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Hegel's thinking, often highly abstract and difficult to understand, seems removed from the world of modern analytic psychiatry. In the following, however, I shall try to delineate some areas of importance to analytic psychiatry which Hegel might help to illuminate.
Hegel, in many of his writings, proceeds in a characteristic fashion: He starts, in a sense, from nowhere. He introduces vaguely defined concepts and problems. Then, in his manner of dealing with these, something meaningful tends to emerge. Imperceptibly, the reader feels, the spark of insight has been ignited. The propositions, which in the beginning appeared global and amorphous, increasingly become more specific, although it seems difficult to state why this is so. And yet it is. The reader has been tricked into that movement of concepts through which, according to Hegel, meaningful insight unfolds.
I shall, in this essay, try to adopt some of this procedure. That is, I also will begin with a general proposition and, hopefully, will end up with something that is more specific and immediately relevant to problems of psychoanalytic moment.
The general issue with which I am going to start is one which preoccupied Hegel: the nature of meaningful insight. How is it constituted?
In reflecting about this problem we run into a paradox. In order to know anything at all, we must, it appears, know everything. Knowledge of the particular requires knowledge of totality. To take an