Contributo in volume Verrücktheit und Idealisierung: Wachen, Schlaf, Traum in Hegels Philosophie des Geistes,

The paper starts by discussing the role that the sleep-wake relationship plays in sentimental, perceptive and judgmental dynamics – therefore at the dawn of individual self-awareness, linked to mind-body unity. In this context madness involves the contrast between the totality of the concrete feeling of self and the sclerotization and fixation in the perceptive particularity imposed by the body on the idealization activity of the soul. Madness, however, does not only involve the opposition between particularity and organic totality of the psycho-body unity, it also concerns the opposition between order and disorder. If the first mode interrupts the positive relationship between sleep and wakefulness, the second breaks the boundary between wakefulness and dream. After having described these two kinds of madness, the paper indicates the feminine-maternal role, die Mutter, and the universal masculine role, der Mensch, (the two moments of genius) in the relationship between conscious and unconscious.