INTRODUCTION

Daseinsanalysis: A Quest for Essentials

Erik Craig
A ministry of the soul: so Freud described the kind of professional care
which he called psychotherapy or psychoanalysis. It was the beginning of
the century and the Viennese physician had already understood that the bulk
of misery which he witnessed in the lives of his medical patients was in es-
sence a spiritual malaise. The abode of their suffering was the soul. As this
basic truth dawned increasingly on Freud so did his hope that he could muster
a band of well-trained professionals prepared specifically to oppose this spe-
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cial kind of distress. Freud believed that the fundamental nature of all such
human dis-ease was a disfranchisement of the self such that the individual
was no longer in control of his or her own existence and, indeed, had been
taken captive by it. The cure, Freud knew, was to restore the individual's
own-most freedom to be.
Things are little changed.
The Problem of Human Suffering
It is an ordinary day in the consulting room of a psychotherapist, today,
nearly ninety years later. A young business woman complains about the
shallowness of the men in her life but wonders why she feels she cannot
manage without them, why she feels so desperate when alone. Later, the
psychotherapist listens to a fortyish engineer's agitation about his new wife
who will not support him in disciplining her contemptuous children. It is
the second marriage for each of the partners and the reality of their difference
looms ominously in the background of each new day. Suddenly the man
bursts into tears, realizing the possibility of yet another shattered dream.
Later still, a young assembly line worker gives voice to his sense of being
held as a captive witness to vivid sexual fantasies involving other men, fan-
tasies evoking feelings he recognizes as his own but dares not declare. Final-
ly, a portfolio manager in her mid-thirties, whose firm values her talents at
three thousand dollars a week, describes long, lonely nights of lying crip-
pled and sweating in the jaws of insomnia and the dread of being discovered
incompetent in her profession, a fraud.
These are a few of the kinds of existential captivities to which psycho-
therapists today are likely to attend. Though, for Freud, even these relative-
ly mild forms of enslavement were explained as the end result of the hidden
maneuvers of hostile factions within the human soul, one wonders if such
an imaginative plot is really necessary to explain what seem to be, for the
most part, fairly common and intelligible difficulties. In these instances,
Freud's theory seems more extravagant than the difficulties it purports to ex-
 2 Erik Craig

plain. Is there a way to understand these kinds of suffering more plainly and
directly? We may think so but, first, let's up the ante.
It is the same ordinary day, or perhaps the next, in the psychotherapist's
consulting room. Other individuals come to tell their stories. A university
vice-president, for instance, has suddenly lost fifty pounds. Too frightened
to drive an automobile on his own, late in the evenings he orders a taxi to
bring him home to his apartment, where he wanders about, gaunt, lethargic
and depressed. The therapist is aware of being worried for this man who,
today, describes an "enormous deadness inside" and who begs to have his
"skin ripped off," to be made "to suffer." Next, a thoughtful, soft-spoken
lawyer is lying on the couch. She has been enduring a vicious pain in her
abdomen for nearly six months. Dozens of medical examinations, some by
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the world's finest physicians, have failed to reveal a cause for her constant
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cramp. Repeatedly she is told it is "all in your head." And yet it is there in
her body: an alien, incomprehensible force, squeezing, tearing, grinding her
intestines like an invisible python bent on strangulating her from the inside
out. The few doctors who recognize the "realness" of her suffering say there
is nothing they can do. Yet she must do something before her whole fami-
ly and career are destroyed by this evil. She has come for psychotherapy:
an undesirable last resort. Later, the therapist is listening to a fiftyish com-
mercial real estate broker who has been "asked to retire" from two major
firms in as many years. Still proud of his abilities, today the man vociferous-
ly complains about the incompetence of his inferior new colleagues and their
audacity in questioning his judgment. Bellowing his indignation over the
latest in a series of explosive encounters with a company manager, the patient
unexpectedly turns to the therapist and shouts, "Why should I bother to come
here? You never do a damn thing but sit there! You're supposed to show
me how to deal with these idiots!" His attack mounts against the therapist
who soon notices his own lips involuntarily beginning to curl, as if "they"
want to snarl back in self-defense. "Some more unfinished business," the
therapist thinks to himself and is relieved when the hour is over. The end of
the day is near and the therapist looks forward to his last appointment. She
is a new patient who had first called two nights previously from a phone
booth near her home. Though clearly frightened of her husband, she seemed
pleasant, intelligent. The hour with this housewife and mother begins quite
as usual but, as she starts to speak of conflicts with her in-laws, her eye-con-
tact abruptly disappears and she becomes agitated. Suddenly she gets up
from the chair and looks out the windows: first on one side of the room, then
on the other. Do her in-laws know she has come here? Will they try to steal
her seven and eight year old daughters or her invention of a new kind of baby
carriage which she hopes to sell to a chain of department stores? Now she
wonders if she should stay for her appointment at all. "Are you sure," she
inquires, "no one can hear us through those doors?"
And so it goes.
 Daseinsanalysis: A Quest for Essentials 3

Though more extreme, these latter instances are still the kinds of dif-
ficulties which psychotherapists are likely to encounter in the course of a
day's work. As unique as each of these situations may seem, in addition to
the plain fact of human suffering they all have at least one thing in com-
mon: they reveal individuals who have lost a certain measure of freedom, a
capacity to consider and carry out the full range of their own possibilities for
being and relating. These individuals are all prisoners of their own exist-
ences and whether their jailors operate in social, psychological or bodily
spheres, the only genuine solution is pardon and parole. It was with these
fundamentals in mind that Freud first designed the psychotherapeutic situa-
tion. He understood very well that the essential source of all psychological
suffering was the loss of freedom, the incapacity of human beings to lay
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claim to the full inheritance of their own possibilities for being in the world.
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There can only be one authentic "cure" for such dis-ease: to free individuals
of their own restrictions, to restore the sense of existential command which
was rightfully, originally their own (Freud, 1926/1959, p. 205). The essence
of Freud's approach was simple: liberation through revelation, emancipation
through insight - the modern scientific version of an ancient wisdom: the
truth shall make you free.
But how are we to understand the loss of human freedom in the first
place? If we follow Freud's theoretical works, the cause of such suffering
is plain. In the course of defending themselves against various early threats
to their own well-being, individuals erect barriers within their own existence,
barriers which at once protect and immure. Even so, the individual's safety
is far from guaranteed for, according to Freud, the voices of desire that were
silenced in the service of self-defense do not comply so easily but, instead,
carry out an uprising of their own. Like palace ruffians who have been forced
to speak a fastidious English for their weak king (the "ego") they perform
their duties with decorous dispatch but, whenever the watch is slack, their
ribaldry leaves the castle in shambles.
Within this psychoanalytic understanding of the etiology of neurosis,
human beings are seen to have little control over their own existence. In
fact, the above scenario provides such a meager basis for any kind of
freedom at all that we are led to wonder on what grounds psychoanalytic
psychotherapy can claim to be a ministry of genuine liberation. The most it
seems we could hope for would be to establish a more congenial relation-
ship between the various inimical factions of the personality through the
benign and hospitable intervention of the psychotherapist.1
Beyond these irksome questions about the nature and origin of freedom
in the first place, we also wonder about the significance of those particular
ways in which freedom is denied in the existence of each individual who suf-
fers so uniquely. How are we to understand the meaning of the various kinds
of suffering and the particular ways in which this suffering appears in the
lives of individuals such as those we encountered above? Although our first
 4 Erik Craig

