Spinoza and Psychoanalysis
In the history of psychoanalysis, several philosophers became subjects of a privileged confrontation with Freud. One such philosopher was Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677). From the 1920s intellectuals noted correspondences between Freudian thought and Spinoza's philosophy (Smith, 1924; Alexander, 1927). This discussion continues to more recent times (Bodei, 1991; Ogilvie, 1993).
Freud himself rarely spoke of Spinoza. Although he referred to Spinoza in Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood (1910c), he did not explicitly mention Spinoza anyplace else. In the work of Jacques Lacan, Spinoza is often present in the background and occasionally cited. For instance, proposition 57 of part 3 of Spinoza's Ethics appears as an epigraph to Lacan's medical dissertation (1932).
Authors who have tried to situate Spinoza vis-à-vis psychoanalysis have pondered several different kinds of questions. W. Aron (1977) asked about the overall influence of Spinoza on Freud's thought. C. Rathbun (1934) noted that the libido, a fundamental concept of psychoanalysis, is adumbrated in Spinoza's concept of conatus, an inborn drive that leads to striving and persisting. On Walter Bernard's reading (1946), it is perhaps closer to eros or desire. But what, according to these authors, were Spinoza's therapeutic principles? These works today appear dated, indicative as much of the intellectual state of psychoanalysis, particularly in Anglo-Saxon countries, as of a poorly informed reading of Spinoza. Some authors, such as Abraham Kaplan (1977) recall that Spinoza's philosophy was not a proto-psychoanalytic science, but a very knowledgeable metaphysics. Francis Pasche (1981) discusses the idea of "practical psychoanalysis." Gilles Deleuze's work on Spinoza, Expression in Philosophy (1992), has opened the way toward a confrontation between Spinozistic and psychoanalytic ethics. Finally, several psychoanalytic authors (Bertrand, 1984; Ogilvie, 1993; Burbage and Chouchan, 1993) have discovered unconscious implications in Spinoza's philosophy.
Bibliography
Alexander, Bernhard. (1927). Spinoza und Psychoanalyse. Chronicum Spinosanum, 5, 96-103.
Bernard, Walter. (1946). Freud and Spinoza. Psychiatry, 5, 99-108.
Bertrand, Michèle. (1984). Spinoza et l'imaginaire. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Bodei, Remo. (1991). Geometrica delle passioni. Rome: Feltrinelli.
Burbage, Frank, and Chouchan, Nathalie. (1993). Freud et Spinoza: la question de la transformation et le devenir actif du sujet. In Olivier Bloch (Ed.), Spinoza au XXe siècle (pp. 525-545). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Deleuze, Gilles. (1992). Expression in philosophy: Spinoza. Cambridge, MA: Zone Books.
Freud, Sigmund. (1910c). Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood. SE, 11: 57-137.
Kaplan, Abraham. (1977). Spinoza and Freud. Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 5, 299-326.
Lacan, Jacques. (1932). De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité. Paris: Le François.
Ogilvie, Bertrand. (1993). Spinoza dans la psychanalyse. In Olivier Bloch (Ed.), Spinoza au XXe siècle (pp. 549-571). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Pasche, Francis. (1981). Métaphysique et inconscient. Revue Française de PsychanalySE, 45 (1), 9-30.
Rathbun, C. (1934). On certain similarities between Spinoza and psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Review, 21, 1, 1-14.
Smith, Maurice Hamblin. (1924). An interesting dream. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 5, 4, 468-446.
Spinoza, Benedictus de. (2000). Ethics (G. H. R. Parkinson, Trans.). New York: Oxford University Press.
—MICHÈLE BERTRAND
