Freud and Nietzsche
By Paul-Laurent Assoun
Translated by Richard L. Collier, Jr.
Continuum, 2002
Reviewed by Paul Bishop, Glasgow
“Another thing I don’t like to hear,” Nietzsche wrote, “is the infamous ‘and’ [ein berüchtigtes ‘und’): the Germans talk of ‘Goethe and Schiller’ […] and with my own ears, although only from university professors, I have heard talk of ‘Schopenhauer and Hartmann’…”. (1) So what, one wonders, would he have made of “Nietzsche and Freud” — a conjunction which, in the words of Paul-Laurent Assoun, “has been recognized and accredited for a long time, indeed from the very beginnings of psychoanalysis” (p.1)? Over the last decade or so, the presence of Nietzsche in Freud’s work has received increasing attention, in the form of monographs written in a variety of languages, including English (2) and German. (3) In the French-speaking world, one of the first book-length treatments was Assoun’s, followed in 2003 by Éric Vartzbed’s study. (4) Assoun’s monograph, Freud et Nietzsche, was first published in 1980 as the conclusion to a trilogy that had begun with Freud, la philosophie et les philosophes (1976) and continued with Marx et la répétition historique (1978). In 1998, the work was reissued with a new preface, which acts in several respects as a convenient summary of its central argument. Assoun, himself a psychoanalyst, as well as a professor of philosophy at Paris VII, has written prolifically on an extraordinarily wide range of philosophical and cultural questions relating to psychoanalysis. In addition, he is a regular participant in programmes about psychoanalysis broadcast on France Culture (including, last year, a discussion of the celebrated Schreber case). (5) Yet, until now, little of his work has been available in English, so it is greatly to the credit of Continuum, the titles of whose expanding catalogue never fail to fascinate (see www.continuumbooks.com), that it has reissued in paperback this English version (first published by The Athlone Press in 2000) of Assoun’s study. With it a Standardwerk among European analysts and scholars is widely available to the English-speaking world. It is also a matter for rejoicing that, a quarter of a century after its first publication in French, Assoun’s work can be seen to have withstood the test of time.
One of the most famous methodological metaphors is genealogy; Nietzsche is an obvious example (although the genetic method is found much earlier in, say, Herder). Freud made use (as did, later, Foucault) of the idea of archaeology. For Assoun, however, the relationship between Nietzsche and Freud is best grasped in terms of palaeontology: the reconstitution of two skeletons with partially similar bones, which “belong to the same genre” but “remain under specific principles of organization” (p. 50, cf. p.184). At the same time, Assoun is concerned to show that, in the Nietzsche-Freud relationship, a broader disciplinary issue is at stake, and so he notes (in his preface to the 1998 edition) that his “exegesis-critique” also “interrogates the interface between philosophy and psychoanalysis” (p. xv). Although both philosophy and psychoanalysis engage Assoun’s interest, it would be fair to say that, in terms of method, psychoanalysis has the upper hand.
In Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood (1910), Freud wrote that “psychoanalysis has made us familiar with the intimate connection between the father-complex and belief in God; it has shown us that a personal God is, psychologically, nothing other than an exalted father.” (6) For Assoun, this means that “what psychoanalysis never ceases articulating is that the subject is taken in a constituent relation to prohibition, which is personified in the (unconscious) function of the father” (p. xxxvi). Eschewing “any ‘psycho-biographical’ temptation”, Assoun nevertheless reads the proclamation of the death of God in the light of the early death of Nietzsche’s father. Licence for this approach can be found in Nietzsche’s enigmatic remarks in Ecce Homo, “as my father I have already died, as my mother I still live and grow old”; and, “in yet another point I am merely my father once more and as it were the continuation of his life after an all too early death”. (7) In his early autobiographical texts, Nietzsche returned time and again to his father’s death (and, although Assoun does not investigate this possibility, it is perhaps worth noting that, some forty years ago, the late R. J. Hollingdale suggested one scene in “Of the Vision and the Riddle”, §2, in Part III of Zarathustra, had its source in Nietzsche’s memory of discovering his dead father). (8) Freud argued that the identification with the dead father constituted a central element of melancholy—and it is melancholy that, in Assoun’s view, could well have marked “the great scene of Nietzsche’s final collapse, in Turin” (p. xxxvii).
