The Unconsious

Nietzsche and Freud both had their ideas about the unconscious. Freud describes two types of unconscious in "The Ego and the Id." He states that "we have two kinds of unconscious - the one which is latent but capable of becoming conscious, and the one which is repressed and which is not in itself and without more ado, capable of becoming conscious. ... The latent, which is unconscious only descriptively, not in the dynamic sense, we call preconscious; we restrict the term unconscious to the dynamically unconscious repressed (Freud, 1923:15)." This is similar to the idea of unconscious that Nietzsche has. Nietzsche's ideas are most seen in "Beyond Good and Evil." Nietzsche refers to the real motivations behind philosophers' work when he states, "It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy has hitherto been: a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir; moreover that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy have every time constituted the real germ of life out of which the entire plan has grown (Nietzsche, 1886:37)."

 In these writings, we can see that both Nietzsche and Freud have similar ideas about the unconscious mind. 

Freud, Sigmund 1923 (1984) ‘The Ego and the Id’ in On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Strachey, James (ed.), London, Penguin.

Nietzsche, Friedrich 1886 (1973) Beyond Good and Evil, Hollingdale, R. J (trans.), London, Penguin.