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The Humanistic Psychologist

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Remembering Medard Boss

a b
Erik Craig
a
Sout hwest ern College
b
113 Camino Escondido #5, Sant e Fe, NM, 87501
Published online: 16 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Erik Craig (1993) Remembering Medard Boss, The Humanist ic Psychologist , 21: 3, 258-276, DOI:
10. 1080/ 08873267. 1993. 9976923

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 Remembering Medard Boss

Erik Craig
Southwestern College
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Abstract
The life and work of Medard Boss is reviewed. This overview
includes the development of his daseinsanalysis, presenting its
roots in psychoanalysis, existential phenomenological psychi-
atry, Heideggerian philosophy, and Indian thought. Also ex-
amined are Boss's contributions to the fields of psychotherapy,
philosophy, and human scientific psychology. The latter con-
tributions include Boss's explication of the meanings of three
specific kinds of psychological phenomena: sexual disorders,
bodily illnesses and injuries, and dreams. The article then
conlcudes with the author's personal reflections on his experien-
ces with daseinsanalysis and Medard Boss.
On December 21, 1990 Medard Boss, a humanistic psychotherapist
and existential analyst whose work was the focus of a special double issue
of The Humanistic Psychologist (Spring, 1988), died in his home in
Zollikon, Switzerland. Dr. Boss would have been ninety years old on
October 4 of this year (1993).
Medard Boss was the founding father of existential analysis and
existential-analytic psychotherapy. He was a life-span contemporary of
such legendary psychologists and humanists as Henry Murray (1893-
1988), Carl Rogers (1902-1987) and B. F. Skinner (1904-1990) and is
recognized by many as belonging among these giants of our field.
Although the bulk of his writing was not readily available in English,
Boss still managed to find a solid place in the history of psychology and
psychotherapy even on this side of the Atlantic. Indeed, he is the last of
 Erik Craig 259

those century-spanning figures whose work has occupied a major portion

of such standard personality texts as Rychlack's Introduction to Per-
sonality and Psychotherapy (1973) and Hall and Lindzey's Tlieories of
Personality (1978). Further, in 1971 Boss was honored with the American
Psychiatric Association's "Great Therapist Award."
Boss's own list of mentors itself reads like a history of psychotherapy
and includes such figures as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Karen Homey.
Ernest Jones, Wilhelm Reich, Otto Fenichel, Eugen and Manfred Bleuler,
Hans Sachs and others. Add to this a study with Kurt Goldstein and, most
significantly, a twenty-five year collaboration and friendship with Martin
Heidegger, philosophical author of Daseinsanalytik (analysis of human
existence), and you have one of the most impressive psychologist's
resumes of the twentieth century. Boss's response to these credentials, at
least in his later years, was hardly so ponderous: he liked joking about
being one of the last "living fossils" with such a background.
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Boss's Path to Daseinsanalysis (Existential Analysis)

Medard Boss was born in St. Gallen, Switzerland on October 4,
1903. When he was still a small boy his family moved to Zurich, near
which he lived for the rest of his life. As a youth Boss dreamed of being
an artist. However, his father, thinking art a "breadless" profession, took
his son to the Pinacothek museum in Munich to show him the works of
Europe's master artists. The elder Boss's intention was undisguised: to
"cure" his son of any illusions of great talent and success. Boss
succumbed to his father's "successful" treatment and chose instead to
enter medicine. In spite of his father's gambit, Boss never lost his own
personal enjoyment of art. Not only did he continue to paint well into his
maturity but also, in his later years, he was fond of collecting great art,
including the works of some of those very masters to whom his father
had introduced him.
Dr. Boss undertook medical studies at the Universities of Paris,
Vienna, and Zurich. While in Vienna he had a brief training analysis
(approximately thirty sessions) with Sigmund Freud. Boss was always
enamored of recalling Freud's breach of his own technical rules: Freud
often gave Boss lunch money at the close of analytic sessions in which
Boss's growling stomach betrayed his hunger. (Boss had to use money
from his own student's food budget to pay for his analysis, since his father
would not help subsidize such a "frivolous" activity as psychoanalysis.)
Subsequent to receiving his medical degree from the University of Zurich
 260 The Humanistic Psychologist, 21, Autumn 1993

in 1928, Boss continued his psychoanalytic training in Berlin and London.

While in Berlin, Boss's primary training and supervisory analyst was
Karen Horney. The concept of dual relationship being still unborn,
Horney also served as Boss's wife's analyst. Returning to Zurich in 1930,
Medard Boss held posts at several Zurich medical facilities, including
the famous Burgholzli psychiatric hospital. In 1933, Boss became a
member of the Swiss and International Psychoanalytic Associations as
well as Director of the Sanatorium for Nervous Diseases in Zurich. Boss
opened his own private practice in psychiatry and psychoanalysis in 1935.
It was during these years in the mid-thirties that Boss began
increasingly to question the "unjustifiable reduction and objectifying of
the human being" (1949, p. xi) and to resent the acrobatic, intellectual
contortions imposed on him by psychoanalytic metapsychology. In the
midst of his growing dissatisfaction with orthodox psychoanalytic theory,
Boss was relieved to find intellectual stimulation and companionship in
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the works of Ludwig Binswanger and Carl Jung. Binswanger introduced

