Arché and Telos

In Arché and Telos, Laureen Park provides a close textual analysis comparing the works of Sigmund Freud and G.W.F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. She convincingly argues that they present complimentary and homologous ontologies that help to elucidate each other's key notions. Hegel's teleological approach helps to frame Freud's notions of instincts, sublimation, and culture, which Freud's reductive hermeneutical framework, as she shows, fails to make sense of. Freud's depth psychology grounds the subject of Hegel's Spirit in a way that preserves the vigor of the themes of life and desire that he intends. She covers a range of themes including their break with Cartesian epistemology, the place of desire in natural being, the first and second topographies and their relation to culture, dreams and their significance for waking life, recognition, morality, and religious consciousness. She concludes that the dark grounds laid out by Freud's psychoanalytic approach cannot be overcome by Hegel's rational spirit.