818994

research-article2019
JES0010.1177/0047244118818994Journal of European StudiesBerthold

Journal of European Studies

Nietzsche and Freud: 2019, Vol. 49(1) 3­–17

© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0047244118818994
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047244118818994
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Daniel Berthold
Bard College, NY

Abstract
Much has been written on the similarities between Nietzsche and Freud, and Freud himself spoke
of his ‘return to Nietzsche’. I argue, however, that at least with respect to their conceptions
of the nature of science – Freud’s psychoanalysis and Nietzsche’s ‘gay’ science – Freud never
‘returned’ to Nietzsche at all, but on the contrary, must be situated in the position of a significant
departure or break. I focus on how these contrasting visions of science rest on fundamentally
different perspectives on the nature of truth and reality and on the relation between science and
art. Ultimately both see a primary task of their science to be the understanding of illness, and I
will close by showing how their contrasting scientific temperaments led to equally divergent views
of the meaning of health and illness. However deep Freud’s attraction to Nietzsche, he finally
remained profoundly distant from him. Indeed, the affinities so often invoked between Nietzsche
and Freud often tend to obscure far-reaching dis-affinities.

Keywords
Sigmund Freud, happiness, health, illness, Friedrich Nietzsche, nobility, science, suffering, truth

Freud famously claimed never to have read Nietzsche. He writes in his History of the
Psychoanalytic Movement that ‘I have denied myself the very great pleasure of reading
the works of Nietzsche, with the deliberate object of not being hampered in working out
the impressions received in psychoanalysis by any sort of anticipatory ideas’ (1953e:
15–16). And in the minutes of a 1908 meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society
devoted to a discussion of Nietzsche, the secretary notes that: ‘Prof. Freud would like to
mention that he has never been able to study Nietzsche … partly because of the wealth
of his ideas, which has always prevented Freud from getting beyond the first half page
whenever he tried to read him’ (Nunberg and Federn, 1962: 32). Evidently overwhelmed
by the sheer richness of Nietzsche’s insights, and cautious lest he inadvertently become

Corresponding author:
Daniel Berthold, Department of Philosophy, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504, USA.
Email: berthold@bard.edu
4 Journal of European Studies 49(1)

hindered by kindred ideas underived from his own scientific labours, Freud represses his
desire to engage the predecessor who died the year of the publication of The Interpretation
of Dreams (1900).
There has been much speculation as to the truth of Freud’s claim1 – after all, Freud
was a member of a reading group in Vienna in the mid 1880s that Paul-Laurent Assoun
describes as ‘infatuated’ with Nietzsche (2000: xix); Lou Andreas Salomé reports Freud
reading Nietzsche to her (Kolb, 2013: 150); his library included the complete works of
Nietzsche (Kolb, 2013: 150); and from time to time Freud refers to Nietzsche’s ideas
explicitly both in his published works and in his correspondence.2 Much has been written
on the affinities between Freud and Nietzsche, showing extensive commonalities in their
critiques of religion and philosophy, their questioning of the foundations of morality,
their destabilizing and reconfiguration of the ‘self’, their inquiries into the nature of cul-
ture, their accounts of repression and sublimation, their preoccupations with the meaning
of health and illness, and, most importantly, their commitment to a ‘depth psychology’
where the domain of the unconscious supplants that of consciousness as what Freud calls
‘the core of our being’ (1953g: 603) and what Nietzsche refers to as ‘the eternal basic text
of homo natura’ (1968a: §230).
Whether or not Freud actually ever seriously studied Nietzsche’s works, it is clear that
he was intrigued by Nietzsche, indeed that Nietzsche exerted a profound attraction on
him, even that Freud experienced a sort of yearning to know the unread (or barely read)
stranger, as though Nietzsche were calling to him beyond the level of words, as an imper-
ceptibly audible yet irresistible presence. Thus, for example, he asserts that ‘the degree
of introspection attained by Nietzsche had never been attained by anyone before him,
and doubtless will never be again’ (Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, quoted
in Assoun, 2000: xxix), surely an odd claim for someone who had never read Nietzsche.
More tellingly, he writes to his confidant Wilhelm Fliess, shortly after the publication of
the Interpretation of Dreams, where he had begun to sketch out the outlines of his depth
psychology, that ‘I have just acquired Nietzsche, in whom I hope to find words for much
of what remains mute in me, but I have not opened him yet’ (quoted in Lehrer, 1995: 32).
In another letter to Fliess, he writes that his discoveries amount to a ‘return to Nietzsche’
(cited in Assoun, 2000: xxvii) – again, a puzzling statement given Freud’s consistent
disavowal of ever having started from Nietzsche.
My purpose in this essay is not to enter the conversation about the extent of Freud’s
familiarity with Nietzsche, nor to engage the question of Nietzsche’s possible influence
on him. Rather, I wish to show that at least with respect to their conceptions of the nature
of science, Freud never ‘returned’ to Nietzsche at all, but, on the contrary, must be situ-
ated in the position of a significant departure or break. The contesting notions of science
are crucial for an appraisal of the Nietzsche–Freud connection, since Freud’s science of
psychoanalysis and Nietzsche’s ‘gay’ science are the foundations of their depth psycho-
logical projects. I will focus on how these contrasting visions of science rest on funda-
mentally different perspectives on the nature of truth and reality and on the relation
between science and art. Ultimately both see a primary task of their science to be the
understanding of health and illness, and I will close by showing how their contrasting
scientific temperaments lead to equally divergent views of the meaning of health and
illness. However deep Freud’s attraction to Nietzsche, the man he guards himself from
Berthold 5

reading precisely due to his intimation of an uncanny closeness, in important ways,

Freud remained profoundly distant from him. Indeed, the affinities so frequently invoked
between Nietzsche and Freud often become blurred into sweeping generalities that tend
to obscure far-reaching dis-affinities.

