Although enough human tragedy lies in this apparently unavoidable fate of the creative type, the denial continued into the work, the philosophy, darkens its noble aspect. For the work born out of this superhuman internal struggle to represent an infallible revelation of the latest universally valid psychological truth may be comprehensible, but brings so many trifling features into the picture of the personality as well that the tragedy almost turns into a farce. Nietzsche, who experienced thoroughly the whole tragedy of the creative man and admitted in his "amor fati" the willingness to pay for it, is in my opinion the first and has been up to now the only psychologist. He was at all events the first who recognized the "moral" danger in every philosophizing and psychologizing and sought to avoid it. He would have succeeded still better, that is at a lesser cost, if he had recognized the necessity of the "moral" in all psychologizing (including the therapeutic) instead of analyzing the philosophers from that viewpoint in so masterly a way. At any rate he recognized the problem and was right to see in it a danger for himself first of all, although correctly understood it is not the common danger he made it. In this sense he is at all events much less philosopher, that is, moralist, than Freud for example and accordingly also much more a psychologist than he. Certainly his freedom from office and calling which he had to buy so dearly had much to do with it. In no case, however, was he a therapist who needed psychological justification, no, not even a patient, a seeker for help, in spite of all his illnesses. He was himself, which is the first requirement for a psychologist, and therefore he was also the first and only one who could affirm the evil will, who even glorified it. That was his psychological product for which he paid not with system building and scientific rationalization, but with personal suffering, with his own experience.
Nietzsche's contribution, therefore, based on Schopenhauer's important discovery of will, is the separation of the will from the guilt problem (the moral). He has not completely solved the problem, could not solve it, because for its solution the analytic experience was necessary. By which I mean not so much the experiences of the analyst through the patient, but also and much more the experience of humanity with psychoanalysis. As Nietzsche's will affirmation represents a reaction to the will denial of the Shopenhauerian system, so Freud's theory is again to be understood as a throwback from Nietzsche's attitude to an almost Shopenhauerian pessimism and nihilism. I do not doubt that my will psychology which has arisen from personal experiences, represents in its turn a reaction against Freud's "making evil" of the will; I shall show further that the whole history of mankind in the individual himself and in the race represents just such a sequence of will action and reaction, of affirmation and denial. I shall then show also that in the historical developmental process of this will conflict, as in its individual manifestations we have to do not merely with a repetition in the sense of the Freudian fatalism but that a continuous evolution can be traced in terms of the broadening of consciousness and the development of self-consciousness. For as little as Freud's theory is a "repetition" of the closely related one of Shopenhauer, so little has my will psychology to do with Nietzsche's "will to power," with which Nietzsche has again finally smuggled evaluation into psychology. With this comparison I mean only to point to a common psychological aspect of experience, which necessarily conditions these reactions, and which we intend to make the object of our investigation.
The will in itself is not as "evil" as the Jew-hating Schopenhauer believes along with the Old Testament, not as "good" as the sick Nietzsche would like to see it in his glorification. It exists as a psychological fact and is the real problem of psychology, first as to its origin, how it has evolved in man, and second why we must condemn it as "bad" or justify it as "good," instead of recognizing and affirming it as necessary.