The Erotic

Lou Andreas-Salome

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781412853842
• eBook ISBN: 9781351296984
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Human Sexuality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Psychoanalyst and author Lou Andreas-Salome may seem to be a figure remote from us, one belonging to a pre-1914 Europe, but in many ways, she is our contemporary. She travelled in a highly romantic world as socialite, sociologist, and author. She was part of Georg Simmel's salon, the most exclusive in Berlin, frequented by elusive poet Stefan Georg, dramatist Paul Ernst, social theorist and polymath Max Weber, and Georg Lukacs, among others.

Salome's unique contribution to the erotic was that she argued sexual difference ran deeper than economics and equality—the politics of Marx and the ideals of the French Revolution. For Salome, to think about women and their erotic nature, you must start with their biological and psychological difference, not their economic situation.

Salome was an outstanding theorist. Her books on Nietzsche and on Rilke are major studies. The field of psychoanalysis would not have developed in the way it did without Lou Andreas-Salome. We cannot understand Freud's "rationalism" or his anti-religious sensibility without Salome's writings. This new English translation is an essential text of psychoanalysis, one that shaped the very conception of the field.

Die Erotik [The Erotic]

Lou Andreas-Salomé
Translated by John Crisp

Introduction

From whatever angle the problem of eroticism is approached, one retains the feeling of it having been extremely one-sided. Even more so, no doubt, when the approach is attempted by means of logic, that is to say, starting from its outward appearance.

For, in itself, beginning with the external requires us as far as possible to abstract from eroticism the immediate liveliness of impressions, until we arrive at a comfortable consensus with the majority of society. Or, to put it differently, in such a presentation we repress our subjectivity, we keep sufficient distance from ourselves as to obtain—instead of the totality, the indivisibility of a living experience—a separate fragment of life, which can thereby be put into words, manipulated with reassuring safety, embraced in a single glance, in its one-sided totality.

However, we are also required to apply this same method of presentation, which inevitably reifies and renders soulless everything it touches, to what we can know only subjectively, only personally from individual experience, and which we are consequently accustomed to describe as the “mental” traces of things, or as traces “in the mind,” to apply it, in other words, to impressions, which are, in principle, precisely beyond the reach of this method. For the sake of consensus, we can only examine and explain such variegated effects on the basis of that one single effect, while everything else that we can say about them is only useful as an aside, part of a description. Moreover, however singular such an approach is to the imperatives of logical congruity, indeed even if it is formally founded in logic, the conviction it can carry nevertheless remains more or less subjective.

This ambiguity, this split, is even more apparent when it comes to the problem of eroticism, in that, more than any other problem, the erotic seems to resist immediate definition, suspended as it is between the physical and the spiritual.

However, blurring or mixing the different methods in no way lessens this contradiction. Quite the contrary: it can only be resolved by adapting them evermore exactly to their purpose, by employing them with ever greater precision; one might say that it is by grasping an object in its totality, as something isolated and material, by defining its limits evermore exactly, that we are able to confirm and demonstrate that which, in the dimensions of our own being, extends beyond the object. This shows us the one-sidedness not only of the object of study, but also of the method: the road, which leads in a sense in two directions, which is the sole access to life, and which only through an optical illusion seemed to converge to a single point. For the further we pursue a question, the further it opens up to us in both directions, just as the horizon recedes with every step we take towards it.

If we go a little further, however, this very exact way of looking at things begins itself to seem one-sided. This is the case wherever the material observed retreats from observation, beyond sense and understanding, into the sphere of the uncontrollable, while its existence remains observable, in the sense that the term existence is understood, and its practical effects can still be gauged. All that reaches us from beyond the short stretch which alone is accessible to observation, are criteria whose value in relation to “truth” and “reality” have been altered. Measured by these criteria, even what is materially most tangible, logically easiest to grasp, becomes a generally accepted convention, a signpost for practical purposes of direction finding, and fades and evaporates beyond that, taking on the same symbolic value as what we define under the categories of “mental” or “psychical.” And at both ends of our path rears the unbreakable commandment: “Thou shalt make thyself an image and a likeness!”, such that symbolism too, that which language can express only through signs and metaphors, without which no description of the mind is possible, is itself incorporated into the fundamental value sphere of human understanding. Just as in that horizon line, which retreats from us step by step, “heaven and earth” nevertheless merge continually into each other to form a single image: the primeval optical illusion and, at the same time, the ultimate symbol.

