me that the same delicacy or discretion might have been extended to such a man as Rilke, who has suffered more than enough from the posthumous disclosures of his friends. She adds details about his physical ailments, as well as a sympathetic and valuable account of his state of mind in 1913, when "his production has become fragmentary."

Yet Lou was well aware that "in his case the only index of these things is to be found in his creative work." Like Freud himself, she was prepared to make every sort of allowance for the exceptional problems of exceptional men and women. She records this very important admission by Freud: "It appeared that the world is indeed less in need of improvement and less capable of it than one might think. One finds types whose socially harmful instincts have developed in such intimate union with their most valuable ones, that one might at best strive only for a better distribution of the forces than that which took place in their childhood. Or conversely, those types in which one sees not so much the neurotic patient as a neurotic world; they would need only courage to attain their natural development within their unnatural milieu, but with it they would destroy this milieu too."

To Lou, this was an instance of Freud's weariness and pessimism; to me, it's an instance of his wisdom, his continuous awareness that many things are beyond the reach of psychoanalysis. She herself was always ready to admit that certain Freudian concepts were still too crude and undifferentiated to be generally effective in diagnosis or treatment; but she was less ready than Freud to dispense with the consolations of dogmatism. As Nietzsche knew, it takes strength to doubt, as well as to believe.

Lou is at her best—and at her least turgid—when she does speak from personal experience, as in her analysis and justification of infidelity in erotic relationships, or her frequent disquisitions on the psychology of women. Mr. Leavy rightly points out that her feminism was quite different from the more widespread sort that stresses the equality of the sexes. Her experience of Nietzsche and other intellectually outstanding men—not including Freud—had rather tended to confirm her belief in the emotional superiority of women, if not in the superiority of the emotions over the intellect.

This is one reason why she was attracted to Nietzsche's irrationalism and Rilke's "bisexual" inwardness before her discovery of the Freudian unconscious. She comments on the concept of the libido in Freud, Jung and Ferenczi: "We must realize that man can never have suffered more fundamentally than in becoming a conscious being, seeing the abyss plunging between himself and the rest, between his race and the world, the beginning of the inner-outer division."

This division was Lou's, as it was Nietzsche's and Rilke's, and this is where her philosophical and literary concerns link up with the psychological, and psychoanalysis itself links up with philosophical and literary developments going back the best part of three centuries. Even Lou's passing remark on schizophrenia, which she sees as the "wish to be the whole, to be All," touches in the most illuminating way on this central dilemma of modern Western man. One does not need to be a Freudian to appreciate Freud's heroic confrontation of it, or to find much that is relevant and engrossing in the present book.