- On Putting Psychoanalysis into a Nietzschean Perspective
This presentation of “perspectivism” and its possible implications for psychoanalytic psychotherapy struck me as well considered, well crafted, and thoroughly reasonable. It also provoked a dissatisfaction that might have been avoided had the ghost of Nietzsche not been so insistently roused at the same time. It was as if one element of Nietzsche’s thinking had been abstracted in a way that bypassed the spirit of his philosophy and even risked betraying it. I shall be asking whether there are other implications for psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic truth of Nietzsche’s reasoning about perspectivism, possibly as important as those discussed here, that have been overlooked.
It is not surprising Nietzsche himself offers no systematic epistemology: this was never his primary concern. His attitude to knowing is consistently skeptical. (On questions of psychological knowledge, his comments are often prescient of a later skeptic, Wittgenstein.) However, Nietzsche’s skepticism, like his perspectivism, is subordinate to a more radical vision of philosophy’s purpose. Philosophy provides an instrument by which a fuller life can be lived. As such, Nietzsche’s work falls within a tradition of practical philosophy whose development I have traced elsewhere (Mace 1999). Concerned with the human rather than the natural world, and how a good life can be lived, its various proponents have often been subsumed under “moral philosophy.” One aspect of Nietzsche’s genius was to demonstrate how philosophy could engage with fundamental questions of living without being moralistic in any traditional sense. It is small wonder, coming on the eve of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology, that Nietzsche’s philosophy is usually seen by cultural historians as having helped to make them possible.
Among alternative ways a consideration of perspectivism and psychoanalysis might have been developed, one seems to shout for further attention. Let us assume that, although a supreme individualist, Nietzsche would still concede that psychoanalytic relationships carried a potential for human growth. It is then possible to see how his own criticisms of many of the kinds of assumptions found in the paper would promote a different understanding of truth’s place in depth psychology, when viewed in the light of perspectivism.
To begin with “perspectivism.” I believe there is a significant disparity between Nietzsche’s use of the term and that adopted here. In the first section of the paper, a perspective is identified [End Page 187] with the unitary outlook of an experiencing subject or ego. It is acknowledged that such perspectives will be individual because of the motivated character of perception and the partial nature of personal knowledge. To Nietzsche, all notions of an easily identified self or ego are, however, no more than a comforting illusion propagated through language. His criticisms of what it is to be a subject are more radical than any cited in the paper, because to acknowledge the importance of human drives is to acknowledge multiplicity and conflict. As Leslie Thiele has put this, “for Nietzsche, the multiple soul with its endless internal strife is the defining characteristic of man” (1990, 58). Nietzsche invokes “perspectivism” when developing his anti-Cartesian critique of the illusion of simple selfhood:
It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against. Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm.
(Nietzsche 1882–88, 267)
In the terms of the paper, therefore, a perspective is neither out in the world nor a personal cognitive construction. It expresses one part of a soul in a state of flux and competition. We all have access to many perspectives as, being human, we already contain a multitude of contrasting drives that are ready to emerge from within. A virtuosic demonstration of the multiplicity of perspective that can apparently be contained in one being will be found in Carl Jung’s seminars on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. (Jung 1988). In repeatedly unraveling the highly contrasting perspectives implicit in Zarathustra’s utterances, Jung links them to unconscious psychic contents and confirms the intrinsic multiplicity of the figure that is “Zarathustra.” By doing this in a...