SOURCE: "Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé," translated by Stanley A. Leavy, in his Modern Writers and Other Essays, Chatto & Windus, 1969, pp. 88-95.

Hampshire is an English philosopher, critic, and educator. In the following excerpt he discusses Andreas-Salomé's personal and intellectual influence on Sigmund Freud during the years 1912-13.

Lou Andreas-Salomé was the intimate friend of Nietzsche and of Rilke, and a pupil, friend, and confidante of Freud. She was a sentimental tourist. She can be seen as one of the 'free spirits' of late romanticism, a voracious adorer, Ibsen's Rebecca West, a woman who urged men of intellect to assert their powers, and particularly their powers of intellectual destruction. Shaw, converting the heroines of Ibsen into figures of high comedy, would have been delighted by her. Her writings on the then fashionable topics of femininity and narcissism are often murky and tire-some, as romanticized biology is apt to...