Science
Nietzsche and Freud are both transgressive thinkers. Nietzsche asks ‘strange, wicked,
questionable questions’ designed to uncover and subvert the prejudices of the philoso-
phers, scientists and, more generally, common ways of conceptualizing the nature of the
self, reality, and value (1968a: §1). For his part, Freud begins the first of his Introductory
Lectures on Psychoanalysis, delivered at the University of Vienna in 1915, by saying that
he ‘seriously advise[s] you not to join my audience a second time’ since he ‘will show
you how the whole trend of your previous education and all your habits of thought are
inevitably bound to make you into opponents of psychoanalysis’ (1953h: 15). At the
heart of their transgressions is the same commitment, their contesting of the traditional
understanding of the self as an inherently conscious being.
‘All our so-called consciousness’, Nietzsche writes in Daybreak, ‘is a more or less
fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but felt text’, the text of the
unconscious (1982: §119). Similarly, in the Gay Science, he notes that ‘for the longest
time, consciousness was considered thought itself. Only now does the truth dawn on us
that by far the greatest part of our spirit’s activity remains unconscious’ (1974: §333). For
Freud, like Nietzsche, consciousness is reconceived as a mere surface, disguise, sign and
symptom. Hence he refers to the unconscious as ‘the true psychical reality’ (1953g: 613),
and states that ‘everything mental [is] in the first instance unconscious’ (1953a: 31). Just
as Nietzsche is amused by ‘the innocence of our thinkers … when they still step before
consciousness with the request that it should please give them honest answers’ (1968a:
§34), Freud asks, in The Interpretation of Dreams, ‘what part is there left to be played in
our scheme by consciousness’, which for other (innocent) thinkers is ‘omnipotent and
hid[es] all else from view?’ (1953g: 615).
Thus both Nietzsche and Freud call for a ‘depth psychology’, a psychology that
exposes the fallacy of those who are ‘content with scratching the mental surface’, as
Freud puts it in his essay on An Infantile Neurosis (1953f: 105). In Nietzsche’s words,
‘the seeker after knowledge must go down, and above all, go inside’ (1968a: §26). In the
same spirit, Freud chooses as the motto for his Interpretation of Dreams the line from
Virgil’s Aeneid, ‘If I cannot bend the Higher Powers’ – the sphere of consciousness – ‘I
will move the infernal regions’ (1953g: 32), going down beneath the mental surface to
the hidden realm of instincts, drives and impulses.
But although there are many intriguing similarities in how Nietzsche and Freud go on
to develop their depth psychologies, these similarities become misleading when we turn
to look at the methods by which they do so. While Freud creates an elaborate systematic
account of the ‘psychic apparatus’, complete with a detailed method of interpretation, a
typology of psychic structures, and an enormous record of case studies meant to elabo-
rate on the vicissitudes and complex architecture of the unconscious, Nietzsche remains
consistently sceptical of the sort of scientific approach Freud pursues. If Freud speaks of
6 Journal of European Studies 49(1)

seeking ‘only the sober results of research’, and of having ‘no wish to find in those
results any quality other than certainty’ (1953b: 37), Nietzsche seeks a fröhliche
Wissenschaft, a gay science – playful, intoxicated, ‘exuberant, floating, dancing’ (1974:
§107). Nietzsche would see Freud as being much too serious in his quest for certainty,
just the sort of ‘gruesome seriousness’ that Nietzsche finds in the ‘clumsy obtrusiveness’
and ‘improper methods’ of usual strategies of inquiry (1968a: preface).
As for Freud’s wish for ‘certainty’, Nietzsche remarks that we ‘should not wish to
divest existence of its rich ambiguity’ (1974: §373), an ambiguity that resists scientific
objectivism and calls rather for an inexhaustible experimentation with perspectives that
honour the relativity of our experience of the world. Thus he writes in the Genealogy of
Morals:

Let us guard against [any longing for] an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye … in which
the active and interpreting forces through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are
supposed to be lacking … There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’; and
the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this
thing … be. (1968c: III, §12)

Given Nietzsche’s perspectivism, a ‘“scientific” interpretation of the world’, as the com-

mon understanding of science would have it, is ‘one of the most stupid of all possible
interpretations … the poorest in meaning’, precisely due to its ‘prejudice’ that legitimate
meaning requires certainty (1974: §373).
This contrast between Freud and Nietzsche is fundamental, and can be traced through
all of the language they use to describe the goals of their respective ideas of science.
Freud, for example, laments the unwanted intrusion of ‘subjective expectations’ or
desires in his investigations, but assures us that he will ‘correct’ them by strict adherence
to ‘the evidence’ (1953d: 5, 53, 55). By contrast, Nietzsche sees science, like philosophy,
as nothing but a ‘ drive … to create the world in its own image’, that is, in the image of
its desires (1968a: §9). We ‘disguise’ these desires from ourselves ‘under cloaks of the
objective’ (1968c: preface, §2). Thus ‘behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of
movement … there stand valuations’ whose origins are in unconscious drives or ‘physi-
ological demands’ (1968a: §3). It is these unconscious sources of value that are for
Nietzsche what he refers to in his notes for the Will to Power as the ‘grand reason’ that
guides our experience of what we call ‘the real’, rather than the ‘petty faculty of reason’
invoked by the scientist (1968d: §333).
Freud speaks of a ‘right to believe’ only if there is ‘scientific evidence’, and of psy-
choanalysis as an ‘impartial instrument’ (1953d: 32, 36) that does not have ‘premises’ but
only ‘results’ (1953e: 17), while Nietzsche is the philosopher of the ‘dangerous maybe’
(1968a: §2) – always partial (always speaking merely from one or another perspective,
and often from several incompatible perspectives simultaneously), never certain, never
without assumptions or premises. Freud’s concern to avoid all ‘speculation’ by a disci-
plined practice of pure ‘observation’ (1953e: 19) is exactly the attitude that Nietzsche –
or Zarathustra – characterizes as the fantasy of an ‘immaculate perception’, a ‘happiness
[sought] in mere looking’, which he views as a form of ‘lechery, looking at life without
desire’ (1966b: II, §15). As Gregory Moore puts it, for Nietzsche, ‘modern empirical
Berthold 7

