Freud's Philosophical Inheritance: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in Beyond the Pleasure Principle

This essay explores the possible significance of Freud's references to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. It attempts to reveal two sides of Freud's philosophical inheritance and explores the structure of Freud's ambivalence toward his intellectual predecessors.

I see that you are using the circuitous route of medicine to attain your first ideal, the physiological understanding of man, while I secretly nurse the hope of arriving by the same route at my own original objective, philosophy. For that was my original ambition before I knew what I was intended to do in the world.

Are not Freud's repeated declarations of indifference to questions of priority and originality simply, in fact, so many negations which serve to conceal his fantasy of mastering his predecessors? A fantasy which concurs with the fantasy of the whole of western metaphysics since Aristotle.

What did Freud inherit from “philosophy”? And what effect has this inheritance had on the relationship between “philosophy” and “psychoanalysis”? In “To Speculate—on Freud” in The Post Card Derrida (1980) draws our attention back to the overwrought topic of Freud's troubled relationship with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. According to Derrida, Freud disavows Schopenhauer and Nietzsche:

No more than to Nietzsche, nothing is owed to Schopenhauer. As such psychoanalytic theory owes him nothing. It has no more inherited from him than one can inherit conceptual simulacra … Schopenhauer's and Nietzsche's words and notions resemble psychoanalytic

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discourse to the point of being mistaken for it. But they are lacking the equivalent of a content proper to psychoanalysis, which alone can guarantee value, usage, and exchange (p. 266).

Why did Freud disavow the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche when these texts contain formulations that are so similar to those of early psychoanalytic thought?1 In 1925 in “An Autobiographical St