Sex and Religion: Two Texts of Early Feminist Psychoanalysis

118 Pages·2016·0.844 MB·English

by  Lou Andreas-Salome

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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2015004389
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Andreas-Salomé, Lou, 1861-1937, author.
[Works. Selections. English]
Sex and Religion : Two Texts of Early Feminist Psychoanalysis / By Lou
Andreas-Salome; Three Letters to a Young Boy translated by Maike Oergel;
The Devil & His Grandmother translated by Kristine Jennings; Introduction
by Matthew Del Nevo & Gary Winship.
pages cm
The Devil & His Grandmother is a play.
Summary: Drei Breife an einen Knaben (Three Letters to a Young Boy) and
Der Teufel und Seine Grossmutter (The Devil & His Grandmother) are texts
that explore sexuality across the lifespan with some unexpected twists and turns.
The Devil & His Grandmother treats the collision of sexuality and religion,
and therefore religious education indirectly. The Three Letters was originally
authored in 1912 with two letters addressed to Helene Klinenberg’s son and
a third added in 1913. The Three Letters were edited, appended and finally
published in 1917 by Kurt Wolff’s Verlag in Leipzig. -- Provided by publisher.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4128-5696-6 -- ISBN 978-1-4128-6218-9 (e-ISBN)
1. Andreas-Salomé, Lou, 1861-1937--Translations into English. 2. Sex instruc-
tion for boys. 3. Sex (Psychology)--Drama. 4. Religion--Drama. I. Oergel, Maike,
translator. II. Jennings, Kristine, translator. III. Andreas-Salomé, Lou, 1861-1937.
Drei Briefe an einen Knaben. English. IV. Andreas-Salomé, Lou, 1861-1937. Teufel
und seine Grossmutter. English. V. Title.
PT2601.N4A2 2015
838’.809--dc23
2015004389
ISBN (cid:18)(cid:20): 978-1-4128-5696-6 (cid:9)hbk(cid:10)
Contents
Introduction
Matthew Del Nevo and Gary Winship vii
Lou Andreas-Salomé: Three Letters to a Young Boy
Translated by Maike Oergel 1
1 Weihnachtsmärchen: Christmas Fairy Tale 3
2 Answer to a Question 13
3 Geleitwort: A Few Words to Send You on Your Journey 23
The Devil and His Grandmother
Translated by Kristine Jennings 37
Act One: The Devil and the Poor Little Soul 39
Act Two: The Devil with the Child 47
Act Three: The Devil and His Accomplices 55
Act Four: The Scream 63
Act Five: The Devil’s Visit with His Grandmother 71
Act Six: Devil’s Death 79
Epilogue 87
Note on the Translation 91