Boss to the efforts of several phenomenologically oriented psychiatrists
as well as to the work of the German philosopher of existence, Martin
Heidegger. However, Boss's own commitment to medical and analytic
approaches to the study of human beings led him to undertake a decade
long study with Carl Jung. Although some authors still refer to Boss as
a Jungian, Boss himself found this Jungian period ultimately disappoint-
ing and eventually returned to the more philosophically informed works
of existentially oriented thinkers and practitioners.
Hints of Boss's progression from orthodox psychoanalytic thought
may be seen in his earliest German publications. Whereas in his first
book, published in 1940 (Korperliches Kranksein als Folge seelischer
Gleichgewichtsstorungen), Boss referred only to the works of Freud,
Janet and Charcot, in his 1943 Die Bedeutung der Psychologie Boss
included at least one reference to the works of Carl Jung. Then, in Die
Gestalt der ehe und ihre Zerfallsformen, a book on the character and
decay of marriage which Boss completed in May of 1944, he not only
made about a dozen references each to the works of both Freud and Jung,
but also, in his foreword, explicitly singled out the contributions to his
thought of phenomenologically oriented thinkers such as Erwin Straus,
Victor von Gebsattel, Hans Kunz and, "last but not least, for me, the
especially trailblazing conceptions of Ludwig Binswanger" (p. 6, free
translation). In the body of this work, Boss refers just as often to Gebsattel
as he does to Freud and Jung and mentions Binswanger nearly thirty
times. Heidegger is also mentioned on eight occasions. Clearly, by the
 Erik Craig 261

early forties, Boss, the once tried and true orthodox psychoanalyst, was
well on his way to widening his intellectual loyalties to include existential
phenomenological perspectives in his understanding of human develop-
ment, personality, psychopathology and psychotherapy. And he still had
not met Martin Heidegger.
His Relationship with Martin Heidegger
As Boss himself reported in personal conversation, it was while
serving as an army captain in a mountain bunker during World War H
that he read a newspaper article about Martin Heidegger's magnum opus,
Being and Time (1962), and, from this, was inspired to study the work
more intensively on his own. With relatively little education and training
in philosophy, Boss initially found himself "philosophically overtaxed"
but also "tremendously excited" while "seizing upon islets of meaning
in a vast sea of incomprehension"(Stem, 1979, p. xiii). Boss was
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particularly fascinated with Heidegger's philosophical grasp of the "care

structure" of human existence, his distinction between the human being's
concern about things (Besorgen) and care for other human beings
(Fursorge) and, especially, his discussions of intervening (einspringende)
and anticipatory care (vorspringende Fursorge). Boss was impressed by
the correspondence which he perceived between Freud's ideal for the
analytic attitude and Heidegger's (1962) delineation of anticipatory care.
Boss (e.g., 1963, pp. 72-74) understood Freud's most basic technical
rules as encouraging the therapist, as Heidegger (1962) put it, to "leap
ahead" of the other "in his existential potential-for-Being, not in order
to take away his 'care' but rather to give it back to him authentically as
such for the first time" (p. 159). For Boss, the therapist's most original
responsibility was to serve as a shepherd for the authentic possibilities
of the other or, again in Heidegger's words, to help "the Other to become
transparent to himself in his care and to become free for it" (Ibid.). The
fact that Heidegger had so succinctly expressed this premiere therapeutic
calling inspired Boss, in 1947, to venture a letter to Heidegger.

1 In an article originally written in the mid-1970's, Boss (1979b, p. 7) sets the date
of his first contact with Heidegger as 1946. Others (Hall & Lindzey, 1978;
Pacheco, 1993), perhaps following Boss's lead, also set the date of the first
exchange of letters as 1946. However, Boss's recent conversations with me (Craig,
1988, p. 28), his last published report of his relationship with Heidegger (Boss,
1987b, p. ix) and the actual date on Heidegger's first letter to Boss (ibid., pp.
299f), all indicate 1947 as the beginning of personal contact between the two.
 262 The Humanistic Psychologist, 21, Autumn 1993

Heidegger, who lived in the Black Forest of southern Germany,

responded warmly to this letter especially because, as he later confessed,
"he had hoped that... his thinking would escape the confines of the
philosopher's study and become of benefit to wider circles, in particular
to a large number of suffering human beings" (Boss, 1979b, p. 7). During
my visit to Boss's home in 1988, Boss showed me a copy of Heidegger's
first letter (dated August 3, 1947). From this letter it is obvious that
Heidegger was open to collaborating with Boss in the areas of psycho-
pathology and psychotherapy. This collaboration was to include the
exchange of many more letters, scores of conversations in one another's
homes, detailed discussions and written notations on Boss's own yet to
be published manuscripts, and, especially, a dozen years of seminars
which Heidegger conducted in Boss's Zollikon home for Boss's students
and colleagues in medicine and psychology (See Boss, 1979b). Boss was
proud of these seminars and, during the final decade of his life, edited
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Martin Heidegger: Zollikoner Seminare: Protokolle - Gesprache - Briefe

(Boss, 1987b), documenting these philosophically dense encounters.
Heidegger's first letter to Boss also provides a hint that their
collaboration would not be entirely academic: Heidegger mentioned that
he would be grateful to Boss if he would provide a small package of Swiss
chocolate in support of the philosopher's work. Heidegger's simple
request hinted at the friendly relationship that would develop between
the two. Boss (1979b) has written about some of the personal aspects of
their relationship, including holidays in Turkey, Italy and Greece as well
as in Boss's mountain house in Lenzerheide. This friendship with
Heidegger was to become, for Boss, the single most important event of
his life, a mighty corrective in the life of a man whose father had crushed
his artistic aspirations and had failed to see the value of his analysis with
Sigmund Freud. Even in the last years of his life, Boss spoke with
devotion of Heidegger and of Dasiensanalysis. Although a mystery exists
about their relationship subsequent to 1969, publicly Boss continued to
speak of Heidegger with only great fondness.

