Daniel Tkatch

In this chapter, I turn to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit, the third part of his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817/1830) and argue that this work can help us better conceptualise the relation between mind and body in mental illness and resist the pull of theoretical extremes: the rationalist view, according to which mental illness is caused by a troubled mind, on the one hand, and its physicalist reduction to an epiphenomenon of physiological pathologies, on the other. Most literature that examines Hegel’s theory of mental illness focuses on his earlier works—above all, on Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)—and to a large extent ignores the Encyclopaedia, where Hegel discusses consciousness and its role in spirit, now incorporating it into a different, anthropological context, based on an account of subjective spirit qua soul as a systematic transition from nature to spirit. I elaborate a Hegelian conception of mental illness as a split in the underlying unity between the soul’s corporeal and mental aspects with severed dynamic relations between what the soul is in itself and for itself. Finally, I draw consequences from the proposed concept of mental illness with regard to contemporary psychology and psychiatry. Considering the recent reappearance in both research and therapy of mental illness of physicalist trends that were dominant in the nineteenth century, I stress the need to always consider both organic and psychical factors, whatever the context of the illness, and that an individual and appropriately spiritual approach remains indispensable.

Is the expression “unconscious phenomena” a contradiction in terms? Do psychoanalytic discoveries compel phenomenology to adapt its methods in treating inapparent phenomena? What role does the body play in the manifestation of such phenomena? In this paper, I approach these questions (1) from within the clinical context of a post-traumatic somatization and (2) by spelling out the implications of Heidegger’s critique of Freudian psychoanalysis in the Zollikon Seminars. Drawing new critical attention to Freud’s earliest theories and methods, developed in the context of the investigation into hysteria, I argue that some of his fundamental insights may be read as following basic phenomenological intuitions. Following Heidegger’s reconfiguration of the field of phenomenology, the inapparent (“that which does not show itself as itself”) may be seen as taking center stage as the exhaustive model for phenomena as such. Placing particular emphasis on a set of Heidegger’s critical notions – “semblance” [Schein],” “understanding”, “motive” [Beweggrund] and “bodying-forth” [Leiben] — I argue that somatization could be conceptualized phenomenologically as a “bodying-forth” [Leiben] of an incapacity to understand or be understood, and that a similar mis-understanding may also befall practitioners who struggle to witness trauma, thus becoming the clinician’s own symptom.