ABSTRACT
I n the passage in his General Psychopathology to wh ich I have referred, Jaspers complained three times in less than one page that, unlike Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, "Freud himself remains opaque personally"—undurchsichtig, untransparent-as i f Kierkegaard w i t h all his pseudonyms and Nietzsche w i t h his masks had been transparent! To this day scholars argue whether views put forward by Kierkegaard were really his own or only held by one or another pseudonym; and Kierkegaard was hardly free from self-deceptions. I t w o u l d be no reason for complaints i f Freud had actually been opaque as a human being. The demand that we ought to be transparent suggests shallowness. But there is a sense in wh ich we can know Freud better than almost any other great personality-because he knew himself so w e l l , was so honest, and wrote such incomparable letters. By comparison, Nietzsche's letters are so many masks and ful l of histrionics, whi le Jaspers' personality has never yet el ici ted the slightest interest.
