"Nietzsche, in whom I hope to find words for many things that remain silent within me," says Freud as he approaches Nietzsche's works. "Freud and Nietzsche": this coupling was recognized from the very beginnings of psychoanalysis, at the moment we learned about the astonishing resonances of one work in relation to the other. We still need to move from analogy to juxtaposition, transferring it to the broader context of the founder of psychoanalysis's relationship with philosophy and philosophers, and deriving from it the historical context of their meeting.
The relationship with Nietzsche even concerns the identity of the Freudian paradigm, which seeks its definition based on relevance and delineation regarding this privileged philosophical paradigm. What we attempt to restore here is the vibrant encounter of Freud and Nietzsche - through their works, through the systematic juxtaposition of common themes - in order to identify the differences and what is at stake with them: instinct and drive, Nietzschean psychology and Freudian psychoanalysis, love and sexuality, the unconscious and consciousness, dream and symbolism, neurosis and morality, culture and civilization, therapy: the transmutation of values and law, the will to power and the death drive. (From the presentation on the back cover of the book)
"Nietzsche and Freud indeed invested in and delineated the field of drives with distinct instruments and heterogeneous principles. We therefore understand the paradox that makes them converse in their absence, since the correspondingly fertile thought of one and the other made them invest with two distinct discourses the same text that is offered for contemplation - the effects of the materiality of the drive, the trace of which within historical dialectics was also highlighted by Marx, as we previously showed." (Paul-Laurent Assoun)