Basis

Such a definitive acknowledgement of the equality of the two values, far from understating the exteriority of objects, in fact further underlines their autonomy of any subsequent accretions. For it is only through objective respect for the material that we can obtain an entirely unprejudiced insight into all relationships within “matter at its most material”: life even in its most physical form. Respect in a sense that we are still far from imagining, being neither sufficiently humble nor sufficiently detached from ourselves to do so: without any diversions into ethical, aesthetic, religious, or whatever other meanings—concentrating entirely on the significance of the purely physical. Concentrating on it as the manifestation of immemorial experience, of—so to speak—voyages of discovery within what we understand as the existent—a manifestation of that which we can decipher everywhere in the existent, as we would decipher battle scars or victory trophies. As if in the physical, the fruit of such an age-long process of becoming, with its immemorial weight of practical wisdom, which offers very different obstacles to analysis than the mental, were contained the very movement of life, seemingly set into sharper lines and shapes, so that even our intellect, that latecomer into the world of physical life, was able to grope its way aboard, as a fragile infant climbs into its grandfather’s lap.

All this means that the basis of eroticism—that is to say, sexuality—needs to be explored in ever greater depth, in its physiological aspect. It is only in this way that the deeper essence and action of sexuality—which, like hunger, thirst or any other manifestation of bodily life, is a type of physical need—become accessible to insight. And just as our need for food, or any other physical necessity, can only be made understandable by means of meticulous examination of the details and confirmation of the facts, so in this case no other rule is valid than that which, in the sphere of ethics, we like to define as the supreme rule: that the slightest, least significant detail, the most humble event, is no less deserving of attention than actions on which every human honor has been bestowed.

Most decisive in this respect, in the absence of any subjective prejudice to cloud the judgment, is the equality of esteem afforded both to sexual activity and to abstinence. If this esteem still belongs, in many respects, to matters pending, this is perhaps in part because the internal secretions of the glands in which both sexual activity and abstinence originate, and the relations between them (which perhaps makes them more interchangeable than we know) are very far from as precisely known as the external sexual secretions. In consequence, we cannot be truly aware of the influences that they may have on our entire person, even when the outward manifestations of sexual activity disappear (as, most commonly, when only the womb and the male member are removed, but not the ovaries and testicles, in which case the secondary sexual characteristics are not altered). For it might be envisaged from this, or from any other similar point, that it is reasonable to conclude that sexual continence not only presents no danger to health, but is also valuable—in the sense that a principle that reinforces creative power can be valuable—in resorbing and transmuting energies. And in this case, there will be many women who will smile secretly, feeling that it is something they have long known—women for whom the implacable sexual discipline of all the centuries of Christianity, at least for many strata of society, has finally been transformed into a natural independence from the brute force of the instincts, and who, still today, for this reason, should think twice—nay, a thousand times—before reaching out for a fruit that is offered to them unwanted, the fruit of a strenuous effort of civilization, and before once again abandoning this independence in favor of a more modern erotic freedom: for it will require far fewer generations to lose than it took to acquire.

However, we should be equally impartial in considering other possibilities that might put us on guard against too careless a rejection of sexuality: cases in which we can recognize in the sexual drive a natural substitute for the powerful excitements present in the body of the child, during its growth, and in the whole of its sensual life, brought about by external stimulations, stimulations that are violent and, for the child, still so novel. The cases of young patients for whom even the involuntary experience of sexuality has become a curative principle, or anemic young women who have blossomed even within an undesired marriage, and who have gained strength under the influence of changes in the tonus of their tissues and in their metabolism. All the cases where there is an obvious risk that the most intimate vital force that exists between youth and old age, might, once compressed, become not an active principle of fertile transpositions, but instead be concentrated into a sort of infection, inhibiting and obstructing life. And, even if such morbid symptoms can be counteracted by phenomena of a different kind, it should nevertheless not be forgotten how often a physiological obstacle can cause man to lose a part of his intellectual capacities, or even his most individual human value.

For all these reasons, every fact that can contribute to a fully objective examination of such questions should be welcome, and we need to be able to treat them as an entirely specific problem, without being led astray either by a hasty idealization of physiological necessities—as we sometimes see in the guise of a contemporary “return to Greece”—or by the imperatives of eroticism, in its narrow sense. For it should also be emphasized how current attempts to refine and individualize amorous feelings are powerless alone to resolve such questions, which does not make such attempts less deserving of respect, and any pure energy whose expression they promote is a very precious gain. However, the growing subtlety in the choice of the erotic object, of course, begins by simply complicating its fixation on a specific object. For it is very rare that our physiological maturity coincides with equally exceptional psychical states—and almost as rare, moreover, that either of them coincide with maturity of intelligence and character in a man intending a lasting union with another being.