science … [ rests on] the misguided belief that dispassionate contemplation or observa-
tion can provide privileged insight into the supposedly rational … structures of the uni-
verse’ (2002: 12).
Freud’s dedication to impartial observation without the intrusion of subjective desires
allows him, he says, to simply ‘look at things again and again until they themselves begin
to speak’ (1953e: 22), silencing the subject so that the object, the real ‘thing’, speaks for
itself. In contrast, Nietzsche seeks a science that frees us from bondage to ‘the thing’, the
myth of a Ding an sich. For Nietzsche, there is no Ding an sich, no ‘thing in itself’ apart
from the many different ways in which experience presents us with appearances filtered
through our perception. Rather than the lecherous gaze into the thing itself, Nietzsche’s
gay science seeks a ‘freedom above things’ (1974: §§54, 107).
Freud, of course, has been criticized mercilessly for his claim that psychoanalysis is
truly scientific. From Karl Popper to Adolf Grünbaum to Frederick Crews and Jeffrey
Masson and dozens of others, he has been characterized, as Wittgenstein put it, as not at
all ‘giv[ing] a scientific explanation’ but as simply ‘propound[ing] a new myth’ (1982: 9).
Two points are important to make here. First, however we side on the question of Freud’s
scientific credentials, Nietzsche – who I suspect would find much in Freud to admire –
would be amused by the ‘gruesome seriousness’ of Freud’s critics, whose indignation at
Freud’s transgressions against the objectivity and impartiality of science reveals their own
fiction of an immaculate perception that is exactly the object of Nietzsche’s critique. And,
second, it is at least clear that Freud fervently believed that he was engaged in the real
thing, science in just the majestic sense his critics invoked, and indeed he was tireless in
fending off all criticisms to the contrary throughout his authorship.3 Nietzsche, though,
would never think to defend his science, his gay science, from such criticisms, because he
takes seriously the value of what Wittgenstein dismissed as ‘myth’. Nietzsche’s science,
as we have seen, is not devoted to objectivity and certainty and, as we will see shortly, is
equally uninterested in an ‘uncovering’ of the ‘true nature’ of ‘reality’. Rather, he values
appearance over reality, and sees the ‘reality’ that is discoverable by reason to be ‘shal-
low, stupid, a falsification’ (1974: §354).

Truth and reality

Central to the disaffinities between Freud’s and Nietzsche’s conceptions of science are
their equally incompatible views of the purported goal of science – truth – and its ostensi-
ble object – reality. Freud reports in his History of the Psychoanalytic Movement on his
lifelong ‘fight for truth’ (1953e: 47), and in the ‘Question Concerning a Weltanschauung’
is stern in his admonition that ‘truth cannot be tolerant’ (1953h: 158). Science requires
nothing less, and any compromise in our fight for truth leads us astray into the sorts of
wishful thinking and fantasy characteristic of philosophy, religion and art. Nietzsche,
though, builds his own thinking precisely around a ‘suspicion of the value of truth’ (1968a:
§1). ‘The will to truth requires a critique’, and ‘the value of truth must for once be experi-
mentally called into question’ (1968c: III, §24). The ideal of truth leads us to seek ‘univer-
sal laws’ – the gold standard of the scientific enterprise – and yet ‘every action that has
ever been done was done in an altogether unique … way’. There may be ‘coarse’ similari-
ties between different actions, but these are ‘really only [mere] semblance’ (1974: 335). If
8 Journal of European Studies 49(1)

all experience is inevitably uniquely situated within a particular situation, relative to a

particular point of view, then truth (something non-particular and universal) and certainty
(something not subject to question or doubt) are mere fantasies themselves. Why exactly
should truth be valued? ‘Why not rather untruth? And uncertainty?’ (1968a: §1).
The radical fissure between Freud’s and Nietzsche’s groundings of their respective
scientific projects – for Freud, in truth; for Nietzsche, in uncertainty and untruth – is
reflected in their similarly opposed conceptions of the value of an adherence to ‘reality’.
Freud states the defining character of science to be that ‘science deals with reality’
(1953i: 74f), and his entire psychoanalytic project is an ‘education to reality’ (1953d: 49)
for those who stray into illusion through a ‘low valu[ation] of reality’, that is, a neglect
of ‘the distinction between [reality] and fantasy’ (1953h: 339, 368). Unlike the pleasure
principle, which seeks satisfaction of all wishes and desires and impulses, the reality
principle ‘oblige[s] [the ego] to renounce … sources of pleasure’ when the gratification
of these desires would conflict with the demands of the external world. The reality prin-
ciple is the triumph of reason over instinct: ‘an ego thus educated has become reasona-
ble; it no longer lets itself be governed by the pleasure principle, but … tak[es] account
of reality’ (1953h: 371f, 357).
If we recall Freud’s description of his ‘sober’ approach to scientific investigation, a
sobriety that rests upon his refusal to depart from ‘the real’, we might see Nietzsche’s
message ‘To the realists’ in his Gay Science as an anticipatory response to Freud:

