Russian-German novelist, essayist, psychoanalyst, and a muse, colleague, and companion for such authors and thinkers as Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud. Lou Andreas-Salomé wrote widely on literature criticism, philosophy and psychoanalysis. With her indifference to moral conventions and insatiable intellectual curiosity, Andreas-Salomé challenged the gender roles of her day.

"And hence I also believe that what we call 'sublimation' is likewise not a mere product of civilization, not a mere gradual turning away from the sexual to the intellectual, but has always been present in the shape of a fruitful adjustment of both. Just as neurosis arises as a reciprocal disturbance of the two, so 'sublimation' without any really negative connontation may be a word for health, i.e., for a creative union of both." (Lou Andreas-Salomé in a letter to Sigmund Freud, 9 November 1912, in Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé: Letters, edited by Ernst Pfeiffer, translated by William and Elaine Robson-Scott, W.W. Norton & Company, 1985, p. 10)

Lou(ise) Andreas-Salomé was born in St. Petersburg into a wealthy family. Gustav von Salomé, her father, was a Russian army officer. Her mother, Louise Wilm, nineteen years younger than her husband, was the daughter of a prosperous sugar manufacturer. Andreas-Salomé was the fourth child and the only girl in the family. She became especially close with her father, who was 57, when she was born. Also her much older brothers adored their little sister and took a protective attitude toward her. Later in her book of memoir, Lebensrückblick (1951), Andreas-Salomé confessed that she would see a brother hidden in every man she met. At home Andreas-Salomé spoke German and French and occasionally Russian. Her books she wrote in German.

Andreas-Salomé's father died when she was 17. At the age of confirmation in the German Lutheran Church, she entered a deeply religious phase. She was tutored at home in philosophy and religion by the Protestant pastor Hendrik Gillot, twenty-five years her senior, married, and the father of two children. When he proposed marriage to her, Andreas-Salomé could not continue with her tutor, her first great love. In Holland, during a strange confirmation in the Lutheran church, Gillot gave her the name 'Lou.' With her mother she then traveled to Switzerland, where she enrolled at the University of Zürich – she was one of the first female students to be accepted by the unversity. Andreas-Salomé studied philosophy, art history, and comparative religion.

Andreas-Salomé had already suffered from health problems in St. Petersburg, but after contracting severe lung disease, doctors gave her only a few years to live. To regain her health, she went to Italy. In Rome she met Paul Rée, a gambler and moral philosopher, who became her companion. They lived in a menage a trois for five years. It is possible that Andreas-Salomé remained a virgin until the mid-1890s.

At the age of twenty twenty-one, Andreas-Salomé met Friedrich Nietzsche, a friend of Paul Rée's. Nietzsche was thirty-seven, a well-known philosopher, but he fell immediately under her spell. "From which stars did we fall to meet each other here?" were Nietzche's first words, according to Andreas-Salomé, when they met at Saint Peter's Basilica. (Conversations with Nietzsche: A Life in the Words of His Contemporaries, edited and with an introduction by Sander L. Gilman, translated by David J. Parent, Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 116)

Nietzsche praised her in Ecce Homo and set her poem 'Hymnus an das Leben' (1882, Hymn to Life) to music. "He who is in any way able to make some sense of the last words of the poem, will divine why I preferred and admired it: there is greatness in them. Pain is not regarded as an objection to existence: "And if thou hast no bliss now left to crown me—Lead on! Thou hast thy Sorrow still." Maybe that my music is also great in this passage." (Ecce Homo (Nietzsche's Autobiography, translated by Anthony M. Ludovivi, T.N. Foulis, 1911, p. 98)

Possibly Nietzsche proposed marriage to her, although according to Rudolp Binion he never did so. In Lucerne Andreas-Salomé, Nietzsche and Rée had a photograph by Jules Bonnet taken of themselves, Lou kneeling in a small cart and holding a whip over the two man-team, who are pulling the cart. Their stormy love triangle inspired Liliana Cavani's film Beyond Good and Evil (1977).

