Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts

How do I imagine love?


How do I imagine love? That is quite uncomplicated--very simple and wholesome. I would compare it with things that are least demonic or romantic, like the daily bread that is blessed and stills our hunger, like the stream of air that comes into our homes to refresh us. In short, with that which is most important, most beautiful, and most natural, on which we most depend and about which we do not need to engage in empty rhetoric.

Lou Andreas-Salome, Fenitschka
Translated by Dorothee Einstein Krahn
(University Press of America, 1990), p. 19


Lou Andreas-Salome (1861-1937) was a novelist and pioneering psychoanalyst to whom Freud sometimes referred patients. She was also a confidante of Nietzsche and Rilke. 

Lou Andreas-Salome: The Audacity to Be Free, a film based on her extraordinary life, is now available on Amazon Prime.


Andreas-Salomé's novella, 'Fenitschka', is set in St. Petersburg in the 1890s (Painting by Eugene Lushpin)

A great yearning


'Don't you think that a great yearning is like the birds' heading south -- a sign that somewhere life is in bloom?'

Lou Andreas-Salomé
Menschenkinder (1899); translated by Raleigh Whitinger
The Human Family, p. 173 (University of Nebraska Press)

Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937) was a prominent German novelist and a pioneering psychoanalyst to whom Freud sometimes referred patients.

A 2016 film told the story of her extraordinary life, and Raleigh Whitinger and I have just published the first English translation of her 1921 novel, Das Haus under the title Anneliese's House (Boydell and Brewer).