You sober people, who feel well armed against [the temptation to fantasy] … and would like to
turn your emptiness into a matter of pride and an ornament: you call yourself realists and hint
that the world really is the way it appears to you. As if reality stood unveiled before you only.
(1974: §57)

The voyeuristic gaze that seeks an unveiled Real may remind us of Nietzsche’s idea of
the ‘lechery’ of ‘immaculate perception’. And the ‘emptiness’ he ascribes to ‘the realist’
points to his critique of the scientific ideal as complicit with nihilism. If we at least
experimentally entertain Nietzsche’s conclusion to his message ‘To the realists’ – that
‘there is no “reality”’, but only appearance – then we begin to understand his sense of
the hollowness of an ‘education to reality’. This would be an education to nothing at all,
the expression of an impotent longing, a voyeuristic yearning to unclothe what truly is,
and a paralysis of the will to create the values that make the world of appearance into a
place worth living in.
This is why Deleuze, in his work on Nietzsche, says that ‘science is part of the nihil-
ism of modern thought’ (1983: 45). In Nietzsche’s own words, ‘the scientific conscience
is an abyss. … [Science] is a hiding place for every kind of discontent … the unrest of
the lack of ideals, the suffering from the lack of any great love’ (1968c: III, §23) – ideals
that become incredible as soon as we disdain ‘mere’ appearance and cling to the impos-
sible demand that, in Freud’s words, we simply ‘deal with reality’.
We may close our consideration of Freud’s and Nietzsche’s views of reality by noting
how their thinking about the importance of dreams underscores their differences. Both
take dreams to be crucial phenomena for understanding the psyche. But while, for Freud,
dreams speak another language than waking life and occur in a different world from
Berthold 9

reality, operating according to laws of their own (1953g: 277), for Nietzsche, existence
itself is a dreaming: ‘There is no essential difference between waking and dreaming …
[since all of our] judgments and evaluations are only images and fantasies based on a
physiological process unknown to us’ (1982: §119). If we were to cease to dream, we
would simply ‘perish’ (1974: §54), that is, succumb to the nihilistic weariness that results
from the resolve to live in the humanly uninhabitable, since unreachable, world of the
real. But then ‘what is “appearance” for me now?’ What is left to distinguish between the
fantasies of dreams and ‘reality’? ‘Appearance’ can no longer mean ‘the opposite of
some essence’, some ‘reality’, for ‘what could I say about any essence except to name
the attributes of its appearance!’ (1974: §54).

Science and art

An important upshot of this contrast between Nietzsche’s and Freud’s estimations of
truth and the real is that Nietzsche’s gay science will seek its foundation in art, ‘the
good will to appearance’ (1974: §172), rather than in the sober, impartial, objective
methodology of Freud’s science, what we might call, on Freud’s behalf, ‘the good will
to reality’. In the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche writes about how art is the logical out-
come of science:

Science, spurred by its powerful illusion [the illusion that truth is possible and that science can
discover it], speeds irresistibly towards its limits where its optimism … suffers shipwreck …
Inevitably … one gazes into what defies illumination. When [science] sees to [its] horror how
logic coils up at these boundaries and finally bites its own tail – suddenly [a] new form of
insight breaks through, tragic insight which, merely to be endured, needs art as a protection and
remedy. (1968b: §§97f)

The tragic insight at the boundaries of science, where explanation falters, is simply that
science cannot know what it seeks, the real, and cannot obtain what it desires, truth.
Indeed, for Nietzsche ‘we have art in order not to die of the truth’ (1968d: §822), perhaps
in the same way that we have seen him to say that if we cease to dream we must perish:
we become incapable of sustaining ourselves in the face of the void that remains when
truth is recognized as unattainable.
In the absence of any ideology by which meaning or value may be ‘unveiled’, art creates
meaning and value. Art, Nietzsche says, is ‘the single … remedy against all will to negation
of life’ (1968d: §853.2), and ‘it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the
world may be eternally justified’, by giving artistic form to the chaos and madness of the
world, what Nietzsche calls ‘the horror [and] absurdity of existence’ (1968b: §§5, 7).
Nietzsche finally seeks in art a redemption from the world of suffering – or rather, mean-
ingless suffering, the suffering of ‘nausea’. ‘If we had not welcomed the arts and invented
this kind of cult of the untrue, then … the realization that delusion and error are conditions
of human knowledge and sensation would be utterly unbearable. Honesty would lead to
nausea and suicide.’ Art is the ‘counterforce’ against this nausea (1974: §107).
Let there be no mistake: a (gay) science that embraces art necessarily embraces illu-
sion, ‘the beautiful illusion of the dream world’, a ‘world of fantasy’ (1968b: §1). True,
10 Journal of European Studies 49(1)

