Freud and Nietzsche

It is extraordinary how often one encounters the statement that Nietzsche was the forerunner of Freud and psychology, anticipating by intuition the insight and theories that the Viennese doctor and his followers had so painfully to acquire by other means. Nietzsche was quite explicit about his pioneering pre-eminence. “Before me there was no psychology at all,” he announced. And Freud himself appeared to support the assertion, repeating in a number of places his view that Nietzsche's “guesses and intuitions often agree in the most astonishing way with the laborious findings of psychoanalysis.”

With these authoritative statements from the two men involved, most scholars have seemed content to let the matter rest, and to forgo a critical examination of the relationship itself. Thus, while a cursory glance at a nearby major library discloses volumes on the relations of Nietzsche to Goethe, Rousseau, Kant, Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky, Burckhardt, Tolstoy, H. Spencer, Machiavelli, and Mussolini, among others, there is no comparable study on the relations of Nietzsche to Freud; nor, aside from a few random pages in various books, are there any significant studies contrasting Freud and Nietzsche.

I find my curiosity aroused by this state of affairs. Is the relationship so obvious that further reflection is obviated? Or, to take a good Freudian position, does the obvious simply prevent one from looking at what possesses in reality a deeper meaning than is indicated by the surface content? At the very least, would not an analysis of the similarities and differences between Freud and Nietzsche reveal