exposure to a present-day psychotherapist's practice hardly seemed to re-

quire extravagant explanations, as the suffering to which we were witness
became more acute, irrational or bizarre, Freud's unconscious scenario
seemed increasingly appealing. Indeed, the apparent unintelligibility of the
latter cases seemed to cry out for inventive understanding. Still, we wonder,
do such unruly phenomena really require the kinds of fantastic solutions
proposed by Freud? And where does the sense of unintelligibility lie in the
first place: in the malaise itself or in our own inability to see what is stand-
ing quite plainly before us? Is there a way to comprehend these disquieting
human phenomena while remaining respectful of the experience of those in-
dividuals who live them? And, of course, who is this being who is so troubled
in the first place? Who is this being we call the human being? And what is
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this home of suffering we call the human spirit, the psyche or the soul?
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The Phenomenological Uprising in European Psychiatry

These are only a few of the kinds of questions which a number of
European psychiatrists had begun to raise just over a half a century ago. In-
dividuals like Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966), Henri Ey (b. 1900), Victor
von Gebsattel (1883-1976), Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), Roland Kuhn (b.
1912), Eugene Minkowski (1885-1972) and Erwin Straus (1891-1975) had
turned away from some of the dubious theoretical claims of psychoanalysis
and appealed, instead, to the discipline of philosophy, hoping to discover a
more rigorous, respectful and anthropological (by which these Europeans
meant, "aimed at the essence of being human" [Binswanger, 1958, p. 191])
foundation for their thinking about human existence and its various misad-
ventures. Though working primarily independently, as a part of the middle
European intellectual community they enjoyed more than occasional oppor-
tunities to exchange perspectives and ideas. The Bellevue Sanatorium in
Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, where Ludwig Binswanger was director, was one
of the places where such exchanges often took place.
The particular philosophers to whom these psychiatrists turned in-
cluded, among others, Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), Alexander Pfander
(1870-1941), Max Scheler (1874-1928) and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976).
Although there was also a general interest in the existential concerns of such
philosophers as Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) and Martin Buber (1878-
1965), the greatest attraction to philosophy was embodied in the appeal of
Edmund Husserl "to return to the things themselves." Such an appeal for a
phenomenological understanding of things came as a welcome relief from
the standard psychoanalytic explanations in which nothing was ever con-
sidered on its own merits and in which manifest appearances nearly always
disguised latent intents. Even the most simple and elegant dream, for in-
stance, was interpreted to be nothing but a flimsy facade for perverse desires.
The Husserlian appeal was also a relief from the equally militant view that
human events, including the appearance, for example, of neurotic symptoms
 Daseinsanalysis: A Quest for Essentials 5

or dreams, did not mean anything at all, that biology was everything, the
quest for meaning a waste of time.
So while many American psychologists were caught up in establishing
psychology's viability as an empirical science of measurable phenomena, at
least one segment of European psychology had been profoundly awakened
to a concern for the manifest meaningfulness of these same phenomena. In
these years between her two World Wars Europe was indeed a fertile intel-
lectual soil and in the midst of this creative unrest new ways of understand-
ing human existence were beginning to emerge. The above mentioned
psychiatrists, in particular, soon established various philosophically ground-
ed approaches to the meaningfulness of human existence which came to exist
alongside the already well established psychoanalytic approach to determin-
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ing meaning. Though the method of reasoning among this group of psychi-
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atrists, who came to be known in Europe as "philosophical" or "pheno-

menological anthropologists," was quite different from that of psycho-
analysts, the followers of both intellectual traditions had one purpose in com-
mon: to ascertain the meaningfulness of human existence not only in its
"everydayness" but also, and especially, in its various crippling forms of
psychological malaise, in the pathological constrictions of the capacity to be
fully, freely, uniquely human.
Medard Boss: The Wedding of Psychoanalysis and Phenomenology
Of special relevance for psychotherapy is the work of one gentle though
iconoclastic psychoanalyst who managed to arrange a surprisingly com-
patible marriage between these two apparently divergent traditions of psy-
choanalysis and of phenomenological philosophy. Today these two intel-
lectual disciplines are nowhere more purely joined and embodied than in the
person of an eight-five year old Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who
is still actively thinking, writing and practicing in his home near Zurich,
Switzerland. His name is Professor Medard Boss.
Born on October 4,1903, in St. Gallen, Switzerland, Medard Boss had
been thrown into the midst of a wider European Zeitgeist of humanistic con-
cern. Originally aspiring to become an artist, Boss was cast unceremonious-
ly into the field of medicine by a father who disapproved of "breadless"
professions. Nevertheless resolved to do things his own way, Boss traveled
to Vienna to begin his medical studies and there underwent, apparently in
defiance of his father, a brief analytic treatment with Sigmund Freud him-
self. Boss returned to Switzerland to complete his medical and psycho-
analytic training with Eugen Bleuler and Hans Behn-Eschenburg and then
went on to study, in Berlin and London, with such eminent figures as Karen
Homey, Otto Fenichel, Hanns Sachs, Wilhelm Reich, Ernest Jones and Kurt
Goldstein. Returning once again to Zurich at the age of thirty-two, he began
a decade of study with Carl Jung.
Throughout these preparatory studies and in his early work as an or-
 6 Erik Craig

thodox psychoanalyst, though impressed with Freud's psychotherapeutic

method, Boss grew increasingly dissatisGed with the theoretical foundations
of psychoanalytic thinking and practice. Indeed he "came to resent," as we
are told by Paul Stern, "the 'strenuous mental acrobatics' imposed by
psychoanalysis upon analysts and analysands alike" (1979, p. xii). At the
height of his dissatisfaction, Boss met Ludwig Binswanger, who was also a
Swiss psychiatrist (twenty-two years Boss's senior) and who had already
been actively searching for some years for a more adequate philosophical
foundation for psychiatry. According to Stern, Boss "experienced a pro-
found sense of liberation when he came across Binswanger's phenom-
enological critique of the Freudian paradigm" (ibid). Binswanger, who had
had the advantage of already having met and studied such philosophers as
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Pfander, Husserl and Heidegger, introduced Boss to the works of Heideg-

