ABSTRACT

This chapter brings forward the philosophical connection to support the 'enworlded' view of psychoanalysis: a connection with Hegel. It concerns Hegel's doctrine of the 'soul'. Hegel's philosophy is an attempt to place holistic and teleological principles at the centre of the understanding of the world, in place of reductive and mechanistic ones. Hegel gives his own treatment of the non-explicit, pre-theoretical, non-propositional background of meaningful relations to the world. He traces the emergence of mind through the most diffuse levels of sentience, in which soul is subject to influences of climate, geography, and natural or innate differences of disposition, temperament and character. Hegel was bound, given the nature of the phase of mind which he was trying to elucidate, to use the empirical material that best fitted his case. The chapter suggests that psychoanalytic findings about unconscious processes can be seen to fit within the framework as well as does the empirical material Hegel uses.