In his last book Moses and Monotheism (1939), Freud once again presents the schema of psychic causality, according to which the subject not only represses some traumatic events from early childhood, but this repressed material returns in his or her adult life as a symptom, shaping the neurotic psychic structure. The repressed material is thus not erased, but returns back in another place in the form that Freud calls distortion (Entstellung). For Freud, not only Jewish monotheism emerges in such a form of distortion (Jewish Jahve’s monotheism does not emerge ex nihilo, but is a distorted form of Aton’s Egyptian monotheism); by drawing the analogy with the structure of primal horde and primal father murdered by his sons, he contends that religion as such (starting with totemism) is the returned of this repressed prehistory of humanity in the distorted form of a symptom.

Hegelian conception of history as a progress of the objective spirit entails the growing expansion of freedom (thus the philosophy of world history), which culminates in what contemporary Hegelians used to advance under the heading of the “end of history”: the actualisation of the spirit in the form of the sovereign state and capitalist civil society, and the gradual expansion of this model. For Hegel, the history as both objective (narrated) and subjective (happened) in the strong sense becomes possible only with historiography, which in turn emerges as a historiography of the state. Hegel thus admittedly dismisses all the history of the pre- or non-state people, tribes, ethnicities, as “prehistory” or prehistorical particularities, which fall out of the concept of history (as universal).

The aim of the paper is to read Hegel’s conception of history through the lens of Freud’s theory of distortion (Entstellung): insofar as symptom is not just mere dysfunction of the system, but precisely the return of the repressed in the form of distortion, history too runs by the repression and the symptomatic return of the repressed. What is, then, the return of the repressed in Hegelian conception of historical progress? The paper will contend that this repressed material concerns precisely the origins of the state and those anti- or non-statal elements (what Hegel dismisses as “prehistory” in broader sense) which were repressed and thus enabled the establishment of the state. So-conceived return of the repressed, however, should not be grasped as a kind of anti-spiritual set of elements, but rather as a sign of the further advancement of the undead spirit toward new, higher forms of freedom.