Friedrich Nietzsche: The First Man To Psychoanalyze Jesus Christ?

Even though Nietzsche was already famous by the time he died, is there any truth to Sigmund Freud’s claim that Friedrich Nietzsche was the first man to “psychoanalyze Jesus Christ”?

By: Ringo Bones 

If the famed father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud really did say that Friedrich Nietzsche was “the first man to psychoanalyze Jesus Christ”, he probably never said it to the faces of fundamentalist Christians. By the time he died in 1900, Friedrich Nietzsche was already world famous. Amateur psychologists have tried to “explain” him, but Sigmund Freud – the founder of psychoanalysis – said: “several times said of Nietzsche that he had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who ever lived or was likely to live.” according to Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud’s biographer. And in his published work, Freud remarked that that Nietzsche’s “premonitions and insights often agree in the most amazing manner with the laborious results of psychoanalysis.” With Sigmund Freud’s high opinion of Friedrich Nietzsche, is it even possible that Nietzsche could have been the first man to “psychoanalyzed Jesus Christ”? 

Nietzsche’s main conceptions – even to the novice – centers around deconstructing organized Christianity. As Jesus Christ is a supposed adherent of “teaching by example”, Nietzsche wonders – maybe still – on why Jesus Christ never spoke about the two broad distinctions of morality – namely master morality and slave morality - during his lifetime when what is now the state of Israel was under the rule of the Roman Empire. With organized Christianity’s still “wonky” moral code 2,000 years later, it seems that this oversight by Jesus Christ is the main reason why Friedrich Nietzsche branded Jesus Christ as an “existentialist pauper”.