Psychoanalysts

"Cynicism is the opposite of soulful. Cynicism means the conduit to the soul has a great kink in it, like a garden hose in which nothing flows in either direction. That’s what makes cynicism. If those conduits are open, you cannot be cynical."

"I feel that men are as much of a mystery as women. Once we get past a certain amount of self-consciousness and protection of certain sacred cows by each gender, we could have a real conversation, maybe, for the first time ever in the universe, in this century."

"I have seen this sky every day of my life and I am still in awed by it. That is what the wild is — this intense medicinal beauty. To look at it makes you feel whole."

"I understand mythology. I understand stories. I understand poetry. I understand that they cut close to the bone. I am a poet who became a psychoanalyst. That is my background. I am a cantadora. I am a storyteller. It comes from my feet, upward, not from my brain, downward."

"I interviewed Robert Bly in 1990. I can remember saying to him, “Now, what about the men’s movement?” And he said, “No, it’s not men’s movement.” And I said, “Well, what will you call it?” “Men’s work, just work with men, that’s all.” And, I really like that. I like that he called it work with men. Mythopoetic is too big a word. It is better to have simpler words."

"We need to see and understand that whatever stands behind nature is what is god. Nature itself, it is the manifestation."

"We are all filled with a longing for the wild. There are few culturally sanctioned antidotes for this yearning. We were taught to feel shame for such a desire. We grew our hair long and used it to hide our feelings. But the shadow of Wild Woman still lurks behind us during our days and in our nights. No matter where we are, the shadow that trots behind us is definitely four-footed."

"She had a very quiet way of speaking and a great gift of inspiring confidence. I am still a little surprised today how much I told her then. But I had always the feeling that she not only understood everything but forgave everything. I have never again experienced such a feeling of conciliatory kindness, or, if you like, compassion, as I did with her."

"As well as foregrounding the title heroine's growth in articulating her independent resolve and her awareness of its demands and costs, Andreas-Salomé's story also weaves into the background line of its critical dialogue with male traditions intimations of possible male growth and insight."

"Of all acquaintances I have made, the most full and valuable is the one with Fräulein Salomé. Only since knowing her was I ripe for my Zarathustra . . . Lou is the most gifted, thoughtful creature one can imagine -- naturally she also has some dubious qualities. I have some, too . . . You can't sense what consolation Dr. Rée was to me for years -- faute de mieux ["for want of anything better"], it goes with saying, and what an incredible benefit the communion with Fräulein Salomé was to me!"

"My most useful activity this summer was talking with Lou. There is a deep affinity between us in intellect and taste -- and there are in other ways so many differences that we are the most instructive objects and subjects of observation for each other. I have never met anyone who could derive so many objective insights from experience, who knows how to deduce so much from all she has learned."

"Here then is the record of long and turbulent life, a gallery of pictures that extend from her birth in Czarist Russia to her death in Nazi Germany. An unusual life, whatever judgement we pass on it. Voila, un homme, said Napoleon when he met Goethe. By way of introducing Lou Salomé, I can only say, Voila une femme."

"I am not saying too much when I acknowledge that we all felt it as an honor when she entered the ranks of our co-workers and co-fighters, and simultaneously as a new weapon for the truth of analytical teachings . . . She was of an unusual modesty and discretion. She never spoke of her own poetic and literary productions. She obviously knew where the real values of life are to be sought. Whoever came close to her received the strongest impression of the genuineness and the harmony of her being and could see, to his astonishment, that all feminine, perhaps most human, weaknesses were foreign to her or had been overcome by her in the course of her life."

"I am delighted to observe that nothing has altered in our respective ways of approaching a theme, whatever it may be. I strike up a -- mostly very simple melody; you supply the higher octaves for it; I separate the one from the other; and you blend what has been separated into a higher unity."

"Salomé's construction of femininity did not challenge the ultimate fact of sexual difference or the presumption of heterosexuality head on. What Salomé did do, however, was figure woman's masculine will and strength as the mark of her completeness in herself. The double directionality of "masculinity" and "femininity" within woman only made her more woman; it differentiated her from modern man, who had renounced his own basis in what Salomé called the primal ground of life or, later, narcissism."

