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Beautiful Soul

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beautiful soul (belle ‚me) The beautiful soul (Ger. schˆne Seele) is a
The beautiful soul (Ger. schˆne Seele) is a stage in the dialectic of self-consciousness which Hegel describes in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel, 1807). The beautiful soul projects its own disorder onto the world and attempts to cure this disorder by imposing 'the law  of the heart' on everyone else. For Lacan, the beautiful soul is a perfect metaphor for the ego; 'the ego of modern man . . . has taken on its form in the dialectical impasse of the belle ‚me who does not recognise his very own  raison d'Ítre in the disorder that he denounces in the world' (E, 70). In a more  extreme way, the beautiful soul also illustrates the structure of paranoiac misrecognition (see M…CONNAISSANCE) (Ec, 172-3).  The concept of the beautiful soul illustrates the way that neurotics often deny their own responsibility for what is going on around them (see AcT). The ethics of psychoanalysis enjoin analysands to recognise their own part in their sufferings. Thus when Dora complains about being treated as an object of exchange by the men around her, Freud's first intervention is to confront her with her own complicity in this exchange (Ec, 218-19; see Freud, 1905e).
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