2 In Boss's (1987b) documentation of his collaboration with Heidegger, there are

no records of any visits after 1969; only three brief letters in 1970 and 1971.
Heidegger died in 1976. Although a close friend of Boss, Paul Stern, told me in
1982 that Boss expressed reservations about his own dependency on Heidegger,
these were closely held. When I asked Boss years later about any reservations he
might have of Heidegger, Boss reiterated his admiration for the philosopher.
 Erik Craig 263

The Influence of his Indian Journeys

In addition to his relationship with Heidegger, Boss was also
profoundly influenced by two journeys to the East. These journeys were
reported in a little known work that Boss regarded as perhaps his personal
favorite, A Psychiatrist Discovers India (Boss, 1965). Although the
purported purpose of these trips was practical, medical research and
education, Boss's personal goals were more passionate and philosophical.
As he put it, "I was hoping to learn more about the nature of man than
the modern sciences of the West had taught me" (p. 89). Boss's quest
was for "a deepening and proper grounding of our anthropology," that
is, for "more adequate insights into the real nature of man in relation to
his essential being and destiny" (p. 88). While in India, therefore, Boss
journeyed to the countryside in search of a spiritual teacher. After many
frustrating delays and disappointing encounters, Boss finally began
fruitful conversations with several Indian scholars and sages. However,
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his most decisive meeting was with Swami Govinda Kaul in the Kashmir
Valley where Boss finally spontaneously experienced "a strange kind of
knowledge" in which "all questioning" was "silently quenched" (p. 165).
What Boss found in India, ultimately, was a remarkable correspondence
to what he had found in the fundamentals of Heidegger's Daseinsanalytik,
particularly with respect to the primacy of the question of being, that
beyond and behind all questions there is, finally, simply, the miraculous
fact and presence of Being itself, of Beingness-as-such, of Brahman.
While Boss rarely mentioned this philosophical correspondence in his
practical psychological works, this fundamental awareness permeated
nearly everything he wrote, indeed, as I knew him, nearly everything he
did.
Given these biographical perspectives, it seems that Boss's own work
may best be understood as a trialogue between the thinking of Freud,
Heidegger and the Indian mystics. Not only was Boss impressed by the
originality and depth of thinking he found in all three sources, but, in
the presence of the three men themselves, Boss seemed to have ex-
perienced a special kind of luminosity. He described each of these three
men, Freud, Heidegger, and, especially, Swami Govinda Kaul, as the
only men whom he (Boss) had ever met who had what he called "shining
eyes" (Leuchtende Augen), eyes which "shined like the sun" almost as
if they had some kind of transcendent light behind them.
 264 The Humanistic Psychologist, 21, Autumn 1993

Boss's Contributions to the Field of Psychotherapy

In spite of this pyramid of mighty influences, Medard Boss was still
very much his own man. He conceived his own most essential life's task
as being "to give psychotherapy a direction and a meaning" which is
grounded in an understanding of "the basic characteristics of human
existence" (See Craig, 1988a, p. 37). For Boss, the psychotherapist was
first and foremost a human being whose most fundamental calling as
such was to serve as a shepherd or servant of being and thus, in the
practice of psychotherapy, to awaken the patient to his or her own-most
possibilities for being-in-the-world. Psychotherapy was, therefore, most
essentially a human encounter, a human being-together the purpose or
destiny of which is "restoring to individuals what was already theirs...
from the beginning: that is, their full capacity for openness and freedom,
for freely disposing and carrying out their own special and authentic
possibilities for being-in-the-world" (Boss, 1988, p. 72).
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Although Boss remained committed to analytic forms of psycho-

therapy including the retention of the use of the couch and of free
association, he sought to recast our understanding of these aspects of the
analytic framework in more adequate phenomenological terms. For
example, for Boss, the use of the couch reduced the supremacy of the
head and, with this, the priority of reason and spirit in the arising of
possibility. He understood the prone position as granting sensual and
emotional capacities of human existing, the realms of the heart and the
body, the freedom to take their full and proper place in the life of the
individual. Further, Boss was also convinced, with Freud, that the use
of the couch offered the individual "the opportunity to be, for once,
totally delivered up to himself (Boss, 1963, p. 63). Likewise, Boss
recast the fundamental rule of free association as requiring the patient to
be completely honest and to say "whatever it is that passes through his
mind or heart or body." For Boss the aim of such existential candor was
a "truth-fullness," that is, a full disclosedness of the patient's existence,
"a shining forth of the emerging unveiled phenomena in the specifically
Daseinsanalytic sense of the ancient Greek alethicT (Boss, 1963, p. 62).
Boss also recognized that the traditional psychoanalytic concepts of
"transference and resistance indisputably refer to actual phenomena of
interhuman relationships" (Ibid., p. 79). Again, however, he was quick
to reframe our understanding of transference phenomena as manifesta-
tions of "the genuine interpersonal relationship to the analyst" (Ibid., p.
239) and of resistance phenomena as a "blocking" of existentially given
 Erik Craig 265

