Nietzsche concludes the first book of Beyond Good and Evil by insisting that the time has come for those who would understand human existence to return to the practice of psychology, properly understood. “For, psychology is now again the path to fundamental problems” (§32). But what is psychology properly understood? And in what way does it lead us back to the most essential aspects of our being?

Participants in this 5-month Psychological Humanities and Ethics workshop will meet from 7 to 830 pm EST on the last Thursday of each month from January to May to examine the insights and ideas of one of history’s most formative psychologists. Reading Nietzsche not as a philosopher in the classical sense but a proto-psychoanalyst, a precursor to Freud and Lacan, participants will trace the genesis of such fundamental psychoanalytic concepts as repression, the death-drive, and the Oedipus complex and will explore Nietzsche’s understanding of the origins of morality, the value of sublimation, the movement from mourning to melancholia—or, in Nietzsche’s terms, from trauma to tragedy—and the possibility of a life lived in affirmation and self-overcoming. By the end of this course, participants will have an in-depth knowledge of the major works and ideas of one of modernity’s most prominent and influential thinkers.