Psychoanalytical Theorizing and Influence

3. Psychoanalytical Theorizing and Influence

While many would be tempted to exclude Salome’s psychoanalytical writings from her philosophic opus, such a division of interests assuredly would have been considered artificial by Salome herself.55 Throughout her life Salome recognized the legitimacy of positing a continuum between the areas of philosophy and psychology - whether in Spinoza’s analysis of the emotions or Nietzsche’s pronouncement that a great philosophy consists of “the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir”.56 So, although many have judged her finest work to be the fruit of her association with psychoanalysis, one ought not to forget that this trend of thought merely served as a continuation of her lifelong interests, an attempt to get to the root of philosophical experiences.57

As ever, Salome takes with her to the study of psychoanalysis a mind suited for synthesis. The concepts she encounters there are extended and enriched by her insights. For example, in an early entry to her Freud Journal she fills in what she had found lacking in a lecture by Freud:

It is of the essence of his simple and ingenious approach to make something unconscious comprehensible by grasping it in illness and kindred states. Only through pathological material could sure knowl-edge be won, only there where the inner life makes a detour and betrays a little of itself, is formulated through expression, and can be caught with the logical hook in the shallows between the surface and the depths.58 

What Salome points to here are the vast riches of the unconscious of which only a warped view is obtained through psychoanalytical exam-ination. These very riches are what she herself most valued.59 Along these same lines, Salome suggests that Freudian sublimation actually amounts to “our own self-realization”.60

Salome’s concerns with religion and the nature of woman and sexu-ality may well have been among her primary motivations to pursue psychoanalysis, especially in view of Freud’s demythologizing of religion and his emphasis on sexuality.61 The primacy of erotic impulses in women is asserted by Salome when she refers to woman as one “whose spirit is sex, whose sex is spirit”.62 Again, Salome emphasizes woman’s greater connection with primal unity, and thus with eroticism.63

Perhaps Salome’s greatest, and certainly most original, contribution to psychoanalytic theory comes in her exposition of narcissism as embodying the dual currents of self-love and self-surrender.64 This too, however, was a further working out of her previous ideas. Narcissism for Salome takes a decidedly positive turn. In contrast to Freud’s assess-ment of narcissism as regressive and pathological, Salome finds in narcissism “the creative element, i.e., the natural and at the same time the spiritual goal of every human development, the unity of sex and ego.”65 Moreover, narcissism for Salome implies a continuity with nature, an identification of self within nature as a whole: “Bear in mind that the Narcissus of the legend gazed, not at a man-made mirror, but at the mirror of Nature. Perhaps it was not just himself that he beheld in the mirror, but himself as if he were still AH”.66 It is this primal unity that Salome commends when she discusses narcissism.

The primal unity is disrupted by “the primal hurt of all of us... the uncomprehending self-abasement of becoming an individual”, which leaves us “homeless and impoverished”.67 Thus, as explicated by Salome, her enriched notion of narcissism ranges across three phases -

1. “a particular developmental stage to be transcended”,

2. the “creative... the persistent accompaniment of all our deeper expe-rience, always present, yet still far beyond any possibility of hewing its way from consciousness into the unconscious”, and

3. the “self-knower.”

4. Later Writings

After 1914 Salome undertook a new career as psychoanalyst, one of the very first women to pursue this emerging profession. Patients were

referred to her by Freud himself and others in his circle.69 The First World War weighed heavily upon Salome, and was often a topic of discussion in her diary, causing her to speculate upon war and its root causes.70 The opposition of Germany and Russia in the war divided her loyalties. The Russian Revolution of 1917 also touched her deeply, and she reacted strongly against the Bolsheviks and their policies.71

The last years of Salome’s life were given over to three major works - her books on Rilke (1928), Freud (1931), and herself (published posthu-mously in 1951). The Rilke book incorporated her work in literary criticism along with psychoanalysis. The Freud text serves as both a tribute to the man and a forum for elaborating her own interpretations of psychoanalytic theory. Her autobiography, originally entitled Grundriss einiger Lebenserinnerungen (“Ground-plan of some life- recollections”), was completed in 1932, and later extended. It is written in phenomenological fashion, touching upon events and people Salom6 deemed central to her life experience, rather than following an historical pattern of specific dates and facts.

The subject of old age also merited Salome’s meditations as she herself experienced this final stage of her own life: “deep down, knowing how to live and knowing how to die go together.”72 The move into old age she compared to a move back to the expansive world of childhood.73 Salome’s positive attitude is more noteworthy in view of the illnesses that beset her last years, including diabetes, heart disease, and breast cancer. She died quietly February 5, 1937, shortly before her seventy-sixth birthday. Her last recorded words: “The best is death, after all.”74