we have just seen in the passage from the Birth of Tragedy that for Nietzsche, a ‘sober’
science is also ‘spurred by a powerful illusion’. The difference is that sober science
would be quite disturbed to learn this, or more likely would never admit it, whereas
Nietzsche joyfully embraces illusion. ‘There is but one world, and it is false, cruel, con-
tradictory, … and without sense.’ Art is necessary simply ‘in order to endure life’,
Nietzsche continues, by creating ‘a marvelous illusion to cover [the emptiness of the
real] with a veil of beauty’ (1968d: §853.1).
Freud in fact shares Nietzsche’s view of the therapeutic value of art, but here again,
this shared ground quickly turns into a space of difference. Freud, like Nietzsche,
believes that we ‘cannot subsist on the scanty satisfaction extorted from reality’, which
explains the human ‘need for fantasy’ (1953i: Lecture 23, 371, 372). ‘Life is too hard’,
he famously writes in Civilization and its Discontents, and art is an attempt to find some
‘satisfaction through fantasy’ (1953c: 31). But in the first place, Freud sees this satisfac-
tion as ‘harmless’ (1953i: 160), a sort of diversion from the pain of life, while for
Nietzsche art is the terrain in which the ‘transvaluation of values’ occurs: the creation
of values that contest the status quo, that make possible the overcoming of the ‘human-
all-too-human’. Hence art for Nietzsche is the space of transgression and danger. More,
art is the space of cruelty (1968a: §229), a merciless refusal of complacency and con-
formity to social norms. In the second place, Freud is of course required to see art as
illness, albeit a ‘mild form of narcosis’ (1953c: 81), precisely because it transgresses
against the reality principle and replaces the dedication to truth with a devotion to illu-
sion, the good will to appearance. As we will see shortly, for Nietzsche, art promises the
possibility of an overcoming of illness through the creation of values that allow for a
‘great health’ (1974: §382). Finally, for Freud the ‘misery’ of life is best confronted not
by art but by science. While science may not bring happiness, a redemption from the
pain of existence, it at least grounds us in the real world, thus protecting us from illusion
and the psychopathology that comes from a break with reality. And it also gives us
something worthy to guide us, our fight for truth.
We have already said enough to see how Nietzsche would respond to Freud’s warn-
ings against illusion. In the absence of a real world, appearance and illusion are all that
is left. The question becomes not one of how to avoid falling into illusion, but how to
create illusions that invent values that are worth living by, that lead to nobility – that is,
to self-mastery, an intolerance for one’s weaknesses, self-legislation rather than obedi-
ence to external norms, the suspicion of any desire for pleasure and happiness, and
egoism (the need for solitude and the refusal of a socially defined self) (see 1968a:
§§257–96). Many illusions are based on decadent art for Nietzsche, most particularly
the illusions of religion that, for Nietzsche no less than for Freud, are symptoms of a
deep sickness (1966a: §3). Religion is a sign of weariness with life, a capitulation to an
‘otherworldliness’ that forsakes the earthly, finite world that is our home. It is a ‘hatred
of nature’ and a ‘corruption of the instincts’ (1966a: §§5, 6, 15; and see 1968a: §§257–
96). The art Nietzsche extols (and practises), on the other hand, while opposed to ‘truth’
(Wahrheit), is ‘truthful’ (wahrhaftig) or honest (ehrlich). It questions itself – ‘there is a
more laudable truthfulness in every little question mark’ than in any declaration of doc-
trine (1968a: §25) – and it is ruthless in its refusal of weakness and nihilism. It seeks not
truth, but health.
Berthold 11

Health and illness

Nietzsche’s and Freud’s preoccupation with health and illness is at the very centre of
their respective authorships. Indeed, the primary goal of the science each develops is its
application to therapeutics. This is obviously true for Freud, for whom the whole edifice
of psychoanalytic theory is meant to provide the tools for the diagnosis and treatment of
illness. But for Nietzsche, too, the meaning of illness and health is central. His whole
‘gay science’ is in search of a ‘saturnalia of the spirit’ that has undergone illness and
seeks the ‘intoxication of convalescence’ and ‘self mastery’. He announces the need for
‘a philosophical physician’ to cure the maladies of exhaustion and nausea that are the
symptoms of the nihilism of modernity (1974: preface, §§1, 2). In Beyond Good and
Evil, he writes that ‘psychology is now … the path to the fundamental problems’ (1968a:
§23), and he makes it clear in the Gay Science that this will be a ‘medical formulation’
of psychology (1974: §120).
There are a number of similarities between Nietzsche’s and Freud’s conceptions of
illness – similarities, however, that once again should be seen as surfaces covering over
deeper differences. Both see illness very generally as a response to the pain of life, and
the development of various strategies to withdraw from this pain. But because pain is
never entirely removable – indeed, both Nietzsche and Freud insist that human life is
essentially painful – there will never be any perfect health. In fact, both are sceptical of
drawing a sharp line between health and illness. ‘We are all ill’, Freud claims, because
‘the preconditions for the formation of symptoms’ are found in us all. Hence even ‘a
healthy person, too, is virtually a neurotic’ (1953h: 358, 457). Gregory Moore points out
that for Nietzsche, too, our usual ‘concept of “health” is too limited. What we consider
to be sick need not be so for those who’ are strong (2002: 187). Indeed, Nietzsche writes
that ‘there is no health as such’ (1974: §120), and this for at least two reasons. First, and
most generally, because there is no impeccable state of health, no state of being that
completely and finally overcomes our resentment against a world that is, as we have seen
Nietzsche say, ‘false, cruel, contradictory … and without sense’. But, second, it makes
no sense to speak of ‘health as such’ because ‘health’ for one person ‘could look like its
opposite in another’ (1974: §120), an idea that underscores Nietzsche’s much more indi-
vidualistic and subjective conception of selfhood than Freud’s.
Nietzsche and Freud both also note the irony that illness is itself in some sense a thera-
peutic attempt. Freud points out that since illness is an effort towards ‘protection of the
ego’, there is a certain ‘gain of illness’. There is misery that is so great that ‘necessity
may … require a person to sacrifice his health’, and ‘the physician … will silently and
solicitously withdraw’ (1953h: 382). For his part, Nietzsche likewise insists that we can-
not ‘dispense with illness’, but his reason for this points to a first major difference from
Freud in their thinking about health and illness. We cannot dispense with illness for
Nietzsche not, as for Freud, because the pain of facing life without the protection of ill-
ness is too great, but because ‘our thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge in particular
… require[s] sick[ness] … as much as health’ (1974: §120). Illness thus has an epistemo-
logical and pedagogical value, as an education into new ways to see and create. As
Nietzsche says in Human, all too Human, health ‘cannot do without even illness itself, as
an instrument and fishhook of knowledge … which permits paths to many opposing
12 Journal of European Studies 49(1)

