When Lou Andreas-Salome began her philosophically and psychoanalytically informed reflection on ethics, she had long been in personal and intellectual dialogue with women such as Ellen Key and Helene Stocker, women at the forefront of a European movement for a new social and sexual ethic. For both Stocker and Key, this new ethic coincided with a movement of sexual openness and liberation for men and women alike. It involved the renunciation of an outdated ethics that Stocker characterized as dusterer Lebensentsagung und Verneinung (dismal renunciation and negation of life; Stocker 5). 1 Liberally interpreting the then popular writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, participants in the movement tended to argue for the diversion of ethical thought away from what were seen as ascetic moralities with sexually repressive norms; they turned against a Christian asceticism that compels one either to be a slave to desire, or a slave to duty. Explicitly refuting the Kantian categorical imperative and its correlate bracketing of self-interest, they promoted a self-interested ethics of sexual enjoyment that purportedly would elevate society above the perceived hypocrisies of bourgeois morality and allow individuals to unite in genuine love and community, thereby eliminating or minimizing social aggression (Key 50). Andreas-Salome took part in this alternate tradition of ethical thought that, running in its modern form from Spinoza through Nietzsche to Foucault and beyond, resists formulating the ethical problem as the coupling of the suspension of self-interest with responsibility to an other and emphasizes instead self-assertion or self-stylization in the world. Yet this study's reading of her 1921 essay Narzismus als Doppelrichtung (trans. by Leavy as The Dual Orientation of Narcissism) and of her 1928 work Was daraus folgt, das es nicht die Frau gewesen ist, die den Vater totgeschlagen hat (The consequences of the fact that it was not the woman who killed the father; compare Martin 216) will examine how her psychoanalytic thought, with its rigorous attention to