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ger. Though this introduction was interrupted by a stint as a medical officer

during World War II, Boss "rediscovered" Heidegger's magnum opus, Being
and Time, during the war while reading a newspaper article which cited the
work and rekindled Boss's intellectual interests. In spite of the heavy
philosophical demand, Boss then began to study Heidegger's work in earn-
est. Pondering Heidegger so challenged and inspired Boss that, after the war,
in 1947, he traveled to the Black Forest to visit with Heidegger in his secluded
woodland hut. There followed an increasingly regular correspondence and
soon this intellectual collaboration grew into a friendship which was to last
twenty-five years.
During the early years of his relationship with Heidegger, Boss was
deeply immersed in a number of professional activities. Already the author
of many books and articles, Boss began a series of works which were even-
tually to form the nucleus of a radical new approach to psychotherapy and
psychoanalysis. Beginning with a 1947 book on the meaning and content of
sexual perversions (Boss, 1949), in which he first revealed the fullness of
his appreciation for Heidegger's thinking and gave "great credit" to Bins-
wanger for having introduced it to psychiatry and the study of psycho-pathol-
ogy, Boss went on to publish, in 1953, the first of two major texts on the
analysis of dreams (Boss, 1958). A year later, in 1954, Boss brought for-
ward a systematic study of psychosomatic phenomena, a special interest of
his which endured through his years as a practicing psychiatrist. Then, in
1957, in what many regard as his finest work, Boss first laid out the sys-
tematic application of Heidegger's philosophical understanding of human
existence to the field of psychology, including a full treatment of psycho-
therapy and psychopathology replete with amply detailed clinical case
studies (Boss, 1963). This was followed, in 1958, by a delightful little
volume, perhaps Boss's personal favorite, describing two journeys to India
(Boss, 1965). In 1971 came his magnum opus Grundriss der Medizin in
which Boss systematically took on once more, this time with even greater
clinical and philosophical richness than in his first foundational text in 1963,
 Daseinsanalysis: A Quest for Essentials 7

the breadth and detail of the concerns of medicine and psychology (Boss,
1979a). Four years later, in 1975, Boss published his final systematic work,
a second volume on dreams in which he returned to some of the questions
he had first raised twenty-two years previously, answering them with the
grace and wisdom of an additional two decades of thinking and practice
(Boss, 1977). Boss's complete body of work also includes scores of articles
which have been published in various journals and books all over the world.
Most of his major works have also been translated into several languages.
In spite of his capacity for solitary intellectual pursuits, Boss was never
the kind of man to wander back and forth between his office and his study
without ever venturing into the world. He was extremely active throughout
his life in medical, psychoanalytic and philosophical societies. In fact, in
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the early fifties he founded the International Federation for Medical Psycho-
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therapy and, for many years, served as its president. He was also a profes-
sor of medicine and psychotherapy at the University of Zurich and, since
retiring from there, he has taught both in his home and an institute which has
been founded to carry on his work (see the Special Reports at the end of this
volume). His extraordinary contributions to psychiatry, psychology and
psychotherapy have been widely acknowledged and, in 1971, he was given
the "Great Therapist Award" of the American Psychiatric Association.
A full appreciation of Boss's intellectual passions is not possible if one
considers only his relation to the West, for it was a journey to the East that
may have had the most radical spiritual impact on his life. Though the in-
fluence of Freud and Heidegger on Boss's thinking is quite well known, the
yield of this third, less familiar wellspring was, in some ways, equally rich.
In 1956 and 1958, Boss undertook two six-month-long journeys to India and
there, in addition to his teaching for universities and consulting for hospitals
and clinics, he made a concerted effort to study with a number of wise men
and women in various villages and ashrams. One swami, in particular,
Swamiji Govinda Kaul, touched Boss's existence so deeply that he compared
the quality of this man's presence with that of Heidegger and Freud. In India,
Boss found a tradition and kind of thought which so captured his interest, in-
tellect and imagination and which so coincided with the essence of Heid-
egger's thinking, as he (Boss) understood it, that he wrote an entire volume
(Boss, 1965) on these journeys and their impact on his own development.
Phrased in the voice of a seeker, this book traces Boss's medical and spiritual
pursuits as they came together in his quest for understanding not only human
existence but also the most fundamental mysteries of Being itself.
Concurrently with all of this activity, Boss continued to work with
Heidegger on applying the fundamentals of the latter's philosophy to the
concerns of psychotherapy, psychology and medicine. Two particular
projects deserve special mention. The first project involved Heidegger's
"patient and painstaking care" (Boss, 1979, p. 12) in assisting Boss with his
two broadly envisioned systematic texts, Psychoanalysis andDaseisanafysis
 8 Erik Craig

(1963) and Existential Foundations of Medicine and Psychology (1979a).

The second project was an extraordinary sequence of seminars by Heideg-
ger which Boss arranged for his colleagues and students in Zurich. These
"Zollikon Seminars," named after the village where the seminars were held
in Boss's own home, embodied and expressed the essence of Boss's hope
for bringing together his two enduring Western passions: on the one hand
phenomenological philosophy and, on the other, psychotherapy, psycho-
analysis and medicine. Boss has published two reports of these collabora-
tions with Heidegger. The first was a 1979 article in the Review of Existen-
tial Psychology and Psychiatry and the second a recently published edited
collection of Heidegger's lectures, conversations and letters which, unfor-
tunately, is only available in German (Heidegger, 1987).
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But who was this man, Martin Heidegger, and what was his special ap-
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peal to Medard Boss?

Martin Heidegger: The Philosophical Patron Of Daseinsanalysis
Martin Heidegger began his career in 1915 at the University of Freiburg
where he was a faculty member and young colleague of Edmund Husserl,
the philosopher widely regarded as the founder of phenomenology. Though
Heidegger was only twenty-six at the time, thirty years Husserl's junior, the
two men developed an important personal and intellectual relationship which
resulted in Heidegger's succeeding Husserl as chair of philosophy in 1928.
We are told by Spiegelberg (1960, p. 279) that Husserl himself had recom-
mended this succession in spite of his growing recognition of serious
philosophical differences: namely, that Heidegger had drifted away from
Husserl's own phenomenology of consciousness with its concern for the
"subjectivity of the ego" and had become increasingly absorbed in what
Heidegger called the question of the meaning of Being which he first set
forth in the bookBeing and Time (Heidegger, 1962). Heidegger's hope was
to use the phenomenological appeal of "returning to the things themselves"
to reveal the very structure of human existence and, subsequently, to ask
after the meaning of Being itself. Though his understanding of pheno-
menology was radically different from Husserl's (to the point, it must be ac-
knowledged, that many phenomenologists do not even consider Heidegger's
phenomenology phenomenological), it was this understanding that enabled
Heidegger to follow a path of thought which carried him through more than
sixty years of contemplation, writing and lecturing. Even with a number of
turns along the way, including what many regard as a complete reversal,
Heidegger's enduring concern with the meaning of Being and of being
human never waned.
It was Heidegger's view of phenomenology along with his bold and
original application of this view to the understanding of human existence
that especially appealed to those European psychiatrists, including Boss,
who were concerned with grasping the nature and variety of suffering which
 Daseinsanalysis: A Quest for Essentials 9