"As is well known, happiness and harmony are much more difficult to portray than strife and suffering. [In her novel Das Haus] Frau Andreas-Salomé has succeeded in creating a beautiful, German image of the family without becoming cloying. It is very feminine, but this philosopher was always surprisingly feminine -- in the best sense. One thinks of the novellas in her collection, Im Zwischenland (In the Country Between). How she traces the germinating emotions of a fourteen-year-old girl; with what tenderness they are parsed. The same fine fingertips are at work here."

"Andreas-Salomé’s work raises questions that are still urgent today: How are the binaries of Western thought [e.g., thinking of woman as the "other" of man) effectively negotiated and transformed into difference and diversity? How do language and narrative contribute to an upsetting of conventional and fixed points of view? And, finally, how does thinking with images open processes of experience and recognition that create diversity and open-endedness?"

"In my talks with Lou, things became clear to me that I might not have found by myself. Like a catalyst, she activated my thought processes. [...] Intellectually, she was nurturing and creative. Not only encouraging – but enthralling. One felt the spark of genius in her. One grew in her presence."

"Published in a traditional women's genre, Das Haus had the potential to reach far beyond limited groups of female intellectuals into the homes and lives of women who might be alienated or threatened by the political articulations of champions of the German's women's movement but could still be influenced by feminist notions of emancipation in popular fiction."

"It delights me to note from year to year how long it takes for much that happens to one to become inner experience. It is only in old age that this process is completed, and for this reason it is right and proper to grow truly old, despite the less pleasant reverse side in the shape of infirmity. It seems to be that this is true even in matters of the intellect, not only in the emotional life. (p. 201)"

"I cannot think of any personal fate which could have cost me anything like such anguish. And I don't really believe that after this we shall ever be able to be really happy again. (p. 20)"

"Outwardly and inwardly both, Lou Salomé's life is among the richest on record. She kept company -- uncannily stimulating, uncannily receptive -- with the cultural elite of her times, as judged from ours. She wrote in the widest variety of literary genres, including a couple of her own devising, happy and unhappy respectively: the diary essaylet and the achronological memoir. And by and large she wrote well: her peers among essayists at all odds are numbered."

"Can a woman be the subject of the gaze, even if she is also its object? . . . Revealing both women's and men's subjection to prevailing categorizations of gendered sexuality and identity, the novellas in Menschenkinder do not merely illuminate the problems of female identity but also touch on corresponding difficulties for men."

"What a great revolutionary you are. -- You didn't overthrow thrones inside me. But the one throne that waited there: you strode past it gently smiling. Ever upward. And my desire, which before had crowded and become tangled around the vacant throne like wild roses, now rise as white columns around the space from whose temple friezes you smile down into my soul and bless my longing."

"The man that we love, regardless of the exalted state of both his spirit and his soul, remains a priest in his robes who only vaguely guesses what he is celebrating."

"If for years I was your wife, it was because in you I encountered what is real for the first time: body and person indistinguishably one, an undeniable fact of life itself. Word for word, I could have confessed what you had said in your declaration of love: ‘You alone are real.’ With that, we became spouses, even before we were friends, and we became friends hardly by choice, but rather from an unseen but already consummated marriage. Not two halves searching for one another: a startled wholeness that recognized, with a shudder, its own incomprehensible unity. And so, we were siblings – but as in previous times, before incest became a sacrilege."

"Whatever happens to me -- I never lose the certainty that behind me arms are open to receive me."

"Human life -- ah! life in general -- is poetry. Unconscious of ourselves, we live it -- day by day and piece by piece -- but in its inviolable wholeness it lives, it composes, us. Far from the old phrase: "turn your life into a work of art"; we are not our art work."

"The most daring thing we have invented was to become human, and, with that, the creation of human values as life's most sublime adventure."

"Our first experience is, remarkably, of a disappearance. A moment ago we were still everything, undivided; any other existence was indivisible from us. Then we were thrust into being born. We became a residual part of everything, which from then on had to strive not to fall into further diminution, which had to assert itself against a contrary world rising ever wider against it, a world into which it had fallen from its fullness into an initially depriving emptiness."

