ABSTRACT
Part II comprises three chapters, each a reworking of a published paper; and each detailing my own journey in discovering Spinoza late in my clinical career. The first paper (Chapter 3) describes my pursuit of Freud's 1905 reference to a Jewish joke leading to his ambivalently tinctured relation to his Jewish identity through his alter-ego, Heinrich Heine. It is Heine who then leads to Spinoza, characterized by Freud as a “fellow unbeliever”, an example of the “negative particle”.