Nietzsche's jealous sister Elisabeth turned against Andreas-Salomé and regarded her as a poisonous vermin that must be destroyed. Nietzsche broke off his relationship with Andreas-Salomé in December 1882. Before this, Nietzsche told Andreas-Salomé that Thus Spoke Zarathustra had been conceived as an artistic substitute for the son he would never have. In a draft of a letter to her Nietzsche asked: "Should Lou be a misunderstood angel?" Should I be a misunderstood ass?" (Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist by Walter A. Kaufmann, Princeton University Press, fourth edition, 1974, p. 59) He never sent the letter to Paul Rée's brother in which he referred to her as "This scrawny dirty smelly monkey with her fake breasts – a disaster!" (Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography by Rüdiger Safranski, W. W. Norton & Company, 2003, p.  255) After separating from Nietzsche and Paul Rée, Andreas-Salomé published her account of Nietzsche's thought, Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken (1894), in which she characterized him a fundamentally religious personality, "a religious genius confronted with the death of God." (Woman and Modernity: The (life)styles of Lou Andreas-Salomé by Biddy Martin, Cornell University Press, 1991, p. 93) Parts of the book had appeared in newspaper serializations. She did not dealt with the sudden break with Nietzsche, who had collapsed into madness in 1889. 

Andreas-Salomé's first book, Im Kampf um Gott (1885), an autobiographical novel, was a success. It is also considered her best prose work. In her of time she was a well-known writer, but today all her fifteen novels are forgotten. However, Andreas-Salomé never regarded herself primarily as a novelist.

In 1887 Andreas-Salomé married the famous orientalist and philologist Frederick Carl Andreas, sixteen years his senior. He taught German to Turks who had settled in Berlin, but later in 1903 he was appointed professor at Göttingen University. Hendrik Gillot reluctantly agreed to officiate at the wedding. The marriage, which lasted over 40 years, was apparently unconsummated, although first Andreas-Salomé did his best to change the situation.

When the socialist politician Georg Ledebour realized the secret of their marriage, that she was still a virgin, he determinedly besieged her. Andreas-Salomé didn't lose her virginity until she was thirty-four; at that time her lover was the Viennese doctor Friederich Pineles. Basically Andreas-Salomé saw the relationship between her sexuality and her life as an intellectual "by nature" conflictual.

Although Andreas-Salomé continued to pursue her travels across Europe and had sexual relationships outside marriage, she always returned to Göttingen. In Paris she spent much time with the German playwright Frank Wedekind, who misunderstood the nature of her interest in him. While in Vienna she visited regularly the Hof Atelier Elvira, a gathering place for gay men and lesbians. In 1891, when she lived with Andreas in Berlin, she became friends with Gerhart and Marie Hauptmann and started to contribute to the social and critical review Die Freie Bühne. Also the graphic artist and sculptor Käthe Kollwitz was one of her friends.

In 1892 Andreas-Salomé published a book on Ibsen's female characters, Hedrik Ibsens Frauengestalten. It was rumored that Ibsen had modelled her famous Hedda Gabler, who desired to live like a man, after her, but Andreas-Salomé expressed particular dislike of the character: "She resembles a ravenous wolf on which a sheep's skin has been growing for a very long time and who has forfeited its predatory strength only to keep its predatory soul." (Woman and Modernity, p. 140)

With Frieda von Bülow, who had been introduced to her in 1891 through a mutual friend, the writer Johanna Niemann, Andreas-Salomé traveled to Vienna, where she had already established relationships with Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Richard Beer-Hofmann, and Peter Altenberg. Bülow shared a great deal in common with her friend;  they both led unconventional lives, were drawn to men with strong personalities, and rejected traditional marriage. Possibly the character Renate in Andreas-Salomé's Das Haus (The House), written in 1904 and published in 1921, was based on Bülow. (German Women for Empire, 1884-1945 by Lora Wildenthal, 2001, p. 233)