"[On receiving the newly completed Sixth, Eighth and Tenth Duino Elegies] Ah слава Богу [Russian for thank God] dear Rainer, how rich his gift to you -- and yours to me! I sat and read and cried from joy, and it was not just joy at all but something much more powerful, as if a curtain were being parted, rent, and everything were growing quiet and certain and present and good. I remember as if it were today how much the beginning of the last Elegy plagued you, and when it had shaken me so severely, how even that plagued you; it has been on your lips for such long years; a word which one cannot make conscious and which is there all the same; in the beginning was this word. And then the Creature Elegy [the Eighth]! -- It is the poem of my most secret heart, oh so sayably glorious; and said, the inexpressible made present and actual. And that, finally is the message of this poetry: that we are surrounded, ringed by things of mute presence that are being rescued, redeemed into existence for us only thus, and yet it is these things alone by which we live. (p. 332-33)"

"For the angels [of the Duino Elegies] are not intermediaries, and that is important. For him there were no mediating saints or redeemers, although the name of the angels may have come from his Catholic childhood. For him God remained for all time the designation for the all-embracing unity. If in The Book of Hours God is addressed only as a “neighbor,” it is because the slightest removal from him would pose an absolute and hopelessly insurmountable distance. What is presented here, instead, before the dominion of the heavens over the earth, is the horizon of angels, an optically unifying illusion. -- Kindle p. 85"

"[Speaking of Rilke] Abandoning himself in everything, and thereby making himself superfluous, the benefactor becomes at once the petitioner, the recipients become donors, and he hides in their secure existence. And were this loner, who was isolated in death, still with us, I believe he would feel most immediately at home in the deepest anonymity of his work’s effects— there in the no longer audible processes of man’s union with the cosmos, where his form is allowed to fade and no longer requires visibility or the boundaries of self. Restored to a stronger presence: standing there, in deep peace, he too a nameless one among the nameless. -- Kindle p. 96"

"[Russia's God] cannot prevent or improve all things; he can only represent closeness and intimacy for all time . . . This all-pervasive sense of security, this omnipresence, leads to a confidence in the surroundings, whatever they may be, and it presupposes an untorn integration with one’s childhood, within the unity of the womb. It was exactly that childlike purity and the primitiveness in basic outlook on life (so characteristic of the Russian spirit) that captured the imagination of the poet and was released in his language. It made possible the return to a kind of familiar divinity in mankind, as if Rilke were suddenly presented with the gift of the primal home and childhood he had been deprived of. Kindle pp. 33-4."

"It delights me that the one thinker I approached in my childhood [Spinoza] and almost adored now meets me again, and as the philosopher of psychoanalysis. Think far enough, correctly enough on any point at all, and you hit upon him; you meet him waiting for you, standing ready at the side of the road. (pp. 75-76)"

"In truth, our narcissism is nothing other than that mysterious knowledge rooted in the emotional life, which posits the ultimate in subjectivity as the keystone of objective existence. When any metaphysical position attempt to harmonize 'Being' with 'God', as the principle of absolute value, it is not only engaged in a narcissistic mode of thought but is itself the very image, philosophically elaborated, of the union of narcissism and objectivity."

"She moves fearlessly among the most burning mysteries, which do nothing to her . . . I know no one else with life so much on their side."

"Mourning is not as singular a state of emotional preoccupation as is commonly thought: it is, more precisely, an incessant discourse with the departed one, in order to draw him nearer. For death entails not merely a disappearance but rather a transformation into a new realm of visibility. Something is not just taken away but is gained, in a way never before experienced. In the moment when the flowing lines of a figure’s constant change and effect become paralyzed for us, we are imbued for the first time with its essence: something which is never captured or fully realized in the normal course of lived existence. -- Kindle p. 26"

"Objectivity is mankind's glorious goal, summoning narcissism, Eros masked, from the dreams of childhood to the service of research, progress, art, and culture. When it stays behind in childish dreaming, and when its leap falls short, it slips without a blow into the bottomless deeps of disease."