life-possibilities, as opposition to "the acquisition of hitherto feared

possibilities of living" (Ibid. p. 240). Unfortunately, Boss's own thinking
about the basic concepts of psychoanalytic practice was historically
situated and, therefore, today seems overly simplistic in the face of all
we now know of these ubiquitous human phenomena. Although he
attempted to correct psychoanalysis's veiled and distorted casting of
transference and resistance phenomena, he seemed to have done so
primarily with respect to what we see today as only the most narrow,
orthodox and stereotypical of psychoanalytic formulations, formulations
which were more characteristic of psychoanalysis as it was practiced in
the first half of the century. In the early fifties, however, both orthodox
and neo-orthodox psychoanalyses underwent a revolution, spurred in
particular by a movement that has been called "the widening scope of
indications for psychoanalysis" (Stone, 1954). Such "post-revolution-
ary," and more humanistic, expressions of psychoanalytic thinking and
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practice are rarely mentioned by Boss and his colleagues.

In addition, the domain of the daseinsanalytic technique for handling
the so-called transference and resistance phenomena was left relatively
undeveloped, partially because of Boss's own unrelenting disputations
with pre-1950's psychoanalysis. Although one observes the presence of
principled thought and action in reports of Boss's own clinical praxis, he
tended to be opaque in his explicit technical recommendations. He was
prone to suggesting, for example, that clinical work becomes a "holiday"
if only one thinks correctly (i.e., daseinsanalytically) and that, when it
comes down to the details of clinical decision making, one needs to feel
one's way "with one's fingertips." This may, in fact, be fair advice for
truly seasoned clinicians, but it offers little guidance for future genera-
tions of prospective existential therapists who, starting out, must rely on
the mastery of sound, clearly articulated technique. Learning psycho-
therapy is, in some ways, no different than learning the practice of any
other art or science; one must, as a jazz musician would put it, develop
one's "chops," before going on to spontaneous, original and authentic
creation. Developing chops in psychotherapy, like learning chords on a
guitar or piano, requires much disciplined rehearsal of the fundamental
building blocks of praxis. Precisely what these specific building blocks,
tools, or procedures are in daseinsanalysis remains yet to be delineated.
With these remarks, it should also be said that Boss himself strongly
supported the further development of daseinsanalysis but simply felt such
work was no longer in his hands. In a personal conversation a few years
before his death Boss said, "Daseinsanalysis now has to make its own
 266 The Humanistic Psychologist 21, Autumn 1993

way. I have grown old and shall die... [The future of daseinsanalysis]
doesn't depend on me. I did what I could to tell it, to hand on what I had
received from Heidegger, but daseinsanalysis has its own future now, its
own fate" (See Craig, 1988a, p. 36). Sharing something akin to Freud's
autumnal feeling about psychoanalysis, Boss was personally very pleased
with the fact that there were so many daseinsanalysts who were continu-
ing the work of daseinsanalysis, not only in many other fields of human
endeavor (e.g., art, literature, medicine, nursing, social rehabilitation,
ecology, etc.) but also and especially in the field of psychotherapy. Thus,
with respect to the formulation of more systematic and methodologically
sound existential psychotherapy, it lies in the hands of present day
existential analysts and therapists to take up where Boss left off.
Boss left two major works upon which future thinkers and prac-
titioners may build. Boss's clearest, finest, clinically oriented work in
English was Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis (1963). While the title
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may suggest that this book was merely a translation of the author's
German text, Psychoanalyse und Daseinsanalytik (1957), this English
text was, in fact, an almost entirely new work, nearly three times the
length of its predecessor. The special value of Psychoanalysis and
Daseinsanalysis lies in its combining of philosophical foundations for
psychology and psychotherapy with many well developed and well
articulated case studies illustrating daseinsanalytic approaches to a wide
range of psychodiagnostic categories and psychotherapeutic problems.
Owing to the efforts of translator Ludwig Lefebre, it is also the most
adequate, often beautiful, presentation of Boss's work in English.
It was obvious, however, that Boss took greatest pride in his second
major clinical work, Existential Foundations of Medicine and Psychology
(1979a), a "work which actually evolved under Heidegger's watchful
eye" (p. xxiii-xxiv). In Boss's (1979b) article on the Zollikon seminars,
he describes and illustrates the "patient and painstaking" assistance and
anticipatory care which he experienced from Heidegger while working
on the book. As Boss (1979a) put it, "there is not one section of
'philosophical' import which was denied his generous criticism" (p.
xxiv). Unfortunately, this English translation did not receive nearly the
care, on this side of the Atlantic, that was given its German original,
Grundriss der Medizin (Boss, 1971). Not only is the English work a
rather abridged version of the original German one, but also it betrays
lapses in editorial attention and production. Nevertheless, this work
contains Boss's latest view's on psychotherapy and psychopathology,
placing our concern for these matters squarely in the domain of a
 Erik Craig 267

philosophically grounded view of human existence and well-being.

Furthermore, in his Existential Foundations, Boss boldly extends the
applicability of daseinsanalytic thinking from the consulting room of the
psychiatrist into the hallways of the medical hospital, particularly through
his philosophically informed understanding of human bodyhood. More
on this shortly.

