Nietzsche and Psychoanalysis

Book excerpt: This book presents a reading of the Nietzschean thought of the eternal return of all things and relates it to Freud's psychoanalysis of the repetition compulsion. Nietzsche's eternal return and Freud's repetition compulsion have never before been so seriously compared. The manner in which this study is executed is drastically different from usual Nietzsche scholarship and Freud studies. Chapelle works with his material until it acquires archetypal levels of significance, even while the level of everyday life experience is never abandoned. He returns the theory and practice of psychologizing and philosophizing to the old ground of imaginative poetic and ultimately mythic thought.