ways of thought’ (1984: preface, §4). Illness for Freud has nothing to do with gaining
knowledge – quite the contrary, illness shields us from knowledge, and knowledge comes
only with the resolving of illness (1953h: 451). Further, for Freud, illness is a conse-
quence of our acquiescence and adaptation to cultural prohibitions. So when he speaks
of the ‘gain of illness’, he means that ‘neurosis [may be] the most harmless and socially
tolerable solution’ (1953h: 382). For Nietzsche, illness in the sense of the ‘terrible, long
… patient’ lingering with suffering (1974: preface, §1) is necessary for nobility, and for
‘great health’.
The ‘great health’ (die große Gesundheit) (see 1974: §382; 1968d: §1013; 1984: pref-
ace, §4; and 1968c: II, §24) is ‘a new health’, quite different from the common concept
of health which essentially sanctifies the status quo and regards as sick ‘any inconvenient
disturber of the peace’ (quoted in Jaspers, 1965: 112). The great health is one ‘that one
does not merely have but also acquires continually, and must acquire because one gives
it up again and again, and must give it up’ (1974: §382), since nobility, and genuine
health, is not so much a state of being as a state of becoming, a perpetual project of self-
surpassing and refashioning of the self.
A second major difference between Nietzsche’s and Freud’s conceptualizations of
health and illness has to do with how they understand pain and suffering. We can already
infer from the fact that Nietzsche sees a great value to illness – well beyond the ‘gain’
that Freud ascribes to the ‘protective’ function of neurosis – that he will have a quite dif-
ferent valuation of pain itself (recalling that for both, illness is a response to pain). Freud
makes it clear in his Civilization and its Discontents that, judging from human behaviour,
people see the ‘purpose of life’ to be the ‘striv[ing] for happiness’. We ‘want to become
happy and to remain so’. And what is happiness? There are ‘two sides … on the one
hand, an absence of pain and unpleasure, and, on the other, the experiencing of strong
feelings of pleasure’ (1953c: 76).
Nietzsche is a relentless critic of utilitarianism’s pleasure principle (e.g. 1968a: §§225,
228, 260), and would be equally critical of Freud. Indeed, Nietzsche virtually reverses
Freud’s happiness axiom (pain: no! pleasure: yes!). He writes in Beyond Good and Evil
to ‘the last man’, the man so enfeebled that he has lost all capacity for nobility: ‘You
want, if possible – and there is no more insane “if possible” – to abolish suffering. …
Well-being as you understand it … [is] a state that soon makes man ridiculous and con-
temptible’ (1968a: §225). Freud’s idea of happiness coincides with what Nietzsche sees
as ‘wretched contentment’ (1966b: prologue, §3), a ‘repulsive … crude, musty, brown
pleasure as it is understood by those who like pleasure’ (1974: preface, §4). For Nietzsche,
though, only ‘profound suffering makes noble’ (1968a: §270). Nietzsche’s ‘new happi-
ness’ is one that requires ‘great pain’:

Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit … the long, slow pain that takes its time
– on which we are burned, as it were, with green wood – compels us … to descend into our
ultimate depths and to put aside all trust, everything good natured … everything that is mild,
that is medium – things in which formerly we may have found our humanity. I doubt that such
pain makes us ‘better’; but I know that it makes us more profound. (1974: preface, §3)

Paul-Laurent Assoun mentions a letter from Freud’s youth in which he admits his ‘shame’
‘at citing David Friedrich Strauss’s formula … “So leben wir, so wandeln wir beglückt”
Berthold 13

