Practitioner Ostfeld de Bendayan (also the Venezuelan Center for Jungian Studies) takes on the Herculean task of presenting a psychobiography of Nietzsche, a man both creative and mad. She understands that both creativity and madness are sparked by unconscious symbolism and engendered by the same feminine source, which Goethe and Jung called "the realm of the mothers." Whether one is ultimately creative or mad depends on the strength of the ego, so Ostfeld de Bendayan closely analyzes Nietzsche's state of mind, his emotional life and patterns of behavior, his relationships with others, the building of his symbolism (particularly that of the feminine) and his manifestations of the self. She also examines the darker side, including his hallucinations, recurrent fantasy motifs, and symptoms, and advances unique ideas about the complex nature of his illness, including the world created of his body, myth, context, and his conscious and unconscious mind. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)