they encountered in the lives of their fellow human beings. Heidegger first
outlined his controversial view of phenomenology in his introduction to
Being and Time. Of particular importance for psychology and psycho-
therapy was his understanding of the nature of a phenomenon. The word
phenomenon comes from the Greek word, phainesthai, which means "to
shine forth," "to appear," or "to show itself"8 and Heidegger took it to indi-
cate "that which shows itself in itself, the manifest" (Heidegger's emphasis)
and to include not only that which "lies in the light of day" but also, and sig-
nificantly, "that which can be brought to light" (Heidegger, 1962, p. 51, em-
phases mine). Consequently, for Heidegger Phenomeno/ogy was a "dis-
course" (from the Greek, logos), a making manifest, a revelation, a letting
be seen (ibid, p. 56) of that which lies in the light of day as well as of that
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which can be brought to light. The "that which can be brought to light" was
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crucial for Heidegger and it was this that represented a basic deviation from
Husserl's phenomenology. According to Heidegger, phenomenological re-
vealing involved much more than the description of those familiar appearan-
ces of everyday life since, for him, what was distinctive and essential about
any phenomenon is that which "for the most part does not show itself" and
"lies/iKWe/z"(ibid,p.59).
In Heidegger's view, whether we consider the symptom of a disease, a
figure in a dream, or merely sitting down at a dinner table with friends, what
is essential is rarely, if ever, immediately available or apparent. In order for
the essential to reveal itself, considerable attention and thought are required
since the kernel of meaning which constitutes every moment of our exist-
ence, though always approaching us, is reticent to reveal itself too easily.
Just as in ordinary life we wisely approach the making of new friends by
only gradually disclosing our most essential truths, so too, according to
Heidegger, do phenomena reveal themselves to us. However, and again sig-
nificantly, this essence is not other than what initially appears. While it is
true that the meaningfulness of things lies hidden from our first view, "at the
same time it is something that belongs to what" we see and nit belongs to it
so essentially as to constitute its meaning and its ground" (ibid., p. 59, em-
phases mine). In other words, the symptom, the dream figure, the meal, the
friend are not anything other than what they appear to be, but precisely and
only the very beings they are showing themselves to be and, if we are open,
they will gradually unveil their hiddenness, their "shy" but essential presence
as the precisely constituted beings they are. What was unique about Heid-
egger's phenomenology, and the source of its appeal as well as of its con-
troversy, was that it was a phenomenology, not of the familiar, but of the un-
familiar: not of the obvious, but of the obscure; not of "surface," but of "sub-
stance."
Martin Heidegger's emphasis on the implicit, only "thought-fully" ac-
cessible significance of things as opposed to the explicit, all too readily avail-
able, "mere" appearance of things resulted in a philosophy which was quin-
 10 Erik Craig

tessentially upsetting. Upsetting, first because, with it, the most awesome
and troubling foundations of human existence, the uniquely beautiful and
burdensome possibilities of being human, were lifted up, out of the darkness
of unknowing, and set before our eyes. Upsetting, secondly, because our
response to this seeing calls up our own anxiety, that very mood which,
though in a derivative form, is the source of so much suffering among those
who come for psychotherapy and which lies at the heart of Freud's under-
standing of neurosis. But it was this "fundamental mood" of anxiety that
Heidegger prized especially. For Heidegger, though anxiety may be "sleep-
ing" it is "there"; "its breath quivers perpetually" through the human being,
not in opposition to joy and tranquility but rather, paradoxically, "in secret
alliance with the cheerfulness and gentleness of creative longing" (Heideg-
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ger, 1977b, p. 108). Anxiety, for Heidegger, was the mood of the philo-
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sopher and thinker, the mood of any individual man or woman who dares to
consider, outside the security of intoxicating belief and compliance, what it
really means to be a human being. Naturally, this existential mood of anxiety
is very important for psychotherapists, at least for those who are open to ac-
knowledging and understanding its presence in their own lives, for it pro-
vides them with a genuine basis for understanding, to some degree, the suf-
fering of persons who solicit their care.
Now it may be seen that Heidegger's starting point was actually quite
similar to Freud's in the view that there is always more than what meets the
eye, that there is a hidden meaningfulness or essence to things, and that it is
not enough to merely observe, classify and describe phenomena, as medicine
and psychiatry are so wont to do. Both men understood well that meaning
and truth require thought and mood. On the other hand, Heidegger's start-
ing point was also at the same time radically opposed to Freud's view that
this meaning was something other than what reveals itself initially, that "be-
hind" what shows itself "stands something else which does not appear"
(Heidegger, 1962, p. 60). On the contrary, Heidegger wrote, "'Behind' the
phenomena of phenomenology there is essentially nothing else" (ibid, em-
phasis mine). In a sentence, though Heidegger was dogmatic on the point
that there was an essential, hidden meaningfulness in all phenomena, includ-
ing the full range of phenomena which appear as human suffering; he was
equally dogmatic on the point that this hidden meaning was not other than
what appears but rather precisely and only what constitutes the very thing
that is trying to reveal itself. Behind what immediately appears is simply
more of the same, more profoundly and richly given, to be sure, but still more
of the same. This understanding of phenomena clearly offered heretical
European psychiatrists, including Medard Boss, the hope that they could in-
deed discover the essential, hidden meaningfulness of the variety of human
sufferings to which they were exposed and, significantly, that they could do
this in a way that would honor the authenticity and integrity of the experience
of those who suffered.
 Daseinsanalysis: A Quest for Essentials 11

Daseinsanalysis for Psychology and Psychotherapy

Through his relentless effort to discover the hidden foundations of
human existence Heidegger's "voice... aroused an amazing echo" (Spiegel-
berg, 1960, p. 272) in persons outside philosophy, in persons from all walks
of life who were concerned with the essential question of what it means to
be a human being. While Medard Boss was only one of these individuals,
he was precisely the one who saw in Heidegger's thinking a potentially
powerful and liberating way of seeing the concerns of the practicing psycho-
therapist. In fact it was Heidegger's description of that kind of human
solicitude which he called "anticipatory care" that struck Boss immediately
as defining "the ideal relationship" between therapist and patient, the only
kind of relationship which "respects and preserves the dignity of the human
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being" (Boss, 1979b, p. 8) and, ironically, the very kind of relationship which
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Freud, almost in spite of his excessive meta-psychological theories, recom-

