Back to a crossroad: Nietzsche, Freud, and the east

Abstract

Nietzsche's work reveals a gradual reversal of his initial antipathy to Buddhism, coming to view the latter no longer as an anaesthetising religious neurosis, but as a methodology for negation that inspires a conquest over ressentiment, a healing of internalized division, and a celebrative existence. This trend was influenced by his relationship to Schopenhauer and Deussen, and his own personal maturation. Both the source of this philosophy and the reasons for Nietzsche's failure to realise it in his own life are traced to conflictual intrapsychic oppositions in his own parental internalizations. Freud's central concepts (the unconscious, instinctual repression, neurosis, internalized good and bad parental objects, and the discontents of civilization) were modeled on Nietzsche's thinking. Yet Freud rejected oriental mysticism and its somatic focus as regressive. His failure to take up Nietzsche's eventual insight into Buddhism, and his consequent pessimism, are attributable to his personal and theoretical resistance to the issue of the early symbiotic union of mother and infant.