I think Nietzsche suffered a deep identification with the collective unconscious to the point of losing his persona completely by the end of his intellectual life. This can explain the richness of primordial images and symbols in all his writings, as well as his convoluted pathos. Also, such loss within the collective unconscious can explain the instinctive and irrational truths of his philosophy, so difficult to understand when we do not try to access it through our intuition but through our rational capacities, as well as the psychotic consequences that this implied to his own mind. In short, he is a magnificent case study of the Western collective unconscious as I understand it from Jung's system.
In his autobiography Ecce Homo (1888) Nietzsche portrays himself as an extremely elevated mind, wise as no other philosopher has ever been. Through Zarathustra, his alter ego, Nietzsche speaks of himself as a prophet and as a diciple of the Greek god Dionysus. Jung says that minds that collapse into the collective unconscious have the propensity to inflate themselves, as if some kind of superhuman enlightenment, or "godlikeness" in Adler's vocabulary, has set them above the rest of his peers, even humanity (Jung, 1975, p. 83-103). But one of the characteristics of the collective unconscious are its irrational contents, the reason of why Nietzsche's philosophy might seem so unphilosophical at times. No wonder why Nietzsche himself denies philosophy as a moralizing quest and denial of the world. He became the conscious rebirth of ancient and pagan symbols repressed by Christianity for centuries, and recently by rationalism.
Nietzsche is no doubt a very strange philosopher. Instead of a quest for truth and knowledge of the world and the mind, he explored the depths of the human instincts, and discovered in them a strength that put into question all the quests for "high ideals" on one side, and salvation on the other. His discovery of philosophy and religion as ideological elements of repression of the instincts made him reaffirm the human as it is given by nature. In this sense Nietzsche is an early psycologist. He saw in Christianity a war against nature, falsifying life and making it miserable, and in philosophy almost as mere fiction. (It is very important that, if we acknowledge that Nietzsche has a theory of ideology, it is far from the Marxist notion. For Nietzsche ideology is the will to power of base and weak minds, not of dominant social classes, consisting in a will to repress aspects of the human instincts that are falsely believed to be evil; hence, keeping under control strong and vigorous individuals with irrational and aristocratic tendencies. Marxism is included within these ideologies, and with good reason).
But what remains remarkable is that his discovery of human instincts was of such a depth that Jung's notion of inflation is clearly seen in his writings. His method of speaking through parables and metaphors is more akin to prophets than philosophers, and he even saw himself in that way. The fact that Nietzsche decided to title his autobiography as "ecce homo", the words Pontius Pilate supposedly said to the Jewish crown when presenting Jesus in John 19:5, is the first and direct signal that he is styling himself after Christ (more precisely as the Antichrist).
But don't get me wrong. The obvious deliriums of his late writings are no reason to discard him as a mere psychotic of no consequence. The difference between him and vulgar madmen are his ginius and his capacity to write. In this sense by styding himself in this state of collapse into the collective unconscious he is saying things about all of us, especially Westerns. This is the reason why he is still considered one of the most important and enlightened philosophers of our era. Definitively not because if his analytical capacities, but because of his acuteness in unmasking our instincts. The symbolic contents of his writings are another reason to believe Jung's system of human psyche; that deep within our unconscious there are collective symbols or archetypes that regulate basic psychical functions. Instead of believing with Freud in a purely biologically determined psyche, the favorite generalization of some neuro scientists, Jung's system explains these shared psychic functions not on cells, neurons or libido, but on contents of purely psychic nature.
Nietzsche, by collapsing on the collective unconscious with the respective psychotic consequences, demonstrates why in the search for our selves we need to pay heed to those symbolic images in religion that he wished to destroy so much.