mended as the optimal therapeutic attitude, one which is "ahead" of patients
in their "existential unfolding," enabling them to become transparent to
themselves and free for their own existence (Boss, 1963, pp. 72-74).
It was not long, therefore, after his initial contact with Heidegger that
Boss, following Heidegger, began to refer to human existence as Dasein, a
strange word, to be sure, for many English readers but in German a word
that is quite common. In fact, the Langenscheidt German Dictionary tells
us that the verb dasein means to "be there; be present; exist, be in existence;
be available," and the noun Dasein refers to "existence, being, life; pres-
ence." The word is also commonly used to form compound words such as,
for example, jDasef/isberechtigung, which may denote either "the right to
exist" or "raison d'etre." Although typically, in German, Dasein may be used
to refer to the existence of anything, the entire range of all that is, from the
presence of a vast and impenetrable Divinity to the most inconspicuous peb-
ble on a beach, for Heidegger and Boss the term was used specifically to
name human existence, the human being, the human presence. But more.
The aspect of "the-there" was unequivocal. The human being is that
being which opens out into its world, its there. Call it consciousness, if you
will. Awareness, perhaps. But still Dasein, the human being, is a being who
"shines forth" permitting all that is to show itself in the "clearing" of this in-
imitable "realm of world openness." Even a precisely literal rendering of
this compound word, Da-sein, with "Da" meaning there and "sein" meaning
being points to this "ecstatic, worldly" nature of human existence: to be
human is not simply to be, it is to be therel Dasein is the individual human
being, the "Being-the-there."
It is on the basis of this human opening out to all that is that human
beings, like no other beings, exist as those who understand not only their
own being but other beings as well. Thus, for Heidegger and Boss, human
beings are in the unique place to serve Being as such, to be servants of all
 12 Erik Craig

that is, allowing it to appear and to be understood with respect to the manifest
and manifold meaning-fullness of the things themselves. These fundamen-
tal characteristics of openness and understanding are prerequisite not only
for even this present moment of communication but also for raising any con-
cern whatsoever with respect to the meaning of human suffering and libera-
tion. It is only because of this openness and understanding that we can even
approach the individuals whom we encountered at the beginning of this chap-
ter with any hope of apprehending their pain.With such a phenomenologi-
cal understanding of human existence we are encouraged to encounter our
fellow human beings as the very individuals they are, considering each of
their unique situations, their unique forms of disquietude, precisely as they
are given in the experiences of the individuals themselves. Furthermore, we
are given the possibility of finding our way, gently and respectfully, to mean-
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ings which lie presently beyond our reach or, rather, the possibility that these
meanings will find their way to us, revealing what is distinctive and essen-
tial in the particular kind of dis-ease and disenfranchisement which appears
manifestly in the existence of the very one who suffers.
Now we can consider, for example, what it might mean that the young
business woman whom we first met continues to hold herself in a depend-
ent relationship with men and to be reluctant to embrace her own possibilities
for a more independent and autonomous existence in relation to her world.
Or, how might it be, for the woman whose stomach was constantly locked
in a python-like grip, that other aspects of her existence are also constricted
and cramped, that there are other ways in which she is unable to let go, to
relax and to allow what is nourishing to come into her existence and to pass
freely through it without such unkindly resistance and control? Also, what
might it mean that the real estate broker, who was so capable and intelligent,
still needs the world to confirm this to him, still requires the admiration and
agreement of others even in this sixth decade of his life? And finally, what
is the significance, with the last patient, not only of her distrust and the break-
down of her relationships with others, but also of her having devoted so many
hours of her life to the development of, not anything, but a very specific
thing, a baby carriage? These are only some of the questions that can now
be asked. They are questions of meaning and essence. They reach for what
is hidden in what is manifest not that hiddenness which is other than the
manifest but, rather, that hiddenness which exists essentially as the manifest,
as the very thing that is trying to reveal itself to us.
Essentials of Daseinsanalysis
Medard Boss called his own approach to psychology and psychother-
apy daseinsanalysis in keeping with Heidegger's designation of his own
philosophical or "fundamental ontologicar analysis of human existence as
Daseinsanalydk. During the twenty-five years of close association with
Heidegger, Boss consistently strove to elucidate the concerns of practicing
 Daseinsanalysis: A Quest for Essentials 13

psychotherapists through the attitudes and methods of Heidegger's hcr-

meneutic phenomenology.12 In this effort Boss did not intend to establish
yet another school of psychology and psychotherapy but rather to offer
psychologists and psychotherapists of various theoretical orientations a
courteous philosophically sound and penetrating way of looking at those
concerns which occupy them on a daily basis. Although it is not possible to
present even a sketch of the full scope of Boss's application of this way of
seeing in psychology and psychotherapy, it is worth touching briefly on a
few essentials.
Daseinsanalysis as Ontology
Daseinsanalysis is grounded in a philosophical approach to under-
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standing the meaning of being, that is, in ontology. At the heart of this on-
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tology, inspiring it and providing its most original ground, is a recognition

of the pure wonder of existence. There are two "wonders" in particular which
form the foundation for daseinsanalysis. The first is the wonder of Being
itself, the very fact that there is something at all when there could just as
easily be nothing; and the second is the wonder that, within this Being-ness
as such, there is such a being as Dasein, such a being as the human being
whose existence provides the clearing for all that it encounters to appear and
be revealed. These two wonders of Being-ness as such and of our human
capacity for perceiving and understanding all that appears within our own
existence, are rarely even noticed in the bustle of everyday life. Though we
have no guarantee that these two fundamental events, Being and the aware-
ness of being, will in fact persist, we live our lives thoughtlessly as if this
guarantee had been given, as if our existence as human beings is ensured and
does not depend - utterly - on the durability of these two primordial events.
Simply acknowledging the presence of these wonders immediately awakens
us to the preciousness of our existence and may even transform the way we
choose to carry it out.
The daseinsanalytic way of thinking also emphasizes the unity of human
existence and therefore is radically opposed to such divisions as those be-
tween subject and object, mind and body, conscious and unconscious.
Heidegger and Boss have both argued that a genuine phenomenological con-
sideration of human existence consistently fails to reveal any legitimate basis
for suggesting such arbitrary dichotomies which merely have the effect of
obscuring our fundamental constitution as being-there, as beings who are in-
extricably one-with our worlds and who carry out our own worldly exist-
ences with an authentic potentiality for being a whole, for being unified and
complete. According to both Heidegger and Boss, the forms of dualistic
thinking which are mentioned above and which predominate in the modern
natural-scientific Zeitgeist, threaten us with the possibility of becoming
alienated from our own fundamental constitution as human beings and also,
 14 Erik Craig

therefore, with the possibility of being denied the opportunity for encounter-
ing our own-most essence.1
To daseinsanalysts this essence is nowhere more apparent than in the
openness of existence, our very own opening into Being such that other
beings - other persons, objects, events - and even Being-ness as such may
appear and be recognized, understood and responded to in ways that cor-
respond with their own essential nature. The importance of this "clearing-
for-Being" as which we exist as human beings cannot be overstated for it is
the precondition not only for perceiving and understanding any being at all
but also for responding freely to that which presents itself. The openness of
human existence is that fundamental characteristic of being human which
grants us the very possibility of freedom in the first place. Without such an
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openness there would be nothing to perceive and understand, nothing from

