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Freud once wrote that Nietzsche was a “philosopher whose guesses and intuitions often agree in the most astonishing way with the laborious findings of psychoanalysis.”1 He referred to such insights in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.2 This paper does not aim at a psychoanalytic reading of the text, but examines some psychodynamically significant themes in an especially evocative section of Zarathustra, Part III, to which I will add what I believe are some observations germane to a future study of the author of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I will proceed by means of a close reading of the section in Part III entitled “On the Vision and the Riddle.”3
In the second section of Part III of Zarathustra, Nietzsche's forerunner of the Übermensch departs from the Blessed Isles where he had sojourned after his flight from the mountains and the many who disgusted him. In this section, he speaks twice directly to the reader, at least to those readers “drunk with riddles.” The ship which carries him has, like Zarathustra, come a long way. A second passenger has alerted the crew to his presence on board.
Zarathustra is strangely silent the first day out and maintains his quiet vigil until the following evening, when he announces that he will present those on board with a puzzling vision, “the vision of the loneliest,” which he has had “not