Sex and Religion Two Texts of Early Feminist

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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2015004389

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Andreas-Salomé, Lou, 1861-1937, author.

[Works. Selections. English]
Sex and Religion : Two Texts of Early Feminist Psychoanalysis / By Lou
Andreas-Salome; Three Letters to a Young Boy translated by Maike Oergel;
The Devil & His Grandmother translated by Kristine Jennings; Introduction
by Matthew Del Nevo & Gary Winship.
pages cm
The Devil & His Grandmother is a play.
Summary: Drei Breife an einen Knaben (Three Letters to a Young Boy) and
Der Teufel und Seine Grossmutter (The Devil & His Grandmother) are texts
that explore sexuality across the lifespan with some unexpected twists and turns.
The Devil & His Grandmother treats the collision of sexuality and religion,
and therefore religious education indirectly. The Three Letters was originally
authored in 1912 with two letters addressed to Helene Klinenberg’s son and
a third added in 1913. The Three Letters were edited, appended and finally
published in 1917 by Kurt Wolff’s Verlag in Leipzig. -- Provided by publisher.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4128-5696-6 -- ISBN 978-1-4128-6218-9 (e-ISBN)
1. Andreas-Salomé, Lou, 1861-1937--Translations into English. 2. Sex instruc-
tion for boys. 3. Sex (Psychology)--Drama. 4. Religion--Drama. I. Oergel, Maike,
translator. II. Jennings, Kristine, translator. III. Andreas-Salomé, Lou, 1861-1937.
Drei Briefe an einen Knaben. English. IV. Andreas-Salomé, Lou, 1861-1937. Teufel
und seine Grossmutter. English. V. Title.
PT2601.N4A2 2015
838’.809--dc23
2015004389
ISBN : 978-1-4128-5696-6 hbk
 Contents
Introduction
Matthew Del Nevo and Gary Winship vii

Lou Andreas-Salomé: Three Letters to a Young Boy

Translated by Maike Oergel 1

1 Weihnachtsmärchen: Christmas Fairy Tale 3

2 Answer to a Question 13

3 Geleitwort: A Few Words to Send You on Your Journey 23

The Devil and His Grandmother

Translated by Kristine Jennings 37

Act One: The Devil and the Poor Little Soul 39

Act Two: The Devil with the Child 47
Act Three: The Devil and His Accomplices 55
Act Four: The Scream 63
Act Five: The Devil’s Visit with His Grandmother 71
Act Six: Devil’s Death 79
Epilogue 87

Note on the Translation 91

 Introduction
Matthew Del Nevo and Gary Winship

Sexuality stands at the center of Lou Andreas-Salomé’s life as its prin-

ciple mystery. Drei Breife an einen Knaben (Three Letters to a Young
Boy) and Der Teufel und Seine Grossmutter (The Devil & His Grand-
mother) are texts that explore sexuality across the lifespan with some
unexpected twists and turns. The Devil & His Grandmother treats the
collision of sexuality and religion, and therefore religious education
indirectly. The Three Letters was originally authored in 1912 with two
letters addressed to Helene Klinenberg’s son and a third added in 1913.
The Three Letters were edited, appended and finally published in 1917
by Kurt Wolff’s Verlag in Leipzig. The Devil and His Grandmother was
written during the same period but not published until 1922 when it
was taken up by Eugen Diedrich’s publishing house in Jena.
Dispensing with the academic formality of her earlier works, which
were wide-ranging, from novels and short stories to philosophical
biography, criticism and formal academic treatises structured by the
demands of recording historical facts or make the case for an intel-
lectual proposition, the Three Letters to a Young Boy and The Devil &
His Grandmother taken together point to a relaxed new phase in Lou
Salomé’s writing life between the years of 1912–1920. Her penchant
for dense prose is replaced by another voice altogether, the sing-song
simplicity of the storyteller. Here is a lively Lou making jokes about
Satan, storks and Father Christmas. The lightness of touch in her voice
is to be detected in her correspondence with Freud which blossoms
during the years 1912–1920, and is recorded in her Journal. Her early
encounters with Freud and psychoanalysis, by her own admission, see
Lou feeling ever more cheerful and lighthearted. She is not daunted by
Freud’s reputation, after all she is more famous than he, and though she
bows to his clinical acumen, Lou’s playfulness disarms Freud. Freud tells
vii
 Sex and Religion

her: “I really think you look on analysis as a sort of Christmas present.”