‘(So we live, so we carry on happily)’.4 Freud goes on to note that ‘Nietzsche had
reproached this phrase of … Strauss as an indication of philistinism’ (Assoun, 2000: xxi,
xxiii). And indeed, in Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche is ruthless in his depiction of
Strauss’s formula for life as an utterly detestable philistinism (1992: 18ff; and see Moore
on Nietzsche’s view of Strauss as exemplifying ‘bourgeois “health”’, 2002: 168f).
Freud’s ‘shame’, though, is purely rhetorical: it does not at all change his view of the
goal of life, the seeking of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. It is a ‘shame’ that
acknowledges that, as Freud wrote to Arnold Zweig, ‘Nietzsche represents a nobility that
is inaccessible to me’ (quoted in Assoun, 2000: xxiv). This inaccessibility of Nietzschean
nobility to the more common (yet for Nietzsche pedestrian and ‘wretched’) definition of
happiness Freud proposes clearly situates the line of demarcation between their thera-
peutics. Nietzsche’s ‘philosophical physician’ rejects any pleasure that aims at content-
ment, and welcomes the therapeutic value of great pain and suffering; Freud’s analyst
seeks to bring his or her patient as much ease of mind as is possible. While full happiness
‘cannot be fulfilled, yet we must not – indeed, we cannot – give up our efforts to bring it
nearer to fulfilment by some means or other’ (1953c: 83).
A final point of comparison between Nietzsche and Freud on the theme of health and
illness begins with their shared idea of illness as a form of ‘disunity’, a loss of integrity
or wholeness of the psyche. But the unity that characterizes health is quite different for
the two. For Freud, ‘reason is the only true unifying influence’ (1953i: 171), since it
alone allows for a reconciliation with the reality principle that has been displaced in ill-
ness, leaving the self disunited. For Nietzsche, on the other hand, unity is supplied by
nobility, which ideally enables a ‘perfect functioning of the regulating unconscious
instincts’ (1968c: I, 10). It is not because we lose touch with reality that we become sick,
as for Freud, but that we capitulate to the reality of social norms that make us weak,
seeking value outside ourselves in rules of conduct that corrupt our highest instincts.
This contrast points to the different valuations Nietzsche and Freud place on the
intrinsically social dimension of illness. For both, society (or culture, civilization)
requires the repression of instincts that it sees as threats to social order, a repression that
in turn leads to the substitute formations of neurosis. For Freud, however much ‘every
individual is virtually an enemy of civilization’, since it is civilization that is ‘largely
responsible for our misery’ by developing coercive measures to insure repression (1953d:
6; 1953c: 86), health requires an integration into the social. For Nietzsche, though, the
‘great health’ necessary for nobility requires a resistance against and a surpassing of
these repressions. In this sense, while Nietzsche’s therapeutics aim at transgressive acts
by which nobility becomes possible – self-mastery and self-legislation rather than an
obedient conformity to social expectations – Freud’s therapeutic effort serves a socially
normalizing purpose in accordance with ‘the work of civilization’ as a ‘restricting’, ‘tam-
ing’ and ‘educating’ of the instincts (1953h: 23). As Assoun puts it, Freudian psychoa-
nalysis is directed towards a ‘recivilizing of the subject … the return of the dissident
desires to a culturally accepted expression’ (2000: 175).
This difference between Nietzsche and Freud is also reflected in their respective theo-
ries of the instincts. While this is too large a topic to address here, we can at least note that
the contrast between Nietzsche’s transgressive and Freud’s more conservative therapeu-
tics is already foreshadowed in Freud’s notion that the instincts themselves operate in a
conservative manner. ‘The dominating tendency of mental life’, he writes in Beyond the
14 Journal of European Studies 49(1)

Pleasure Principle, ‘and perhaps of nervous life in general, is the effort to reduce, to keep
constant or to remove internal tension due to stimuli (the ‘Nirvana principle’) – a tendency
which finds expression in the pleasure principle’. And again, ‘the pleasure principle … is
a tendency operating in the service of a function whose business it is to free the mental
apparatus entirely from excitation or to keep the amount of excitation in it constant or …
as low as possible’. This ‘function’ is the ‘death instinct’, the regressive urge to recover
the ‘ancient goal’ of ‘quiescence’. The ‘aim of all life’, Freud states, ‘is death’, since death
is the ultimate happiness, the ultimate cessation of pain (1953b: 55f, 62, 38).
For Nietzsche, too, there are certainly regressive drives, but our highest instincts are
those that enhance power, the accumulation of energy in the service of growth. Rather
than the ‘reduction of tension’ Freud posits as the guiding work of the instincts, Nietzsche
proposes that our instincts seek an increase in tension, an augmentation of the energy
that motivates curiosity and creativity: ‘We … free, very free spirits – we still feel it, the
whole need of the spirit and the whole tension of its bow. And … also the arrow, the task’
(1968a: preface). His alternative to ‘the compulsion to repeat’ that Freud sees as a basic
function of the death instinct (1953b: 18ff, 38; 1953c: 118) is the hypothesis of an ‘eter-
nal return’ (1966b: III, §§2, 15, 16; IV, §19; 1974: §341). If life were to recur, if each
action I take were to be repeated endlessly, then for the strong of spirit, each action would
gain an urgency, an intensity and importance that would give life value. ‘Was that life?’
Zarathustra asks; ‘well, then, once more!’ (1966b: III, §2). The idea of the eternal return
thus speaks to the life-affirming possibilities of our instincts, in direct opposition to the
Freudian death instinct. ‘Redeem the dead!’ Zarathustra shouts; ‘Now the tombs stam-
mer’ – it is time to ‘sing!’ (1966b: IV, §18; III, §13).

Conclusion: loneliness, style and strangeness

Nietzsche and Freud were both ‘lonely pioneers’, to cite the phrase Peter Gay uses to
describe Freud (1995: xviii). In the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, Freud
recounts his lonely development of psychoanalysis: ‘not subject to influence from any
quarter’, surrounded on all sides by scepticism and, later, false appropriations, he lives,
‘like Robinson Crusoe’, on a ‘lonely island’ (1953e: 55). Nietzsche, too, constantly refers
to his loneliness. Karl Jaspers tells us that already at an early age, during his time as a
professor at Basel, ‘surrounded by friends, in the time of his enthusiasm for Wagner, dur-
ing the success of his Birth of Tragedy’, Nietzsche writes of a ‘terrible loneliness’ that
leads him to create an alter ego, the ‘last philosopher’, to whom he can speak ‘as if I were
two’ because he ‘cannot bear the terror of the loneliest loneliness’ (quoted in Jaspers,
1965: 56). Lou Salomé recounts her first impressions of Nietzsche in this way:

