It has been on its way for so long, has been prepared for, indeed has already almost arrived. She writes of Rilke’s creative breakthrough: In her response, poured out of her dual identity of muse and analyst, Andreas-Salomé offers a beautiful testament to the embodied experience of creative revelation and to what John Dewey would later term the vital “live creature” aspect of the artist.

On those images in you, those captive ones įor you conquered them: but you still don’t know them. Life is easy for those people who are granted a very small portion of creativity to go along with their strong experiences and can expend the former entirely on the latter and now and then those others, the ones who are creative by nature, succeed the other way around but much more often the two as it were meet somewhere in the middle and die there, since they collide on their one path rather than proceed along it together.Ī few days later, Rilke breaks through his creative block and sends her a newly written poem titled “Turning,” containing the following verse: a creative period about to begin in response to new human experiences … a terrible danger is as close as a great victory. In June of 1914, shortly after her correspondence with Freud about human nature, she writes to assuage Rilke’s frustration with the creative block that had befallen him: Nowhere does Andreas-Salomé’s uncommon insight into the human spirit come more fully abloom than in their prolific correspondence, published as Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters ( public library) and spanning a quarter century of intellectual intercourse well after the end of their affair. Even after their romance ended in 1900, she remained Rilke’s closest confidante and, in many ways, his most important influence. It was at her urging that he changed his first name from “René” to “Rainer,” which she found more virile and Germanic. Young Rilke became besotted with her, wrote her exquisite love letters, and dedicated his Book of Hours to her. Nietzsche, whose masterwork Thus Spoke Zarathustra was largely inspired by Andreas-Salomé, set down his ten rules for writers in a letter to her.

Her extraordinary intellectual gravity and creative grace made her a muse to some of Europe’s most celebrated minds. At the age of fifty, already an established poet and philosopher, she trained with Freud and became the world’s first female psychoanalyst. In an era when the self-actualization opportunities for women of genius amounted to little more than becoming wives of geniuses, the Russian-born writer and intellectual Lou Andreas-Salomé (February 12, 1861–February 5, 1937) realized a life commensurate with her brilliance.

Rilke letters