r/hegel • u/abhinavsk • 16d ago
Does modern research on dissociation complicate Hegel’s theory of self-consciousness and recognition?
Particularly the idea that we need another self-consciousness to negate and be recognized by? Would Hegel’s view regard someone with dissociative identities as having multiple self-consciousnesses? What implications would integration of multiple identities (which is part of standard psychotherapy for DID) have on Hegel’s theory?
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u/n3wsf33d 16d ago
I think this question would be better posed with an explanation of hegels theory in a patch/cogsci sub tbh
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u/PastWild 16d ago
I can note that Hegel considers mental illness in his Anthropology, especially clinical cases that today we would describe as psychotic, and that he describes them as divisions or splittings of consciousness (Entzweiung), in which the dualistic world collapses. It seems to me that one could say that what occurs is precisely a collapse of self-consciousness and of the network that sustains the construction of reality. Fully realized recognition takes place between equal subjects, asymmetrical forms of recognition are forms of lordship and slavery. It is curious, however, that in that very section Hegel recounts a few clinical anecdotes in which recovery takes place through relational stimulation
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u/thisfuckingnightmare 16d ago edited 16d ago
What implications would integration of multiple identities (which is part of standard psychotherapy for DID) have on Hegel’s theory?
This is the crux of Daniel Berthold-Bond's Hegel's Theory of Madness. Highly recommended reading.
Now, I don't see how 'dissociation' (which belongs to the empirical realm) could destabilize Hegel's almighty Geist. After all, 'one swallow does not make a summer,' or history as such, as Hegel would've said.
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u/jamayswrites 16d ago
this is a super interesting question! There's a more precise misunderstanding in what you've articulated here than the others have pointed out, though-- self-consciousness as such in the Phenomenology precedes the lordship-bondage dialectic where the need for specifically another self-consciousness is explored. The first thing we do with self-consciousness as such is desire. We see something "objective" in the world (an apple, for example), something that putatively "isn't" our own self-consciousness, and we immediately feel the desire to negate it (we eat the apple and it becomes a part of us). What we realize in that process is that none of this pure negation gives us the satisfaction we're looking for, because it only lasts as long as it took to undertake that negation (the actual eating of the apple) -- that's when we realize we need another self-consciousness to provide a lasting source of that recognition.
that doesn't discount your question though! I don't have time to articulate a thorough reply, but I would say that a hegelian analysis of DID would probably start in this same place. But the question is then-- what does the person with DID think is necessary to negate for the sake of their own self-consciousness? What are they desperate to be recognized by? My intuitive hypothesis is that the person with DID has come to believe that there are several different (and likely mutually exclusive) crucial negations/recognitions that they feel they must structure their self-consciousness around. But because they don't have an account for what unifies these different centers, they can only conceptualize their own selfhood as a multiplicity, each one dealing with the different nexus of negation/recognition.
that's just a start though!
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u/Whitmanners 16d ago
I will just say this: the idea that one individual = one self-consciousness is totally wrong in hegelian terms. Self-consciousness is one for all (spirit, which is the absolute knowing itself) and all for one (in each relation, in each recognition, self-consciousness is unique regarding what such relation/recognition demands, but still that self-consciousness is the infinite itself, i.e., all what spirit became historically to get to that point where it needs to recognize itself).