Lou can “only agree.”1
Her correspondence and exchanges with Freud are lively, and we see
from her journal of 1912–1913 that in Vienna she is attending up to
three seminars a week. The seminar themes cover diverse areas from
dreams, fairy tales and enchantments, to trauma, alcoholism and sexual
perversion. In contrast to the animated tone of her letters to Freud,
her letters to Rilke are grey and somber, often didactic and certainly
lacking in the humor we see with Freud. Three Letters and The Devil
& His Grandmother emerge in the afterglow of her time in the Vienna
circle and her contact with the psychoanalytic brotherhood, including
Alfred Adler though especially Victor Tausk who Lou takes as a lover. It
is with a newfound spirit of free thinking perhaps informed by her own
literary experiment in the psychoanalytic technique of free association
that transports us in Three Letters and The Devil & His Grandmother
into a new theater of Lou’s imagination.
So we might think of Three Letters and The Devil & His Grandmother
as Lou’s psychoanalytically inspired babies, so to speak. But the ques-
tion of paternity is subject to speculation, was it Rilke or Freud? In
December 1913 Lou wrote to Rilke:

At the moment I am finishing something about which I occasionally

wonder: what would you make of it? It grew out [of ] correspon-
dence with Reinhold Klingenberg and is called: Three Letters to a
Boy with letters separated by three year intervals. Only the last two
are relevant, since the first is a fairy tale: would you, sometime or
other, care to read through them in typescript? Had I not known of
so many similar cases, I wouldn’t have let this matter pass beyond
the specific personal situation that it originally addressed. But here
too Freud’s attitude regarding this issue seemed to me the right one:
especially this total distancing from every previous soft-coloring of
things—whereby paradoxically, I believe, the genuine hues of life are
for the first time allowed to shine.2

However, by the time Lou gets round to publishing Three Letters in

1917, Freud is so present in her life that the Three Letters book could
easily be seen as something akin to their love child. Three Letters or
the “small book,” as Lou called it in her correspondence with Freud,
might be described as charting Lou’s transition between Rilke and
Freud. Three Letters is something of a psychoanalytic fairy tale of
sorts, which Freud described as “exquisitely feminine.”

viii
 Introduction

In the first letter Lou meets Father Christmas sitting on a bench. He

tells Lou about the time when the storks went on strike and refused
to deliver babies. Father Christmas tells her that he gobbles up bad
children. She is horrified but Father Christmas laughs and points out
that he means he eats the marzipan on which he has written down the
dreams of children, and not the children themselves. But the light-
hearted spirit of the magical encounter foreshadows the first important
lesson; that babies are not reared and born in a magical stork pond,
but rather they are made under mummy’s heart. Father Christmas tells
Lou that Jesus Christ was just another baby born a long time ago and
there have been many more babies born since then who are just as
important. And though Lou spells out that babies come from mother,
the role of father is only hinted at. Lou takes one last look at Father
Christmas, the miracle man who can fulfill wishes with his: “beard,
hood and rucksack,” and makes a delicate observation of the phallic
pubic hair (beard), penis (hood) and testes (sack).
The second letter begins with a response to a question from Bubi.
The letter changes pace because Lou’s reply is only addressed to Bubi
and not his younger sister. Although we don’t know what the ques-
tion is, we can guess that Bubi has heard his school friends talking
about sexual encounters. Lou suspects that Bubi finds the idea of the
sexual act as “ugly,” and perhaps therein she detects an early onset
of neurosis. Lou sets about putting the record straight and mounts
a persuasive case for intimacy as beautiful. We see herein that the
Three Letters can be contextualized in term of sexual pedagogy.
Sexual education was a genre of Viennese literature at the time of
writing and Britta McEwen has explored this in Sexual Knowledge:
Feeling, Fact and Social Reform in Vienna, 1900–1934. Sex educa-
tion was part of the pre-war Aufklärung. There were contesting
ideologies: progressive and conservative, Catholic, Protestant, and
other ideas about the format for sex education. How to introduce
the topic of reproduction was the hot question, “the overwhelm-
ing answer was to build upon observable parallels from the natural
world.”3 According to McEwen’s study of the literature of the period,
Lou’s Three Letters “serves to illustrate a widening base of the sexual
education movement.”4 This is how Lou is positioned then within
the sexual culture debates of the time. In McEwen’s assessment, the
best we have, of Lou’s position in context is that: “This was a very
advanced and progressive discussion, notable for its complete lack

