Invisible Women

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Sigmund Freud does not necessarily believe everything Lou Andreas-Salome says when she describes the women she has seen in her endless expeditions, but the doctor nonetheless continues listening to this beautiful aging woman with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other friend of his. In the lives of psychoanalysts there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon — if we can overcome each small barrier — know and understand the truths of the human mind, but somehow there is still a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, when the odor of histories and presents appears in tangible forms, mocking us with their absent information, all the integral pieces withheld from us, and if only they had the knowledge to tell us, we would have had the fullest picture, the most complete understanding, but instead, we are left with this void that comes only when the sun sets and the fear of bullets and war and defeat rise. And yet, with this emptiness comes a firm acknowledgment of all we have done, of all we have helped, those women and men destined to their banal lives of obsession, who beseech our protection, offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. It is in this desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our prescription, that the triumph over enemy minds has made us the heirs of their long undoing. Only in Lou Andreas’s accounts was Sigmund Freud able to discern, through the words and obsessions destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites’ gnawing.