title: [The psychology of compassion. An analysis of the 100th anniversary of the death of Fredrich Nietzsche].
abstract: Friedrich Nietzsche is supposed to have been one of the harshest critics of compassion. Many of his publications try to unmask its failings and to expose its true motives. From an ardent admirer of Schopenhauers's ethics of compassion, Nietzsche turned into a vigorous despiser of compassionate feelings. It is shown that this change was above all caused by overwhelming personal experiences of compassion due to illness and death in his family and, later on, with his first aid activities in military hospitals during the German-French war in 1870. Combined with that, Nietzsche suffered from feelings of passivity and helplessness, which gave him the impression of compassion being a negative and--in the end--loathed emotion.
authors.affiliation: Abteilung für Kinder- und Jugendpsychiatrie, Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wilkes
mesh_terms: D004645:Empathy; D005197:Famous Persons; D049672:History, 19th Century