Spinoza: Multiple identities at the origins of psychoanalytic psychology

Abstract

The present paper addresses Baruch Spinoza’s radical affirmation of individual identity emergent from within the psychosocial tensions of group membership. Focusing upon psychological experience beginning with a lived history of fearful Inquisitional persecution, and continuing from conformity to rebellion within the constraints of the Amsterdam Jewish synagogue, we trace the psychological recognition of individual identity in Spinoza’s understanding of the self-determined, immanent acts of daily life. Spinoza’s multiple names are depicted as markers, corresponding to membership in mutually exclusive social groups, each constraining freedom of thought and action.

Key words:

• Spinoza
• psychoanalytic psychology
• individuality
• modernity
• history of ideas
• ethnic prejudice

Notes

1 Mead’s concept of the “significant symbol” is a chronological precursor to Bion’s “significant fact,” which itself Bion attributes to Poincarre (Bion, 1992, p. 5), a contemporary of Mead.

2 On the other hand, doubled identities also provided an experiential basis for the communicative pleasure of polysemic multiplicity. The Spanish-born Hebrew poet and biblical commentator Abraham Ibn Ezra, fluent both in Arabic and Hebrew and cited by Spinoza in his Tractatus, observes a doubled level of understanding within linguistic meanings in his biblical commentary on Genesis (Ibn Ezra, 1988). Spinoza’s contemporary Joseph de la Vega, the first author to write on the workings of stock markets, employs the Spanish word flor to indicate both a flower and a card-sharp (De La Vega, 1688 ); and Spinoza’s posthumous detractor, Daniel de Levi Barrios, recounting the synagogue face-off between Rabbi Saul Morteira and Spinoza, describes the latter as a “thorn” (espinos) in a “meadow” (prados) –alluding to the link between Spinoza and his fellow in “heresy,” Juan de Prado (Israel, 2001).

3 Spinoza’s concept of Nature attends to what humans do, their lived experience, and how they act. In recognizing God as unknowable, Spinoza turns away from theological attention to the relational domain between Man and God. One consequence is in freedom for all – whether New Jews or conversos – - from observance of the Commandments, which practice had been incentivized by the promise of Eternal Life. Indeed, the fantasy of Eternal Life was also negated. Relative to the synagogue controversy that had been the background of Spinoza’s childhood, his Ethics effectively places conversos and New Jews on the same footing within the immanence of their mortality, not only reversing Rabbi Morteira’s ruling decision, but also eliminating the entire question that had roiled the Amsterdam community. As we shall see further in the next section, this continuation of Spinoza’s audacity also signals an unspoken Oedipal victory in his turn from social determination by group membership to an affirmation of psychological individuality.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ian S. Miller

Author

Ian S. Miller, PhD, is Associate Editor of American Journal of Psychoanalysis; Chair, Section of Individual Members at The International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies; Member, Irish Forum of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy; Chartered Psychologist, Psychological Society of Ireland.