“…als käm ich heim zu Vater und Schwester”: The Correspondence of Lou Andreas-Salomé and Anna Freud, 1919–1937
What the book is
This volume makes available, in the original German, the surviving correspondence between Lou Andreas-Salomé and Anna Freud, running from 1919 to 1937. It is not a narrative by either woman but an edited collection of their letters, arranged chronologically, framed and explained by editorial material. The title is drawn from the correspondents’ own language: Anna Freud described the experience of being with the older woman as something like coming home to father and sister — that is, to the atmosphere of the Freud household in Vienna, which Lou had come to know closely and which Anna, as Sigmund Freud’s daughter and closest collaborator, inhabited as a matter of course.
The edition belongs to the documentary rather than the biographical genre. Its substance is the exchange itself: greetings, reports, requests, confidences, professional news, and reflections written across nearly two decades, in wartime’s aftermath, through the inflation years, the consolidation of the psychoanalytic movement, the political catastrophes of the early 1930s, and up to the last year of Andreas-Salomé’s life. The editors supply an introduction, annotations identifying the persons, works, and events alluded to, and the usual apparatus of a scholarly correspondence edition; the letters themselves are printed with their dates, and the reader moves through them in sequence rather than through chapters or thematic sections.
The two correspondents
The relationship at the center of the book is unequal in age and in temperament, and the letters show both the closeness and the asymmetry. Lou Andreas-Salomé, born in 1861 and thus a generation and more older than Anna Freud, was by 1919 already a celebrated writer and a practicing psychoanalyst, one of the first to write seriously about female sexuality and narcissism; she lived a largely retired, studious life in Göttingen with her husband, the orientalist Friedrich Carl Andreas. Anna Freud, born in 1895, was at the outset of the letters a young woman recently trained as a teacher, just completing her own analysis with her father, and on the threshold of the analytic career that would define her life.
The tone of the exchange reflects this. Anna’s letters are the more confiding, affectionate, and unguarded: she writes of the household in the Berggasse, of her father’s health and moods, of her own work and uncertainties, of the small domestic detail that the letters treat with evident pleasure. Lou’s replies are warmer in a cooler register — sympathetic, advisory, often playful, but also more reserved, given to reflection and to the perspective of age. Over the years the friendship becomes one of the emotional anchors of both lives: Anna finds in Lou a confidante outside the immediate family circle, and Lou finds in Anna a link to the analytic world and to the Freud household she had come to regard with deep loyalty.
Psychoanalysis as the constant subject
The professional life of the psychoanalytic movement runs through the correspondence from beginning to end. Both women were analysts as well as writers, and their letters report on patients, on lectures and papers, on the practical business of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and the teaching institute, and on the affairs of the International Psychoanalytic Association and its publishing house and journals. Anna writes about her clinical work, her teaching, and her writing on child analysis and on the technique of analysis with children — work she was developing through the 1920s and 1930s — and about her growing role as her father’s collaborator and, in effect, his literary executor in waiting.
Lou writes about her own late theoretical essays, particularly her work on narcissism, and about her book-length appreciation of Freud, in which she set down her sense of what analysis had meant to her intellectually and personally. The letters also register the movement’s internal conflicts — the doctrinal quarrels and personal estrangements that marked the period — though always from the vantage point of these two women rather than as systematic history. Throughout, Sigmund Freud is a constant presence: as father, as teacher, as the object of Lou’s lasting admiration and Anna’s wholehearted devotion, and increasingly as a frail and ill man.
Family, health, and the passing of years
A large part of the book’s human interest lies in its record of private life. Anna’s letters report the illnesses, operations, and slow decline of her father, whose cancer and repeated surgeries from the early 1920s onward shadow the family; she writes of her mother and siblings, of the household routines, of holidays and visits, and of the friends and colleagues — including the women who became her lifelong companions and coworkers — who passed through her days. Lou’s letters describe the quieter, more isolated existence in Göttingen: her work, her visitors, the strains of her husband’s long final illness and his death, and her own advancing age, illnesses, and declining energies. The correspondence thus functions as a double chronicle of two women growing older, one at the center of the analytic movement and one at its edge, and of the affection that sustained them across the distance between Vienna and Lower Saxony.
The political years and the end of the correspondence
The letters of the 1930s inevitably register the political situation. After 1933 the correspondence reflects the pressures on a movement that was largely Jewish in its membership and German-Austrian in its institutions: the emigration or dismissal of colleagues, the transfer of publishing operations, and the growing precariousness of psychoanalysis in Germany and, after 1938 — beyond the span of this book — in Austria. Lou Andreas-Salomé, living in Germany, and Anna Freud, in Vienna, write to each other about these developments with a mixture of concern, practical calculation, and the personal loyalty that characterizes the whole exchange.
The volume closes with the end of the relationship it documents. Lou Andreas-Salomé died in February 1937, and the last letters belong to her final months of illness and to Anna’s responses to them. The book therefore ends where its correspondents’ exchange ends, with the death of the older woman and the silence that followed it; it does not carry the story of Anna Freud beyond that point.
What the reader takes from it
Read as a whole, the collection is a portrait of an unusual friendship between two women of different generations who shared a vocation, a devotion to Freud and his work, and a temperamental seriousness about inner life. It is also a firsthand source for the everyday texture of the psychoanalytic movement in its formative decades, and for the domestic and emotional world of the Freud family as seen by the daughter who was closest to its center. Its value lies less in any single revelation than in the accumulation of detail: the ordinary letters of two intelligent, hard-working women reporting to each other, over eighteen years, on their work, their health, their households, and the world closing in around them.
The title as an emotional key
The phrase that gives the book its title names the central metaphor of the correspondence: the Freud household as a place of return, a chosen family organized around the paternal figure of Freud and the sisterly presence of Anna. The letters allow this metaphor to unfold without resolving it into a single role. Lou appears variously as guest, colleague, confidante, and honorary member of the family; Anna appears as daughter, sister, caretaker, and fellow worker. The book’s depth lies in the overlap of these positions: psychoanalytic work is conducted in the language of family, and family feeling is mediated through work.
Psychoanalysis as a way of life
The correspondence shows psychoanalysis not only as a body of theory or an institution but as a habit of mind and a social world. It enters the letters as a shared vocabulary for understanding inner life, as a vocation that shapes daily routines, and as a network of loyalties maintained through visits, reading, writing, and the exchange of news. The collection is significant because it records how the movement was sustained by ordinary affection and attention as much as by doctrine or organization.
The epistolary texture
Because the volume is made of letters rather than memoirs, it preserves the unfinished, ongoing texture of two lives. The reader sees a relationship built in installments — news answered, moods registered, practical help offered, solitude and company negotiated. Its value as a historical source is inseparable from this intimacy: the book does not present psychoanalytic history from above but from within the private, daily, often frail world of two women who kept each other company through work, illness, and age.
