Freud, Nietzsche and the Challenge to Positivism

(Powerpoint and handout will be on the website)

Mankind does not represent a development toward something better or stronger or higher, in the sense accepted today. “Progress” is merely a modern idea, that is, a false idea.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Preface to The Antichrist (1888)

I have been careful to refrain from the enthusiastic prejudice that sees our civilization as the most precious thing we possess or can acquire, and believes that its path will necessarily lead us to heights of perfection hitherto undreamt of.

Siegmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (1930)

Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche at Shulpforta

Jacob Burckhardt

Richard Wagner

Lou Salomé, Paul Rée, and Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche and Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, 1899

Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche welcomes Adolf Hitler to the Nietzsche Archive, 1933

Friedrich Nietzsche, draft of a letter to Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, December 1887

In the meantime I've seen proof, black on white, that Herr Dr. Förster has not yet severed his connection with the anti-Semitic movement. [...] The separation between us is thereby decided in really the most absurd way. Have you grasped nothing of the reason why I am in the world? [...] Now it has gone so far that I have to defend myself hand and foot against people who confuse me with these anti-Semitic canaille; after my own sister, my former sister, and after Widemann more recently have given the impetus to this most dire of all confusions. After I read the name Zarathustra in the anti-Semitic Correspondence my forbearance came to an end. I am now in a position of emergency defense against your spouse's Party. These accursed anti-Semite deformities shall not sully my ideal!!

Socrates

(c. 470–399 BC)

Sigmund Freud

Freud’s Birthplace

Josef Breuer and his wife

Bertha Pappenheim (‘Anna O.’)

Jean-Martin Charcot

Sigmund and Martha Freud

Freud’s Couch

Alfred Adler

Carl Jung

Freud and Jung at Clark University, 1909

Freud at his desk