ABSTRACT
Popular misconceptions continue to regard Nietzsche as a champion of the strong over and against the weak, in favour of the rule of the elite over man who inspires fear in the cowering masses. In this chapter, the authors describe the way that he demands to be read Nietzsche can be a tremendous resource in the efforts of psychoanalysis to bring about such daringness both within its clinic and in the world at large as it relates to the clinic. Nietzsche sees that everywhere social relations are composed of non- or pre-moral techniques of individuation and regression: relations of force that command and that in doing so produce more or less complexity and affective engagement. Bion is here at his most subtle and incisive, challenging classical analytic expectations about the intrinsic connections between interpretation, knowledge, and therapeutic action. In the clinical example cited, the patient seemed to acquire new ways of reflecting on himself, yet nothing essentially changed.
