Eros Of The Impossible

The History Of Psychoanalysis In Russia

Alexander Etkind

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367010256
• eBook ISBN: 9780429720888
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Marxism was not the only Western idea to influence the course of Russian history. In the early decades of this century, psychoanalysis was one of the most important components of Russian intellectual life. Freud himself, writing in 1912, said that "in Russia, there seems to be a veritable epidemic of psychoanalysis." But until Alexander Etkind's Eros of the Impossible, the hidden history of Russian involvement in psychoanalysis has gone largely unnoticed and untold. The early twentieth century was a time when the craving of Russian intellectuals for world culture found a natural outlet in extended sojourns in the West, linking some of the most creative Russian personalities of the day with the best universities, salons, and clinics of Germany, Austria, France, and Switzerland. These ambassadors of the Russian intelligentsia were also Freud's patients, students, and collaborators. They exerted a powerful influence on the formative phase of psychoanalysis throughout Europe, and they carried their ideas back to a receptive Russian culture teeming with new ideas and full of hopes of self-transformation. Fascinated by the potential of psychoanalysis to remake the human personality in the socialist mold, Trotsky and a handful of other Russian leaders sponsored an early form of Soviet psychiatry. But, as the Revolution began to ossify into Stalinism, the early promise of a uniquely Russian approach to psychoanalysis was cut short. An early attempt to merge medicine and politics forms final chapters of Etkind's tale, the telling of which has been made possible by the undoing of the Soviet system. The effervescent Russian contribution to modern psychoanalysis has gone unrecognized too long, but Eros of the Impossible restores this fascinating story to its rightful place in history.

1
At the Crossroads of Worlds and Centuries: The Life and Work of Lou Andreas-Salomé

In 1861, a girl was born in the General Staff building on Palace Square in St. Petersburg—a girl destined for fame abroad while remaining virtually unknown in her home country. Her father, Gustav von Salomé, was a Baltic German in the service of the Russian army, a Huguenot by confession. After receiving a military education in Russia, he had quickly risen through the ranks under Czar Nicholas I. His wife had been born in Russia, the descendant of Danish Germans. The couple gave their newborn daughter a Russian name—Lyolya.¹

Lyolya lived the first twenty years of her life in St. Petersburg. Much later, speaking of her childhood, she found it difficult to identify her native tongue. Her parents spoke German, her nanny Russian, and her governess French; and Lyolya was enrolled in a private English-language school. "We felt ourselves to be Russian," Lyolya recalled, at the same time noting that the family's household servants were Tatar, Swabian, and Estonian. For her, St. Petersburg "combined the charm of Paris and Stockholm." Remembering its majestic beauty, reindeer-drawn sleighs, and ice castles on the Neva, she described it as a cosmopolitan city despite its idiosyncrasies.²

Lyolya's father, a general and a privy councillor, had been close to Czar Nicholas I, and he viewed the reforms of Alexander II with suspicious reservation. His six children—Lyolya was the youngest, and the only girl— grew up in an atmosphere of intellectual and political excitement such as had never before been experienced in Russia. The novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were written during these decisive decades. It was also at this time that the first socialist-revolutionary movements were formed, with women playing a significant role. According to historians' calculations, 178 women were convicted in the political trials of the 1870s and 1880s. Most belonged to the "People's Will" terrorist organization, which succeeded in assassinating Alexander II on its seventh attempt, the day before he was to sign the first Russian constitution. One of the women who had played a key role in the conspiracy against the "Czar-Emancipator" was sentenced to death.³ It is unclear to what extent Lyolya was aware of these events; but throughout her life she kept a photograph of Vera Zasulich, a revolutionary who was acquitted by a jury after her attempt to assassinate the mayor of St. Petersburg that same year. The case became a political cause célèbre throughout Europe, and Zasulich was described by one French journal as the most popular person on the continent.

