Choosing the Apollonian and Dionysian as categories of artistic creation is a curious and unusual voyage that attempts to investigate the origin of the creative act through “philosophical reasoning”. If bring the three names of Nietzsche, Freud and Fellini together is surprising, in reality the journey is united by a single, effective presence: the Apollonian and Dionysian. However, this is not the classic vision that we have always had from “The Birth of Tragedy” on. In fact, ever since Nietzsche imposed them on aesthetic culture and contemporary philosophy, the Apollonian and Dionysian have represented man's two possible modes of being, irrational (Dionysian) and rational (Apollonian). However, in order to unravel the tangle of what was, for us, an immediate intuition, i.e., the equivalence of the “artistic staging” of the Fellini's film 8½ and Nietzsche's study of “artistic creation” in terms of the Apollonian and Dionysian, we first had to seek to confute the more traditional interpretations that, in the post-modern era, were made of “The Birth of Tragedy” and that consider the book as only a forge in which philosophy sharpened the tools with which it waged war against modernity. This single point of view, the most attractive for post-modern culture, prevents appreciating the work's other aspect, i.e., that of an aesthetic treatise that, in this sense, enunciates a theory of artistic creation, identifying its principles in the figures of Apollo and Dionysus. In short, this dissertation develops these two figures into “mental categories” of the process of creation, which can be used to explain a work of art (used to analyse Fellini's film 8½). In truth, Nietzsche also used them in this way, but it is certainly the aspect least taken into account in all of Nietzschean exegetics, to the extent of being completely ignored. In our opinion, this has occurred because this mode of being brushes against psychologism and there is a risk of overflowing into it. Nietzsche himself was certainly a psychologist, a term that he uses often in his works, because his considerations often push beyond existential philosophy to investigate man's mental mechanisms. We also found ourselves faced with the risk of overflowing into psychology. In fact, we developed the two categories of artistic creation as “pure categories,” in the Kantian sense, i.e., “formal,” which is to say, stripped of their meaning in terms “of content,” i.e., existential values, staying with their other possible meaning, that “of use,” i.e., that of explaining how man comes to produce these images, forms, words, thoughts, metaphors and everything that serves to express a sense for what we feel inside. As one can see, the boundary with psychology is subtle and we believe that, due to some affinities of content, it is necessary to make a clear distinction with Freud's Psychoanalysis, revealing how “philosophical reasoning” could, within the same argument, explore differently than “psychological reasoning,” indicating the limits of this in aesthetic material. It was also an occasion to stress the investigational affinities of some of Freud's discoveries with those of Nietzsche but also the possibility of demonstrating how, in an age in which “psychological reasoning” seems to acquire exclusive authority in man's consciousness, “philosophical reasoning” can, on one hand, be a good critical observation point on “psychological reasoning” and, on the other, demonstrate how certain paths of knowledge are precluded to psychology. In conclusion and in view of what we have said so far, we express a judgement on our research. We believe that the result is a small, aesthetic treatise that, by comparing three authors that seem to be unrelated to each other, we offer a philosophical reflection on a new path to follow in interpreting the Apollonian and Dionysian, on the one hand, and we offer psychoanalysis an idea for a further mediation on its own nature, on the other. But, most of all, we hope to have made a small contribution to better defining the figure of Fellini on the cultural landscape of the 20th century, even if we limited ourselves to analysing the film 8½, which, in any case, is a nodal point of his filmography.