ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a handful of Nietzschean thought experiments that are pivotal to an investigation of psychotherapeutic theory and practice. In relation to psychotherapy, the question then is whether a particular form of therapeutic practice is life-affirming, or whether it is fuelled by the instinct of revenge – by the need to justify, amend, and redeem life. Psychotherapy was and still largely is a contractual bourgeois association based on the trading of words and money. After Friedrich Nietzsche, the task is to clear the view for new horizons to appear – a task that is as urgent in psychotherapy as it is in science, art and also religion. Nietzsche’s famous declaration God is dead was sombre recognition of the groundlessness of existence and at the same time exultation for the deep blue sea open at last to seekers and explorers. Nietzsche considered attachments to any so-called fatherland, with their “lapse and regression into old loves and narrow views”.