"The more fully we enter into the 'challenge of the hour', into the present factual moment, into the conditions that hold from one case to another, instead of being trammeled by prescriptions and directives (written by human beings!), the more connectedly do we act in accord with the whole . . . If anyone thinks that is immorally presumptuous and high-handed, then it would be truer to call the childish-slavish obedience to prescriptions, which make everything easy, a convenient moral slovenliness!"

"Branhardt set aside the book he had come for. Her face, which was not beautiful and, through all those years, could have faded into banality if it hadn't borne the intimate inscription of her soul, spoke eloquently to him. He loved it as strongly and deeply as he had in his youth. But differently now, because he too bore, perhaps in harsher letters, what was also written there: the signature of life itself. (p. 17)"

""Conflicted creatures, that’s what we [parents] are — we give birth, without knowing to what; we educate, without knowing whom; we must answer for it, without knowing how; and we can give up neither our power nor our fear." -- Anneliese, p. 52"

"The house stood on a hillside, overlooking the town in the valley and the long stretch of mountains beyond. From the country road that climbed through the hill's woods in a wide curve, you stepped right into the middle story, as if it were at ground level -- so deeply was the little, white house nestled into the slope. But perched up there it had a freer view out over the terraced garden and the broad expanse below, gazing down with many bright window-eyes and with boldly protruding bays -- extensions of original rooms that had been found too confining. This undeniably made for whimsical architecture, but it gave the house an impression of grace and lightness -- almost as if it were just resting there. (p. 1)"

"The problem of the erotic is characterized by two things: for a start, it must be regarded as a special case within physical, psychic and social relations in general, and not, as often happens, as autocratically isolated. Rather, it relates all three of these kinds of problems to each other, and thus merges them into a single problem -- its problem. (p. 188)"

"In the fusion of single cells . . . the two cells' nuclei totally merge with each other, forming the new creature, and only what is inessential, at the periphery of the old cell, disintegrates, dying off. It may well stem from such influence that . . . the total fusion of single-cell organisms corresponds allegorically to what, in the highest dreams of love, the mind imagines as the full joy of love. That is arguably why love is so easily associated with longing and trepidation about death, which are not even clearly differentiated from each other; with something like a primal dream in which oneself, one's lover, and their child could still be one, and just three names for the same immortality. (p. 191-92)"

"You can tackle the problem of the erotic however you want, but you will always feel that you have done so very one-sidedly, especially if you tackle it by means of logic -- that is, from the outside. (p. 184)"

""Theory and practice, philosophy and religion, and heaven knows what, how little all that means compared to this one simple thing: the desire for life of a completely healthy, physically harmonious person — and I’m not one of them. — Only such a person knows what life really is. Life can be trusted — if Liese trusts it." -- Renate, p.52"

""No! No! Not one! Never just one! Even the wisest judgment can become unjust, willful, arrogant, when measured against life. And the worst -- you see -- the worst thing under the sun -- is the violation of one person by another." -- Anneliese, p. 117"

"Hildegard sensed darkly that she would now at once have to spread two light gray wings and let them lift her up -- high, high, as in her dream. But she also sensed darkly how it is in feverish dreams: as though something in her were helplessly, powerlessly beating its wings -- and suddenly she didn't know whether she was flying -- or falling --. Then Dietrich drew the playing child to him. He looked at Hildegard, almost a bit timidly -- and at the same time gently kissed the child on his blond hair. And Hildegard slowly laid her hand in his. Reaching out over a paradise. -- ("Paradise"), p. 132"

""But this danger you mention?" he went on. "Tell me, where is there beauty that isn't at the same time in danger? -- and when wasn't the greatest beauty also the greatest danger! -- And mind you: this know-it-all attitude and drive to control, the 'firm hand' you were talking about -- all that arrogance, especially of the usual, masculine kind, will go to pieces trying to deal with this! That approach is only best right from the start and with women who are no threat to anyone. But -- please tell me -- what's so great about a manly stance that has to look out for itself, that's so anxiously self-defensive?" -- Marcus, p. 180"