Boss's Contribution to Human Scientific Psychology

Perhaps Medard Boss's most original scientific contributions to our
field are seen in his examination of three specific kinds of psychological
phenomena: namely, sexual disorders, bodily illnesses and injuries and,
especially, dreams. Here is a summary of the essential thrust of each of
these three lines of investigation.
The Meaning of Sexual Disorders
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In 1947, the same year in which he first met Martin Heidegger, Boss
published the German edition of a book on sexual dysfunctions. This
book, Boss's second phenomenologically oriented work and his first to
appear in English, was translated and published two years later with the
title Meaning and Content of Sexual Perversions (1949). Here, following
Binswanger, Boss referred to love as a "dual mode of existence" (Boss,
. 1949, p. 33) and examined the meaning of sexual behavior from the
perspective of the fullness of this loving mode of human existence (p.
36). Boss described love as a mode of being which opens individuals to
the world, enabling them to surpass finitude, earthliness, isolation,
narrowness, meaninglessness, and nothingness. He contrasted love with
anxiety,, "the essential anthropologic counterpole of love" (p. 47), which
shrinks and hems in human existence, forming a barrier which prevents
individuals from realizing their own inherent possibilities for "fullness,
broadness, depth, rootedness, infinity and eternity" (Ibid.). For Boss,
the so-called sexual perversions were all manifestations of human
attempts to achieve "the sensuous lovefullness of human existence" (p.
51). On the one hand, they narrow down the individual's existence,
"dimming and covering up... the love fullness," and, on the other hand,
they provide, within that very narrowed down domain, an "entrance gate
to the mode-of-being of love into the world" (Ibid.,p. 55). In other words,
Boss came to understand dysfunctional sexual behavior as an existential
aperture opening up to what he called "the fundamental anthropologic
superiority of the dual mode-of-being of love over any other possible
mode-of-being" (p. 148). Thus for Boss, the key to understanding what
 268 The Humanistic Psychologist, 21, Autumn 1993

we today refer to as sexual disorders or sexual dysfunctions rested in a

kind of stereoscopic consideration of both the individual's constricted
manner of being-in-the-world and the individual's uniquely liberating
dual mode-of-being of love. Perhaps even more significant than Boss's
findings was his demonstration of the power of pure description. Each
of his case studies provides evocative, richly textured, first person
descriptions of the most intimate features of his patients' worlds. Reading
these, one sees how meaning may be found "in the things themselves,"
without the necessity of imposing external categories or formulations.

The Meaning of Bodily Illnesses and Injuries

A second domain of human scientific interest for Boss concerned
the domain of the body. Beginning with a critique of the applicability of
the paradigm of natural science to psychosomatic medicine with the
publication, in 1954, of Einfiihrung in die psychosomatische Medizin
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(Introduction to Psychosomatic Medicine), Boss later turned his attention

to the whole field of general medicine (See Boss, 1979; Boss, Condrau
& Hicklin, 1977). Throughout these works, Boss assailed the ubiquitous
medical assumptions of causality and Cartesian duality, repeatedly
reproaching modern medicine for its myopic quest for causal deter-
minants and its reduction of the human being to an epidermally bound,
corporal entity, shorn of its essential world relatedness. Although he
acknowledged the extraordinary positive achievements of medicine, Boss
claimed that in its exclusive adherence to natural scientific principles,
modern medicine had failed to apprehend the inherent meaningfulness
that constitutes human existence as such. The blocked artery, the broken
bone, the headache, the irritable bowel, the facial tic, and the hernia all
mean something, all have an existential context of significance in the life
of the individual. Thus, Boss (1979) once compared the natural scientific
approach of modern medicine with the attitude of a misguided art critic:
The natural scientific research method treats the body as it might
treat works of art. Given a collection of Picasso paintings, for
instance, this method would see only material objects whose
length and breadth could be measured, whose weight could be
determined, and whose substance could be analyzed chemically.
All the resulting data lumped together would tell us nothing about
what makes these paintings what they are; their character as
works of art is not even touched by this approach. (
Boss dared medical professionals to carry out, in a more radical
(i.e., fundamental, original) way, their own calling for genuine physician-
ly concern. He challenged doctors, nurses and psychotherapists alike to
 Erik Craig 269

understand those whom they serve as whole, unique, distinctively human

individuals; to grasp the fundamentally meaningful structure of their
particular forms of illness or suffering; and to appreciate the body not
merely as a material entity but also as the individual's own-most vessel
for experiencing, carrying out or "bodying-forth" the entire scope of
worldly relationships as which he or she exists.
The Meaning of Dreams
It was also in the early fifties that Boss first turned his attention to
the phenomenon of human dreaming (Der Traum und seine Auslegung,
1953). In this second major work to be translated from German (The
Analysis of Dreams, 1958), Boss finally revealed, to English readers,
the fruits of his first few years of association with Heidegger. Boss began
by confidently taking Freud, Jung, Fromm and others to task for having
"lost sight of the primordial full content and meaning" of dreamt
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phenomena and, therefore, for having unjustifiably reduced "all dream

