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In Origins, Jon Mills offers a sustained philosophical contribution to what he calls “process psychology,” a psychological theory inspired by the work of G.W.F. Hegel, Freud, and others. This is a fascinating contribution to the existing literature that examines the intersection between philosophy and psychoanalysis, and it offers an alternative analysis of Hegel's relationship to psychoanalysis to that of other texts, including the social analysis of Jessica Benjamin in The Bonds of Love. The main task of Mill's book is to apply the Hegelian account of the origins of mind to the psychoanalytic account of the origins of the ego. For Hegel, mind is a dialectical process of sublation—the progressive negating and preserving movement toward self-consciousness—and Mills develops this into a psychoanalytic account of the prenatal origins of mind, which he claims undergirds all subsequent psychological development. The life of the unconscious mind—what Mills calls “the abyss”—is said to ultimately generate consciousness and the vicissitudes of intersubjectivity. Mills writes: “Psychic reality begins as unconscious experience constituted through presubjective events that collectively organize into an unconscious sense of agency … before we can speak of the infant … the mother … attachment … culture or language, we have to account for the internally derived activity that makes consciousness, attachment, and social relations possible” (p. 7).
Toward the beginning of the text, Mills eschews the need to critically engage with the existing psychoanalytic literature, which he suggests constrains the free development of theoretical insights. Consequently, the first half of the book is mainly devoted to this development in the form of analyses of the Hegelian system as a potential metaphysical basis for psychoanalysis, the structural development of “the abyss” (the dialectic of unconscious mind) and the genesis of the ego. Mills' account of this aspect of Hegel's theory is quite wel