ix
 Sex and Religion

of emphasis on purity.”5 Like Wedekind and Freud “Andreas-Salomé

did not deny the reality of sex in the lives of young people.”6 Although
Lou displays her poetic intimacies which come through strongly
in the third of the Letters, she was attuned to her time, like Freud,
and she balances her literary appetite with an interesting array of
scientific research.
The third letter again shifts gear, and is perhaps a response to some
news of unruliness on Bubi’s part. Lou’s tone is didactic and the lesson
for this letter is to unfold the nature of emotionality and bodily drives.
Lou’s approach has discernible Freudian overtones and she even goes
as far in a footnote to tell Bubi that one day he too will be grateful for
Freud’s insights. Lou shores up the animal urges of the male, which she
has eloquently outlined in the first letter, with the relational necessity
that these animal drives must be accompanied by warmth, faithfulness,
and other human values which underpin love. It is an altogether con-
summate lesson about the sexual act as a moment of sensitive intimacy.
If Lou’s extended lesson in her 1910 book The Erotic was a treatise on
female sexuality focusing on the politics of sexuality for women, her
lesson to Bubi looks in the direction of male sexuality, and becomes a
lesson in relational manners and self-control.
Taken together the Three Letters offers an interesting version of
stepped sexual education, that is to say, how knowledge about sexuality
from childhood through to adolescence will evolve in terms of meta-
phor and biological explicitness. It is notable that Lou deploys the story
of Father Christmas as a segue to a seminar on sexual enlightenment
and of course this foreshadows Melanie Klein’s first paper (1919) which
takes the psychoanalytic stage with the self-same premise, that is, a
case description about the symbolic significance of Father Christmas
as a motif for sexual enlightenment. Klein would have been familiar
with Lou’s work through various connections including Karl Abraham
and Sandor Ferenczi, so we might wonder how much of an influence
Lou’s Three Letters was for Klein. That two of the founding woman of
psychoanalysis draw from the same source may be coincidental. We
might ask, who is Father Christmas, with his woe, wisdom, and whis-
kers? When Freud read the book he was overjoyed, perhaps because
he saw between the lines his own state of burden, his own full sack
too heavy for others to carry. We know Freud saw himself as Moses
carrying the tablets of stone, but here Lou recasts the role. Happily
Freud would have seen also that here was Lou positioning herself at
his elbow. Could he want for more?
x
 Introduction

