ABSTRACT
According to Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who ever lived or was ever likely to live. This deep self-knowledge is revealed in a string of books which have stood the test of time both as literature and as philosophy. They are idiosyncratic, fragmentary, infuriating, and at times exhilarating. They defy simple analysis, and summaries cannot do justice to the richness and diversity of their contents. Most contain passages which, it must be said, are little more than the ranting of a madman and which anticipate his eventual mental breakdown. A shadow is cast over all of them by the fact that anti-semites and fascists have, by selective quotation, found support for their views in them; however, the ideas that some Nazis found so attractive are, for the most part, caricatures of Nietzsche’s philosophy.
