Here is a partial quote from an article in the San Francisco Chronicle:
>
Studying the seductive woman
> Jane Ganahl
> Sunday, November 23, 2003
>
> Lou Andreas-Salomé was considered
a brilliant peer of Sigmund Freud and
> one of the founding mothers of psychoanalysis. The toast of 1912
> Vienna, the celebrity author and intellectual wrote more than 20 books,
> along with countless essays, articles and reviews arguing, among other
> things, that women are the naturally polygamous superior sex. She was
> also one of the world's great seductresses. Her list of literally
> hundreds of lovers and suitors included Frederick Nietzsche and the
> nihilist philosopher Paul Ree (she lived with both in a menage a
> trois), the poet Rainier Maria Rilke, even Freud. One suitor committed
> suicide for want of her love, and two others, including Nietzsche,
> attempted to end it all because their attentions were spurned. And --
> hold onto your hats, Barbie wannabes -- she wasn't even particularly
> attractive.
A letter in yesterday's Chronicle stated that the truth about Lou Andreas-Salomé is that she was simply a "nerd hag." This perhaps is a simplistic overstatement, but I think it's more accurate than calling her a seductrice. You have to realize that at the time Andreas-Salomé became involved with Nietzsche, Paul Ree, and Rilke, they were not famous philosophers and poets. They were lonely young guys with no social life, totally absorbed in writing things that apparently nobody would ever be interested in reading.
It didn't take a seductrice to attract them. Lou Andreas-Salomé simply used the most powerful method of seduction women have: she was simply willing to pay attention to these guys. And she was able to appreciate these men for those qualities in them which they themselves care the most about.
If a woman says to me, "You're really handsome," then she will definitely get my interest. But this ploy will have only limited power, because looks are not something I value highly. (Anyone who knows me can see that from the way I dress!) I'm an intellectual, and if a woman says to me, "You have such a fascinating mind! I could sit and listen to you talk for hours," then I'll probably be willing to marry her and give her all my money. But she has to convince me that she understands what I'm saying. If she makes a comment that shows she has completely missed the point, then I lose interest in her. After that, I consider her just a bimbo.
I think Andreas-Salomé deserves an enormous amount of credit for the fact that she was able to recognize men with very interesting and strange minds and wanted to be involved with them and learn from them.
> What she did have were charisma, brains and power. "She was absolutely
> self-sufficient, her own woman,'' Betsy Prioleau says
in her book
>Seductress: Women Who Ravished the World
and Their Lost Art of Love.
>
> Andreas-Salomé wrote in one article that
"women do not need men in any
> sense!" So of course men lay at her feet.
> It's a secret -- albeit a long-dormant one -- of the femme fatale that
> men are drawn to women they don't think they can ever quite possess.
To say that Lou Andreas-Salomé had charisma is not an explanation. "Charisma" does not explain, it it something that requires explanation. Charisma is not a quality of a person, but rather a statement of the way others respond to that person
Lou Andreas-Salomé certainly did have charisma. Men were fascinated by her. She was the model for the character Lulu in Alban Berg's opera. (Actually, I think she was the model for the character in the play which the opera was based on, but I've forgotten who the playwright was.)
She was basically a nerd herself. The triad with Ree and Nietzsche was non-sexual, much to the frustration of the men. I don't know about her involvement with Freud, but I believe that her approach to him was basically to say, "I want to be your pupil. I want to learn to do the things you do."
She later wrote a book on psychoanalysis, and she is considered an important contributor to the field. She also wrote a book on Nietzsche which he himself said was a good explanation of his ideas. As I recall, in his will Nietzsche deeded all his papers to Andreas-Salomé, with the hope that she would be able to organize them and turn them into books. But Nietzsche's sister, who was very antagonistic to Andreas-Salomé, managed to keep the papers for herself.
So we can somewhat see the pattern: Find a man with very interesting ideas, get to know him and understand his thinking, then use his ideas to write books of your own.
> Reading Prioleau's fascinating new book, which features profiles of 50
> of the world's most famous seductresses -- from Cleopatra to Catherine
> the Great to Mae West -- it becomes clear that physical beauty was not
> -- and is not -- a required attribute in the arts of seduction. Many,
> if not most, of the women she writes about were not beauties. Far more
> important are the gifts of wit, brains, empathy and self-sufficiency --
> the opposite of neediness.
I think this last is not completely true. I don't know enough about Lou Andreas-Salomé to say what her own approach was, but there is a certain sort of neediness that can be very attractive to men. One of the most powerful things a woman can say to a man is, "I need you to help me. You're the only person who could possibly help me with this." I think that Marilyn Monroe was a good example of a woman with this sort of appeal to men. Certainly it was true of the persona she projected on the screen, and apparently it was true in her private life as well.
There's an important distinction to be made. On the one hand, there is the woman who is stunningly successful at attracting men's attention, because of either her beauty or other charismatic qualities --- the classic siren type. (One might think of Elizabeth Taylor and Jacqueline Kennedy.) It would seem that such a woman could have any man she wants. And in fact, she has her choice from among those men who are socially and sexually aggressive, or glamorous, or able to give her vast amounts of money and glamorous experiences. But on the other hand, many other very interesting men are ones she will never get to know, because they are intimidated by her.
On the other hand, there is the woman who does not attract universal attention, but who in one-to-one encounters is very successful in making a man feel special and valued and admired. In some ways, this woman actually has a lot more choice in the men she gets involved with, although the glamorous superstars are mostly not available to her.
It seems clear that Lou Andreas-Salomé was this second sort of woman.
--Lee Lady
-------------
Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life, and that is why
we adore them. But life as it is lived has no shape and meaning.
-- Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn