Clinical Spinoza

Integrating His Philosophy with Contemporary Therapeutic Practice

Ian Miller

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000575385
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Philosophie
• Thema: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

Discovering Spinoza's early modern psychology some 35 years into his own clinical practice, Ian Miller now gives shape to this connection through a close reading of Spinoza's key philosophical ideas.

With a rigorous and expansive analysis of Spinoza's Ethics in particular, Miller explores how Spinozan thought simultaneously empowered the original conceptual direction of psychoanalytic thinking, and anticipated the field's contemporary theoretical dimensions. Miller offers a detailed overview of the philosopher's psychoanalytic reception from the early work of German-langauge psychoanalytic thinkers, such as Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé, forward into its Anglophone reception, influencing both mid-century humanistic American psychoanalysis as well as anticipating thinkers such as Bion and Winnicott.

Covering key concepts in psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice, this book demonstrates how knowledge of Spinoza's philosophical work can help to both illulminate and improve modern psychoanalytic therapies.

Part I

Chapter 1 The Philosopher of Psychoanalysis (I)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003246404-3

Lou Andreas-Salomé glowingly describes Baruch Spinoza as the “philosopher of psychoanalysis” (1964, p. 75).

Reviewing textual history, the clinical reader recognizes strong convergence between Spinoza's Ethics and psychoanalytic thought spanning three distinct periods: (1) the early German-language development of psychoanalysis; (2) Spinoza's Anglophone reception; and (3) and the articulation of Spinozan values within humanistic psychoanalysis.

This chapter focuses initially upon Spinoza's reception during the German-language development of psychoanalytic thinking. Next, the focus changes both in geographic location and language. Navigating the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean, German language reception of Spinoza shifts toward early Anglophone reception.

Chapter 2 reads Spinoza as the precursor to modern psychoanalytic psychology through the vehicle of published journal papers. Philosopher of science Ludwik Fleck, a contributor to Thomas Kuhn's notion of scientific paradigm shift (Kuhn, 1970, p. vi), recognizes journal science as that period when individual practitioners, working independently and subjectively registering scientific recognitions, announce their findings formally to their larger, scientific thought collectives (Fleck, 1979, p. 118). The journal publications of Amy Tanner in the United States (Tanner, 1907a, 1907b) and M. Hamblin Smith in Great Britain (Smith, 1925, 1926) introduce Spinoza to English-language communities in psychology and psychoanalysis. Smith's (1925) publication, “Spinoza's Anticipation of Recent Psychological Developments” in the British Journal of Medical Psychology, the paper from which his 1926 International Journal of Psychoanalysis contribution is derived, provides the journal-based foundation for understanding both Spinoza's anticipations and convergences with then-emergent psychoanalytic thought. Building on Smith (1925, 1926), Constance Rathbun's (1934) publication in The Psychoanalytic Review titled, “On Certain Similarities Between Spinoza and Psychoanalysis”, consolidates Spinoza's position within psychoanalysis. Rathbun, in turn, is referenced by Walter Bernard in his Psychiatry publication, “Freud and Spinoza” (1946). Earlier, Bernard's (1934) monograph on Spinoza had presented the German reception of Spinozan thought to a new, Anglophone audience in the United States. Bernard begins,

There is no doubt that the Ethics of Spinoza constitutes an extremely important landmark in the history of philosophy. From the days that Spinoza was rediscovered by that eager group of literary men in Germany with Lessing at their head, the influence and the import of Spinoza's philosophy has been extending to ever widening spheres; and today there seems to be prevalent among philosophers the unqualified opinion that Spinoza is one of the very few major thinkers of the world, and a first-rate power in the history of thought. All subsequent philosophies, with very few exceptions, have taken due cognizance of, and issue with, the Spinozistic philosophy, and must perforce continue to do so. Many philosophers, scientists, and literary men have freely confessed a more or less intimate devotion to and dependence on Spinoza. Even Hegel was once moved to say: Du hast entweder den Spinozismus oder gar keine Philosophie. (Bernard, 1934, p. 11)

Chapter 2 concludes with the contributions of what were then called Neo-Freudian psychoanalysts in the United States. As Walter Bernard's quote suggests, inspired largely by German-speaking refugees from Nazi Germany, Spinoza became highlighted as representing the enlightened development of humanism in psychoanalytic understanding (Fromm, 1964a, 1964b; Weiss, 1952). With this development, America's enthusiastic post World War II embrace of psychoanalysis underlines the explicit humanism of Ethics, Parts IV and V (Fromm, 1964a, 1964b; Weiss, 1952). For the first time, Spinozan clinical formulation becomes integrated within psychoanalytic discussion (Reid, 1955; Tigner, 1985). Retrospectively, through this opening of the psychoanalytic door to a clinical Spinoza, earlier unattributed Spinozan influences in direct clinical practice become clearer and more greatly distinct to the clinical reader (Tanner, 1907b; Tausk, 1934, 1969; Federn, 1915).