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which to choose.
The realm of world openness as which we exist also reveals us to be
that very kind of being which is concerned with Being, with understanding
Being. In daseinsanalysis, this fundamental "care" of existence, which per-
meates every moment of the our existing, is not understood as merely a par-
ticular mood such as love or worry but rather as a kind of ever-present
shepherding of all that is encountered. While our characteristic care is dis-
closed in manifold ways, the basis for each concrete manifestation of care is
always our unavoidable calling to be servants of Being, to heed and to enable
all that we encounter to be fully what it is. This characteristically human
care of existence is the ontological foundation for the very promise and pos-
sibility of psychotherapy.
One of the ways in which this primordial care discloses itself in dasein-
sanalysis is by the systematic attempt to uncover the fundamental ontologi-
cal structure of existence. In the effort to disclose the "meaning-fullness" of
being human through thoughtful phenomenological analyses, daseinanalysis
focuses on characteristic constituents of human existence, called "existen-
tials" or "existentialia." These fundamental characteristics of Dasein do not
need to be inferred or imagined for they may be observed and described as
manifestly inhering in every moment of an individual's existence. In other
words, these are the very characteristics which constitute our being as human
being and without any one of them the humanness of our being disappears.
Temporality, spatiality, mood, bodyhood, relatedness and mortality are only
a few of the more obvious "existentials." Less immediately apparent, though
equally ubiquitous human characteristics are designated by such terms as
thrownness, fallenness and projection, among many others. Of obvious
therapeutic importance in the analysis of human existence are such fun-
damentally human characteristics as freedom, responsibility, anxiety, guilt,
possibility and authenticity. Though daseinsanalysis is often criticized as
being a "theory without content," its quest for understanding and articulat-
ing the ontological structure of existence reveals such criticism to be ground-
 Daseinsanalysis: A Quest for Essentials 15

less, for while the "content" of the daseinsanalytic understanding of human

existence is not theoretical, it is clearly given by the things themselves, by
our human existence itself.
Daseinsanalysis as Psychotherapy
In addition to continuing the fundamental ontological project of which
we have just been speaking, daseinsanalysis is also concerned with the
project of understanding and enhancing the practice of effective psycho-
therapy. One will search in vain, however, for a body of new methods and
techniques since, while Medard Boss became thoroughly disenchanted with
psychoanalytic theory, avoiding as it did the immediately given phenomena
of psychological thought and practice,14 he remained profoundly and jus-
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tifiably impressed with the power of "Freud's unsurpassed practical recom-

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mendations" (Boss, 1963, p. 285) for the conduct of psychoanalytic therapy.

The first challenge for daseinsanalysis, as Boss sees it, is to separate care-
fully the psychoanalytic explanations of therapeutic phenomena (especially
the standard explanations of foundational psychoanalytic methods and
events) from the phenomena themselves. This kind of thoughtful differen-
tiation is then followed by a hermeneutic re-examination and recovery of the
fundamental significance of these very same psychotherapeutic phenomena.
Medard Boss's distinctive project was thus to "restore the original
meaning of Freud's actual, immediate, concrete and most brilliant observa-
tions" (1963, p. 59). In Boss's own technical writings, therefore, one finds
him tirelessly tearing various well-known phenomena, which have been
called by such names as "transference," "countertransference," "resistance,"
"repetition compulsion" and "acting out," free of their incarceration in bur-
densome psychoanalytic conceptualizations and then immediately consider-
ing them again, this time in the philosophically "purified" light of pheno-
menological reflection. Boss's hope, in part, is of "curing" patients and
therapists alike of what he refers to as "a new neurosis best called 'psycho-
analytis,'" which he describes as the "ritualistic thinking and talking in
psychoanalytic terms and symbols" (ibid., p. 236). This cure was aimed at
nothing less than the full emancipation of psychotherapeutic phenomena in
order that they may appear as the precisely and legitimately meaningful
things which they are in themselves.
The premiere act of liberating psychotherapeutic phenomena to be what
they are was to clarify the ground of psychotherapy as first and foremost a
unique form of human being-together which has a wholeness and integrity
of its own. Throughout his writing, Boss has especially disputed the no-
tion that any present moment of human relationship can be reduced to an un-
conscious repetition of previous attachments and experiences. While he
fully recognizes that both the patient and the therapist may "fall prey" to
specific limitations in freedom which first appeared prior to the two persons
ever having met and that each of the individuals may carry these constricted
 16 Erik Craig

patterns of relating into their present situation, Boss argues that the im-
mediate human being-together of psychotherapy can be genuinely under-
stood only as a happening which is, in itself, a fundamentally new event.
The challenge is to ascertain and apprehend those ways in which the lack of
freedom in either individual is obstructing, today, the essential purpose and
potential of psychotherapy which is to embolden patients to take up the com-
plete range of their own possibilities for relating to others, to enable "the
reclamation of a full and authentic sense of [their] own being-in-lhe-world"
(Craig, 1986, p. 22).
One of the most concrete effects of this revaluation of the foundations
of psychoanalytic psychotherapy is to change the focus and manner of clini-
cal interpretations. In handling typical therapeutic phenomena such as, for
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example, the patient's so-called "transference," "resistance," or "acting out"

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the daseinsanalytic therapist responds not only with a sense of appreciative

understanding for the immediate constructive value of the event itself but
also for its prospective potentiality, that is, its significance as an indicator of
future possibilities. Consistently one sees in Boss's case reports an excep-
tionally permissive attitude, an attitude embodied in his distinctive use of
the simple question, "Why not?" Attitudes and behaviors which were once
labeled "resistance" or "acting out," and which have been torn away from
their exclusive and deterministic attachment to the past by Boss's pheno-
menological reconsideration, are now free to be considered within their most
essential context, that is, the fully reinstated temporal horizon of the patient's
entire life. This new, existentially adequate horizon certainly includes the
past but only as an aspect of a present which is destined for the future.
Beyond the radical phenomenological rethinking of the essentials of
psychotherapy, including its unique structure and meaning as well as its most
ubiquitous and characteristic phenomena, daseinsanalysis has added little
that is novel to the actual conduct and practice of the craft.1 Nevertheless,
the yield of this more respectful understanding of the fundamentals of effec-
tive psychotherapy is well worth the effort. Individuals in daseinsanalytic
psychotherapy are especially relieved to have their experiences and expres-
sions understood on the basis of their own intrinsic meaning. Boss's case
presentations, especially those involving individuals who have previously
undergone other forms of treatment (typically Freudian or Jungian), describe
patients in daseinsanalysis as particularly grateful to find that their human-
most possibilities are truly their own, that the domain of the soul is not the
exclusive province of experts who speak a foreign and technical tongue and
who require a belief in psychic scenarios which defy the patient's own
wildest imagination. In this sense Boss's phenomenological approach to un-
derstanding the struggles and aspirations of those who come for psycho-
therapy faithfully upholds the spirit of Freud's famous 1918 remarks in
Budapest:
 Daseinsanalysis: A Quest for Essentials 17