Andreas-Salomé and Bülow met the poet Rainer Maria Rilke in Munich in May 1897. The three of them spent several weeks at a vacation cottage in Wolfratshausen, a small town outside Munich. In the winter of 1899-1900 she read a lot of books of Russia and painting. Her affair with Rilke lasted until 1901. Rilke sent her many more letters than she sent back. "I am yours, just as the last tiny star belonds to the night, that hardly knows it and does not recognize its light. . . . ." (Rilke to Lou, June 8, 1987) (¨The Young Poet Meets His Muse: An Introduction', in You Alone Are Real to Me: Remembering Rainer Maria Rilke by Lou Andreas-Salomé, translated with an introduction and afterword by Angela von der Lippe, BOA Editions, 2004, p. 7) He was 14 years her junior – occasionally she was mistaken for his mother. Together they visited two times Russia.

On the first journey, they met Leo Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana; his wife Countess Sofia Andreevna nearly turned the unexpected visitors out of the house. When Tolstoy asked Rilke, "Womit befassen Sie sich?" (What do you occupy yourself with?), Rilke responded, "Mit Lyrik" (With lyrical poetry). (Rilke's Russia: A Cultural Encounter by Anna A. Tavis, Northwestern University Press, 1994, p. 98) Tolstoy did not agree with Andreas-Salomé's view of Russian religiosity and warned his guests not to romantize Russian national traits of servility, humility and ignorance. (Ibid., pp. 96-98)

In 1911 Andreas-Salomé spent some time with her friend Ellen Key in Sweden, where she formed a friendship with the physician and analyst Poul Bjerre; he brought her with him to Weimar to attend the Third International Psychoanalytic Congress. "I have become closely acquainted with her and must say that I have never met with such an understanding of psychoanalysis down to the last and smallest detail," wrote Karl Abraham, one of the participants, to Freud. (Jung: A Biography by Gerhard Wehr, translated from the German by David M, Weeks, Shambhala, 2001, p. 138) In the famous group photo documenting the congress, Andreas-Salomé, wrapped in a long fur, was seated at center near Freud. With Victor Tausk, Freud's brilliant but disturbed colleague, Andreas-Salomé had a close relationship and helped him with his publications. Tausk committed suicide in 1919. Distinctly, their "Pythagoren friendship" had much similarities with Nietzsche – Rée – Andreas-Salomé triangle, now Freud playing the role of the prophet.

Before meeting the founder of psychoanalysis, Andreas-Salomé had published a study of sexual love, Die Erotik (1911). In 1912 she asked in a letter to Freud his permission to come to Vienna for psychoanalytical training. Andreas-Salomé was still in her fifties youthful-appearing. As a public figure, she was more famous than Freud.

When Freud first encountered her, he warned one of his younger followers that she was "a woman of dangerous intelligence" but that "all the tracks around her go into the Lion's den but none come out." The tone of her letters to him was lighthearted. Freud tought that Andreas-Salomé looked on analysis as a sort of Christmas present. (Sex and Religion: Two Texts of Early Feminist Psychoanalysis, with an introduction by Matthew Del Nevo and Gary Winship; translated by Maike Oergel and Kristine Jennings, 2016, p.viii)

During her stay in Vienna Andreas-Salomé associated also with Adler, but eventually turned against him. For a brief period, Andreas-Salomé was Freud's closest woman pupil and she was allowed to attend regularly the internal Wednesday gatherings at Bergstrasse 19 at Freud's home. "Frau Lou" became also close to Freud's daughter Anna. Noteworthy, she never questioned Anna's adoration of her famous father.

Andreas-Salomé kept up a correspondence with Freud for over two decades. From 1913 Andreas-Salomé took patients for analysis, but it was not until the 1920s when her practice started to gain professional recognition. A keen observer of human nature, Andreas-Salomé fully utilized her great gift of empathy to help her patients, sometimes even without a fee. In the confrontation between Freud and Carl Jung, she first attempted to behave "diplomatically," but eventually she considered that Jung gave up the attempt to be a scientists.

