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Ian Miller's tome on Baruch Spinoza will likely become an essential reference text for psychoanalytic and philosophy researchers interested in the historical roots of psychoanalysis in philosophy. But this book is much more than a scholarly rendition of the origins of psychoanalytic discourse. Miller explores the relevance of Spinoza's ideas to contemporary clinical technique. Miller distills Spinoza's incisive insights into epistemological and ontological aspects of his reflections on a theory of mind and body. Unlike Freud's dualistic consideration of the individual experience in terms of life or death drives, objective brain activity distinct from subjective minding, and thinking versus experiencing, Spinoza's conception of the individual experience is monistic considering that mind and body are different manifestations of the same substance. The individual's substance or soul is equivalent to the person's mind and being. He considers the soul as divine and in communion with God. Spinoza did not believe that God should be considered in anthropocentric terms, nor as a being in the external world, but that God was equivalent to Nature and natural laws. The soul, a composite of body and mind, is ruled by divine or natural laws. Biological heritage impacts one's being, and vice versa. This is a very contemporary view of the relationship between body and mind impacting each other experiencing external environmental stimuli. The driving life force of the individual is conatus, an Aristotelian concept of striving to persist in one's being, the equivalent of will and self-preservative drive. This contrasts with Freud's dual drives of aggression and libido, but in line with Winnicott's concept of going-on-being. While the physical and the psychical are different domains, they depend on each other to produce a phenomenon. Perception, feeling, imagination, and the striving of will are extended to action in the world on an external object and has impact on the object. The re