The presence of Spinoza in the exchanges between Sigmund Freud and Romain Rolland

Abstract

Although Freud recognized his profound affinity with Spinoza, we seldom find explicit and direct references to the philosopher in his works. The correspondence between Romain Rolland, the ‘Christian without a church’, and Freud, the ‘atheist Jew’, is full of Spinozian reminiscences that nourish their works of this period and are underpinned by their mutual transference. The Future of an Illusion is written according to a Spinozian blueprint and aims at replacing religion, qualified as superstition, by psychoanalysis. A quotation from Heine, ‘brother in unbelief’, is a direct reference to Spinoza. Concurring with Freud’s critiques of dogmas and churches, Rolland proposes an analysis of the ‘oceanic feeling’ as a basis of the religious sentiment. Freud replies with Civilization and Its Discontents. In 1936, on the occasion of Rolland’s 70th birthday, Freud sends him an open letter, A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis, where the strange feeling that he has experienced in front of the Parthenon refers inter alia to his double culture: Jewish and German. In the light of this correspondence, the creation of psychoanalysis turns out to be a quest for the sacred that has disappeared in modernity; Freud, though, was able to find it inside man’s unconscious.

Key words:

• history of psychoanalysis
• metapsychology
• research

1. Translated by Andrew Weller

1. Translated by Andrew Weller

Notes

1. Translated by Andrew Weller

2. See the remarkable book by Bernard Duchatelet (2002) on this author.

3. A prize that Freud no doubt coveted, but never obtained.

4. This relation has escaped many commentators, such as P.‐L. Assoun (1976) who examines Freud’s relation with the philosophers without mentioning the philosopher from Amsterdam.

5. Quotation from the correspondence between Freud–Rolland (Vermorel and Vermorel, 1993).

6. The first part – which had just appeared – of his novel, L’âme enchantée.

7. Heine, one of the authors to whom Freud was closest, defined himself as a ‘defrocked romantic’.

8. This friend is not mentioned in the text, and it is thanks to Ernst Federn, who kindly gave me this information, that this anonymity could be lifted.

9. With the dedication, ‘The landtier to his great oceanic friend’.

10. Meanwhile, Amalia, his mother, had died in 1930.

11. It is described as an inner voyage, a sort of odyssey, not without an ‘oceanic’ ring about it: “When first one catches sight of the sea, crosses the ocean & one feels oneself like a hero who has performed deeds of improbable greatness” (Freud, 1936, p. 247).

12. The first draft of this text was entitled Das Unglaube [Unbelief]: does the association with Unglaubensgenossen [brothers in unbelief] suggest a link with Spinoza?

13. He died in 1944 from respiratory failure.

14. Like the German romantics who, along with the philosopher and pastor Schleiermacher, had abandoned everything of religion except the religious feeling.

15. My italics.