Abstract

The relation between mental pathology (madness) and habit has a systematic place in Hegel's philosophy of psychiatry. The spirit, in anthropology, is still a subjective substance, for it is not yet a subject. This means that the relations between sensations, feelings, impulses and desires with the world are deposited in the unconscious in the sense of self. The mechanism of the self-feeling is habit. Thus, habituating ourselves to the determinations from our preconscious stage is for Hegel the criterion that allows us not to fall into madness. This being so, then mental pathology is an error of mechanisms of the self-feeling.