Freud vs Nietzsche
The striking analogies between the ideas of Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche, whose works were published from one to three decades before those of Freud, have been commented upon, but no previous systematic correlation of the ideas of Nietzsche and Freud has been made.
Br J Psychiatry 1995
The influence of Nietzsche on Freud’s ideas
Background: The striking analogies between the ideas of Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche, whose works were published from one to three decades before those of Freud, have been commented upon, but no previous systematic correlation of the ideas of Nietzsche and Freud has been made.
Method: The major works of Nietzsche were read, and each possible analogy to an idea later broached by Freud was correlated by a systematic review of his works. Any references to Nietzsche in Freud’s writings and reported conversation were culled.
Results: Concepts of Nietzsche which are similar to those of Freud include
(a) the concept of the unconscious mind;
(b) the idea that repression pushes unacceptable feelings and thoughts into the unconscious and thus makes the individual emotionally more comfortable and effective;
(c) the conception that repressed emotions and instinctual drives later are expressed in disguised ways (for example, hostile feelings and ideas may be expressed as altruistic sentiments and acts);
(d) the concept of dreams as complex, symbolic “illusions of illusions” and dreaming itself as a cathartic process which has healthy properties; and
(e) the suggestion that the projection of hostile, unconscious feelings onto others, who are then perceived as persecutors of the individual, is the basis of paranoid thinking. Some of Freud’s basic terms are identical to those used by Nietzsche.
Conclusion: Freud repeatedly stated that he had never read Nietzsche. Evidence contradicting this are his references to Nietzsche and his quotations and paraphrases of him, in causal conversation and his now published personal correspondence, as well as in his early and later writings.
Parallels of Nietzsche & Freud: Humans, Dreams and Pleasure
https://medium.com/@alexwakeman/parallels-of-nietzsche-freud-humans-dreams-and-pleasure-961e26ec9f7c
In a Freudian context you could say he insists on the ego determining the terms of compliance with the super-ego. He is wary of any undue sense of guilt weighing down on the creative freedom of the human spirit and being made to comply with moral codes.
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The problem with Freud is not due to his theories themselves, but the uncanny religiosity found in the practice of psychoanalysis and from Freud’s disciples. Nietzsche teaches us that we must read all great thinkers with a pinch of salty scepticism and recognise that each has their own motivations and perspectives. We need to make up our own minds about such monumental concerns.
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It is not healthy to obsess over one’s thoughts in this way, and a better approach according to Nietzsche would be to just accept everything that enters the mind not as good, bad, ideal or base but simply as a consequence of being human (- all too human). When we forgo the self-criticism that we impose on ourselves in this way, be it through conformity to religious doctrine or Freudian psychoanalysis, we are enabled to take psychical flight and form our own notions of self. We are free to forge an identity of our own creation.
Nietzsche and Freud: Disaffinities
Given Nietzsche’s perspectivism, a ‘“scientific” interpretation of the world’, as the common 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 ‘physiological 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 psychoanalysis 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 disciplined 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 science … [ rests on] the misguided belief that dispassionate contemplation or observation can provide privileged insight into the supposedly rational … structures of the universe’ (2002: 12).
Download: The Intellectual Relationship between Nietzsche and Freud