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Both Spinoza and Freud showed that a mind that is filled with 'confused' ideas and overcharged with affects is a suffering mind: it is unable to put to use its actual capacities—to differentiate between past and present, between substance and semblance, between the rational and the irrational. Both insisted, moreover, that such confused or inadequate ideas could be made to give way to adequate or clear ideas; that was, after all, the 'proper' way for the human mind to behave, as can be seen from the fact that whoever has achieved it feels a deep sense of truth.
Yet Spinoza, partly as a result of his concept of thinking as the conatus of the mind, was led to believe that a mind that is given to proper thinking will, ipso facto, be balanced and productive. To Freud, however, such a conception could not be regarded as sufficient; despite the fact that clear thinking and reason are essential components of knowledge, he knew that they are not by themselves able to penetrate to the deepest layers of the mind, to the unconscious, and are therefore unable to unravel emotional disorders or to master man's emotions. It is not reason that is capable of subjugating emotion, he showed, but the other way around; that was why not thought but affect had to be the focus of scientific investigations of the mind, as well as of its treatment.