According to Freud, the concept of drive is one of the most important of psychoanalysis and it is essential for psychology. Despite its conceptual relevance and centrality, the obscurity and vagueness that permeates this definition always raised controversial issues. The theory of drives suffered rearrangements, additions and corrections throughout the freudian production and still remained, according to the author, incomplete. In this work, the presentation of Spinoza’s concept of potency serves as a starting point for reading and systematization of Freud’s concept of drive. The persistence of the old problem concerning the relation between mind and body explains, partly, the current interest in the thought of Spinoza. For the philosopher, mind and body are expressions of a unique substance - indivisible, in one hand, but with proper causalities of each one, in the other. The potency, one of the key concepts in this philosophy, is used in this research with aim to provide an extra view of the drive’s concept, which definition is at the center of the mind-body problem. The axis of convergence between these two concepts mainly lies in the fact that are both constituent forces, that engender the human and that they present intensive variations. Starting from this similarity, other issues are also managed: the issue of lack of free will and the possibility of thinking the psychic apparatus as a work performed by the body.