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The degree of introspection achieved by Nietzsche had never been achieved by anyone, nor is it likely to be reached again.
Nietzsche correctly characterized himself as an enigma that is hard to solve. He contrasted his life as a lonely ignored outsider to that of the scholar who has adjusted to society, and he presented many masks and experiments with various belief systems and literary forms. These masks demonstrate his denial of the absolute unity of the personality (Morgan, 1965). For Nietzsche, nobody is ultimately any one thing, there is no essential self. He would argue that our “sense of self” so emphasized by Kohut is a myth, an illusion, a prejudice.
The curious back-and-forth movement in Nietzsche's writings between intimately personal comments and significant philosophical thought makes him impossible to classify (J. Stern, 1979). A man of tremendous intellectual energy who kept starting over, he experienced the world as fragmented and conveyed it to us as such; this experience of fragmentation depicted by Nietzsche suggests he belongs in the realm of Kohut's self psychology. Kohut (1978) wrote that the modern artist heralds the coming fragmentation of his or her culture, and Nietzsche's superlative literary prose and poetry clearly heralded the breakup of European civilization in World War I. In this article, however, I will concentrate primarily on Nietzsche's perspectivism and show its relationship to Kohut's concentration on empathy and to recent work labeled as constructivism in modern psychoanalysis.