Lyolya was very close to her father and brothers. Later she would recall that she was so accustomed to the company of older men in her childhood that when she went abroad "the whole world seemed populated by brothers,"⁴ Judging from her memoirs, she was also an independent, introspective, and dreamy child. She never played with dolls but was constantly inventing stories: She spoke with the flowers that grew in the gardens at Peterhof, where she spent each summer, and she made up stories about people she saw in the streets. She remembered that it took her a long while to believe that mirrors faithfully reproduced her image, as she did not feel separated from the world around her. The world was probably kind to her. But her memoirs are also marked by childhood rows with her mother. Her reminiscences include her childhood faith in God and the early loss of that faith. Lyolya seems not to have felt burdened by protestant rituals and to have believed in God only to the extent that she found belief necessary. At some point in her childhood, God disappeared; but there remained a "darkly awakening sensation, never again ceasing ... of immeasurable comradeship .. . with everything that exists."⁵

First Encounter

This idyllic childhood—if such it was—appears to have ended when Lyolya was seventeen. She had written to a certain Pastor Gillot, whom she did not know but whose sermons interested her, introducing herself boldly:

The person writing you, Herr Pastor, is a 17-year-old girl who is lonely in the midst of her family and surroundings, lonely in the sense that no one shares her views, let alone shares her longing for fuller knowledge. Perhaps it is my whole way of thinking that isolates me from most girls of my age and from our circle—there is scarcely anything worse for a young girl, here, than to differ from the rule in her likes and dislikes, in her character and her ideas. But it is so bitter to close everything up in oneself because one would otherwise give offence, bitter to stand so wholly alone because one lacks that easy-going agreeable manner which wins people's trust and love.⁶

The pastor must have answered politely, as the two subsequently met. This meeting was the first in a series of encounters that would change Lyolya's life. Gillot loaded her down with lessons in philosophy, religious history, Dutch, and other subjects that he deemed important. The main protagonists in their discussions were Kant and Spinoza. He also freed her from the intense dreams she found so onerous, in a way that she would understand only later—by forcing her to relate them to him in minute detail.

Lyolya concealed her meetings with Gillot from her parents; one can well imagine how difficult and stormy this as yet unnamed process was for the introverted, passionate young woman. She later recalled how she saw God in Gillot and how she bowed down to him as if before God himself. The two became increasingly intimate, and one day, Lyolya reported, she lost consciousness as she sat in the pastor's lap.

In 1879, Lyolya's father died, and Gillot instructed her to tell her mother about their lessons. After meeting with her mother, Gillot proposed marriage to Lyolya. The girl was in shock; for her, the experience was like losing God a second time. "With a single blow, what I had worshipped dropped out of my heart and senses and became alien."⁷ For many years afterward, sexual intimacy with her would be impossible; Gillot was but the first in a long line of men who would be enraptured with this girl and brought to desperation by her stubborn refusal of physical intimacy, linked as it was with her extraordinary beauty.

The romance with Gillot ended when Lyolya had a row with her mother, refused confirmation, and developed a pulmonary condition. Travel abroad was the recommended solution. Gillot helped her obtain a passport, which was difficult due to her lack of religious affiliation. Her passport was stamped with her new name: Lou. It was under this name that she would go down in history.

Something Almost Unwomanly

Lou found herself in Zurich with her mother. For a time, she studied philosophy at the university. The professor who taught the history of religion there described her as "a fundamentally pure being who had, however, with exceptional energy concentrated solely on mental development." He even saw this as "something almost unwomanly."⁸ Another memoirist recalled her as "a lovable, winning, genuinely feminine being . . . who has renounced all the means that women use and has taken up the weapons with which men conduct the battle of life."⁹ In photographs that survive from that time, Fraulein Salomé looks haughty and very pretty: a coal-black dress, hair pulled straight back, a pale, concentrated face. The girl had just turned twenty, and she had come to Europe for the first time.

