According to Broene, Nietzsche suffered from the absence of a strong male presence after the early death of his father. “Growing up as he did in a family of women,” and longing for the “strong, controlling hand of a father,” he developed a “changeableness, a mutability” that explained his inability to make commitments both emotional and intellectual. In Broene’s estimation, Nietzsche’s philosophical antifoundationalism was the direct result of his feminized psychology.
