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It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of—namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown…. To be sure, in the case of scholars, in the case of really scientific men, it may be otherwise—“better” if you will; there may really be such a thing as an “impulse to knowledge,” some kind of small, independent clock-work, which, when well wound up, works away industriously to that end, without the rest of the scholarly [autobiographical] impulses taking any material part therein.
This statement anticipated and could well have been written by Freud, yet Freud was only 29 when Nietzsche made this observation in 1885. It has always been the responsibility of “scholars,” in Nietzsche's terms, to appraise whether “the small, independent clock-work” of scientific theorists has avoided the subjectivity of unconscious autobiography. It was timely that the editors of this journal elected to review a book that highlights the unresolved interrelated conceptual problems of drives, ego, and self that theoretically divide the profession and lead to disparate