'Narzissmus als Doppelrichtungen'  (1921), Andreas-Salomé's most important psychoanalytical study, appeared in Imago, a psychoanalytical journal where several of her other works came out. She developed into a new direction Freud's ideas which he had sketched in his 1914 essay 'On Narcissism', and argued that love and sex are a reunion of the self with its lost half. Freud considered her article on anal eroticism from 1916 one of the best things she wrote. Andreas-Salomé associated anal sexuality with genitality and argued that "it is characteristic for animals that anal and genital orientations go together completely," and continued that "it is no accident that the genital apparatus remains so closely connected to the anus (and in woman is merely rented from it)." (Woman and Modernity, p. 213)

Friedrich Andres died of cancer in 1930. Lou Andreas-Salomé died of uremia in Göttingen seven years later, on February 5, 1937. She remained childless throughout her life. Biographers have suggested that she had two miscarriages or terminated two pregnancies, one by Rilke and one by Pineles. Freud learned of her death from a newspaper and wrote to Arnold Zweig, that he "was very fond of her" but assured, "strange to say without a trace of sexual attraction." (Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision by Louis Breger, John Wiley & Sons, 2000, p. 358)

Grundriss einiger Lebenserinnerungen (1933) and Lebensrückblick (1951), Andreas-Salomé's autobiographical books, give a fascinating but somewhat coloured view into her life and acquaintances. Noteworthy, she don't mention Pineles in Lebensrückblick.  Her correspondence with Rilke was published in 1952.

For further reading: Lou Andreas-Salomé: Una vida para la libertad: Musa de Nietzsche, Rilke y Freud by María Gabriela Rebok-Holz, et al. (2023); Lou Andreas-Salomé: Zwischenwege in der Moderne = Sur les chemins de traverse de la modernité, edited by Britta Benert & Romana Weiershausen (2019); Friedrich Nietzsche e Lou Salomè: il femminile e le donne by Susanna Iris Rizzi (2018); Women, Emancipation and the German Novel 1871-1910 book. Protest Fiction in its Cultural Context by Charlotte Woodford (2017); Image in Outline: Reading Lou Andreas-Salomé by Gisela Brinker-Gabler (2012); Women in the Works of Lou Andreas-Salomé: Negotiating Identity by Muriel Cormican (2009); Lou von Salomé: a Biography of the Woman who Inspired Freud, Nietzsche and Rilke by Julia Vickers (2008); 'Lou Andreas-Salome'́, in Zarathustra's Sisters: Women's Autobiography and the Shaping of Cultural History by Susan Ingram (2003); 'Authority and Resistance: Women in Lou Andreas-Salomé's Das Haus' by Muriel Cormican, in Women in German Yearbook 14 (1999); Lou Andreas-Salomé: Feministin Oder Antifeministin-Eine Standortbestimmung Zur Wilhelminischen Frauenbewegung by Caroline Kreide (1997); Die Frauen Sigmund Freuds by Lisa Appignaesi and John Forrester (1994); Woman and Modernity: The (Life)Styles of Lou Andreas-Salomé by Biddy Martin (1991); Lou Andreas-Salomé by Linde Salber (1990); Lou Andreas-Salomé by Ursula Welsch and Michaela Wiesner (1990); Salomé: Her Life and Work by Angela Livingstone (1985); Lou Andreas-Salomé: Leben, Persönlichkeit, Werk: eine Biographie by Cordula Koepcke (1986); Frau Lou: Nietzsche's Wayward Disciple by R. Binion (1968); My Sister, My Spouse by H.F. Peters (1962)

Selected works:

