The woman who stirred the lives of great men and rejected them until she found them suitable for herself, Lou Andreas Salome was what the infamous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud said to be a woman who understood people better than people understood themselves. She was born in St. Petersburg to an army general and his wife on 12 February 1861. She was a Russian-born psychoanalyst and an author. 

Salome was the only daughter, with five brothers, to parents of French Huuenot and Northern German descent. However, her family was later attacked on the basis of being “Finnish Jew” by the Nazis. She obtained her education at 17 by pursuing the Dutch preacher Hendrik Gillot to teach her theology, philosophy, world religions and French and German literature. Gillot was so fascinated by her that he had planned to divorce his wife and marry her. 

Salomé’s mother took her to Rome when she was 21. There she was acquainted with Paul Rée, an author. He was immediately head over heels for her, but she rejected his proposal and rather suggested that they should live and study together as siblings, along with another man to gain them academic commune. This made Rée accept and he called on his friend Nietzsche. The latter, too, fell in love with Salomé. He proposed to her via Rée once, to which she did not accept. He did so later again when the both of them were alone, but she did not accept then either. Of many of the works by Salomé, she also wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken (Friedrich Nietzsche in his Works) in 1894 about Nietzsche’s personality and philosophy. Nietzsche, however, blames the failure of his advances to his sister Elizabeth who called Salomé an ‘immoral woman’ and constantly tried to disrupt their commune by writing letters to the families of Salomé and Rée. 

In 1887, Salomé married the Orientalist Friedrich C. Andreas, a professor at the University of Gottingen. She was against the institution of marriage and this occurred only on the terms that it would never be consummated. This marriage deeply unsettled Rée, who left and later committed suicide. Throughout the time she was married, she had affairs with other men. The range included the German journalist and politician Georg Ledebour, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke on whose life and works she was a major influence and on whom she also based her work Rainer Maria Rilke in 1928 (her relationship with him and exchange of letters is recorded in her book The Erotic), the psychoanalyst Viktor Tausk. She writes of these associations in her volume Lebensruckblick. 

Though there are rumours about her romantic involvements with Sigmund Freud, her relation to him was quite intellectual. She was his disciple. She joined the Viennese Psychoanalytical Circle and became the first woman psychoanalyst. She is also the first to write on female sexuality. Her essay on the anal-erotic in 1911 was admired by Freud.

Both Salomé and her husband Andreas suffered of many illnesses towards the ends of their lives. They grew closer at the end despite years of non-communication. She passed away 7 years after his death, on 5th February 1937 of uremia in her sleep. Her urn was laid to rest on her husband’s grave in he Friedhof an der Groner Landstrabe in Gottingen.