Friedrich Nietzsche embodied philosopher, psychologist, poet, madman, and provocateur, occupying a fraught place between nihilism and self-becoming. His reputed breakdown in January 1889, triggered by a violent scene with a horse, marked a collapse into private madness and later familial care. Sigmund Freud continually drew on Nietzschean insights about hidden drives, moral conflict, and the subterranean life of the psyche, translating them into concepts of id and superego. Nietzsche proposed that genuine transformation requires a plunge into darkness that risks madness. Freud pursued a contrasting path of bringing unconscious material into conscious understanding to enable healing.
Who was Nietzsche? Philosopher, psychologist, poet, madman, provocateur-these names orbit around him but never settle. He is the "strange German," dismissed by some as the father of nihilism and amorality, revered by others as the prophet of self-becoming. No thinker has hovered so closely to the abyss or beckoned so many to peer into its depths. Fewer still have so haunted the origins of the psychoanalytic revolution, both as inspiration and as fateful warning.
It is now legend: In January 1889, at Turin square, Nietzsche, so the story goes, witnesses a cab driver savagely beating his exhausted horse. Moved by an overwhelming surge of empathy or pain, he rushes to the animal, clings to its neck, and weeps uncontrollably. Some accounts claim he shields the horse, collapsing in tears, uttering words of compassion or madness-begging forgiveness of the horse, of humanity, of the world itself.
Freud, the sculptor of the unconscious, never ceased mining Nietzsche's "subterranean galleries." Both gazed long into the night-side of the soul-into that labyrinth where forbidden wishes, childhood wounds, and the secret machinery of morality coil and writhe. "God is dead," thundered Nietzsche; the gods, Freud replied, had taken up residence within us, as the punishing superego and the shape-shifting id.
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