phenomena to mere [symbolic] reproductions of 'real objects'" (pp.
100-101, brackets mine). The Swiss psychiatrist then showed, with many
clear examples, how dreamt phenomena may be invited to speak for
themselves and to reveal, of themselves, their "inseparable belonging-
ness... to the total pattern of [waking] relationships in which [the
dreamer] moves and has his being" (p. 113). To conclude, after reviewing
the diversity of human possibilities which show themselves to be a part
of human dreaming existence, Boss reminded us that dreaming is "a form
of existing in its own right" (p. 207) and that there is no basis whatsoever
for considering it as separate from waking. Whether "awake or dream-
ing," Boss wrote, we "always fulfil one and the same existence" (p. 209).
In reading Boss's first book on dreams, one observes his maturing,
radical, phenomenological commitment "to return to the things themsel-
ves," a commitment which was particularly evidenced by his practice of
uncovering the hidden secrets of dreams entirely through devoting
attention to the meaning content of the manifest dream itself. Boss was
thus widely acknowledged as the first psychoanalytically trained analyst
to espouse a rigorous respect for the dream itself, for the immanent,
manifold meaningfulness of the manifest dream. His profound respect
for the dreaming mode of existing as such was even more passionately
demonstrated in a 1977 work on dreams, entitled / dreamt last night...
(a translation of the 1975 German work Es traumte mir vergangene
Nacht), in which he applied the daseinsanalytic understanding of dreams
to the clinical situation. In this second major dream work, which he
 270 The Humanistic Psychologist, 21, Autumn 1993

described as "a simple exercise book" offering "practical-therapeutic,

pedagogical and spiritual benefits" (1977, p. 21), Boss again and again
called upon us to eschew theoretically founded, symbolic impositions on
living fabric of the dream itself. Presenting dreams of persons from many
different cultures, countries, and levels of psychological functioning,
Boss demonstrated, with patient repetition, specific attitudes and inter-
rogatory techniques that may be employed to evoke not only the human
richness of the dream itself but also its relevance for the dreamer's
history-making life as an awakened person. While the English.version,
once again, suffered from serious lapses in editorial care, in this work
Boss left us with perhaps his most detailed account of the specific kinds
of clinical and philosophical thinking which he undertook when en-
countering the lived experience of those whom he served.
Boss's two works on dreams comprise his most significant contribu-
tion to human science. Nowhere else was his phenomenological, dasein-
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sanalytical approach to understanding human experience so rigorously

and effectively demonstrated.

Boss's Philosophical Contribution

The foundation for Medard Boss's existential (daseinsanalytical)
approach to psychology and psychotherapy was Martin Heidegger's
philosophical analysis of the ontological structure of human existence
(called Daseinsanalytik). For Boss, and Heidegger, the only adequate
and proper signifier for the existence of the human individual was Dasein,
meaning There-being or, more literally Being-the-there. What was
disclosed by this term was that we do not exist as epidermally-bound
monads of consciousness, but rather as whole worlds, that is, as
indivisible constellations of world relationships gathered around a unique
and inviolable sense of mineness (Jemeinigkeit). While the details and
implications of this view would be impossible to present here, even in
the most cursory fashion, I will mention what I consider to be the two
most original and useful features of this perspective.

3 For full presentation of the daseinsanalytic perspective in psychology I would

recommend the following sources, in order of increasing difficulty: Craig (1988),
Boss (1963, 1979), Heidegger (1962). The Craig volume, a special issue of The
Humanistic Psychologist also includes lengthy annotated (pp. 233-258) and
unannotated (pp. 268-275) bibliographies.
 Erik Craig 271

First, Boss viewed human existence as a primordially cast spatial

and historical unity. One cannot, in this view, understand the individual
apart from the sum total of his or her world relationships. The individual
is in the .world, the world is in the individual. Thus, Boss provided a
philosophically articulated perspective which helps us to understand our
becoming as "co-becoming," as becoming along with our world, thus
surpassing the inescapable, ontological solipsism embedded in other
humanistic theories of self-actualization. According to Boss, we all have
a distinctive life journey, a distinctive potentiality-for-being-a-whole, but
neither the journey, nor the potentiality, can be understood or lived in
isolation, apart from one's time, one's world and one's fellow human
beings. If one takes this view seriously, one's everyday life and one's
therapeutic calling take on a radically different destiny. One understands
oneself as a servant of being and possibility, a servant whose field of
concern and responsibility extends as far as the limits of awareness and
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even beyond, whose very own becoming is contingent upon the becoming
of his or her world.
Second, Medard Boss's daseinsanalysis dealt with the phenomena
of the so-called depth psychologies but made no assumptions about the
presence of an unconscious mind. Transference, resistance, dreams or
everyday slips of the tongue were all understood and handled on the basis
of immediate experience without having to concoct speculations about
unconscious dynamics. For Boss, human existence was always both
partially revealed and partially concealed. That which exists, appears,
or stands out in the light of day, always does so within the context of that
which is as yet unknown and even unknowable. However, simply because
we are surrounded by the unknown, by darkness and mystery, does not
mean we have the right, in the service of our own wish for tranquility or
omniscience, to invent a mental machinery to explain what we do not
know, what we cannot grasp. On this, Boss (1963) was eloquent:
In his untiring search for the unconscious, Freud was on the way
to the concealed, to concealment as such. Without concealment
and darkness, man would not be the world-disclosing being that
he is. Light and darkness, concealment and disclosure, belong
together inseparably; Freud must have sensed this. He said this,
too, of the unconscious: that it contained the "indestructible"
forces of the human mind, that it was the "true psychic reality."
As a child of his power-hungry time, he was unable to let
concealment be the secret it is. He found it necessary to make
objectivistic, psychologistic objects out of concealment in order
to be able to drag it into the light and make it usable. As it has
 272 The Humanistic Psychologist, 21, Autumn 1993

