The German Genius

way to psychological man. He too said we have entered a period of “therapeutic sensibility”: therapy, he argued, had established itself “as the successor to rugged individualism and to religion.” This new narcissism means that people are more interested in personal change than in political change, that encounter groups and other forms of awareness training have helped to abolish a meaningful inner private life—the private has become public in “an ideology of intimacy.” This makes people less individualistic, less genuinely creative, and far more fad- and fashion-conscious. It follows, says Lasch, that lasting friendships, love affairs, and successful marriages are much harder to achieve, in turn thrusting people back on themselves, when the whole cycle recommences. Modern man, Lasch concluded, was actually imprisoned in his self-awareness. He longs for “the lost innocence of spontaneous feeling. Unable to express emotion without calculating its effects on others, he doubts the authenticity of its expression in others and therefore derives little comfort from audience reactions to his own performance.” 8
    There is no shortage of evidence for the startling penetration of the “therapeutic sensibility” in our society. A troop of Brownies in California has its own stress clinic for eight-year-olds; a primary school in Liverpool, England, gives its stressed children aromatherapy. In 1993 British newspapers used the word “counseling” 400 times in a year; by 2000 it had risen to 7,250; some 1.2 million counseling sessions take place each month in Britain. Recently, the Archbishop of Canterbury himself claimed that therapy was “replacing Christianity” in Western countries, that “Christ the Saviour” is becoming “Christ the counsellor.” 9
    If that all seems rather a lot to lay at Freud’s door—well, we are not done yet. Freud must also be understood in the context of his German-speaking contemporaries Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Weber.
    T HE “E NTRANCE D OOR” TO M ODERN T HOUGHT
     
    Nietzsche’s most well-known—some might say notorious—aphorism is “God is dead.” One of his most important achievements, along with Max Weber, was to think through and confront the implications of that sentiment, to work out in what he saw as terrifying detail the consequences of modernity, a world of vast populous cities, mass transport, and mass communications, in which the old certainties had been dissolved, where the comforts and consolations of religion had disappeared for many people, and in which science had acquired an authority that was, in his view, as arid and empty as it was impersonal and impressive. It is in this sense that Martin Heidegger called Nietzsche the “culmination” of modernity—i.e., Nietzsche felt the loss of whatever had gone before more keenly than anyone else, and he described that loss in more vivid hues.
    Formally, Nietzsche’s influence is second only to that of the Greeks and Kant, and maybe even that doesn’t do him justice. Until, roughly speaking, the Second World War, his influence was primarily literary and artistic. Robert Musil regarded Nietzsche’s thought “as one of the great events of the twentieth century.” 10
    Beyond art, Anatoly Lunasharski and Maxim Gorky tried to construct a “Nietzschean Marxism” in Russia but that did not outlast the rise of National Socialism and their appropriation (and inversion) of some of his themes (the last thing Nietzsche was, was an anti-Semite). But as the twentieth century lengthened, Nietzsche’s relevance became clearer. Stephen Aschheim, in his study of the Nietzsche legacy in Germany, lists books detailing the philosopher’s influence in Italy, “Anglo-Saxony” (Britain, the United States), Spain, Austro-Hungary, and Japan, and on the Catholic Church and Judaism. Karl Jaspers saw Nietzsche as “perhaps the last of the great philosophers of the past” and, as Ernst Behler has noted, divided the intellectual history of the West into two periods: “one marked by the domination of the logos and the admonition ‘Know Thyself,’ culminating in Hegel; the other characterized by a radical disillusionment with the self-confidence of reason, the dissolution of all boundaries, and the collapse of all authority, a period that began with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.” Together with Marx, Behler said, “They stand at the entrance door to modern thought.” 11
    For Heidegger, Nietzsche’s philosophy “is