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A psychoanalytic study of Friedrich Nietzsche, by Everett D. Martin. (Author's Abstract)
Nietzsche had a brilliant and cultivated mind and a personality endowed with great sensitiveness, violent emotional conflicts, and great candor. People who have been unsympathetic towards Nietzsche's teachings have for the most part been quite without scientific knowledge of psychology, and have for years sought to discredit his philosophy by appearing to find through all his writings evidences of an incipient psychosis. Max Nordau was a good example of this. It is enough to say that Nietzsche was throughout the greater part of his life unadjusted and that this fact influenced his thought to some extent. He felt this lack of adjustment himself, and a large part of his philosophy should best be understood as an attempt, to use his own words, 'to cure' himself. Undoubtedly, he struggled against a tendency to inversion and much of his philosophy of affirmation should doubtless be understood as compensation.
Was Nietzsche a paranoiac with a tendency to psychic homosexuality? Undoubtedly he had an unusual tendency to heroworship which long survived his adolescence. His periods of most successful functioning seem to have been those during which he was the friend and apologist for some great man. His relations to Ritschel and Wagner and his violent attachment to such historical persons as Goethe, Schopenhauer, are cases in point.