Themes in Psychoanalytic Reception of Spinoza

Chapter 1 is divided into two thematic units. The first, detailing early German language psychoanalytic reception of Spinoza, includes the subsections: (1) themes in psychoanalytic reception of Spinoza; and (2) the German Spinoza, philosopher of psychoanalysis.

The second unit documents early Anglophone reception of Spinoza in psychology and psychoanalysis. It includes three subsections: (1) challenges for Tanner (1907a, 1907b) and Smith (1926); (2) Amy Tanner's “Spinoza and Modern Psychology” (1907a); and (3) M. Hamblin Smith's “Spinoza's Anticipation of Recent Psychological Developments” (1926).

Observing Spinozan reception within psychoanalytic thought across the 20th century, the reader becomes aware of two underlying themes in all writers’ presentations. The first is that Spinoza is consistently present in relation to the writer's contemporary understanding of psychology and psychoanalysis. Writing at different moments in psychoanalytic development, each writer progressively integrates Ethics more tightly into the emerging weave of psychoanalytic conceptions. When Lou Andreas-Salomé and Freud reference Spinoza, it is relative to the opening phases of psychoanalytic development. When M.H. Smith references Spinoza, it is relative to the exciting introduction of psychoanalytic thought in the United Kingdom, just as Smith also references new currents in forensic psychiatry in the United States, represented by William Alanson White. A decade later, Constance Rathbun not only references Spinoza relative to the development of American ego psychology, but also refers to MH Smith's earlier understanding of Spinoza's psychoanalytic links. She is succeeded by integrations of Spinoza within developing interpersonal and humanistic currents of psychoanalysis (Bernard, 1946; Fromm, 1964a; Reid, 1955; Weiss, 1952; Tigner, 1985).

Second, each writer references their Spinoza, anchored in their psychoanalysis, through consistent use of memory and associative process, psychology's foundational building blocks, observed by Spinoza in Ethics, Part II. Ethics, in this way, provides both correlative contents and intrinsic psychological processes that align with later writers’ subjective understandings of psychoanalytic principles and values. Each text reveals a record of its author's Spinozan discovery relative to his or her time-bound understanding of psychoanalytic psychology.

The German Spinoza, Philosopher of Psychoanalysis

One of the earliest published links between psychoanalysis and Baruch Spinoza is in Freud's critical observation that Leonardo da Vinci's artistic “development approaches Spinoza's mode of thinking” (1910, p. 75). This laconic reference suggests that Freud's affirmation of his own “dependence on Spinoza's doctrine”, some twenty years later, may have been more extensive than admitted. Writing in 1931 to Dr Lothar Bickel, Freud confesses,

I readily admit my dependence on Spinoza's doctrine. There was no reason why I should expressly mention his name, since I conceived my hypotheses from the atmosphere created by him, rather than from the study of his work. Moreover I did not seek a philosophical legitimation. (Bernard, 1977, p. 63)

Freud's suggestion in the context of Leonardo da Vinci is that thinking is foundational to Spinoza's art. Freud's linkage between Leonardo and Spinoza focuses upon the capacity of the artist to intuit clearly from self-experience unbound by biased judgment, in encountering and addressing the world. That Freud's Spinozan reference construes thinking as a mode reaches back to the language of Spinoza's detailed explanatory descriptions in Ethics. Minimally, Freud would have pondered the definition of mode as

the affections of a substance; that is, that which is in something else and is conceived through something else. (Spinoza, 2002, I. Definition 5, p. 217)

Consistent with Freud's own recognition of psychic determinism from its embodied, physical substrate, thinking as Spinoza's functional projection of a pre-existent something else becomes represented by Freud, as the functional extension of Psyche, or Mind.

However, Freud's pairing of Spinoza with Leonardo DaVinci is not his first psychoanalytic reference to Baruch Spinoza. Five years earlier, Spinoza enters psychoanalysis through the Freudian backdoor; and Freud's initial reference is anything but straightforward. Rather, the person of Spinoza is referred to as an example of a particular kind of humor, the kind that is constructed economically from what Freud terms “a negative particle” (Freud, 1905, p. 77). Like the construction of the term unheimlich, Spinoza is described by Freud as a “fellow un-believer”, a witticism attributed by Freud to Heinrich Heine. Later, in Chapters 3 and 12, we return to this initially undignified presentation of Spinoza within psychoanalysis, in consideration of Freud's own ambivalent relatedness to his Jewish cultural identity and its linguistic forms of expression, which he often communicated through reference to Heine.

