Over the last decade or so, the presence of Nietzsche in Freud’s work has received increasing attention, in the form of monographs written in a variety of languages, including English and German

“Another thing I don’t like to hear,” Nietzsche wrote, “is the infamous ‘and’ [ein berüchtigtes ‘und’): the Germans talk of ‘Goethe and Schiller’ [...] and with my own ears, although only from university professors, I have heard talk of ‘Schopenhauer and Hartmann’...”. So what, one wonders, would he have made of “Nietzsche and Freud” ― a conjunction which, in the words of Paul-Laurent Assoun, “has been recognized and accredited for a long time, indeed from the very beginnings of psychoanalysis” (p.1)? Over the last decade or so, the presence of Nietzsche in Freud’s work has received increasing attention, in the form of monographs written in a variety of languages, including English and German. In the French-speaking world, one of the first booklength treatments was Assoun’s, followed in 2003 by Éric Vartzbed’s study. Assoun’s monograph, Freud et Nietzsche, was first published in 1980 as the conclusion to a trilogy that had begun with Freud, la philosophie et les philosophes (1976) and continued with Marx et la répétition historique (1978). In 1998, the work was reissued with a new preface, which acts in several respects as a convenient summary of its central argument. Assoun, himself a psychoanalyst, as well as a professor of philosophy at Paris VII, has written prolifically on an extraordinarily wide range of philosophical and cultural questions relating to psychoanalysis. In addition, he is a regular participant in programmes about psychoanalysis broadcast on France Culture (including, last year, a discussion of the celebrated Schreber case). Yet, until now, little of his work has been