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Freud often declared that he had no Weltanschauung of his own, that he was purely a scientist. Yet he appears to have been too modest about his own range. Freud clearly has a metapsychology, a moral theory and a metaphysical theory of the mind, which includes the preconscious, the conscious and the unconscious.
There are many significant points of contact between the basic views of Freud and those of Spinoza, the seventeenth century “God-intoxicated” pantheistic Jewish philosopher. The mood and direction of these two thinkers are so similar, the agreement and approximation, in essential elements, is so striking that we can easily support Rathbun,1 when he affirms that “there is a closer alliance of Spinoza's psychology with Psychoanalysis than there is with any other modern school of psychology.” We shall only refer to the most striking similarities in the course of this article.
The most general—and fundamentally the most striking—point of agreement between the two thinkers is their common assumption of a thoroughgoing psychic determinism. Spinoza was strictly and consistently a determinist and he applied die doctrine to all spheres of thought: ethics, politics, religion, natural science and psychology. The inexorable laws of causality and mechanical necessity that permeate