Something concealed, an intimation of an unspoken loneliness – that was the first strong
impression that gave Nietzsche’s appearance its captivating power … His eyes spoke a revealing
language … they seemed like guardians and keepers of inner treasures and mute secrets.
(quoted in Jaspers, 1965: 37f)

After his botched attempt at a relationship with Lou, Nietzsche writes to his friend Franz
Overbeck that ‘as soon as I had merely dreamed this dream of not being alone, the danger
Berthold 15

was frightful’, and ‘I commit[ted] nothing but follies: I realize more and more that I no
longer fit among human beings’ (quoted in Jaspers, 1965: 72, 73).
But even in their respective experiences of loneliness, Freud and Nietzsche are profoundly
different. However lonely Freud feels in his endeavour to champion and defend psychoanaly-
sis, it is not a loneliness he has chosen, but one he hopes to overcome: he seeks community
and indeed builds a community, a ‘Psychoanalytic Society’. How unlike Nietzsche, who, so
far from seeking community, feels that ‘all community makes men – somehow, somewhere,
sometime “common”’, which is to say, ‘unclean’ (1968a: §284). Nietzsche’s loneliness is his
preference: he seeks ‘always [to be] only in [my] own company’ (1974: §166).
This difference in the manner of Nietzsche’s and Freud’s experiences of loneliness is
reflected as well in the very style of their authorships. In keeping with Freud’s idea of
science, with its goals of objectivity and impartiality, he ‘fights for truth’ through rea-
soned discourse. Again, for Freud, ‘reason is the only truly unifying influence’, so that
reasoned discourse alone makes the achievement of a scientific community possible. But
in keeping with Nietzsche’s idea of a ‘gay science’ that scorns ‘objectivity’ and ‘truth’ as
myths and that is committed rather to radical perspectivism and the ideal of nobility as
solitude, his style of authorship displaces the expectation of agreement, openness, cer-
tainty and truth – Freud’s ideals – with a persistent deferral of direct communication.
More strongly, Nietzsche deliberately invites misunderstanding: ‘Every profound thinker
is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood’ (1968a: §290). Nietzsche
the author is ‘a concealed man who … is inexhaustible in his evasion of communication,
[who] wants and sees to it that a mask of him roams in his place through the hearts and
heads of his friends [readers].’ He is ‘the hermit’, in whose ‘writings … one always hears
… the echo of the desolate regions …; in his strongest words, even in his cry, there still
vibrates a new and dangerous kind of silence’. The hermit ‘does not … ever express his
real and ultimate opinions in books’, but ‘write[s] books precisely to conceal what [he]
harbours’, so that his ‘every … word [is] a mask’ (1968a: §§40, 289).
Nietzsche’s authorship is ‘strange, wicked, and questionable’ (1968a: §1), in part
because his style of communication is so elusive, so committed to disguise and evasion.
However strange and wicked Freud’s own project may be in the way it unsettles and
shocks us – recall his warning to the audience of his lectures on psychoanalysis at Vienna,
that he ‘will show … how the whole trend of your previous education and all your habits
of thought’ will be challenged – he addresses an audience he seeks to convince through
values he believes we all share: the value of the search for truth, the commonality of our
faculty of reason, and the shared space of our reality. Nietzsche, though, questions those
very values and hence renounces the pretext that what he has to say can be grounded in
a shared set of assumptions. Thus his words remain strange out of necessity. What value
we find in his words will not, then, be a value we can confirm by any ordinary set of
scientific criteria, but perhaps simply by the extent to which they beckon us to think in
strange ways ourselves. Finally, at the very least with respect to the themes explored in
this essay – the nature of Nietzsche’s and Freud’s views of science; their approaches to
truth and reality; the role of art; the meaning of health and illness and the nature of
therapy; the appraisal of happiness, pleasure and nobility; and the character of the
instincts – it is this strangeness that separates Nietzsche and Freud and that should lead
us to view the undeniable similarities in much of their writings with healthy suspicion.
16 Journal of European Studies 49(1)

Notes
1. See, for example, Anderson (1980), Assoun (2000), Cybulska (2015), Kolb (2013), and
Lehrer (1995). Reinhard Gasser, however, presents evidence that Freud likely never devoted
any serious attention to Nietzsche (2013: 3–173).
2. The comprehensive index of the Standard Edition of Freud’s works lists 16 such instances,
and there are quite a few more in his correspondence.
3. For my own quite sympathetic reading of Freud’s scientific project, see Berthold-Bond (now
Berthold) (1989).
4. This is actually a covert quotation from Goethe’s poem Zueignung, the ‘Dedication’ that pre-
cedes Faust. I am indebted to the fine Nietzsche scholar Paul Bishop for pointing this out to me.

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Author biography
Daniel Berthold is chair of the Department of Philosophy, Bard College. His research interests
focus on continental philosophy. Recent publications include The Ethics of Authorship:
Communication, Seduction, and Death in Hegel and Kierkegaard (2011); ‘A desire to be under-
stood: authority in Kierkegaard’s Authorship’, in K. Westfall (ed.) Authority and Authorship in
Kierkegaard’s Writings (2018); ‘Kierkegaard and Camus: either/or?’ International Journal for
Philosophy of Religion (2013); ‘The author as stranger: Nietzsche and Camus’, Idealistic Studies
(2012) and ‘Suicide, silence, and authorship in Camus’, Journal of European Studies (2013).