You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
When studying with Freud in Vienna early in her psychoanalytic career, Lou Andreas-Salomé jotted into her notebook that Spinoza is the ‘philosopher of psychoanalysis’ (Andreas-Salomé, 1958, p. 69). She left the statement relatively under-explained, commenting on Spinoza's ideas of mind and body as one and the same and saying a few words about the interconnection of all things. But she never explains in that brief commentary or elsewhere whether Spinoza might have something to offer the methodology of psychoanalysis. What happens, however, if we try to read ‘“Anal” and “Sexual”’ as just such a methodological statement? How would a Spinozist reading inflect our understanding of this complex text?
It is an odd undertaking, to be sure, given that Andreas-Salomé explicitly denounces philosophy in ‘“Anal” and “Sexual”,’ or the idea that psychoanalysis needs any philosophical supplement. Given her explicit endorsement of Freud's ‘empirical’ approach to the psyche, however, it is not Spinoza-as-metaphysician that would be relevant here but rather his own empiricism and distrust of abstract philosophizing: his effort to study the affects in the same manner one would study lines and planes; and his insistence on studying political formations without any recourse to philosophical ideals. In both cases, he assumed no founding origin or telos. Affects do not begin or end with the subject but rather are products of ceaseless social interaction; and political formations, too, have no origin (no mythical founding contract) or telos (no direction in which they are necessarily evolving). They are just the ever-changing products of social forces.