Liliane Frey-Rohn, Friedrich Nietzsche A Psychological Approach
to his Life and Work
At the very start of the work, Nietzsche announces his momentous struggle with traditional Christianity by proclaiming the now fully conscious notion of the ‘death of God.’[1] In effect, when ‘God dies – the central numen of an era – then His leadership must undeniably be replaced by another authority.
Nietzsche realized a new image of God in the figure of Zarathustra, who casts
off his previous existence in the world of light to provide man with a new
awareness of good and evil.
The latter is initially limited to heralding the overman,[2] a supra-personal being who will reveal new meaning for the earth.
At the same time, this event calls for a great sacrifice, the downfall of
conventional man, who has been rooted in a collective morality.
The tragedy Nietzsche foresaw has thus declared itself. Zarathustra states laconically:
“God is dead … I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be
overcome…. The overman is the meaning of the earth…. Behold, I teach
you the overman: he is the lightning, he is the frenzy.”[3]
In setting himself this new aim, Zarathustra-Nietzsche diverges greatly from the traditional view of God.
The worldly realm of corporeal reality has now usurped God’s unworldly one, with earthly values replacing the absolute ideals of their impotent, afterworldly equivalents.
Man entered the empty space left behind by the “old God” and prepared a new spirit of creativity.
By announcing the “new tablets” of the “overman” the focus was shifted to a new type of man who would decide the fate of common humanity:
“What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he [is] an overture and a going under.”[4]
The earthbound destiny of man functioned as a bridge reaching across to the overman.
Zarathustra’s proclamation fulfils the role of a revolutionary vision of the future rotating around the death of God, the overman and the downfall of existing man.
Each of these concepts represents a shaking of the hitherto valid conception of the world.
The nearly 2,000 year old conception of a suprapersonal God of light, truth and perfection is relentlessly called into question.
With it, the idea of a kindly Father in control of man and His world collapses.
Man is thrown back onto himself and deprived of protection and security in his life.
Who or what can guarantee his surviving this disastrous situation?
What Nietzsche had in mind was making mankind aware of an idea that was already latent within the unconscious.
Although it had not yet been clearly stated, people had been touching on this repressed complex of ideas about God since the French Revolution.
Along with theology – represented by David Strauss and Auguste Comte – science and philosophy had made progress towards ridding the world of God.
We need only mention the works of Voltaire, Diderot, Hegel and Fichte.
In a late work, Nietzsche put it this way:
“Why atheism today? – ‘The father’ in God has been thoroughly refuted;
likewise: ‘the judge,’ ‘the rewarder.’ Also his ‘free will’: He does not hear
– and if he heard, he still would not know how to help.”[5]
Experience teaches us that the individual’s attitude towards the concept of God is highly important.
From a psychological viewpoint, the existence of the suprapersonal, archetypal factor can be neither denied nor invalidated without endangering the soul.
The psychological health of the human being depends to a great degree on acknowledging this, both externally and internally.
If he denies its existence on the outside, the question arises as to whether he has accepted it on the inside.
If he then also denies such a reality within, he will either fall prey to deflation and despair, or attribute the divine to his own ego (inflation).
Whenever he identifies himself with this, he overestimates his own personality[6] to a dangerous extent, losing his detachment from things human and claiming for himself the power that belongs to God alone.
Let us look at how C.G. Jung follows up the effects of such behavior:
“Nietzsche was no atheist, but his God was dead. The result of this demise
was a split in himself, and he felt compelled to call the other self
‘Zarathustra,’ or at times, ‘Dionysus.’ … The tragedy of Zarathustra is
that, because his God died, Nietzsche himself became a god; and this
happened because he was no atheist…. It seems dangerous for such a man
to assert that ‘God is dead’: he instantly becomes a victim of inflation …
inflation and man’s hubris … elected the ego, in all its ridiculous
paltriness, to become the lord of the universe…. The individual ego is much
too small, its brain is much too feeble, to incorporate all the projections
withdrawn from the world. Ego and brain burst asunder in the effort …
.”[7]/[8]
It is easy to trace how the tendency to overestimate himself that had lain
dormant in Nietzsche from the start – as a child he felt he was destined for
something special – increased in strength as he grew older.
The early death of his father hindered the fortification of his character and, instead of being able to project inner images onto his father and thus develop a fully formed
manliness, the archetype of the great man awakened in his unconscious.
True to his dependent nature, Nietzsche became fascinated by those who bore the
projection of ‘higher men’ and ‘great educators’ – I remind the reader of
Schopenhauer and Wagner; but his overly high expectations were repeatedly
disappointed.[9]
With no one to turn to but himself, the idea of the overman[10] crystallized within him, and rather than establish an inner relationship to its overpowering content, he began to identify himself with it.
The inclination to overestimate himself, which in Zarathustra had already reached a questionable level, steadily grew into the near self-deification of Ecce homo.
The excessive pathos it held prefigures his insanity.
The more vehemently he expressed himself, the more likely it was that he was in the
throes of a repressed conflict between the identification of ego and God on the one hand, and inner doubt about his ‘divine mission’ on the other.
Although he ‘knew’ from an early stage about the danger of killing God, which would replace security with isolation and slide him into the ‘eternal void,’ he was pulled along by an inner process and incapable of avoiding the catastrophe.