• Im Kampf um Gott, 1885
• Hedrik Ibsens Frauen-Gestalten, 1892
  - Ibsen's Heroines (edited & translated with an introduction by Siegfried Mandel, 1985)
• Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken, 1894
  - Nietzsche (edited, translated and with an introduction by Siegfried Mandel, 1988)
• Ruth, 1985
• Jesus der Jude, 1895
• Aus fremder Seele, 1896
• Fenitschka, 1898
  - Fenitschka; and, Deviations: Two Novellas (translated from the German with an introduction by Dorothee Einstein Krahn, 1990)
• Menschenkinder, 1899
  - The Human Family = Menschenkinder (translated and with an introduction by Raleigh Whitinger, 2005)
• Ma, 1901
• Im Zwischenland, 1902
• Die Erotik, 1910
  - The Erotic (with a foreword by Matthew Del Nevo, and an introduction by Gary Winship, translated by John Crisp, 2012)
• Drei Briefe an einen Knaben, 1917
  - Three Letters to a Young Boy (translated by Maike Oergel, in Sex and Religion: Two Texts of Early Feminist Psychoanalysis, 2016)
• Das Haus, 1921
  - Anneliese's House: A Translation of Lou Andreas-Salomé's 1921 Novel Das Haus: Familiengeschichte vom Ende vorigen Jahrhunderts (translated by Frank Beck and Raleigh Whitinger, 2021)
  
• Der Teufel und seine Großmutter, 1922
  - The Devil and His Grandmother (translated by Kristine Jennings, in Sex and Religion: Two Texts of Early Feminist Psychoanalysis, 2016) 
• Die Stunde ohne Gott, 1922
• Rodinka, 1923
• R.M. Rilke, Gedenkbuch, 1928
  - You Alone Are Real to Me: Remembering Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Angela von der Lippe, 2003)
• Mein Dank an Freud: Brief an Professor Sigmund Freud zu seinem 75. Geburtstag, 1931
• Grundriss einiger Lebenserinnerungen, 1933
• Lebensrückblick, 1951 (edited by Ernst Pfeiffer)
  - Looking Back: Memoirs (edited by Ernst Pfeiffer, translated by Breon Mitchell, 1991)
• Rainer Maria Rilke, Lou Andreas-Salomé; Briefwechsel, 1952 (edited by Ernst Pfeiffer)
• In der Schule bei Freud. Tagebuch eines Jahres, 1912/1913, 1958 (edited by Ernest Pfeiffer)
  - The Freud Journal of Lou Andreas-Salomé (translated by S.A. Leavy, 1964)
• Briefwechsel mit Freud, 1966 (edited by Ernst Pfeiffer)
  - Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé: Letters (edited by Ernst Pfeiffer, translated by William and Elainen Robson-Scott, 1972)
• Lebensrückblick. Grundriss einiger Lebenserinnerungen, 1968 (new ed., edited by  Ernst Pfeiffer)
• Rainer Maria Rilke, Lou Andreas-Salomé: Briefwechsel, 1975 (new enlarged ed., edited by Ernst Pfeiffer)
  - Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé: The Correspondence  (translated by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler, 2006)
• Drei Dichtungen, 1981
• Fenitschka; Eine Ausschweifung: zwei Erzählungen, 1982 (edited with an afterword by Ernst Pfeiffer)
  - Fenitschka; and, Deviations: Two Novellas (translated from the German with an introduction by Dorothee Einstein Krahn, 1990)
• Eintragungen. Letzte Jahre, 1982
• Rainer Maria Rilke / Lou Andreas-Salomé; mit den Fotografien der Erstausgabe, 1988 (edited by Ernst Pfeiffer)
• Lou Andreas-Salomé: mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten, 1990 (edited by Linde Salber)
• Lou Andreas-Salomé, Das "zweideutige Lächeln der Erotik", 1990 (edited by Inge Weber and Brigitte Rempp)
• "--als käm ich heim zu Vater und Schwester": Lou Andreas-Salomé-Anna Freud: Briefwechsel 1919-1937, 2001 (edited by Daria A. Rothe and Inge Weber)
• 'Three Letters to a Young Boy', in Sex and Religion: Two Texts of Early Feminist Psychoanalysis, 2015 (translated by Meike Orgel)
  
• Sex and Religion: Two Texts of Early Feminist Psychoanalysis, 2016 (with an introduction by Matthew Del Nevo and Gary Winship; translated by Maike Oergel and Kristine Jennings)
  
• Lou Andreas Salomé: la compreneuse, 2022 (correspondence, selections; by Annie Anargyros)
  
• Lebensrückblick, 2022 (Outlook Verlag)