Abstract

Hegel has not been considered a philosopher of trauma. But the fact is that trauma is one of the themes most elaborated by Hegel in his Anthropology under the notion of mania (_Wahnsinn_). Mania was considered as a series of pathological behaviours because of fixed ideas or elements that triggered it. This causes a bad associative habit, whose hold is involuntary and unconscious. This is sedimented in the human being in memory and recollection. Hegel will state that memory and recollection are necessary for representation, which means that if these are associated by habituation with traumatic experiences, then the person generates pathologized representations. This Hegelian theory of mania is later compared with the DSM-5 to corroborate that Hegel's theory of mania is what we now call trauma.