ABSTRACT
Hegel’s treatment seeks to demonstrate the potentialities scientifically, the scientific account at the same time remaining essentially one with the moral judgment. Hegel seeks to unite his psychological explanation of hypnosis and his moral judgment upon it by means of his science of spirit, and of the psyche and consciousness as determinate phases of spirit. The phenomenon of hypnosis, according to Hegel, reveals in rather startling fashion the nature and potentialities of the psyche as spirit. For Hegel, as for Thomas Mann, the relation of two individuals in the hypnotic trance has a degrading aspect. The advance of the soul to the ego of consciousness, according to Hegel, is ascension in ideality: that is to say, a development in determinateness of the Idea. The concept of mental illness, says Hegel, has just as necessary a place in the science of subjective spirit as that of crime in the science of right.