In general, the mixing of all concretely conceivable points of view—whether hygienic, romantic, educational, or utilitarian—is undesirable, in that it seems always to result in pure objectivity being abandoned by one approach, allocated to another, before it has truly achieved expression. So, for example, the interests of physiology may be too hastily asserted by reference to a robust ideal of physical culture, or conversely, discredited through devotion to an ideal of delicacy; or in turn, the latter may fear confusion with its more muscular competitors, and take shelter in an overhasty marriage, which will then be set about with so many concessions and dilutions in its rigor that its physiological roots become highly suspect … and so back to where we started. And it is in this way that, in order to avoid succumbing to a style that is either frivolous or traditional, the style adopted is sometimes free and exalted, sometimes marked by philistine narrowness; just as, in the past, retired divinities were relegated to the ranks of demons and no one could imagine that they had so recently been objects of belief, until a more analytical eye reveals the fact that the very same divinities have been resurrected in their successors. That is perhaps why an unbiased examination will gain by ignoring respective rankings, any reforming intentions or the history of former struggles.

Subject

Two facts are characteristic of the problem of the erotic: First of all, that eroticism should be considered as a special case within the sphere of physiological, psychical, and social relations, rather than independently and separately as is often the case. But secondly, that it once again links together these three kinds of relations, merging them into one, and making them its problem.

Rooted since the beginning in the substrate of all existence, eroticism grows from a soil that is ever the same, rich and strong, to whatever height it grows, whatever the immensity, the space occupied by the marvelous tree in which it flowers—subsisting—even when that soil is entirely overrun by edifices—below them, in all its primeval, obscure, and earthy strength. Its immense value to life consists precisely in the fact that, capable though it is of imposing its hegemony widely or of incarnating noble ideals, it has no need to do so, but can draw a surplus of strength from any humus, adapt to serve life in any possible circumstance. Thus we find eroticism associated with the almost purely vegetative functions of our physical being, bound closely to them, and even if it does not become, like these functions, an absolute necessity of existence, it continues to exert a powerful influence upon them. That is why, even in its elevated forms and manifestations, even at the topmost point of the most complex ecstasies of love, there remains in it something of the simplicity and profundity of its origins, always present and ineradicable—something of that healthy gaiety which experiences the life of the body—in the specific sense of the satisfaction of the instincts—as always new, always young and, so to speak, like life itself in its primitive sense. Just as all healthy beings rejoice at awakening, or in their daily bread, or in walking in the fresh air, with a pleasure that is constantly renewed, as if at a joy that is born anew each day, and just as the beginnings of neurosis can often be accurately diagnosed in the fact that these daily joys, these fundamental necessities, become tainted with “boredom,” with “monotony,” with “nausea,” likewise, in the existence of the erotic, behind and beneath the other moments of happiness that it entails, there is always present a happiness which, hardly felt and impossible to measure, man shares with everything that, like himself, breathes.

Even in animals, eroticism is not confined to this pleasure alone, since in the higher animals acts of sexuality are accompanied by changes in the brain which shake their nervous tissue with violent exaltation: basic sexuality is thus impelled towards sensation, and eventually the romanticism of feeling, to the most subtly variegated peaks and summits, in the sphere of that which is most specific to man. However, the foundations upon which this ascending evolution of love takes place are constantly shifting: instead of something that permanently retains both its nature and its value, it is governed by that law of all animal existence which holds that the intensity of excitement diminishes with each repetition. The need to choose both the erotic object and the moment of love—so evident a proof of a higher love—is paid for by the exhaustion that is soon aroused by what was previously so violently desired, and therefore by the desire for the never repeated, for the undiminished force of excitement: the desire for change. It can be said that the natural erotic life, in all its forms and perhaps above all in its most clearly individuated forms, is based on the principle of infidelity. Certainly, habit—the exact counterpart and counterforce to pleasure—for its part rather expresses, at least in its coarse form, the effects of the vegetative physical needs, those opposed to change, which are within us.

