Invisible Women

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Lou Andreas was no ordinary woman. She was simultaneously a woman, a wife, a friend, a daughter, a writer, a psychoanalyst, an observer, etc. She is the writer of over a dozen books, and yet what is remembered of her is her role as lover, student, and devastator. She is measured by the yardsticks of the men she slept with, the ones she loved, her closest friends. She is known as the woman who renamed Rilke from Rene to Rainer because Rene was simply too feminine. She is woman who left Friedrich Nietzsche, and although not quite the cause of his insanity, something close. She is the woman who at fifty, redefined herself as a psychoanalyst and began a lifelong friendship with Sigmund Freud, who studied with him, but she is more than all this. She is an explorer, a renovator, an artist, but her legacy is that this one unimaginable woman was paramour to these three incredible men. Lou Andreas-Salome should be in our memory so much more, but what are all these women — all these women living right down the hall — if not mere extensions of the men they sleep with?