Once again her health gave out, and her mother took her to Italy. In Rome, Lou met the famous Malwida von Meysenbug, a writer and passionate advocate of women's liberation, devoted to the establishment of new, "honorable" relations between the sexes. Malwida was a close friend and longtime correspondent of Alexander Herzen's; she raised his daughter and had lived for an extended period in his house in London. A quarter-century before the events at hand, Herzen wrote, "I would like to test Mademoiselle Meysenbug and take her in. She is unusually intelligent and very educated ... fantastically ugly and thirty-seven years old."¹⁰

In her Memoirs of an Idealist, von Meysenbug recalled her desire to found an educational union that would lead adults of both sexes toward the free development of their spirituality, "so that they might then enter the world as sowers of a new, inspired culture."¹¹ Within the framework of Malwida's project, the familiar forms of the cultural salon were combined with the recently instigated search for the new man and new relations between people. It was not a matter of theory; for Malwida, as for some of her contemporaries and many who were to follow, this idea was thoroughly practical. It was possible to create a new human being. For this to happen, all that was needed was ... The completion of this formula was an important and perhaps a defining aspect of modernist culture.

A frequent guest in Malwida's salon was Friedrich Nietzsche. His interlocutor, a thirty-two-year-old Jewish philosopher named Paul Rée, was the author of several books on moral philosophy in which he demonstrated the applicability of the principles of ethics to practicality, rationality, and Darwinism. Rée was also a passionate and totally impractical person, hysterically ashamed of his Jewish identity, prone to attacks of irrational melancholy, and unable to rein in his love of roulette.

In Malwida's words, her project was received with intense enthusiasm by the two men. Nietzsche and Rée were ready to participate on the spot as lecturers. Malwida was convinced that this would attract a large number of young women to whom she could devote particular attention, in order to make them into noble defenders of female emancipation.¹²

Lou, however, did not become a feminist in Italy, just as she had not become a revolutionary in Russia. She went her own way, cutting across the intellectual trends of her time, assimilating something from each, and moving on in the direction dictated by her subtle intellectual curiosity and equally refined feminine intuition.

Rée met Lou during a lecture he was giving to a group of educated young ladies in Malwida's salon. He fell in love with her right away, and although he considered it irrational to marry and produce children in such a horrid world, he hurriedly asked for her hand. Lou rejected him just as firmly as she had Gillot a short time earlier, but now she felt strong enough to do more than that. There was no need to run from a man who proved incapable of controlling his emotions; better to conquer those emotions in him, to force him to crush them just as she had crushed them in herself. As a reward, Rée was allowed to continue seeing Lou and even to live with her. The girl reasoned that if Rée were to eliminate all possessive feelings toward her, they would be able to live together through their common spiritual interests. Public opinion did not concern her. Rée, once again violating the principles of his own moral philosophy, agreed. It remained only to overcome other sources of understandable resistance: Lou's mother, Pastor Gillot, and even Malwida von Meysenbug, whose ideas were no longer sufficiently up-to-date. As Lou wrote to Gillot.

Malwida too is opposed to our plan.... But it has been clear to me for a long time now that basically we always have something different in mind, even where we agree. Her usual way of expressing herself is: "we" may not do this or that, or "we" must accomplish this or that—and I've no idea who this "we" actually is—some ideal or philosophical party, probably—but I myself know only of "I."¹³

In 1882, the year he met Lou, Nietzsche was on the threshold of yet another in a long series of discoveries; this one would lead to his creative zenith and then to his final ruin. He had been seriously ill with a malady that physicians and historians have been unable to diagnose. Some think Nietzsche suffered from syphilis, while others (such as Odessa physician I. K. Khmelevsky, who devoted an entire research project to the subject¹⁴) assert that his degenerative paralysis had a different cause. In any case, by the time he met Lou, Nietzsche was practically blind and was continually tormented by headaches, which he soothed with an ever increasing dose of narcotics and frequent changes of scenery. His illness was cyclical, and during the periods of reprieve he wrote ceaselessly and voluminously. He was lonely despite a close attachment to his sister Elisabeth. Several times he had asked his friends to find him a wife; with the onset of blindness, he urgently needed at least a secretary. There were rumors that he had never been with a woman. In sum, he was a man singularly unlike his favorite hero, the Übermensch. He was a romantic who lived vicariously through his diseased but remarkable mind.

