Nietzsche, Freud, Benn, and the Azure Spell of Liguria

Edith Jacobson: Gefängnisaufzeichnungen (Edith Jacobson’s Black Prison Notebook)

“…Set in the cultural landscape of excavated Pompeii, the story exemplifies Freud’s idea of the spatialization of time (buried/repressed; mummified/denied; excavated/analyzed) and became a trigger for his metaphor of psychoanalysis as an archaeology of the mind. See Martina Kolb, “Guilt Trips on Royal Roads: Freud’s Ligurian Affinities,” in Kolb (2013), pp. 126–162.…”

Nietzsche and Freud: Disaffinities

“…There has been much speculation as to the truth of Freud’s claim 1 – after all, Freud was a member of a reading group in Vienna in the mid 1880s that Paul-Laurent Assoun describes as ‘infatuated’ with Nietzsche (2000: xix); Lou Andreas Salomé reports Freud reading Nietzsche to her (Kolb, 2013: 150); his library included the complete works of Nietzsche (Kolb, 2013: 150); and from time to time Freud refers to Nietzsche’s ideas explicitly both in his published works and in his correspondence. 2 Much has been written on the affinities between Freud and Nietzsche, showing extensive commonalities in their critiques of religion and philosophy, their questioning of the foundations of morality, their destabilizing and reconfiguration of the ‘self’, their inquiries into the nature of culture, their accounts of repression and sublimation, their preoccupations with the meaning of health and illness, and, most importantly, their commitment to a ‘depth psychology’ where the domain of the unconscious supplants that of consciousness as what Freud calls ‘the core of our being’ (1953g: 603) and what Nietzsche refers to as ‘the eternal basic text of homo natura ’ (1968a: §230).…”

“… 1. See, for example, Anderson (1980), Assoun (2000), Cybulska (2015), Kolb (2013), and Lehrer (1995). Reinhard Gasser, however, presents evidence that Freud likely never devoted any serious attention to Nietzsche (2013: 3–173). …”