Preface: A Reading That Opened a Door
This essay began with a reading of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, a collection from the University Notre Dame Press, Edited and Translated by Peter Fuss and John Dobbins that captured my attention. These lectures—delivered at the University of Berlin in 1822, 1828, and 1830—were not written as a formal treatise but were transcribed from classroom presentations, preserved through the notes of Hegel’s students and his own marginalia. After his death, they were edited and published by Eduard Gans in 1837.
Hegel’s vision of world history is not a mere chronology of events, but a philosophical account of how Spirit (or Geist) unfolds through time—through nations, individuals, revolutions, and contradictions. It was in reading his remarks on the Reformation, on the transformation of labor, money, and ethical life in Protestant Europe, that I began to sense something deeper at work—not just a historical thesis, but a spiritual diagnosis. Hegel was describing not only external shifts in religious and political life but also the beginnings of a profound inward turn—a redirection of moral life away from external institutions and into the structure of the self.
This essay follows that line of thought forward: from Hegel’s observations on Protestant freedom and guilt into the psychological frameworks that would later emerge in the German-speaking world. It is not a historical argument in the academic sense, but a philosophical exploration—one that traces the transformation of religious guilt into psychological unrest, and shows how the Reformation planted the seeds for what would eventually become the modern science of the psyche.
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From Reformation to Psychology: The Inward Turn of the German Soul
In the wake of the Reformation, as Martin Luther shattered the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, a profound shift began—not merely theological, but psychological and cultural. Where once the Church had cast money and worldly work as spiritually suspect—symbols of temptation and moral decay—Luther and his followers redefined labor, commerce, and individual action as part of a divine calling. As Hegel observed, “Unemployment no longer was seen as something saintly; it was acknowledged to be better to make oneself independent by activity, intelligence and industry.” The Protestant conscience, no longer beholden to priestly mediation, began to locate its spiritual drama within the individual. The world, once a site of sin, became a stage for moral agency.
Hegel further recognized that the ethical status of work had undergone a complete inversion. “Industry, crafts and trades now have become ethical, and the obstacles which the Church had erected to their recognition have vanished.” The prohibition against lending money at interest—once considered sinful—was openly violated by necessity, as the emergence of banking families like the Lombards and the Medicis made clear. In this new order, Hegel noted approvingly, “It is considered more honest that he who has money should spend it even on un-urgent needs than that he should give it away to idlers and beggars… for he gives it to an equal number of persons, and these must at any rate have worked for it.”
But this liberation from external authority brought with it a new kind of burden. Guilt did not vanish—it migrated inward. If the Church once imposed shame from without, the Protestant conscience now became its own judge, examiner, and accuser. Hegel understood this as a historical necessity: the evolution of Geist, or Spirit, required the interiorization of moral life. Yet in this inward turn, something unresolved took root. The self, newly free from ecclesiastical judgment, found itself haunted by guilt it could not fully explain.
This guilt—detached from its original object—did not disappear. It became formless, persistent, and psychological. It no longer declared “money is evil” or “the world is fallen,” but whispered that the self itself was inadequate. Success in the world might be achieved, but it came tethered to anxiety, to a scrupulous need to prove worth through work, order, or productivity. This was not freedom in the full sense—it was a spiritual and existential restlessness that could not be quieted by religious means alone.
It is from this unresolved interiorization that psychology, particularly in the German-speaking world, begins to emerge. Not as a rival to theology at first, but as its inheritance. Freud’s superego bears uncanny resemblance to the Protestant conscience. Jung’s explorations of neurosis often echo the soul’s estrangement from symbolic wholeness that Christianity once mediated. Even Nietzsche’s wrathful dismissal of Christianity reveals an acute sensitivity to the residue of guilt that Protestantism internalized but could never dissolve.
Nowhere is this transformation more potent than in the life and work of Sigmund Freud, whose personal emergence as a thinker reflects precisely the kind of inner unrest his theories sought to explain. Born in 1856 to a non-observant Jewish family in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Freud was raised in the shadow of a Christian culture whose theological content was in decline, but whose moral atmosphere remained thick with inherited expectations. The God of his culture was no longer present in the churches—but He was alive in the conscience, the law, the pressure to succeed, the shame of failure.
Freud himself experienced intense early conflicts between instinct and restraint, between desire and the need for approval—not only from society, but from his father, his teachers, and his own demanding moral self. By his own admission, he struggled with neurotic symptoms, dreams, and psychosomatic disturbances. But unlike most, Freud turned inward and listened to these disturbances. He followed the symptoms into their symbolic logic, and in doing so, began to excavate what religion had once interpreted as sin—but which he came to see as unconscious conflict, repressed desire, and the remnants of inherited moral codes no longer consciously believed.
For Freud, guilt was not a mistaken feeling—it was the structural consequence of becoming civilized. In his later work, especially Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), he argues that guilt is the price we pay for living in community. Repression, particularly of aggressive and sexual impulses, becomes the condition for social order. And at the heart of this repression is the internalization of authority—what Freud calls the super-ego—which judges the self harshly, even when the external world is forgiving.
“The tension between the claims of conscience and the actual performance of the ego is experienced as a sense of guilt.” — Freud
In this sense, Freud is not merely describing mental illness—he is charting the spiritual afterlife of religious law, now re-encoded in the modern psyche. His psychology is a kind of archaeology of guilt, and in that sense, he stands not at odds with theology, but in its lineage.
Nor was Freud alone. The emergence of modern psychology in the German-speaking world was not the invention of one man, but the surfacing of a shared inner condition. Figures like Alfred Adler, who emphasized feelings of inferiority, compensation, and the striving for mastery, were responding to something that had long existed within Christian religious life: the deep conviction of personal unworthiness, sin, and the inability to measure up before God. What had once been called guilt or fallenness was now translated into the language of psychic imbalance, but the emotional structure remained intact. The Protestant emphasis on personal conscience, on the individual’s relationship to divine perfection, created fertile ground for a worldview in which the self was perpetually at risk of not being enough.
Adler’s psychology may speak of self-esteem and compensation, but beneath it is the same psychic unrest that haunted Luther: the sense that one must strive endlessly to prove worth, to be justified—no longer by grace, but by achievement. In this way, Adler carries forward the Reformation’s spiritual architecture, but now under the banners of individual psychology, self-determination, and social interest.
What unites these early figures of German and Austrian psychology is not simply their language of the unconscious, but the recognition that the modern individual is estranged from his origins, split between instinct and law, between the desire for freedom and the weight of moral inheritance. In Freud, this conflict expresses itself as repression and neurosis; in Adler, as striving and inferiority; in Jung, as alienation from symbolic meaning. But in each case, the new science of psychology takes up the ancient work of the soul—not through confession, but through analysis.