Introduction
Matthew Del Nevo and Gary Winship
Sexuality stands at the center of Lou Andreas-Salomé’s life as its prin-
ciple mystery. Drei Breife an einen Knaben (Three Letters to a Young
Boy) and Der Teufel und Seine Grossmutter (The Devil & His Grand-
mother) are texts that explore sexuality across the lifespan with some
unexpected twists and turns. The Devil & His Grandmother treats the
collision of sexuality and religion, and therefore religious education
indirectly. The Three Letters was originally authored in 1912 with two
letters addressed to Helene Klinenberg’s son and a third added in 1913.
The Three Letters were edited, appended and finally published in 1917
by Kurt Wolff’s Verlag in Leipzig. The Devil and His Grandmother was
written during the same period but not published until 1922 when it
was taken up by Eugen Diedrich’s publishing house in Jena.
Dispensing with the academic formality of her earlier works, which
were wide-ranging, from novels and short stories to philosophical
biography, criticism and formal academic treatises structured by the
demands of recording historical facts or make the case for an intel-
lectual proposition, the Three Letters to a Young Boy and The Devil &
His Grandmother taken together point to a relaxed new phase in Lou
Salomé’s writing life between the years of 1912–1920. Her penchant
for dense prose is replaced by another voice altogether, the sing-song
simplicity of the storyteller. Here is a lively Lou making jokes about
Satan, storks and Father Christmas. The lightness of touch in her voice
is to be detected in her correspondence with Freud which blossoms
during the years 1912–1920, and is recorded in her Journal. Her early
encounters with Freud and psychoanalysis, by her own admission, see
Lou feeling ever more cheerful and lighthearted. She is not daunted by
Freud’s reputation, after all she is more famous than he, and though she
bows to his clinical acumen, Lou’s playfulness disarms Freud. Freud tells
vii
Sex and Religion
her: “I really think you look on analysis as a sort of Christmas present.”
Lou can “only agree.”1
Her correspondence and exchanges with Freud are lively, and we see
from her journal of 1912–1913 that in Vienna she is attending up to
three seminars a week. The seminar themes cover diverse areas from
dreams, fairy tales and enchantments, to trauma, alcoholism and sexual
perversion. In contrast to the animated tone of her letters to Freud,
her letters to Rilke are grey and somber, often didactic and certainly
lacking in the humor we see with Freud. Three Letters and The Devil
& His Grandmother emerge in the afterglow of her time in the Vienna
circle and her contact with the psychoanalytic brotherhood, including
Alfred Adler though especially Victor Tausk who Lou takes as a lover. It
is with a newfound spirit of free thinking perhaps informed by her own
literary experiment in the psychoanalytic technique of free association
that transports us in Three Letters and The Devil & His Grandmother
into a new theater of Lou’s imagination.
So we might think of Three Letters and The Devil & His Grandmother
as Lou’s psychoanalytically inspired babies, so to speak. But the ques-
tion of paternity is subject to speculation, was it Rilke or Freud? In
December 1913 Lou wrote to Rilke:
At the moment I am finishing something about which I occasionally
wonder: what would you make of it? It grew out [of] correspon-
dence with Reinhold Klingenberg and is called: Three Letters to a
Boy with letters separated by three year intervals. Only the last two
are relevant, since the first is a fairy tale: would you, sometime or
other, care to read through them in typescript? Had I not known of
so many similar cases, I wouldn’t have let this matter pass beyond
the specific personal situation that it originally addressed. But here
too Freud’s attitude regarding this issue seemed to me the right one:
especially this total distancing from every previous soft-coloring of
things—whereby paradoxically, I believe, the genuine hues of life are
for the first time allowed to shine.2
However, by the time Lou gets round to publishing Three Letters in
1917, Freud is so present in her life that the Three Letters book could
easily be seen as something akin to their love child. Three Letters or
the “small book,” as Lou called it in her correspondence with Freud,
might be described as charting Lou’s transition between Rilke and
Freud. Three Letters is something of a psychoanalytic fairy tale of
sorts, which Freud described as “exquisitely feminine.”
viii
Introduction
In the first letter Lou meets Father Christmas sitting on a bench. He
tells Lou about the time when the storks went on strike and refused
to deliver babies. Father Christmas tells her that he gobbles up bad
children. She is horrified but Father Christmas laughs and points out
that he means he eats the marzipan on which he has written down the
dreams of children, and not the children themselves. But the light-
hearted spirit of the magical encounter foreshadows the first important
lesson; that babies are not reared and born in a magical stork pond,
but rather they are made under mummy’s heart. Father Christmas tells
Lou that Jesus Christ was just another baby born a long time ago and
there have been many more babies born since then who are just as
important. And though Lou spells out that babies come from mother,
the role of father is only hinted at. Lou takes one last look at Father
Christmas, the miracle man who can fulfill wishes with his: “beard,
hood and rucksack,” and makes a delicate observation of the phallic
pubic hair (beard), penis (hood) and testes (sack).
The second letter begins with a response to a question from Bubi.
The letter changes pace because Lou’s reply is only addressed to Bubi
and not his younger sister. Although we don’t know what the ques-
tion is, we can guess that Bubi has heard his school friends talking
about sexual encounters. Lou suspects that Bubi finds the idea of the
sexual act as “ugly,” and perhaps therein she detects an early onset
of neurosis. Lou sets about putting the record straight and mounts
a persuasive case for intimacy as beautiful. We see herein that the
Three Letters can be contextualized in term of sexual pedagogy.
Sexual education was a genre of Viennese literature at the time of
writing and Britta McEwen has explored this in Sexual Knowledge:
Feeling, Fact and Social Reform in Vienna, 1900–1934. Sex educa-
tion was part of the pre-war Aufklärung. There were contesting
ideologies: progressive and conservative, Catholic, Protestant, and
other ideas about the format for sex education. How to introduce
the topic of reproduction was the hot question, “the overwhelm-
ing answer was to build upon observable parallels from the natural
world.”3 According to McEwen’s study of the literature of the period,
Lou’s Three Letters “serves to illustrate a widening base of the sexual
education movement.”4 This is how Lou is positioned then within
the sexual culture debates of the time. In McEwen’s assessment, the
best we have, of Lou’s position in context is that: “This was a very
advanced and progressive discussion, notable for its complete lack
ix