Invisible Women

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In times of need, Freud gave Lou Andreas patients. One young woman in particular confounded the Great Freud. This girl had a savage fear of flora. Whereas she could withstand — and even enjoy — the most toxic of insects crawling over her skin, the moment a blade of grass or the most perfect flower came near her, she would wail, unable to be comforted until the plant-life were removed and the scent of it erased. Even if there were no discernable smell, she would argue that there was, but this was barely translatable considering the pitch of her screams.

Freud asked, or imaged himself asking, “In all your travels and experiences, did you ever happen to see another woman resembling this one?” Freud, while asking this, imagined the girl and her pristine smile, the clarity in her speech, and how quickly this transformed on the introduction of a plant. Before giving her to Lou, he had attempted to trick her with a recreation of a flower, made of silk and the finest scents, and she played with the false flower as though it were a doll.

“No,” Lou answered, “I should never have imagined a woman like this could exist.”

The doctor tried to peer into her eyes. The Russian lowered her gaze, or imagined herself lowering her gaze. Freud remained silent for the whole day.

After sunset, on the terraces of his home, Lou Andreas-Salome expounded to the doctor the results of her missions. As a rule, the Great Freud concluded his day savoring these tales with half-closed eyes until his first yawn indicated his necessity for rest. As quickly as his first yawn appeared, the old man would retreat to his bed. But this time Freud seemed unwilling to give in to weariness. “Tell me of another woman,” he insisted.

“There is a woman down the hall who has skin that flutters like loose rags,” Lou begins saying, enumerating her names and customs and wares. Her repository could be called inexhaustible, but now she was the one who had to give in. Dawn had broken when she said: “Doctor, now I have told you about all the women I know.”

“There is still one of which you never speak.”

Lou Andreas bowed her head.

“Yourself,” Freud said.

Lou smiled. “What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?”

The doctor did not turn a hair. “And yet I have never heard you mention that name.”

And Andreas said: “Every time I describe a woman I am saying something about myself.”

“When I ask you about other women, I want to hear about them. And about you when I ask you about yourself.”

“To distinguish the other women’s qualities, I must speak of a first woman that remains implicit. For me, it is myself.”

“You should then begin each tale of your women from the departure of self, describing yourself as you are, all of you, not omitting any truth as you acknowledge it.”

Outside, the morning sun was brutal. Even though they both wanted some relief, there was little hope from the early light.

“Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,” Andreas said. “Perhaps I am afraid of losing myself all at once, if I speak of myself. Or perhaps, speaking of other women, I have already lost myself, little by little.”

“It seems as though you’ve been speaking of nothing but memory.”

“It always seemed to me: since our body must play for us a double role, since it is just as much ‘we ourselves’ as also at the same time the immediate piece of external reality, to which we are in the most various ways forced to adjust ourselves in exactly the same fashion as to all the rest of the external world — for this reason it can only accompany us a little way along the road of our narcissistic behavior.”