At that time, he also wrote:
“If we do not make a great renunciation and a lasting victory over ourselves out of the death of God, then we must bear the loss.”[11] What Nietzsche meant was the creation of a greater being to supercede and excel Christian man. When he was still under the sway of the Schopenhauerian spirit, he had already tried to capture this notion of a godlike man in the concept of genius.[12] Even then, he had described this type of man as belonging to the “highest exemplars of humanity.”
This concept became less convincing with Nietzsche’s exposure of ideals, and was
replaced by that of the ‘hero.’
From then on, potency and strength characterized the “great man of the future” with Nietzsche increasingly affording him the attributes of the man of power, and thereby obviously compensating for his own physical weakness!
In the end, it was the idea of the overman that won out, exhibiting a ‘new will’ capable of creating “meaning for the world” and originating “beyond good and evil.”[13]
He apportioned him the task of shaping the world anew and legislating over
humanity.
With this idea of a world-creator, the image of archetypal man had formed within him, probably an unconscious image lodged in man’s psyche since the mists of prehistory.
The archetype attempts to establish the unity of the world as its creator and the bringer of light.
The loss of the concept of God and the resultant transference of psychic energy to the unconscious made recourse to this most ancient of genotypes possible.
Seen in terms of the dynamics of the psyche, no energy is, in fact, lost: the power-flow released by the concept of God activates latent archetypes of the world-redeemer that had been dormant in the unconscious.
The form of the new symbol varies according to the religious expectations associated with it.
In Nietzsche’s day, this hope was projected onto the déesse raison – reason, – which had been elevated to its throne by the French Revolution.
Nevertheless, the issue still arose as to who or what might now exorcise the threats emerging in this age of materialism and capitalism, i.e., onto which figures these powers may be transferred and projected.
Did Nietzsche’s overman measure up to this expectation?
The weakness in his vision clearly lay in his projecting the function of the redeemer onto the outside and into the future.
It was thus removed from human control and transported into a mythical time span.
From a psychological point of view, it would have been much more fruitful to have withdrawn the projection to the inside, whence it came.
As a symbol of the self or of a suprapersonal spiritual power, it would have had the
advantage of allowing the individual a conscious relationship with the image or concept of God.
Nietzsche had no feeling for such a possibility; his age was not yet prepared for a psychology of the unconscious that Freud was to initiate and Jung would carry forward.
As it was, Nietzsche’s personal ego was sucked into the powerful maelstrom contained by his projection, with the result that he identified himself with the autonomous complex of a godlike being – the overman – and so cut himself off from the vital, regulating powers it also possessed.
Despite repressing the dangers posed to himself by the death of God,
Nietzsche understood all too well the consequences of mankind divorcing itself from an unworldly concept of God.
Thanks to the prophetic gift that led him to surmise the hidden connections behind the surface events of his age, he was able to predict the threat to the world caused by wars, the rise to power of tyrants and, equally important, the creation of huge power blocs.
With the over-cultivation of the intellect, he expected a corresponding development in technology (airship travel), a vision that came all too true in the 20th century, with its explosion of technical inventions (space travel, electronics, atomic fission).[14]
It would be a misreading of the facts to attribute to Nietzsche’s prophecies on the growth of power-politics a direct causal effect on the political future, even though his remarks were frequently misunderstood, particularly with regard to National Socialism.
On this subject, I would like to quote Mazzino Montinari, one of the two editors of
the critical edition of Nietzsche’s works.
He writes:
“It is impossible to talk of a real National Socialist assimilation of Nietzsche’s thought.
Recent research has shown Nietzsche to have been virtually unknown to the founders of National Socialism.
Alfred Rosenberg, who vindicated him with the 20th century myth that he stood as
an antecedent of the ‘movement,’ puts Nietzsche in the dubious company of Paul de Lagarde (whom Nietzsche despised) and Houston Chamberlain (who, for his part, rejected Nietzsche from a racial and Wagnerian standpoint).
Hitler himself had no connection with Nietzsche; it is doubtful that he even read him.
It would be tantamount to carrying the ‘owls to Athens’ to quote the countless passages in which Nietzsche speaks out against the racial theories of the genuine forerunners of National Socialism in general and anti-Semitism in particular.
He even had the occasion of corresponding with a future National Socialist deputy: his two letters to this man truly mock the confused racial ideology of the 1880’s with their – as Nietzsche put it – dubious concepts of ‘Aryanism’ and ‘Germanism.’
Shortly after this correspondence with Nietzsche, Theodor Fritsch reviewed Beyond Good and Evil (1887) and (rightly) found it a ‘glorification of the Jewish people’ and a ‘curt rejection of anti-Semitism.’
Nietzsche was dismissed by him as a ‘fisherman in philosophical shallows’ on whom all and any understanding of national existence is lost and who grows philosophical ‘cabbage like an old woman.’
According to Fritsch, Nietzsche’s statements in Beyond Good and Evil concerning the Jews were the intellectual fondlings and shallow chit-chat of a Jewicised parlourroom academic’; ‘luckily,’ he wrote, ‘Nietzsche’s books will be read by hardly more than two dozen people.’
These were Nietzsche’s concrete connections with anti-Semitism and Germanism during his lifetime.
Yet, even today, Nietzsche is regarded by the general public as the intellectual pioneer of National Socialism.” Cf. R.F. Krummel, Nietzsche und ~Liliane Frey-Rohn, Friedrich Nietzsche A Psychological Approach to his Life and Work, Page 87-92
