Perhaps one of the main reasons why many of Nietzsche's contemporary followers do not understand Nietzsche is that they fail to follow closely enough his recommendations on a practical level. Nietzsche's philosophy is a practical recipe for shamanisation.
Why does he uphold the need for a strong ego? There are some cultural and historical reasons that have to do with being a "complimentary man" in opposition to the principles of one's age -- for example, of wishy-washy 19th Century Christianity. But this contextualisation of the principle in historical and cultural terms does not, in itself, suffice to explain the practical meaning and reasons for the need for a strong ego.
Quite simply, it is required to have such if one is to develop practical knowledge of the Unconscious. Otherwise, one is at risk of being totally overwhelmed and submerged by the power of one's own Unconscious thoughts. To avoid this, the development of ego strength has to be practiced.
Why, though, the injunction to go against the principles and mores of one's age?
Because, by finding oneself at war with everything, one is most likely to find oneself cast entirely onto one's own psychological resources, as one struggles for survival. It is this kind of psychological pressure-cooker experience that is most likely to cause one to shamanise -- that is, to discover the previously hidden resources of the Unconscious. So the Nietzschean injunction to be "at war" is actually a recipe for shamanising.
But ego strength alone is just a recipe for public and private foolishness.
It's not a recipe for the "great health" that Nietzsche spoke about, but only makes its adherents sick and sicker. To take "ego strength" in just one direction is to inflate the ego to the point that it is no longer receptive to communication from the "Self". (This Self is in Jungian and Nietzschean terms the core part of the identity. In Jungian terms, it is the creative principle of life that governs the Unconscious. In Nietzschean terms, it is actually the reality principle within the Unconscious . It calls the bluffs of ego, whenever ego has set off on any path of self-deception. For example, it can cause you to become physically sick if/when you embrace a false ideology like Christianity.) But if you cannot hear "the Self" because your ego is too puffed up, and you are too "strong" and determined to plod along the iron path that you have set for yourself, you will make an enemy of the Unconscious, which will in turn try to draw you back towards it by making you fall flat onto your nose!
Indeed, the development of ego strength as a goal in and of itself is just a prime recipe for an extreme kind of inwards slavery.
Enjoy.
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Perhaps that is why Bataille wrote as he did -- because he could see that the "ego-strengthening" response to Nietzsche's philosophy wasn't working. He had to reintroduce the "destruction" trope to the Nietzschean project to try to make it clearer. But even that is subject to misunderstanding -- a notion that it is about masculinist chaos.
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Another shamanic use for relativised ego strength:
It's in the meaning of the "eternal recurrence" -- to be able to face again, all the traumatic moments of one's life, without shrinking away from them and thus losing "soul", (which is what happened in the first developmental instance, when one was weak or immature). Thus one recapitulates the past and becomes stronger.
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