Ouphilpo

There are numerous relations between Freud and Hegel in their conceptualization of the unfolding of experience. For instance, Freud examines how “a state of consciousness is characteristically very transitory; an idea that is conscious now is no longer so a moment later” (Freud 4). This understanding is sympathetic to Hegel’s examination of the Now, and how ‘Now’ always eludes the speaker due to an appeal to universals to describe a particular, the “Now that has been” (Hegel 63). Additionally, Freud comments, “thinking in pictures, is, therefore, only a very incomplete form of being conscious,” (Freud 14) much like Hegel’s insight towards the certainty of sight as “the most abstract and poorest truth” (Hegel 58). Both agree on the dynamics of consciousness, as well as the limits of perception, however, they differ in their placement of (or not) importance on the contingent, where Freud shows his true colors as a contingent Hegelian, placing truth on the most minute of details, where Hegel would scoff at the idea, placing truth within nothing less than consciousness-of-itself; absolute knowing.
Hegel writes, “when consciousness itself grasps this its [sic] own essence, it will signify the nature of absolute knowledge itself” (Hegel 57). Understanding Kant’s ding-an-sich of consciousness-for-consciousness, the ultimate unity, is the underlying quest of Freud’s attempts at creating the unity between one’s social and personal worlds, where the social world of one’s superego is dialectically related to the unfettered personal or intrinsic world of one’s own cognition. However, Freud is more formalistic than Hegel in that Freud’s thought led to psychoanalysis, which is concerned with the contingent in a way that Hegel is not interested in, and in this way the two thinkers diverge. Hegel believes in “the singular detail…[becoming] correspondingly less important, when, too, that universal aspect claims and holds on to the whole range of the wealth it has developed, the share in the total work of Spirit which falls to the individual can only be very small” (Hegel 45). The emphasis in our society on Spirit is increasingly placed on the universal aspects of spirit, while one’s own individuality and individual experience of Spirit is rendered less important. “Because of this, the individual must all the more forget himself…of course, he must make of himself and achieve what he can; but less must be demanded of him, just as he in turn can expect less of himself, and may demand less for himself” (ibid). The empowerment of the universality of Spirit comes through the culturally-based importance on science, where claims to universality usurp individual and singular experience. Objectivity has overridden subjective opinion and Freudian contingency to the point where one’s singular experience is, and can only articulate itself in terms of the universal.
However, Freud’s psychoanalysis is much the opposite, used “to understand the pathological processes in mental life, which are as common as they are important, and to find a place for them in the framework of science” (Freud 3). Freud uses his method to find a place for the singular, individual events in a person’s life in the overarching framework of objectivity, where Hegel finds this relationship irrelevant to the project of philosophy. Opinions, beliefs, faith, etc. are all subjective keys to the door of a larger objectivity for Freud. The ego is represented as the synthesis of the id and superego, as “the ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world,” (Freud 18 ) as well as “a coherent organization of mental processes”(Freud 8). For Freud, this notion of a universal self-consciousness fits into the notion of an organizational process; the same manner in which Hegel views the very worldly notions time and space, for instance. Both are necessary in their own essence for overall comprehension of the scientific universal that both Hegel and Freud acknowledge exists, however different their views might stand in regards to the relationship between one’s singular relationship to the scientific universal.