Emotion, Thought and Therapy. A Study of Hume and Spinoza and the Relationship of Philosophical Theories of the Emotions to Psychological Theories of Therapy: By Jerome Neu. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977. 194 pp.

This book is a major contribution to our understanding of the relationship between problems in philosophy of thought and problems

in psychoanalysis around the nature of thought and emotion. The argument of the book begins with an extended contrast between Hume and Spinoza on the nature of emotions. This contrast is between "systematic representatives of two opposing traditions of argument about the relation of thought and feeling in the emotions. The Humeans treat emotions as essentially feelings (impressions or affects) with thoughts incidentally attached. The Spinozists say roughly the reverse, treating emotions as essentially thoughts ('ideas' or 'beliefs') with feelings incidentally attached" (p. 152). Spinoza, the author argues, is closer to the truth, and, further, Spinoza's position represents a position closer to the premises of psychoanalysis.

This bare outline scarcely does justice to the richness, subtlety, and importance of this book. The author is a professional philosopher whose interests center on "philosophy of mind," a philosopher who has a profound understanding of many aspects of psychoanalytic thought. His analysis of Hume and Spinoza is a detailed study of the question of how affects are embedded in, and in part defined by, belief and thought. This question, in turn, is crucial for a consideration of several fundamental psychoanalytic questions, e.g., how interpretations effect emotional changes, the nature of insight, the problem of unconscious affects, and how fantasy may affect somatic processes.

The contrast between Hume (Chapter I) and Spinoza (Chapter II) forms the basis for Chapter III, "Thought, Theory and Therapy," the chapter most explicitly dealing with psychoanalytic issues. There, Neu produces an extraordinarily interesting analysis of the contrast between psychoanalytic and nonpsychoanalytic therapies (especially behavioral therapy).

For me, a most important contribution of this book is the application of Spinoza's ideas on