But for Lou there is also the grumpy old Father Christmas, who has
an unpleasant turn, the hermit who becomes the rocks itself; it is as if
Lou resuscitates Zarathustra. The whiskers here then become those of
Nietzsche, leaving her with an unpleasant aftertaste. And then further
back there is something of Gillot perhaps as Father Christmas who tries
to sell Christ to Lou. Anyway, with the second letter, Lou rejects the
motif of Father Christmas and seeks solace in the seriousness of science.
The personal poignancy of the letters is that they come from a
childless Lou who muses over what it might be like to tell a story of
sexual enlightenment to her child. Here Lou is caught between her own
mothering urges, and her indifference. Why would she want children
when she had Rilke, and also perhaps “Daughter Anna”? Biographically
sex and procreation are areas of mystery in Lou Salomé’s life. There
are unanswered questions about Lou’s actual babies. Lou’s marriage to
Carl Andreas, who was sixteen years older, was never consummated.
Although it appears to have been a mutual agreement of platonic
companionship from the outset, the story of her nonsexual marriage
rather inculcated her reputation as something of an erotic tease. Her
virginity was preserved until she was thirty-four. In what appears to be a
rather dramatic whirlwind romance with someone she had only briefly
come to know, she took physician Friederich Pineles or “Zemek” as he
was nicknamed, eight years younger than her, as her lover. Later Lou
would speak to friends about an “accidentally interrupted pregnancy”
in 1896 and it was likely that Zemek was the father.7
In 1897 when Lou met Rilke, he was twenty-one years old and
she was thirty-six. By this time Lou was a renowned and established
author, while Rilke was a vulnerable stammering poet given to anxiety
and psychosomatic illnesses. Rilke sorely needed a mother muse, who
might help steer him toward his promise. Within six months of meet-
ing, Lou and Rilke became lovers and so remained for several years
after. We see from the letters between Rilke and Lou that she was open
with husband Carl about her relationships with both Zemek and Rilke.
We also see from the letters that Rilke was gushing with adoration for
Lou: “It feels to me: as if as all the roses in the world bloom for you,
and by means of you—and only through an act of royal condescension
do you maintain the pretense that they aren’t really yours and allow
the Spring to keep them.”8
Rilke’s letters indicate an erotic transformation of Lou’s womanhood,
from her early relationships with paternalistic godheads (Gillot and
Nietzsche), embodied in her marriage to Carl Andreas, to a position
xi
 Sex and Religion

where she has become mother-goddess. Indeed, there can be no more

telling evidence than Rilke’s effusiveness:
I’ve never seen you without wanting to pray to you. I’ve never heard
you without wanting to place my faith in you . . . I’ve never desired
you without wanting to be able to kneel before you.9

If we have cause to speculate about Lou’s sexual intimacies, then

we know more about Lou as a figure who keeps a distance from the
men in her life. There is something undeniably essential about Lou’s
role as muse to the men around her, beginning with Nietzsche who
chased her, Rilke who wooed her, Wedekind who wished to force
himself on her, and then to Freud who was influenced by her and
sought to influence her: “staring at the empty seat I had reserved for
you” he tells her in a letter when she fails to arrive for an evening
seminar in 1912.10 Perhaps the most extreme example of the way in
which Lou burrowed herself into the minds and hearts of those who
loved her was the young Viennese psychoanalyst Victor Tausk who
killed himself when he felt Lou’s love was unrequited. And Nietzsche’s
friend Paul Rée who after his affair with Lou, and the shock of her
going off with Carl Andreas, could never settle down and is thought
to have ended his life in the Alps. A muse can be a dangerous power,
even a fate.
With Rilke, we might say Lou plays the role of mother muse, but he
is deeply uneasy about Lou actually becoming a mother. Would Lou
have written Three Letters if she had Rilke’s baby? Although she had
told him about the Letters in 1913 Rilke does not get to them until later
in February of 1914. Rilke has also been thinking about children too
and writing about dolls, a theme not far from the world of Bubi and
Schnuppi. Rilke observes the pregnant mother carrying both life and
death,11 so how would it have been for the energetic young poet to face
the prospect of his “mother muse” falling pregnant, either by him or
someone else? In a letter to Rilke, when Lou hints that she has been
“pregnant” and will spend a few more days recovering with Zemek,
Rilke is oblivious to Lou’s illness and in his response we see him deeply
self-absorbed as usual in his own health frailties, creative doubts, and
career ambitions. Rilke does not want to think about such matters, a
life education far from his mind.
Just as the overall theme of the Three Letters has to do with sexual
education, the overall theme of The Devil & His Grandmother is con-
cerned with the collision of sex and religion. While Lou is working on
xii
 Introduction

The Devil & His Grandmother, Rilke (1914) is likewise pondering the
surrogacy and meaning of playing with dolls:
But that, in spite of all this, we did not make an idol of you, you sack,
and did not perish in the fear of you, that was, I tell you, because we
were not thinking of you at all. We were thinking of something quite
different, an invisible Something, which we held high above you and
ourselves, secretly and with foreboding, and for which both we and
you were, so to say, merely pretexts, we were thinking of a soul: the
doll-soul.12

And:

Only you, doll’s soul, one could never say exactly where you really
were.13

The doll presents Rilke with the split or barred subject that sits some-
where just beyond knowing in the unconscious. For Rilke, the doll in
the nursery is witness to a battlefield of childhood emotions, from
hate and violence to succour and repair. In The Devil and His Grand-
mother, the split subject is the God and the Devil and the climax in the
play resembles Rilke’s violence when playing with his nursery dolls:

“The Child (screaming for the rapidly sinking infant).

