The feeling soul's unresolved contradictory identification as substance and subject, as previously instantiated by way of the foetus–mother relationship, intensifies under the rubric of what Hegel calls ‘self-feeling’ [Selbstgefühl]. The category of self-feeling manifests an acute rupture within the feeling soul's substantial totality (corporeal body). It is a crucial moment in the analysis, conceptually mapping the intensifying internal scission of substance [Urteil], resembling the decision [Ent-Scheidung] crucial to the foundation of subjective experience as presented in Schelling's Weltalter and made much of by Žižek, which will establish the self as the unity of drives whose unruliness must nevertheless be bound within the unconscious – a critical moment in the self-differentiating processes that will come to constitute subjectivity proper. Feeling soul's internal conflict will, in turn, be resolved by way of the category of habit [Gewohnheit], what Hegel calls ‘actual soul’ [Die wirkliche Seele], where a single agency possesses the entirety of the determinations of the psychosomatic interface of the body, such that the latter serves as an expressive medium of the former. This in-habiting of the body is the final threshold which, simultaneously, will make a complete negative distance from it possible, that is, the emergence of the simple, self-relational structure of the abstract ego that operates at the core of consciousness proper. Anticipating these developments, the dynamics of self-feeling nonetheless introduce Hegel's bizarre yet fascinating discussion of psychopathological states and the role they play in the formations, and, as we will emphasise, the potential regressions of finite subjective spirit.

We intend to emphasise how psychopathology proper instantiates an acute form of regression when considered in relation to developed subjectivity. When we speak of ‘regression’ we mean that the logical primacy of spirit's reconstructive ordering of its material origins is undermined, such that the instinctual drives of the individual attain that status as the determining-dominate dimension of subjectivity, with the consequence that the latter is paralysed in terms of its existential ‘project’. Hegel's methodology, like Freud's and perhaps even Nietzsche’s, suggests that the analysis of various pathologies makes explicit relations that are only implicit in the functioning of healthy subjectivity.