However, it is indeed the most spiritual—that is to say, the most complex—principle in our vitality that impels us towards change and towards discrimination in the excitements we enjoy; this is the behavior, refined by intelligence, which, for this very reason, rejects the inveterate constancy, the stability, of the more primitive processes, which makes them, in many respects, the basis of a security that closely resembles the permanence of the non-organic—something that recalls, a little, the solidity of earth or rock. For eroticism, therefore, there is neither weakness nor loss of value in the fact that it is, by nature, hard to reconcile with fidelity; indeed, this fact is rather a sign of its ascension towards even more powerful vital relations. And that is why, even when it forms part of such relations, it cannot but retain a good part of that insatiable sensibility together with its roots in the most primitive processes of organic life. And, just as the latter—that which is “most corporeal” in us—should not be regarded other than respectfully and without prejudice, eroticism too merits the same marks of respect even in the most reckless of its aberrations, although it has become customary to perceive in these only that which has made erotic aberration the scapegoat of every tragedy of love.

This context, in which eroticism is divested of its worst faults, at least in the best instance, is provided by the workings of our minds. When we receive something into understanding and consciousness, instead of simply incorporating it into our bodily desires or our soul, we no longer experience it solely as a less powerful stimulant, weakened by the satisfaction of that desire, but modified by the growing interest of the mind, thus in its specificity and in that in it which is humanly unreproducible. Here alone lies the full meaning of what it is in love that propels one being towards another, hence towards a second, another irreplaceable I, in order to be realized for the first time in the reciprocal relations with the other, taken not as an instrument of love but as an end in itself. While it is not until this point that love also assumes its social significance, it is clear that this is not true of its external aspect: for the accommodations that love finds with its external consequences, its inevitable connection with the community’s sphere of interests, contains its other side, the social side, from the very beginning. However, this time, it is its deepest vital meaning that emerges: the degree of spiritual vitality, in comparison with which the very instinct for change, with its need to be mobilized by external stimulation, seems to constitute a lack of internal resources, while here such stimulation would rather seem intrusive or even obstructive. Fidelity and constancy here take on an entirely new background: in this hegemony of that which contains, that which offers being a maximum of life, new ways of organizing external life are provided, it again becomes possible to achieve a world of permanence, an entirely new and more secure basis for all the potential of life, analogous to our physiological base and to that which our organism separates from itself, as the incarnation of the ultimate goal of love, in the child.

In itself, however, the essence of the erotic is not entirely captured by the description of these three stages, but lies in the fact of their reciprocal interaction. In consequence, it is only with great difficulty that it is possible to establish hierarchies within it, and these do not take the form of a clearly established scale of values that can, in theory, be deduced from this correlation, but of an always self-complete whole, living and indivisible. Whether, in each case, we judge this whole to be wider or narrower, we nonetheless never know, from one case to another, whether it encompasses its total content, precisely where it is unable even to be aware of that content: somewhat in the same way that the child, physiologically, perfectly realizes the purpose of love, even though in the most ancient times the vague unconsciousness attributed the child’s birth not to the sexual act, but to the strangest acts of demons. This is what is needed to complete our description, inasmuch as the physiological element of eroticism, which, to the end, extends its influence everywhere, is also and primarily influenced by other, imprecisely identified factors: it is only by a total grasp of its essence that the problem may be defined.

The Sexual Act

In the world of the least differentiated creatures—very approximately—coupling is accomplished through a miniscule and perfect totality, which in itself has so little structure that it could almost be a symbol for the state of affairs described above. In the fusion of single-celled organisms—a fusion which sometimes seems to serve as the basis of their individual growth—the two nuclei merge completely, thus forming the new being, while only a minimal quantity of living material is split off from the surface of the original cell and then dies: procreation, the child, death, and immortality are not yet separate. We can still define the child as the animal born of the fusion of the parents—consequence as cause—somewhat as different fragments are interchangeable in the sphere of that which we call “the inanimate.” However, once the organs become more structured, coupling ceases to be a whole and can only occur partially, and the gaping contradiction becomes apparent in all its clarity: that which maintains life is at the same time a condition of death. And often so instantly that the two acts seem a single act, although they occur in two beings, representing two generations. When differentiation finally goes so far, in each individual, that each becomes unique of its kind, and therefore nothing of the progenitors survives in the product of their procreative act, death is absent from the actual union, because the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction to Die Erotik: Nietzsche, Lou Andreas-Salomé, and Psychoanalysis
• Die Erotik [The Erotic]
• Index