ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud took many things for granted out of his atmosphere and hence drew back from admitting that sort of relationship with Spinoza which might require Freud to give independent philosophical justifications for some of his central assumptions in methodology. When Freud coined the phrase that the ego was the true seat of anxiety he was giving voice to a very true and profound intuition. Freud had an innate aversion against introversion, which he identified with an auto-erotic narcissistic attitude of mind. Spinoza is a thinker who can imbue a thinker like Freud when in want of access to such salvational truth, although he shunned any guidance for the self-exploration of the immense mystery of man’s own unknown Being. Freud’s teacher Franz Brentano was engaged in writing a treatise on psychological methods which anticipated many of Freud’s latter ideas, in particular Freud’s emphasis on the intentional, or meaning content of an individual’s action as the central focus of psychological inquiry.