always done, and will always do, the secret withstood such
characteristically modern impertinence, (pp. 100-101)
The real gain of such phenomenological thinking, of course, accrues
to the psychotherapy patient for no longer is there any justification for
pejorative interpretations about his or her "deeper," hidden or devious
motives. Boss's phenomenological approach provides a genuine
philosophical basis for what is fashionably called today "experience near
interpretation" and, at the same time, enables such interpretation to be
profound, that is, to penetrate to the depths or essence of the individual's
existence. However, in remaining phenomenological, daseinsanalytic
interpretation also allows the patient to see for him or herself the
foundations for such interpretations as they are embedded concretely in
his or her very own immediate experience.

A Personal Reflection
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I have often wondered why Medard Boss's work has not been more
widely embraced, particularly here in America. Surely part of the reason
is the difficulty his works have had with discovering decent English
vehicles.4 Another, perhaps more significant, reason is the obscurity of
the language of daseinsanalysis. Even the very term dasein, for the
individual human being, seems an obtuse and unpalatable designation for
the average person to consider seriously. Beyond this, there is a whole
world of tongue-twisting German and endlessly hyphenated English
terms that presents a formidable barrier to even the most sincere
investigators and students. Perhaps, too, the grounding of daseinsanalysis
in arguments with old, immature forms of psychoanalysis has left little
room for fresh dialogue. Another reason may have more to do with
personal and intellectual prejudice.
For example, I remember first hearing of Boss's work in the early
1970's. A colleague had shown me Boss's book, Psychoanalysis and

4 A good portion of Medard Boss's work was never even translated into English.
For example, in addition to some of the works already mentioned, he also wrote
a short book on the existential-analytic treatment of anxiety and guilt entitled
Lebensangst, Schuldgefuhle und psychotherapeutische Befeiung (Life Anxiety,
Guilt Feelings and Psychotherapeutic Liberation, 1962). Also worth mentioning
are a collection of various articles published under the title Von der Sanweite der
Seele (On the Wingspan of the Soul, 1962) and the fourth German edition (1987a)
of his book on his journeys to India which includes a new preface discussing the
relationship between Indian thought and Heidegger's Daseinsanalytik.
 Erik Craig 273

Daseinsanalysis (1963) and told me that Boss was a humanistic

psychiatrist who had attempted to interpret psychoanalytic thinking with
a phenomenological, existential lens. I was immediately skeptical that
someone who took Freud seriously could be truly humanistic and,
without having read a single page, I dismissed the book as fundamentally
misguided. As fate would have it, however, seven years later I found
myself in a training analysis with Paul J. Stern, an existential
psychoanalyst in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a good friend of Boss.
My old defensiveness still intact, I initially protested the use of the couch
though conceded my opposition when Stern said, simply, that this was
the way in which he worked and that I was, of course, free to decide for
myself whether or not to work with him. Electing to continue, on an
"experimental basis only," I was shocked to find myself, within six
weeks, palpably confronted with important psychological matters which
a dozen years of personal growth work had not even vaguely ap-
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prehended. Furthermore, I could not avoid recognizing the fact that I had
been accompanied to the edge of these foreboding existential forests in
a gentle, profoundly humanistic fashion. The point is that perhaps other
humanistically trained therapists in America share some of the same old
anti-psychoanalytic prejudices and refuse to open themselves to any form
of thinking and practice that might, even if only occasionally, use the
couch or that might take seriously such powerful, secret-laden pheno-
mena as transference or resistance. And, of course, there is the fact that
daseinsanalysis, like psychoanalysis, requires that one tell the whole truth
and nothing but the truth. Such truth speaking and truth hearing is rarely
easy or tranquil. A narcotic, truth is not!
Finally, one must consider the effect on his work of Medard Boss's
own robustly argumentative and adversarial style, a style that was to
become increasingly pronounced as he came into his prime in his fifties
and sixties. It is worth remembering that Boss saw himself as besieged,
on the one side, by psychoanalysts who could not seem to free themselves
from their old natural-scientific ways of apprehending meaning and, on
the other side, by medical colleagues who were suspicious and neglectful
of meaning altogether. Both groups often assailed Boss, if not for his
phenomenological discourse or praxis, then for his humanistic ethos.
Such a professional milieu or existential circumstance does not lend itself
to a placid response, at least not from Boss. Nevertheless, perhaps Boss's
often contentious defense of the essentially gentle ways of daseinsanalysis
cost him the wider following his work genuinely deserved. It is difficult
to miss the irony of this since Boss was not only a remarkably gentle
 274 The Humanistic Psychologist, 21, Autumn 1993

man but also very concerned about the future of psychoanalysis, psycho-
therapy and medicine. He remained actively involved in Swiss and
international societies for psychoanalysis and founded the International
Federation for Medical Psychotherapy, remaining honorary president
until his death.
Medard Boss was just as robust in his personal life as he was in his
professional. Boss carried out a hearty, active life-style and enjoyed
hiking and skiing in the mountains as well as travel and water sports in
the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean. He even went
water skiing in Barbados just a few months after receiving a gallbladder
operation at the age of eighty-three! In spite of his extraordinary vigor,
the people who were closest to him, while recognizing the forcefulness
and independence of his personality, often described him as "sweet,"
"kind," "gentle," "loving," "a really wonderful man." I personally felt
most fortunate to have met him in the last few years of his life when he
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especially sought to realize the mood that Heidegger called Heitere

