Hegel and Psychoanalysis

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Both Hegel and psychoanalysis make use of history to articulate the problems that a human being has to master. Hegel starts from the lowest level of consciousness and points to the shortcomings of that level in order to introduce the next level. Psychoanalysis starts with the problems that an individual encounters and goes back to childhood experiences to explain and remove the difficulties experienced by patients in their current life. Hegel uses a teleological method. Psychoanalysis uses an archeological method. The great Hegel scholar, Jean Hyppolite, wrote a path breaking article pointing to several passages in Hegel that overlap with psychoanalytic ideas. Thus in his master/slave dialectic Hegel makes the distinction between an enslaving ideal ego and a liberating ego-ideal. In his passage on the law of the heart, Hegel demonstrates that a defective position of the spirit leads unavoidably to paranoia. Hegel thereby contradicts American psychiatry by arguing against a biological explanation of paranoia in favor of a mental explanation. These are only two of many examples where Hegel’s analysis overlaps with psychoanalytic insights. In this course we will study and analyze the many overlapping analyses of human behavior between Hegel and psychoanalysis. Both make use of the idea of inner conflict. We will make use of recent publications developing this idea further.