We refused most emphatically to turn a patient who puts himself into our
hands in search of help into our private property, to decide his fate for
him, to force our own ideals upon him, and with the pride of a Creator
to form him in our image and see that it is good. (Freud, 1919/1955, p.
164)

The daseinsanaly tic devotion to achieving a gentler, more respectful un-

derstanding of the fundamental meanings of human suffering and of psycho-
therapy, should not be mistaken, however, to mean that daseinsanalytic
therapists try to turn psychotherapy into a schedule of soft and soothing en-
counters. To be in psychotherapy still means to be in some kind of pain,
often extraordinary pain. At least, with a phenomenological approach, in-
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dividuals are more likely to recognize their suffering as their own. It is a

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suffering which they can begin to claim, to understand and to assume respon-
sibility for in their own terms and as they themselves become ready. One
can easily imagine that a gentle and unpretentious psychoanalyst is likely to
offer the very same kind of revolutionary sanctuary and, indeed, at least one
article has appeared (Thoma, 1959) in which the question is raised of whether
or not Freud himself was a daseinsanalyst. The point of daseinsanalytic
psychotherapy is not, therefore, to offer an entirely new form of psycho-
therapy but, rather, to point out that by using a phenomenological approach
one may reveal the essence of psychotherapy, of human suffering and libera-
tion, in a way that is more respectful not only of therapeutic phenomena and
patients themselves but also of the very essence of human existence.

Footnotes
1. In Freud's theoretical discussions of the nature and structure of the human per-
sonality (see, for example, Freud, 1926/1959, pp. 195-198; 1923/ 1961; and
1933/1964, pp. 75-79) one consistently finds the human ego depicted as bare-
ly conscious and constantly assailed by instinctual impulses from within and
social prohibitions from without. The view is indeed one of a rather anemic
king desperately trying to control his own realm of personal existence. Freud
said it directly: "The ego is not master in its own house" (1917/1955, p. 143,
emphasis Freud's). A number of prominent psychoanalysts who followed
Freud were especially concerned about this rather limited conception of human
nature which had been set forth by drive-determined early psychoanalytic
theory. The hope of correcting this defici-ency lay at the heart of the work of
such well-known psychoanalytic ego-psychologists as Paul Federn (1952),
Anna Freud (1946), Heinz Hartmann (1958) and Paul Schilder (1938), as well
as, to a certain extent, of the more popularly known work of Erik Erikson (1950,
1956, 1968). As will become apparent throughout this volume, the failure of
Freud's own psycho-analytic theory to comprehend adequately the human
being's characteristic existential freedom became a cornerstone for the criti-
 18 Erik Craig

que of psychoanalysis by the "Zurich school" of daseinsanalysis founded by

Medard Boss.

2. As Freud himself understood very well, most of medical science would be

quite content to ignore the meaningfulness of human suffering: a diagnostic
classification is sufficient for treatment. Following such an approach the uni-
queness of the individuals whom we encountered in the opening pages becomes
quickly lost behind their clinical titles. Hear their diagnoses in order of presen-
tation: adjustment disorder with mixed emotional features; adjustment disor-
der with depressed mood and marital problem; adjustment disorder with
depressed mood and ego syntonic homosexuality; atypical anxiety disorder and
insomnia; major depression; spastic colon with depression; narcissistic per-
sonality disorder; bipolar disorder, manic. Such diagnostic labels may be use-
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ful for various institutional or bureaucratic purposes but the purely descriptive
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classification of psychopathology says very little, if anything at all, about the

fundamentally meaningful nature of the particular suffering which is being en-
dured by the individual. This seems especially ironic when one considers the
fact that it is in the domain of meaning that psychotherapy, at least as it was
developed by Freud, operates. It was Freud himself, in fact, who protested such
superficial descriptions of human suffering and who dedicated his whole
professional life to the tireless pursuit of meanings which remain hidden be-
hind such manifest pheno-mena as neurotic symptoms, dreams and
parapraxes. Though Freud's manner of interpreting these hidden meanings
may be questioned, his concern with hidden meaning per se is the very foun-
tainhead, the sine qua non of all modern meaning-oriented (i.e., "dynamic-in-
terpretive") psychotherapies.

3. Dates in parentheses refer to the year of publication of the English translation.

The original date of publication usually precedes this by several years.

4. Professor Boss has generously provided translations of portions of this latter

work, Zollikoner Seminare (Heidegger, 1987), for inclusion in the present
volume. These previously untranslated works by Heidegger appear in Chap-
ter Four and the Appendix.

5. For an illuminating discussion of the relationship between Husserl and Heideg-

ger see Spiegelberg's (1960) account of the fifteen years between 1916 and
1931 (pp. 276-283).

6. Being and Time, which many regard as the most important philosophical text
of the twentieth century, was originally published in German (Sein und Zeit)
in 1927. More than a third of a century passed, however, before English
readers, with the appearance of the 1962 translation by John McQuarrie and
Edward Robinson, were able to read this influential text in its entirety.

7. This famous reversal or turning (Kehre) was announced by Heidegger in his

1947 Letter on Humanism, a recent translation of which may be found in Basic
 Daseinsanalysis: A Quest for Essentials 19

Writings (Heidegger, 1977a, pp. 193-242; see especially p. 207f). Heidegger

also discusses his turning in a letter to Father William Richardson (Heidegger,
1963) which appears as the preface to Richardson's (1963) analysis of
Heidegger's philosophy.

8. Heidegger himself actually went to some lengths to distinguish "what shows

itself from "what appears" but this distinction is too complicated to discuss
adequately here. Readers who are interested may consult Heidegger's think-
ing directly in Being and Time (1962, pp. 51-55).

9. Surface and substance are placed in quotation markss since, phenomenologi-

cally speaking, at least in Heidegger's understanding, there is no such thing
either as a perceptually manifest veneer or an underlying content which stands
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alone or separate from the other. Surface always contains and indeed is the im-
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mediate manifestation of a particular meaningful structure, even if that essen-

tial meaningfulness or essence is not readily recognized or apprehended. The
"sur-face," that is, the "uppermost face" of something is simply that which is
initially perceived. However, what constitutes this sur-face, enabling it to ap-
pear as the very thing it is, is "sub-stance," that which "stands-under" and also
exists as the thing itself, including the sur-face. Sur-face and sub-stance do not
imply two layers of reality but, rather, are fundamental constituents of every-
thing that is. Every being exists in its entirety as both sur-face and sub-stance,
as both perceptible and apprehendable. Heidegger spoke of these two features
or possibilities of Being as the ontical and the ontological. As noted below,
ontical refers to the immediately perceptible, "pre-reflective" manifestation of
a "particular entity or being." Ontological, on the other hand, refers to the fun-
damental structure of a being, its essential meaning-fullness or, in Heidegger's
terms, its "being-ness" and its "Being-ness as such" (see passages below for
discussions of these different meanings of Being).

