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Pastor Karl Ludwig Nietzsche had a neurotic constitution that may have given Friedrich Wilhelm, his son, an innate tendency to introversion and regression. The Pastor had asked to be removed from the city, where he suffered much from nervous headaches, to the quiet country rectory where Friedrich was born. The suggestions of Nietzsche's religious home so powerfully reinforced his inherited capacity for the inhibition of impulse that it is difficult to study the pregenital stages of Nietzsche's libido in the absence of a psychoanalytical biography.
In his early years Nietzsche showed an unusual intensity of moral scrupulosity and self-control. His sister noticed his silent reaction to punishment, his love of solitude, and his thoughtful, earnest behavior. “The serious introspective child, with his dignified politeness, seemed so strange to the other boys that advances from either side were out of the question.” When the child Nietzsche felt a scruple he would leave his game, hide in an obscure corner, and refuse to come out to play with his sister until he had either allowed or condemned his desire: when the man Nietzsche felt a problem on his conscience he would go into solitude and say that he felt like a philosopher in a hole.
Nietzsche's hypersensitiveness to stimuli must have led to an intense enjoyment of autoerotic activity in babyhood. There are traces in Nietzsche's actions and ideas of a strong oral erotism and an intense disgust which was expressed in attacks of vomiting and in loathing for mankind in the mob. As a student Nietzsche had a great fondness for sucking sweets; and his egocentric doctrine of power may be in part a reaction against his infantile feeling of impotence when he no longer possessed the means of oral gratification. There remain a few indications of his anal erotism, though it seems to have been mainly sublimated in highly productive paths. Nietzsche knew his lack of a conscious tendency to hate: “With enmities I was never long in earnes