“Transvaluation of all values”

“Transvaluation of all values” is identified in the notes as a phrase associated with Friedrich Nietzsche and is used to illuminate the work of Sigmund Freud: the revaluation at stake is not simply an abstract philosophical gesture, but a transformation of private psychical material into a new account of the mind. The book’s self-analysis exposes how ambition, guilt, family memory, and social position complicate the scientific authority of that account.

Nietzschean Phrase and Psychical Revaluation

The note traces the phrase to Nietzsche’s writings, including On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), where Nietzsche announces a projected work titled The Will to Power: An Attempt at a Transvaluation of all Values. Compiled from Nietzsche’s notebooks by Peter Gast and Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, that book appeared posthumously in 1901. The note’s related wording, “transvaluation of all psychical values,” brings the phrase into Freud’s immediate context: what is reconsidered is the standing and meaning of psychical experience, especially material that ordinary self-understanding might conceal or dismiss.

The Book as Self-Disclosure

Freud explains that he relied on his own dreams because published dreams and those collected from strangers could not serve his purpose, while the dreams of patients in psychoanalytic treatment were entangled with neurotic characteristics. Publishing his own, however, meant revealing more of his inner life than he wished. He describes the disclosure as painful and embarrassing, yet necessary if readers were to have evidence for his psychological conclusions. He also admits that he omitted or substituted material to soften the indiscretion, while recognizing that such alterations weakened his examples.

The introductory discussion consequently presents The Interpretation of Dreams as a partly concealed autobiography. Its exposed autobiographical material includes Freud’s dealings with his father, relatives, and colleagues; his medical training, daily life, health, and family holidays; and the politics, sexuality, and slang of 1890s Vienna. The phrase’s resonance lies in this double movement: the book turns personal experience into evidence for a general theory while acknowledging that the evidence has been selected and partly disguised.

Ambition, Failure, and Displacement

Freud’s professional hopes and anxieties enter the dreams alongside the argument. His appointment as a lecturer in neuropathology at Vienna University enabled him to marry Martha Bernays in 1886, but supporting a family required him to establish a private practice. Although he conducted prolific research, his promotion to professor was delayed until 1902, partly because of anti-Semitism. In 1897, when his name was proposed without success, a dream identified a Jewish colleague, R., with Freud’s Uncle Josef, who had been sentenced to ten years in prison for handling forged banknotes. The dream’s displacement links Jewish identity with criminality as a professional handicap, transferring the association onto a colleague.

Another dream turns scientific disappointment into images of destruction. Freud had narrowly missed recognition for discovering cocaine’s anaesthetic properties: he published on the topic, but his friend Carl Koller carried out the crucial research shortly afterward. In the botanical-monograph dream, dating from early March 1898, a dried plant specimen is connected through artichoke leaves to pages that Freud and his sister had been encouraged by their father to tear from an illustrated book. Books are thereby associated with desiccation and destruction, and the image implies Freud’s sense of failure as a writer. His father, dead for about sixteen months when the dream was recorded, is cast as an enemy of books and covertly blamed for that failure.

Guilt, Colleagues, and the Limits of Self-Interpretation

The dream Freud presented as a defence against professional accusations carries a more painful history. In 1895 he treated Emma Eckstein for hysteria and, accepting Wilhelm Fliess’s naso-genital theory, believed an operation on her nose might help. After the operation she continued to suffer nosebleeds; a severe haemorrhage led Freud to call in another doctor, who removed gauze left in her nasal cavity. Freud reassured Fliess that the mistake was minimal and later attributed Emma’s symptoms to her desire for the doctor’s love. In the dream, Freud protects himself from comparable accusations by blaming colleagues, but the wider associations make the self-defence unstable.

Those associations include Freud’s role in the fate of Ernst Fleischl von Marxow, a physiologist he admired. Fleischl, who had a painful hand condition and became dependent on morphine, was encouraged by Freud to replace it with cocaine, then regarded as ordinarily non-addictive. Freud’s discreet published interpretation makes the dream appear to concern professional rivalry alone; the fuller account reveals guilt over experiences that Freud’s presentation keeps at a distance. It also describes intense bonds among male colleagues. Emma becomes a channel for affection between Freud and Fliess, while the dream’s surrounding doctors make Irma appear as a patient under collective medical scrutiny. The phrase thus names a revaluation that is never simply triumphant: the production of theory also uncovers what its author would prefer to leave unspoken.

Marginality and a Universal Science

The introductory account connects Freud’s intellectual standpoint to his position as a Jewish intellectual in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He and his family identified with an Imperial government that had gradually extended Jewish civil liberties, culminating in emancipation through the 1867 constitutional compromise. They were loyal to German language and culture, while looking toward Germany for stronger political Liberalism. Freud was deeply formed by Western culture, yet that acculturation did not bring full social integration; he felt most at ease among fellow Jews, with whom he described a shared inner identity and private mental world.

From this partly inside, partly outside position, Freud sought to construct a universal science that would subsume Jewish difference within an account of the hidden and often shameful forces governing the mind. The book presents this marginal standpoint as a source of both pressure and perspective: Freud felt compelled to prove himself, yet the distance it afforded also enabled him to examine his society as a participant observer. “Transvaluation of all values” consequently resonates beyond Nietzschean borrowing. It marks the conversion of private and socially situated experience into a challenge to accepted explanations of the self, while leaving visible the personal costs and distortions involved in that conversion.