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A searching and interesting analysis into this work of Nietzsche which by comparing the psychological and metaphysical side of the Birth of Tragedy seems especially fitted for analytic investigation. The author bases his remarks on the well-known work of Winterstein, who sees a connection between Dyonisian plays, primitive initiation rites, and totem feasts. This same connection dawns on Nietzsche, though he does not actually realize the unconscious significance of death and rebirth in these customs. The development into actual tragedy—the Apollonian element, as Nietzsche calls it—is the sublimation of incestuous and homosexual tendencies. The hero, the ideal, which the Greeks created so successfully, is a sublimation of these tendencies combined with their own narcissism.
The detailed investigation comes to the conclusion that the finished product, the tragedy, is distinguished from its origin by a more conscious and stronger guilt on the part of the central figure. On the metaphysical side new light is thrown by Freud's remarks on the Uncanny, which open up new vistas by referring us to the artist's temporary regressions to the level of the infant, so far removed from the adult world of thought.