At the same time, Assoun is constantly alert to the historical dimension of Freud’s engagement with Nietzsche—to what he calls their “strange contemporaneity”; after all, Nietzsche was only a dozen years older then Freud (p.3). So when, in 1868, Nietzsche became professor of philology at Basel, Freud had yet to begin his medical studies; in 1873, the year of publication of the first Untimely Meditations, Freud entered the Faculty of Medicine in Vienna; in 1882, as Nietzsche explored the idea of eternal recurrence, Freud became a physician; while Nietzsche continued work on Zarathustra, Freud was studying hysteria in Paris with Charcot; when Nietzsche was approaching his final crisis in 1888, Freud had only just started outlining his psychoanalytic ideas in his correspondence with Fliess; and when Nietzsche collapsed, Freud was still only 33; not until 1899, the year of Nietzsche’s death, did The Interpretation of Dreams appear. The passing-away of Nietzsche thus coincides with the birth of psychoanalysis.
Furthermore, Nietzsche’s presence in the early years of psychoanalysis, when its tenets were being formulated, is ummistakeable. For instance, he formed the topic of discussion at the meetings of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society on at least two occasions: on 1 April 1908, when Eduard Hitschmann discussed the ascetic ideal in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals; and again on 28 October 1908, when Adolf Häutler presented a lecture on Ecce Homo (pp. 6-11). During the discussion in the second meeting, Freud observed: “Nietzsche has transformed ‘being’ (ist) into ‘duty’ (soll), but such a ‘duty’ is a stranger to science. In that, Nietzsche remained a moralist and thus was unable to free himself from the theologian” (cited p.186). In this remark—a deliberate echo of Hume’s discussion of the “is”-“ought” dilemma or the fact-value distinction in his Treatise of Human Nature (Book 3, Part 1, §1)?—Assoun locates an important distinction between Nietzsche and Freud. Both thinkers refer to the Copernican revolution, (9) but their intentions are, as Assoun observes, significantly different. For Nietzsche’s revolution is “axiological, metonymizing Sein into Sollen,” while Freud’s “upholds Sein, even if to erect it in Sollen, and erecting in consequence the requirement for a cognizance of ethics” (p.188). Assoun concludes that Nietzsche and Freud are “like two discourses set up face to face that, despite their different codes and distinct keys, nevertheless cross the same zones of language and there determine the form, each radical in their fashion, of subversion” (p.189).
On 21-22 September 1911 the Third International Psychoanalytic Congress was held in Weimar. Thus “by an accident of history and geography,” the “Freudian court” actually sat “in the Nietzschean citadel,” that is, the town where Nietzsche spent his final years, as well as “a place that, symbolically, held the vestiges of the great Goethe” (pp.11-12). Hanns Sachs and Ernest Jones paid a visit to Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche; Assoun notes the “limited but precise” significance of the event, Nietzsche being the sole contemporary philosopher who received, “at the very moment of its institutionalization,” such a “manifestation of respectful sympathy from a faction of the official analytic movement” (p.14). And it was in Weimar that Lou Andreas-Salomé—a living link with Nietzsche, and the great rival to his sister—made contact with Freud. Again, an affinity; again, a difference. For Assoun, Lou’s account of Freud’s reaction to Nietzsche’s “Hymn to Life” (based on her own “Prayer to Life”) is highly revealing. “A difference of sensibility” traces “a line of divergence between Nietzsche and Freud,” he writes, distinguishing “the cry from the murmur, the dithyramb from the elegy, tragedy from witticism” (p.28), so that “where Nietzsche’s soul dilates, Freud’s soul ‘contracts’”—in the phrase from Wilhelm Busch—“‘into the tiny cavity of a molar’” (p. 29). In short, “this is what stops Freud at the gates of the temple of Dionysus!” (p. 28).
So if, in these early—and defining—years, Freud is, as Assoun writes, “bombarded with Nietzschean solicitations; everywhere around him, he discovers Nietzsche,” it is also the case that “he has constantly to reiterate his act of avoidance” (p. 25). These solicitations, together with these acts of avoidance, take numerous forms, and Assoun’s study offers a comprehensive consideration of Freud’s explicit—and not so explicit—remarks on Nietzsche. In the conclusion of his letter to Eduard Silberstein of 13 March 1875, Freud’s reticence to conclude his letter “And thus we live, thus fortune guides our steps” is explained by Freud himself with reference to Nietzsche’s onslaught in his first Untimely Meditation (§4) on David-Friedrich Strauss for using this phrase (pp. xxi, xxiii). One might also remember the origin of this phrase in a poem by Goethe; and by noting the subterranean presence of Goethe in the writings of both thinkers (p. xxvi), Assoun hints at the significance of this shared intellectual and literary source.
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