—Come here! To me—! my little sister in hell!—
Father God, heaven, hell, Devil: Help!!
Devil (bouncing the child up and down on his arm, swinging it high
in wild triumph).
My little doll, bouncy-bouncy baby
My favorite, my very dearest little doll!” (442–48)

For Rilke the doll resembles our mute core or the subject-as-object/
object-for-subject. The doll is both absolutely strange in itself, but the
closest participant in our reality to begin with, the means by which we
begin to make sense of reality. The puppen play is truly our “mirror
stage.” But while we discover ourselves in and through it, we also have
a suppressed knowledge that this is only a doll, that its sheer object-
ness answers a lack in us, where “I” is “not I.”14 Rilke scholar Anthony
Stephens writes:

In this period then, there are two basic possibilities of experience

given which Rilke contrasts as “Fremdheit” [strangeness, foreign-
ness] and “Beteiligung” [participation]. In most cases “Beteiligung”
is what is sought and the experience of “Fremdheit” serves as a
xiii
 Sex and Religion

starting point, as is the case in two of the most impressive poems of

1913, Die spanische Trilogie and Die gosse Nacht. Broadly speaking,
“Beteiligung” is sought in three different directions: to experience
union with some transcendent power, to establish complete com-
munication with another person, that is to say with “die Geliebte”
[the lover], and to establish an emotional readiness between the
self and the world of “die Dinge” (things). The dividedness becomes
apparent in the fact that Rilke is driven by an overriding imperative
to experience all three forms of “Beteiligung” at once, to experience
“ein ganzes Leben” [a greater life], but that he is quite unable to do so.
[For] the “ich” is alienated from the “Dinge” of its environment.15

Rilke’s puppen is not the transitional object of developmental psy-

chology, but a transectional object because the imaginary and symbolic
registers both transect it, while puppen exists qua object. This was
Rilke’s fascination that ultimately the puppen resisted the imaginary
and symbolic play upon it. The ineffable from above (symbolic) and
emotional in front and beside (imaginary) are two directions and the
third is that of the real, the an sich. Rilke’s problem, so well described
here by Anthony Stephens, pertains equally to Lou in the two texts
published here. First, the transcendent connection of the Little Soul
is with the Devil or obversity of God; second, the lateral connection is
with another person and his or her sexuality; and third, one’s material
or environmental well-being in the world. These three may hardly be
parcelled out. For Rilke they come together in his meditation on the doll.
Men’s meditation on the doll such as that of Rilke has increased
since his day and lent itself to cinema, for example in Monique (2002),
or Hirokazu Koreeda’s Air Doll (2009), or ‘Sad Mannequin’ (2010) in
The Tales of Nights where the myth of Pygmalion is erotically replayed
in Korean. There are dozens of such examples where the investment
of fantasy brings alive the dynamic. Well-being is caught in all three
directions, two of which are not necessarily of the world strictly speak-
ing, and Rilke’s alienation from the doll encapsulates a cultural state—a
dumbness. But the essence of language consists precisely in this cut,
this alienation.16
The doll is at the limit of language, so is God and the Devil, so are
children coming into their sexual selves. We discover in the epilogue to
The Devil & His Grandmother that the events of the play, rather Lewis
Carroll-like, may indeed be born from the dream of a child. If this is a
dream then, it is derived from the dark theater of Lou’s imagination.
Peppered with references to excrement and littered with allusions to

