Nietzsche, Freud, and the
Challenge to Positivism
HI 153
Making of the Modern World
Week 14
What is/was positivism?
Auguste Comte (1798-1857)
• Scientific view of
world; ‘scientism’
• Only the observable
& measurable counts
(for which there is
positive proof)
• Enlightenment
rationality in action?
• Linked to notions of
progress
Irrationality
• Discovery of emotion and sexuality as
driving forces in human nature
• Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau
recognised the force of emotion in human
history (L. L. White, The Unconscious
before Freud, 1979)
• Romanticism: artistic movement of late
18th/early 19th centuries stresses the idea
of authenticity through feeling
Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900
• Trained as philologist (historian of
language), specialising in Greek
• Abandoned academia to become
polemicist and cultural critic
• Passing friendship with composer Wagner
• Aphoristic style spurned more traditional
essayistic approach
• 1889: nervous collapse; reduced to
vegetative state
• Ailing years spent with sister who
cultivated Nietzsche myth
The Birth of Tragedy (1872)
Apollo, god of
order, art, and
boundaries
Dionysus, god of dance,
drinking, debauchery &
dissolution of boundaries
Symbolises
individuating desire
& rationality
Symbolises human
consciousness &
irrationality
Socrates (469-399 BCE)
`father of rational
thought’; for Nietzsche,
he represented the spirit
of 19th-century
scientism/positivism
Voluntarism
Arthur
Schopenhauer,
1788-1860, author
of The World as
Will and Idea,
1819; early
influence on
Nietzsche
• Voluntas = Latin for will
• Human faculty to foresee actions
& project desire onto world
• Schopenhauer: the only reality is
the reality projected from self
(i.e. no objective reality outside
of self)
• Nietzsche’s theory of Will to
Power: all living beings (and all
energy sources) constantly seek
to expand their radius of power
Nietzsche and the Nazis
• Aristocratic values of the
‘overman’ (Ubermensch) versus
the ‘herd morality’ of the masses
Elisabeth Foerster-Nietzsche
greeting Hitler at the
Nietzsche Archive in Weimar
• Belief in great men of history
creating own values and
‘overcoming’ or fusing the rational
and irrational
•
Nietzsche’s sister fostered
connection with Nazism
• Had to airbrush out Nietzsche’s
actual contempt for German
Nationalism and anti-semitism
Deconstructing language
• Historical development of values
• Philosophy not exact science because of changing
meaning of words
• Saussure (1857-1913); structuralism; the relationship
between the signifier and the signified (word and thing) is
entirely arbitrary
• Through Saussure, Nietzsche an influence on 20th
century literary deconstructionists, like Jacques Derrida
• Beyond Good and Evil (1886); Genealogy of Morals
(1887)
Killing God
• Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72): religion is social construct;
projects human notions of goodness onto a supreme
being
• David Strauss, Leben Jesu (1835); historicised religion
by examining social context
• Dislike of ‘other worldliness’ of Christianity with its stress
on life after death
• ‘Eternal recurrence’: would you welcome the perpetual
repetition of the moment? If Yes, you have affirmed life,
in Nietzsche’s view
• Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-85): an anti-Bible, loosely
based on Zoroastrianism; source of Nietzsche’s claim
that ‘God is dead’
Sigmund Freud, 1856-1939
• Founder of psycho-analysis
• Began career as neuro-biologist;
remained a scientist, using rational
means to explore the irrational;
Sulloway, Freud. Biologist of the
Mind (1992)
• Treatment of hysteria in patients led
to formulation of the `unconscious’
Freud’s method
• Talking cure: analyst listens to patient, allowing much free
association
• Word association
• Dream analysis
• The use of `science’ to cure
• Unconscious is formed by the process of repression
• Unconscious reveals itself in dreams, in slips of the tongue,
and through the process of psycho-analysis itself
• Dreams are `the royal road to the unconscious’
Freud’s Model
• Superego = parental values; society;
civilisation
• Ego = Latin for ‘I/me’: the rational
individual self, mediating between cultural
constraints from above and primal urges
from below
• Id = Latin for ‘it’: the unconscious self
which regulates automatic behaviour
(breathing during sleep), but also primal
instincts, such as reproduction and selfassertion
‘The Ego and the Id’, 1923.
‘The ego seeks to bring the influence of the external world
to bear upon the id and its tendencies, and endeavors to
substitute the reality principle for the pleasure principle
which reigns unrestrictedly in the id … . The ego
represents what may be called reason and common
sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions.’
Freud was ill-served by his translators. See Brenda
Maddox, Freud’s Wizard. The Enigma of Ernest Jones
(2006) for a recent account of them.
Infantile sexuality
• Oral stage (birth -1 year): fixation on mother’s breast, as
source of all good and not-good
• Anal stage (toddler): fixation on excretory functions
• Phallic stage (child): beginnings of sexual awareness;
• Oedipus Complex as child vies for maternal affections
with father
• Childhood abuse: were patients reporting real abuse
which Freud had to turn into metaphor to avoid the
stigma attached to even mentioning such things?
Civilisation and its Discontents (1930)
• Investigation of social relations, art and religion; Western
mores distort personality
• ‘The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was
greatest before there was any civilization, though then, it
is true, it had for the most part no value.’
• Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation (1955): `history’ is not the
Marxist anti-capitalist class struggle but fight against
repression of the instincts
• Fuels libertarian movements of 1960s in which selfemancipation through revolution of self is the goal
Psycho-history
• Can Freudian models predict behaviour, individual and
collective?
• Erikson, Young Man Luther (1958) explained individual
and religious development by medical and psychological
episodes in the young Luther’s life
• Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism
(1931): Nazism released the psychosexual energy of
masses in rallies
Freud and art
• Artists draw on interior world
• Expressionism: art is not an emulation of nature but
projection of the interior world of human beings,
particularly of the artists
• Surrealism: emphasises word association, dream
worlds
• Edward
Munch, The
Scream (1893)
Surrealism
Salvador Dali, The Great
Masturbator (1929)
Freud and capitalism
Edward Bernays,
1891-1995, Freud’s
nephew and founder
of motivational
research
• Advertising seeks to influence
subliminal decision-making process
• ‘If we understand the mechanism
and motives of the group mind, it is
now possible to control and
regiment the masses according to
our will without their knowing it.’
(Bernays)
• Positional goods reflecting desire
for social status; consumerism and
the pleasure principle
David Eder (1865–1936)
psycho-analyst
• Deptford Clinic and Open-Air School, London
• North of England Education Conference, Jan
1913
• `Child Life and Sex Teaching’, Yorkshire
Observer, 1 Jan 1914
• M. D. Eder and Mrs Eder, `The Conflicts of the
Unconscious in the Child’, Child Study, 9:6
(1916), pp. 79-83.