10. The word heretical is used here with the sense of its Greek origins in the word
hairetikos, meaning "to choose" or "to be able to choose." For the Greeks,
heretics were those who kept their intellectual options open so they could
choose the course of belief and action deemed most appropriate to a given set
of data or circumstances. In this sense phenomenologists are all "heretics"
since they actively resist closing out their "options" for perceiving and under-
standing things by refusing to follow any predetermined beliefs or assumptions
about those things.

11. The German spelling, Daseinsanalytik, including capitalizations, is used here

to distinguish Heidegger's philosophically grounded fundamental-ontological
analysis of human existence from Boss's application of this in the domains of
psychology and psychotherapy, known as daseinsanalysis or daseinsanalytic
psychotherapy. Ludwig Binswanger was actually the first European
psychiatrist to apply Heidegger's Analytik of Dasein to the understanding of
psychiatric phenomena. Although the only major English translations of
Binswanger's works were not published until 1958, with the release of May,
Angel and Ellenberger's classic anthology Existence, and 1963, with the ap-
 20 Erik Craig

pearance of Binswanger's own Being-in-the-World, Binswanger actually be-

gan formulating a daseinsanalytic approach to psychiatry in the early 1930's.
Boss himself acknowledged the importance of Binswanger's contribution in
his (Boss's) first major daseinsanalytic work (Boss, 1949). Even then, how-
ever, Boss was already expressing his reservations (ibid., pp. xi-xii) about
Binswanger's so-called "creative misunderstanding" of Heidegger, namely,
Binswanger's failure to understand the gist of Heidegger's ontological vision
and of his concept of "care" which Binswanger thought should be augmented
with "love." Nevertheless, it is important to know that there were actually two
men who stood most clearly in the crossroads of psychoanalysis and of
phenomenological philosophy though they (Boss and Binswanger) did so with
quite different appreciations and purposes. Whereas Binswanger's "existen-
tial analysis" or "psychiatric daseinsanalysis" focused on the development of
new scientific foundations for psychi-atry and psychopathology, Boss's da-
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seinsanalysis was primarily concerned with the foundations of psychother-

apeutic work in psychology and psychoanalysis. That both Binswanger and
Boss have a claim to their own distinctive positions in the crossroads of
psychoanalysis and existential phenomenology is also evidenced by their
biographies. Binswanger was a colleague and personal friend of Freud's and
also had a good deal of contact with phenomenologists like Husserl, Pfänder
and Heidegger. Boss on the other hand, though "merely" an analysand of
Freud's, experienced twenty-five years of close friendship and collaboration
with Heidegger. Living near Zurich, of course, meant that both men, Bins-
wanger and Boss, were personally acquainted with such prom-inent figures as
Bally, Bleuler, and Jung. Finally it should be noted that Binswanger also called
his application of Heidegger's philosophical method daseinsanalysis (Daseins-
analyse) even though he (Binswanger) apparently considered "phenomeno-
logical anthropology" to be the most accurate designation of his approach to
psychiatry. The classic anthology, Existence (May, Angel and Ellenberger,
1958) spares English readers considerable confusion by referring to
Binswanger's psychiatric daseinsanalysis as existential analysis. Whatever
name is used, Binswanger himself, in contrast to Boss, came to differentiate
his approach from that of Heidegger, noting that Heidegger's Daseinsanalytik
was "a phenomenological hermeneutic of Being understood as existence and
moves on an ontological level" (Binswanger, 1963, pp. 269-270; emphasis
mine), and that his (Binswanger's) own psychiatric daseinsanalysis was "a her-
meneutic exegesis on the ontic-anthropological level" (ibid., p. 269, emphasis
mine). Given the fact that it was Boss who most faithfully adhered to Heid-
egger's thought, it is ironic that in America Binswanger is the most well known
European existential analyst! This is possibly because Binswanger's contribu-
tions were emphasized almost exclusively in the influential anthology, Exist-
ence, comprising nearly two thirds of that pioneering English exposition of
Heideggerian thinking in psychology.

12. Heidegger's particular approach to phenomenology is oftencalled hermeneutic,

i.e., interpretive. The word hermeneutic derives from the name of the Greek
god Hermes, the son of Zeus who was known as the messenger of the gods.
As Hermes "practiced" the "revelation" of divine messages, so hermeneutic
 Daseinsanalysis: A Quest for Essentials 21

thinkers and philosophers practice the discovery and exposition of original

meanings. First used to describe the discipline of interpreting religious texts,
the term hermeneutic is now used to describe interpretation in various dis-
ciplines such as literature, philosophy, psychology and psychoanalysis. It is
worth noting that Heidegger was not alone in the attempt to develop a sys-
tematic approach to phenomenological interpretation, that is, an interpretation
which always grows from and returns to "the things themselves." Readers in-
terested in hermeneutic phenomenology may consult works by such
philosophers as Wilhelm Dilthey (1976), Paul Ricoeur (1976,1981) or Hans-
Georg Gadamer (1988). An excellent introductory sampling of classical her-
meneutic literature has recently been published by Mueller-Vollmer (1985).

13. See Heidegger's (1977b, pp. 26-29) discussion of the threat which the "enfram-
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ing" of technology poses to the human being's possibility for encountering him
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or herself.

14. In this phrase, the past tense is used specifically with the intent of acknow ledg-
ing the fact that the last two decades especially have brought a noticeable shift
in psychoanalytic thinking about the value of the experiential significance of
patients' communications. The growing interest in a more phenomenological
attitude with respect to the "structure of a person's experiencing" (Atwood &
Stolorow, 1984, p. 33) and in the so-called "intersubjectivity" of the therapeutic
situation has been gradually finding its way into psychoanalytic literature, par-
ticularly through the work of certain "object relations" theorists and psycho-
analytic self psychologists. A recent book by Atwood and Stolorow (ibid.) has
catalyzed and coalesced considerable interest in this regard. This is not to sug-
gest, however, that any significant "theoretical" rapprochement may be ex-
pected in the near future since the philosophical foundations of daseinsanalysis
and psychoanalysis (even of these more phenomenological versions) are still
radically opposed to one another.

15. In a recent series of articles in The Humanistic Psychologist, three phenomenol-

ogically-oriented North American psychologists have, entirely apart from one
another, also attempted to explicate essential aspects of this basic being-with
structure of psychotherapy (see Craig, 1986; Mook, 1987; and Moustakas,
1986).

16. I am referring, of course, to those particularly trenchant phenomena which Freud

denoted with the terms "transference" and "countertransference." The dasein-
sanalytic dispute with psychoanalysis is not with the fact that such phenomena
appear in psychotherapy (and stubbornly so) but, rather, with the way in which
these phenomena are conceptualized and explained, particularly in relation to
such unprovable notions as "unconscious" and "psychic determinism."

17. One noteworthy exception is Medard Boss's distinctive use (mentioned above)
of the question "Why not?" through which Boss intends to embolden patients
to consider possibilities of their own to which they have previously remained
closed.