- Spinoza, B. de. "The basis of the state; the natural and civil right of the individual, and the right of sovereign powers." In The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume II. 528.
- Ibid, 528: “[I]t is to men's advantage to live in accordance with the laws and sure dictates of our reason, which, as we have said, aim only at the true good of men.”
- Ibid, 528: “[T]he life of men without mutual assistance must necessarily be most wretched and must lack the cultivation of reason [… thus] in order to achieve a secure and good life, men had necessarily to unite in one body.”
- Ibid, 530. Spinoza argues that it is never beneficial for a state to act unreasonably, since tiranny never lives long; “violenta imperia nemo continuit diu.” I think you could argue against this very easily.
- Freud, S. (2005). "The Question of Lay Analysis", in The Essentials of Psycho-Analysis. 18.
- “Spinoza’s Psychological Theory (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy),” November 21, 2024. Can be found here.
- Freud, S. The Essentials of Psycho-Analysis. 25.
- Ibid, 17. Freud describes the Ego as an "external, cortical layer" on top of the Id.
- Bunge, W. van. "Spinoza" in (2012) Deleuze Compendium. Boom. 99.
#6 Some Thoughts on Similarities between Spinoza and Freud
In his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Spinoza argues, among other things, what he considers the best form of government. He characterizes the optimal state as one in which the subject relinquishes part of their natural justified capacity to act on their desires to a powerful entity, that is, the sovereign. [1] This view appears to have an oppressive character, which is why this text must address the question of whether there is a similarity between this repressive part of Spinoza's text and another thinker who has largely focused on repression: Freud, and his essay The Question of Lay Analysis.
Returning to the repressive element of Spinoza's text: it is best for humans to curb their desires somewhat and live according to reason, [2] and this can best be achieved through participation in society; Reason and the democratic state coincide, [3] as Spinoza argues that the sovereign in a democracy can only act according to reason. [4] This relationship within the subject between its natural desires on the one hand, and the mechanism of repression based on reason, formed by society with the aim of interpersonal organization, on the other, is also found in psychoanalysis: Freud makes this distinction between what he calls the Id and the Ego, respectively, stating that the former is characterized as the multiform mental material as the subject acts according to its nature, while the latter is that within the psyche that is formed by external influences and has an organizing character with a tendency toward unification, [5] just as, in Spinoza, reason in society functions to enable individuals to live together by partially suppressing their desires.
This comparison between Spinoza and psychoanalysis is, however, unfounded, as will be argued here, given that Freud's theory assumes that the mind of the subject can be divided into a conscious and a subconscious, with the subconscious being that within our mind that influences us but which we do not perceive. This seems at first glance to be similar: Spinoza describes desire as the striving for something combined with a consciousness of the striving. [6] This striving is an essential part of everything, and by stating that desire is the awareness of this striving, a distinction is made between conscious and non-conscious or unconscious striving, which seems comparable to the way in which desire or drives emerge from the unconscious in Freud's view; this is essentially what the psychoanalyst does, uncovering these invisible parts of the mind in order to address the patient's problems. [7]
What doesn't correspond, however, is the supposed spatial relationship between these two parts of the mind. Psychoanalysis assumes a vertical structure: as stated in the famous Iceberg Theory, the part of the mind we are conscious of is said to lie on top of the unconscious part, as a covering [8] – in English, it is also sometimes called the "subconscious," where the prefix "sub" carries the meaning "under"; Spinoza's metaphysics, however, is characterized as immanent and therefore horizontal: [9] in his monistic worldview, in which everything is merely an attribute of God, everything exists in principle alongside each other, without any distinction being made between things being above or below one another. In other words, no hierarchical division can be made between the conscious and the unconscious parts of the mind, since they simply exist alongside each other, and not above or below one another.
In conclusion, both Spinoza and Freud recognize a specific repressive component in their theories of the subject, which nevertheless appear quite different in both, primarily in the breadth of social influence and the spatial structure of the subject. Yet, a similarity seems impossible to find, because the way in which they both wrote about the phenomenon of repression differs so much in, among other things, its spatiality that the comparison drawn at the beginning of this essay is invalid; other similarities might be found, of course, based on further research.
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