That spring, however, Nietzsche was feeling better than ever. When Rée and then Meysenbug wrote to him about Lou, he read his own subtext in their words: "Do greet that Russian girl for me, if you see any sense in it: I have a passion for this kind of soul. ... Considering what I intend to do in the next years, it's essential. Marriage is an entirely different story; I could agree to two years of it at most,"¹⁵ he answered Rée lightly, little suspecting what was to come.

The three of them met in Rome in April 1882. Nietzsche read to Lou and Rée from his recently completed book, Joyful Wisdom, the most life-affirming of his works, in which he lauded the strength and magnificence of the extraordinary man of the future, the Übermensch. Man as he was, was not enough for Nietzsche. ] is a different ideal that draws us, a marvelous, seductive, and potentially dangerous ideal..., in comparison with which all the lofty things by which the people justly gauge their values would be no more than baseness, humiliation, danger, or at the very least a mere means of self-preservation." He added with remarkable accuracy that his ideal often seemed nearly inhuman.¹⁶ Nietzsche had little time left in which to see his ideal come to fruition: A tragedy awaited him; but in Rome he experienced only a melodrama—his meeting with Lou.

Together the three traveled through the mountains of northern Italy and Switzerland and prepared to set up housekeeping together in Paris. They joined forces to successfully repel an attack by Lou's mother, who, horrified by her daughter's lifestyle, had enlisted Lou's favorite brother, Yevgeny, in an attempt to take her back to Russia.

Don’t Forget the Whip!

A remarkable photograph was taken during those days in Lucerne. It shows Nietzsche and Rée standing harnessed to a cart in which Lou sits, with a whip in her hand, against the backdrop of the Alps. Rée's pose is confident, that of a man who feels utterly at ease. Nietzsche, with his huge mustache, trains his unseeing eyes on the distant horizon. There is no mockery in Lou's face, although it was she who had choreographed this little sketch; indeed, this was serious business. It was less than a year later, after his painful breakup with Lou, that Nietzsche would compose the celebrated line, "You go to women? Don't forget the whip!"

As she brandished her whip, Lou dreamed of building a small intellectual commune, "as holy as the Trinity," where men who had relinquished their claims on her would channel their demands into common spiritual pursuits that would allow her an equal role. Rée accepted this plan. She called him "Brother Rée" and praised him for his "unearthly kindness." For his part, Rée referred to himself as "your little house"¹⁷ in his letters to her. In Lou's new life, Rée truly took the place of her former, brother-filled home. Her relationship with Nietzsche, however, was entirely different.

In August 1882, Lou wrote to Rée,

Talking with Nietzsche is very exciting, as you know. But there is a special fascination if you encounter like thoughts, like sentiments and ideas—we understand each other perfectly. Once he said to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 At the Crossroads of Worlds and Centuries: The Life and Work of Lou Andreas-Salomé
• 2 Russian Modernist Culture: Between Oedipus and Dionysus
• 3 A Case of Neurosis in the Revolutionary Generation: Sergei Pankeev, the Wolf-Man
• 4 Psychoanalytic Activity Before World War I
• 5 Back to Russia: Sabina Spielrein
• 6 Psychoanalysis in the Land of the Bolsheviks
• 7 Between Power and Death: The Psychoanalytic Passions of Trotsky and His Comrades
• 8 Pedological Perversions
• 9 The Ambassador and Satan: William Bullitt in Bulgakov's Moscow
• 10 The Intelligentsia in Search of Resistance
• Conclusion
• Notes
• About the Book and Author
• Index