Two years after Freud's publication of “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood”, writing in December 1912 of her attendance at the Wednesday meetings of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Lou Andreas-Salomé entitles a section of her “Freud School” journal, Spinoza. There, she articulates a breathlessly enthusiastic perspective, very similar to that adopted by Gilles Deleuze, seventy years later. Deleuze, writing in the late 1980s would observe that

Writers, poets, musicians, filmmakers- painters too, even chance readers- may find that they are Spinozists; indeed, such a thing is more likely for them than for professional philosophers. It is a matter of one's practical conception of the “plan”. It is not that one may be a Spinozist without knowing it. Rather, there is a strange privilege that Spinoza enjoys, something that seems to have been accomplished by him and no one else. He is a philosopher who commands an extraordinary conceptual apparatus, one that is highly developed, systematic, and scholarly; and yet he is the quintessential object of an immediate, unprepared encounter, such that the nonphilosopher, or even someone without any formal education, can receive a sudden illumination from him, a “flash”. Then it is as if one discovers that one is a Spinozist; one arrives in the middle of Spinoza, one is sucked up, drawn into the system or composition. (Deleuze, 1988, p. 129)

So too, was Andreas-Salomé, who also includes Victor Tausk in her effusions. Tausk, newly discovering himself a Spinozist, had already written an essay on Spinoza five years before Andreas-Salomé's diary entry (Andreas-Salomé, 1964, p. 74). Observing her own enthusiasm as well as Tausk's, Andreas-Salomé writes,

It is a quality of Spinoza that a few pages by him can teach us whether we are his disciples, whereas big interpretive works have been written about him based on the most erudite misunderstandings. For to think like him does not mean to adopt a system, but just to think. (Andreas-Salomé, 1964, p. 75)

With this, Lou-Andreas Salomé's 1912 lecture diary breaks psychoanalytic conceptual ground in explicitly linking the process of psychoanalytic thinking with Spinozan thinking; and proceeds through her own comparative equivalence of Spinozan ideas, to discover elements of Spinoza's thinking within the developing system of psychoanalysis.

The first Spinozan linkage cited by Lou Andreas-Salomé is through Tausk's understanding of psychic parallelism in transformation of the physical into the mental. She writes that for Tausk, this idea is “quite representative of his inner allegiance to Spinoza” in that

to grasp Spinoza it is only necessary to think through to its conclusion the concept that physical and mental manifestations are representations of one another. (Andreas-Salomé, 1964, p. 75)

Translated into other terms, Andreas-Salomé draws a parallel between psychic representation and its physical embodiment within a hierarchical structure of scientific laws traceable from Nature as a whole phenomenon, to its separate aspects, including human psychology.

Freud, in his early monograph on aphasia (Freud, 1953), would argue for the functional difference between body and mind. This difference affirms Hughlings Jackson's neurological understanding of “dependent concomitance” in which one structure relies for its operation on a precursor structure. However related, these domains differ from one another in their functional operation (Grossman, 1992). Another example of dependent concomitance, published at the same time as Freud's thoughts on aphasia, was psychologist John Dewey's interpretation of the “reflex arc” in which he demonstrates that the discrete neurological pairings of electrical stimulus and response cannot account for the transformative chain of neural transmission, empirically demonstrable in the difference between a nerve's original stimulus, and its pathway's final behavioral outcome (Dewey, 1896).¹

Similarly, Andreas-Salomé addresses the holistic linkage between integrated organic systems. This contrasts with what she refers to sardonically, as then-contemporary psychiatry's “deepest wisdom” in atomistic fascination with “cerebral localization and the like” (1964, p. 75). Elaborating, she writes that the Spinozan contrast between physical and mental representations suggests an

inward contemplation of the integrity and presentness of two worlds- as we reckon- which nowhere exclude or determine each other, because they are but one. (Ibid, p. 75)

Andreas-Salomé's employment of italics underlines the Spinozan principle of monism which she recognizes as

the philosophical step that goes beyond Freud; he has developed throughout a method of its own for the one of these two worlds which can be grasped psychologically. (Andreas-Salomé, 1964, p. 75)

Turning from monism, Lou Andreas-Salomé recognizes too, that the overdeterminism (her itali...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Part V
• References
• Index