Lou Andreas-Salomé

Lou Andreas-Salomé, born in St. Petersburg in 1861, was a Russian-born psychoanalyst and writer from a family of French Huguenot and North German descent. She studied for a year at the University of Zurich, where lectures in philosophy, psychology and theology shaped her wide interests, and she went on to publish novels, essays and studies of religion, sexuality and psychology. Her friendships with Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Rée, Rainer Maria Rilke and Sigmund Freud placed her at the centre of several intellectual circles. After meeting Freud at the 1911 psychoanalytic congress in Weimar she worked as a psychoanalyst, and she lived in Göttingen late in life. She wrote on female sexuality before and alongside her analytic work, including an essay on the anal-erotic that Freud admired. She stopped practising as a psychoanalyst at the age of 74 and died in Göttingen in 1937. This entry records her as an early woman analyst, not as a source of clinical guidance.