The Unconscious Abyss: Hegel's Anticipation of Psychoanalysis

Two. Unconscious Spirit

Two Unconscious Spirit HEGEL NEVER USES the term Ungrund to refer to the unconscious although he was very familiar with its significance in Boehme and Schelling, as we have seen. It is surprising that Hegel did not directly mention the Ungrund in his treatment of Boehme in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy. When he summarizes Boehme’s position on God’s self-revelation, he specifically refers to knowledge of the being or selfhood [Ichts] of self-consciousness within the spirit as opposed to nothingness [Nichts]1 but he does not address Boehme’s further treatment of the Ungrund even though he relied on Boehme’s texts where it specifically appears .2 But Boehme also uses the term Abgrund (abyss) to designate the divine omnipresence of the deity,3 a term Hegel himself uses to characterize the unconscious mind. While the Ungrund has a specific explanatory force for Boehme, its significance for understanding the problem of original ground is germane to our application to Hegel. It is important to note however, that the abyss serves several functions for Hegel, disclosing different forms of unconsciousness, the notion of original ground bearing only one meaning. Hegel uses the German nouns Schacht (pit, mine, or shaft) and Abgrund to refer to the unconscious abyss in several key passages in his psychological treatment of theoretical spirit, each carrying with it different meanings, but most of the time he simply uses the word unconscious (bewußtlos). Petry informs us that Hegel may have taken over the reference to an “unconscious abyss” from the works of J. F. Herbart (1776–1841), a contemporary whose work Hegel was familiar with.4 However, as we have seen, the introduction of the abyss may be properly said to have been motivated by multiple philosophical sources and thus its sole attribution to Herbart seems unlikely. When Hegel does mention the word abyss, he is often referring to psychic space, a place where images are “preserved unconsciously” in the bowels of the mind. The use of this imagery may be interpreted as Hegel’s abbreviated attempt to propose a depth psychology that Freud was later to provide, because Hegel allows the abyss to serve many psychic functions that traverse the plane of mental topography, thus 53 bringing forth images, affect, and presentations to bear upon the operations of imagination, fantasy, and memory that hover within the spheres of preconsciousness and conscious awareness. But he also equates the abyss with an agency or entity that is spirit’s original being—“intelligence as this unconscious abyss [Bewußtlos Schacht]” (EG § 453)—where “images of the past [lie] latent in the dark depth of our inner being” (EG § 454, Zusatz). In fact, Hegel recognizes the significance of unconscious agency as early as the Phenomenology where he equates “unconscious Spirit” with the “force and element”—the Trieb behind the maturation of “universal self-conscious Spirit” (PS § 463). It is interesting to note that despite the introduction of the unconscious in the Phenomenology, there is barely mention of the abyss (Schacht) in the 1817 first edition of the Encyclopaedia, and it was not until the 1827 second edition that it was first discussed.5 Furthermore, Hegel’s 1827 treatment of the abyss alters significantly in the third edition of 1830 where he adds further elaborations to the notion of the abyss in both the main text and in his remarks. Whereas the word unconsciously (bewußtlos) was only referred to in parentheses when first introduced in § 453 of the 1827 edition, by 1830 the parentheses were removed and it was made a proper part of the text. Here Hegel also specifically equates intelligence “as this” unconscious abyss, a comment that was left out in 1827. What is clear from the texts is that the notion of the abyss was growing on Hegel. He identified it in 1827 and even mentioned it in his lectures of 1827–1828,6 but by 1830 he felt he needed to add more to it. We can see from this that the conceptual importance of the abyss was being rethought and incorporated into his system in a more thorough way. One can only speculate what he might have done with this concept if it were not for his untimely death a year later.7 In the stage of Recollection discussed in the Encyclopaedia, Hegel is struggling with how we move from a particular image we sense and recall, to something that is universal and thus which can stand for a...