We have attempted to reconstruct Hegel's account of psychopathology largely in terms of Freudian metapsychology and its category of the unconscious, to provoking and illuminating effect. We now attempt to systematically connect Hegel's account of ‘derangement’ with his conception of habit [Gewohnheit], what he also refers to as the second nature [zweite Natur], at the basis of what will constitute finite subjectivity. While we might take such a move in several directions, we wish to restrict our focus in an attempt to discern how the category of habit is deployed with the objective of stabilising the acute diremption triggered in the psychopathological disunity of self-feeling. Consequently, our position is to view the various modes of treating psychopathology as processes of (re-)habituation and maintain that both categories can only be properly understood by being thought in conjunction. In this sense, the construction of a second nature through habit proves the stabilising category by which the internal scission of the feeling soul as present in psychopathology is overcome. This expresses not only the overcoming of ‘derangement’s’ traumatic division but also the emergence of ‘actual soul’ [Die wirkliche Seele], where the corporeal body functions as a singular expression, as a ‘sign’, of the transformative unitary activity of the soul. This subjective permeation signifies a process of mediation where the soul, first discovered as substantial unity, has come to show itself as a stabilised, subjective structure of embodiment, set against the objects of the world it engages. Hence, we might say that this final moment of the Anthropology constitutes substance's transformation into subject. This thorough subjective structuration announces the emergence of the simple self-relation of the abstract cogito (I=I), namely consciousness. Taken as a whole, the advancement of soul to consciousness will mark spirit's radical break with the exteriority which dominated the natural register as indicated in the simple yet profound utterance of ‘I’.

Bracketing Hegel's discussion of treatment and the emphasis he places on Pinel's concept of ‘moral treatment’ [traitement moral], we intend to focus on the category of habit because it is through it that we discern the precise ways in which the protruding content of self-feeling, and its potentially psychopathological significance, is reconfigured within the fluid (ideal) totality en route to (re-)establishing the synthetic unity of the ‘I’.