xiv
 Introduction

fornication, we discover ourselves at the Freudian developmental cusp

of the anal and genital phases.
The Devil & His Grandmother encapsulates three ages of woman and
we might consider these as autobiographical markers, albeit uncon-
sciously perhaps, for Lou’s own life. Without the neat chronology of
the Three Letters, the lifespan of womanhood is described from the
child who is born from the belly of mother and reaches for the nipple
seeking a breast full of milk, to the lost soul who is destined to be the
Devil’s bride, and finally to the Devil’s Grandmother herself.
The narrative is quirky, comical, and irreverent—darkening to a
climax of pornographic obscenity. There is perhaps much of Lou in
the grim determination of the Devil’s bride who is unwilling to give
herself to a husband from whom she desires no sexual relationship.
Here is Lou the woman who preserved her virginity until her thirties,
despite the attempts by the men in her life to possess her. Beginning
with Gillot who inappropriately proposed marriage, Nietzsche who
stole a kiss and needed to be repelled, Wedekind who hoped for more
than he got, which was friendship, and then finally her husband Carl
who she woke one night to find on top of her, trying to force marital
consummation, to which she responded by kicking him off. In The Devil
Lou paints the full force of sexual violence with a description of the
Ripper-like ritual of lacerating the sexual organs. Indeed, procreation
and birth throughout are conveyed only in the context of abortion and
death. How far childless Lou contemplating the loss of her own child-
bearing desires. Indeed, a benign construction of a mother and infant
seems a distant mirage, overshadowed by the sinister game-playing of
the Devil at a certain point of generalization.
Originally, The Devil and His Grandmother is the name of one of
Grimm’s Tales. In the fairy tale the story is of three soldiers who form
a Faustian pact with the Devil. The consequences of such a pact are
avoided when one of the soldiers manages to get in touch with the
Devil’s Grandmother who gives them an answer to the Devil’s riddle
that frees them from the pact. Lou does several things: she turns the
story into a dialogue, she mythologizes the content giving it a (post-
Nietzschean) religious meaning, and she makes the myth intrinsic to
psychoanalytic theory (as say Freud had done with Oedipus and did
later with Moses), and she makes psychoanalytic theory intrinsic to the
myth she has created, thereby showing the mutuality of psychoanalysis
and myth.

xv
 Sex and Religion

In the dialogue the Grandmother is just a voice and not a personal

voice but a Voice akin to that of nature, archetypally a Gaia figure. She
is not power: “All power exists through God the Lord alone” (966).
The Devil is a split-off from God the Father, again prefiguring Jung’s
notion, arrived at decades later, of God’s shadow side and the need for
integration in God. The Voice tells the Devil:
“You poor rascal,—you’re not at fault,—not you!
You simply misread your own role, and, therefore
Spoke out against God, whom you too closely resembled.” (992–95)

But back of this is the psychoanalytic notion of the split or barred self.
The Voice says:
“I am because he saw me: then I was countenance.
Was face before him. Were he to look away,
So I would be naught. I am—because in me He shines back to himself.
I am—only him
Reflected. Semblance and soil of his complexion.”(980–84)

Here then is an example of the knotting of myth, metaphysics, and

psychoanalysis. It is curious to see the essential shape of the psycho-
analytic idiom within the older more familiar mythic and metaphysical
register, bringing them back to life in a new theoretical voice. Theory
arises precisely where the first principles are contested, as in the post-
Nietzschean and Freudian contexts.
The logical impossibility of the purity of the loving God alone, given
by the apostasy of the Devil, is basic to the dialogue. The Little Soul
is simply innocent, a state prior to “pure” theological love as well as
beyond it. The Devil signifies a split in the divine which the denial (by
theology) only makes more obvious. The Devil in the dialogue makes
fun of Father God “On his throne, which I alone supported / For
thousands of years so that it does not wobble.” (1063–64). There is no
God the Father, no Father’s love, without the Devil. This is more than
an irony—although Salomé treats it thus as well—it is metaphysics
expressed representationally. The Grandmother loves God the Father
and the Devil as her own.
The movement of the dialogue is like that of Rosenzweig’s Star
of Redemption (written around the same time) from Death to Life.17
What is released into Life is the unique soul—not just the self, because
a person is more than a self and it is this “more” than self that really
matters, for the selfishness of the self is a lack tied to Death. Lou’s
xvi