Inside, outside Nietzsche

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Friedrich Nietzsche is both subject and interlocutor in this innovative study. The book mirrors the psychoanalytic situation, mediating between the interiority of Nietzsche's biography (and the philosophical world he created for himself) and the external world challenged by his philosophy.Eugene Victor Wolfenstein, a distinguished social theorist and practicing psychoanalyst, focuses on the opposition between the foundational concepts of psychoanalytic theory and Nietzsche's linked concepts of the will to power and perspectivism. Through critical engagement with these Nietzschean concepts, he brings them into the purview of psychoanalytic theory and practice.Using this revised version of psychoanalytic theory, Wolfenstein then turns to Nietzsche's biography. He contends that Nietzsche philosophized from within a transitional space between the maternal and paternal extremes of the male imaginary, a space in which gender identity is notably unstable, and sublimity consorts with the most abject misery. This psychical location lies behind and takes form as Nietzsche's conceptions of eternal return and the feminine.Finally, Wolfenstein explores Nietzsche's genealogy of moral appraisals from a psychoanalytic perspective and in the light of Nietzsche's biography. He concludes that Nietzsche's revaluation of values leaves us painfully short on both love and compassion.