Despite Freud's renowned disavowal of links between philosophy and psychoanalytic thought (Holowchak, 2013, Rathbun, 1934), the Anglophone reception of psychoanalysis resonated with interest in the parallelism between psychoanalytic attitudes and the psychological considerations of the 17 th century Dutch thinker, Baruch Spinoza (Brill, 1931; Rathbun, 1934; Smith, 1926; Tanner, 1907). Spinoza
... [Show full abstract] conceived of human striving as Conatus, an organic conception of mind as the containing, processing center of conflicting, deformed ideas, arising from the body, but absent Freud's later energic formulation of libido. Like Freud, Spinoza hypothesized a pleasure principle, as well as the workings of desire. The Spinozan conception of desire conforms more to operational definition than does Freudian wish. For Spinoza, desire is the extension of capabilities already recognized, directed toward other uses. Its operation is well-depicted in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, written only a generation after Spinoza's death, in a repetitive narrative pattern demonstrating how bits of learning, garnered through observation in enduring life experience, are later remembered and pressed into new service (Defoe, 1719). In this way, the autodidactic attitude of learning through experience expands self-knowledge, forming a precursor idea to the 18 th century German development of Bildung, or the enlightenment culture of self-formation, reflected in Goethe, Schilling, Humboldt, Lessing, Mendelssohn, and Heine (Bruford, 1975; Goetschel, 2004, Miller, 2018).
