Finding the text of Freud's Two Nietzsche Evenings

When I was researching my article “Nietzsche’s Secrets,” published in Nietzsche and Depth Psychology in 1995, I came across a captivating reference to two of Freud’s Wednesday evening meetings in 1908 that were devoted to Nietzsche’s recently published posthumous memoir Ecce Homo.

The Minutes of those evenings promised to provide a missing link to what Freud knew in 1908 about Nietzsche’s syphilis and his sexuality, answering a question about whether it was Lou Andreas Salome who told him certain things about Nietzsche from the time she had spent with him in 1882.

Lou didn’t join the Freud circle until several years after the 1908 meeting. Oct 30, 1912 is the first time she is mentioned as a guest; after that Rank merely notes “Lou” or “Frau Lou” in the attendees list. The1908 Minutes show that Freud already had an opinion about Nietzsche’s sexuality and his syphilis and that Lou was not the one who revealed that to him.

The Minutes, published in four volumes between 1962 and 1975 by the International  Universities Press, were not to be found—at least until I discovered that copies existed in the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute library. That day the biggest storm of the year was raging. Ignoring flood warnings, I raced into San Francisco and, in the warm and dry library, I found what I was looking for—that despite denying that he ever read Nietzsche, Freud was able to mention that he had only missed two things in anticipating psychoanalysis, that Carl Jung, who had interviewed Nietzsche’s colleagues at the University of Basel, was the source when Freud referred to Nietzsche “as a homosexual,” and that Freud had an opinion about Nietzsche’s late stage syphilis, which had been revealed by P.J. Moebius.

Freud’s Wednesday evening discussion group began as informal meetings in Freud’s apartment in 1902.  In 1906 Otto Rank was entrusted with recording the meetings as a paid secretary. In 1908 the group was formalized as the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Rank counted the attendance and took notes on the conversations that took place until 1915 when he left Vienna to fight in World War I. Only fragmentary Minutes were kept until the last meeting in 1938 when Hitler occupied Austria.

When Freud escaped Vienna for London in 1938, he gave the Minutes to Paul Federn who soon also left Vienna taking the manuscript with him. Due to ill health and lack of funds, Federn was unable to publish the Minutes but he arranged in his Will for Herman Nunberg and his son, Ernst Federn, to see that they were translated and published. 

Although Freud commissioned Rank to memorialize the discussions, the conversations were often so heated that it seems the participants felt the meetings were private, as they were  for more than five decades. And now, another half century has passed and the Minutes exist only as rare out of print books.

When I got a notice that the Institute library was have a street sale of old books, I was delighted to find all four volumes for sale for a few dollars.

The following is a fictional dramatization of the two Nietzsche evenings from Otto Rank’s perspective, my attempt to make sense of what transpired there, and to incorporate additional information from biographies about the people who were in attendance.