Nietzsche and Freud: Disaffinities

Abstract

Much has been written on the similarities between Nietzsche and Freud, and Freud himself spoke of his ‘return to Nietzsche’. I argue, however, that at least with respect to their conceptions of the nature of science – Freud’s psychoanalysis and Nietzsche’s ‘gay’ science – Freud never ‘returned’ to Nietzsche at all, but on the contrary, must be situated in the position of a significant departure or break. I focus on how these contrasting visions of science rest on fundamentally different perspectives on the nature of truth and reality and on the relation between science and art. Ultimately both see a primary task of their science to be the understanding of illness, and I will close by showing how their contrasting scientific temperaments led to equally divergent views of the meaning of health and illness. However deep Freud’s attraction to Nietzsche, he finally remained profoundly distant from him. Indeed, the affinities so often invoked between Nietzsche and Freud often tend to obscure far-reaching dis-affinities.