Gellassenheit or "mirthful serenity." I have fond memories of his
kindnesses to me and to others in his home and at various daseinsanalytic
gatherings both in the city of Zurich and in Switzerland's verdant, alpine
countryside. Boss privately exemplified, in the years that I knew him,
the very kind of human presence and solicitude of which he so often
spoke and wrote in public. He seemed to be so often quietly "ahead" of
those with whom he spoke, so often clearing the way, quite unselfcon-
sciously, for the other to be.
I remember being surprised to hear, in 1989, that Medard Boss
would be making trip, at age eighty-seven, to give a series of talks in
North and South America. It was during this trip that I saw and spoke
with him for the last time. Though obviously weakening, he still exuded
a peaceful sense of wonder. I also spoke with him briefly on the phone
shortly before he returned home to Zurich. In the course of that brief
conversation, I commented on the physical demands of his journey. He
laughed and said gaily, "Well, this is my swan-song."
The awareness of dying seemed to present no difficulty for Boss.
Death was simply one of the characteristics of being human, the mark
of completion, the ultimate realization of one's potentiality-for-being-a-
whole. Thus Medard Boss strove to live the essence of daseinsanalysis.
In his writing, in his teaching, in his therapeutic work and in his personal
life he sought always and above all to be a shepherd for Dasein, for what
it means to be a human being.
 Erik Craig 275

References
Boss, M. (1940). Korperliches Kronksein als Folge seelischer Gleich-
gewichtsstorungen [Bodily illness as a consequence of mental im-
balance]. Bern: Verlag Hans Huber.
Boss, M. (1943). Die Bedeutung der Psychologie fur menschlichen Lebens
und Arbeitsgemeinschaften [Psychological significance of human love
and work]. Thalwil-Zurich: Emil Oesch Verlag.
Boss, M. (1944). Die Gestalt der ehe und ihre Zerfallsformen [The nature of
marriage and its deterioration]. Bern: Verlag Hans Huber.
Boss, M. (1949). Meaning and content of sexual perversions (L. L. Abell,
Trans.). New York: Grune & Stratton. (Original work published in 1947)
Boss, M. (1954). Einfuhrung in die psychosomatische Medizin [Introduction
to Psychosomatic Medicine]. Bern: Verlag Hans Huber.
Boss, M. (1958). The analysis of dreams (A.J. Pomerans, Trans.). New York:
Philosophical Library. (Original work published in 1953).
Boss, M. (1962). Lebensangst, Schuldgefuhle und psychotherapeutische
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Befreiung [Life anxiety, guilt feelings and psychotherapeutic liberation].

Bern: Verlag Hans Huber.
Boss, M. (1963). Psychoanalysis and daseinsanalysis (L.B. Lefebre, Trans.).
New York: Basic Books. (Original work published in 1957).
Boss, M. (1965). A psychiatrist discovers India (H.A. Frey, Trans.). London:
Oswald Wolf. (Original work published 1959)
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Gardner Press. (Original work published 1975)
Boss, M. (1979a). Existential foundations of medicine and psychology (S.
Conway & A. Cleaves, Trans.). New York: Jason Aronson. (Original
work published 1971)
Boss, M. (1979b). Martin Heidegger's Zollikon seminars (B. Kenny, Trans.).
Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry. 16, 7-20. (Original
work published in G. Neske [Ed.]. [1977] Erinnerung an Martin
Heidegger [Recollection of Martin Heidegger], pp. 31-45. Pfulingen:
Neske.)
Boss, M. (1882). Von der Spannweite der Seele [On the wingspan of the soul].
Bern: Benteli Verlag.
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journey] (4th Ed.). Bern: Verlag Hans Huber.
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- Gesprache - Briefe [Martin Heidegger: Zollikon seminars; protocols
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and to live]. Benteli Verlag.
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Craig, E. (1988a). An encounter with Medard Boss. The Humanistic Psychol-

ogist, 16, 24-55.
Craig, E. (Ed.). (1988b). Psychotherapy for freedom: The daseinsanalytic
way in psychology and psychoanalysis [Special issue]. The Humanistic
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Hall, C. S. & Lindzey, G. (1978). Theories of personality. New York: Wiley.
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (J. McQuarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.).
New York: Harper & Row. (Original work published 1927).
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Psychology and Psychiatry, 21, 3 - 8 .
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Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 2, 567-594.

Erik Craig received his doctorate in humanistic and behavioral studies

from Boston University. He is the founder of the Center for Existential
Studies, Worcester, MA and Sante Fe, NM. He is currently teaching in
a new humanistic and transpersonal graduate program at Southwestern
College. From 1985 through 1989 he studied daseinsanalysis in Zurich
and in 1988 edited the special issue of The Humanistic Psychologist
entitled Psychotherapy for Freedom: The Daseinsanalytic Way in Psychol-
ogy and Psychoanalysis. He is past president of the Division of Humanis-
tic Psychology. Address correspondence to: Erik Craig, 113 Camino
Escondido #5, Sante Fe, NM 87501.