دازاین کاوی و تحلیل دازاین
Daseinsanalysis
And
Daseinsanalytik
A Report on Martin Heidegger's Zollikon Seminars
Akbar Jabbari
Introduction:
But no matter how well know Heidegger may be as a philosopher, his impact on psychotherapy has been strangely neglected, particularly in English-speaking countries. We have a number of books illustrating the relevance of Heidegger's ideas on art, language, politics and ethics. We have some biographies. We have explorations of East Asian influences on his thinking. But nobody has yet looked in any depth at his importance for psychotherapy, or his involvement with it. This is the aim of this Thesis.
As far as I know Heidegger's lectures in Zollikon Seminars was the first attempt to develop a method of psychotherapy from "existential" roots. In addition, Heidegger was personally and actively involved in this approach by teaching - from 1959 to 1969- psychotherapists and psychiatrists an outline of his world-view and its potential relevance to their work. There will be a more detailed account of this in Thesis.
Under the influence of an increasing interest in aspects existential philosophy, different groups of therapists in different countries, seeking an alternative to therapies rooted in psychoanalytic theories, called themselves "existential" though giving different meanings to this word. Some of them included Heidegger's views, others did not. None, as far as I know, based their approach consistently or predominantly on Heidegger's way of seeing "existence" as the Swiss School attempted to do. But Medard Boss, who had become a close friend of Heidegger, had invited him to Switzerland and later became the director of the Institute for Daseinsanalysis, and the present head of the Institute, Gion Condrau. The psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, who created a "Daseinsanalyse" of his own which was essentially phenomenologically descriptive and not conceived as a 'therapy', went his own way early on.
An appreciation and critique of the work of these 'Daseinsanalysts', as it is presented in their writings, requires a book of its own. Such a book would be of great importance, as these therapists were pioneers of existential therapy, in direct contact with Heidegger for many years, and their writings are deeply illuminating.
Perhaps they were too closely involved with the beginnings of this new development and therefore overemphasized some aspects of it at the expense of others. As far as I know there is not yet a clear and comprehensive overview of this group's relation to Heidegger's thinking, particularly as he expressed it in the Zollikon Seminars when he addressed a group of Swiss psychiatristsnand therapists.
Heidegger and Binswanger
Binswanger was a psychiatrist who had trained at the Burgholzli hospital under Bleuler and Jung, and he had become a lifelong friend of Freud. Heidegger and Binswanger met for the first time in 1929 in Frankfurt, where Heidegger gave a lecture. What drew Binswanger to Heidegger was, above all, his view of human existence as "Being-in-the-world", which came close to Binswanger's desire to understand the total reality of the suffering of patients. He wrote about this in a paper discussing the influence of Heidegger's analysis of Dasein on psychiatry.
Heidegger's "Daseinsanalytik" was an ontological exploration of Being itself, while Binswanger's "Daseinsanalyse" dealt with the understanding of 'specific individual persons'. In Zollikon Heidegger he was emphatic in his distiniction between "Daseinsanalytik" and "Daseinsanalyse".
"Daseinsanalyse" is ontic, "Daseinsanalytik" ontological. Daseinsanalytik is an ontological interpretation of being human, and server to prepare the question of Being. Heidegger states: 'From this "Daseinsanalyse" needs to be fundamentally distinguished when it is the demonstration and description of phenomena which are shown factually by a definite existing Dasein' (Ibid., p163)
Heidegger and Boss
In 1947 a Swiss psychoanalyst, Medard Boss, also wrote to Heidegger. For some time Boss had been looking for a different philosophical foundation for his work. He had tried to read Being and Time, but he had found the book difficult to comprehend and turned to the writer for help. The problem that particularly occupied Boss was that of 'Time'.
Boss tells us how surprised he was to receive an answer by return of post. Heidegger was prepared to give him whatever help was possible. This was the first of a series of 256 letters, which marked the beginning of their friendship and only ended with Heidegger's death. Why this new friendship extinguished Heidegger's contact with Binswanger so completely, we do not know, but we are free to wonder about it.
The Zollikon Seminars
Heidegger went to visit Boss frequently in house in Zollikon, and eventually seminars were worked into these visits. They gave 'friends, colleagues and students' of Boss 'a sound philosophical foundation for [their] medical activities' as Boss put it. These seminars lasted from 1959 to 1969, though they were only protocolled from 1964 by Boss himself. These protocols were sent to Heidegger, who corrected them and returned them.
The Zollikoner Seminare in 2001 have been translated by Franz Mayer and Richard Askay in Northwestern University. Their German publication in 1987 has an introduction by Boss, and he adds to the seminar protocols a number of fragments of conversations between himself and Heidegger as well as a selection of their letters. There is a certain carelessness about this book that does an injustice to its importance. For instance, it lacks a proper index and provides very few notes. Some thorough research into the occasion and themes of the Zollikoner Seminare would be most desirable.
At this Thesis I shall only give a overview of Heidegger's teaching and discussions at the time. This will show that Heidegger was genuinely concerned with seeing the problems of psychotherapy in the light of his own philosophical thought.
The Zollikon Seminars offer psychotherapists essentially an introduction to Heidegger's thinking. It is interesting that he bases a great deal of his exposition on Being and Time, his earliest major work which, as we have seen, concerns itself with the specific aspects of human existence or Dasein. This contradicts the frequently held assumption of a radical break between Heidegger's early and later writing. Going back to a work written more than thirty years before he started teaching students and therapists in Zollikon shows that Heidegger still acknowledged his original insights as the roots from which his later thinking had grown.
Heidegger's teaching and the discussions arising from it cover the following main themes:
1-The difference between phenomena and explanation.
2-The difference between Being and beings.
3-Aspects of Time.
4-Aspects of Space.
5-The body/mind question
6-Descartes and naturl science.
7-The subject/object question.
Framing the Task
This sketchy outline of the various dimensions of our subject.
Heidegger played an active part in contributing to the first model of an existentially orientated psychotherapy. More importantly he is a source and influence, albeit to varying degrees, for most contemporary existential thinkers. In his writings he also offers a contact with three philosophers who are often considered to be forerunners of existential thinking, namely Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Husserl. But, there is some difference between Heidegger and Husserl. Some of topics in this Thesis:
1-The important difference between Husserl's concept of phenomenology and Heidegger's modification of it is rarely clarified. Heidegger did not accept Husserl's idea of "reduction"- he did not think one could or should put the "world" in brackets. Heidegger's existential phenomenology does not acknowledge Husserl's "epoche".
2-Heidegger's specific definition of the world "existence" is rarely mentioned, and a more colloquial and somewhat woolly usage is, on the whole, preferred.
3-Heidegger's illuminating distinction between the "ontological" and the "ontic" is rarely applied.
4-"Being-in-the-world" is perhaps the most frequently quoted Heideggerian concept, but the fact that it goes against the very grain of Western thinking, challenging as it does the Cartesian split between subject and world which in many ways still dominates us, is, my view, not sufficiently emphasized.
What is Daseinsanalytik?
How did Heidegger see "Daseinsanalyse" at a time when he was an important participant in its establishment as an existential therapy? In Zollikon he was emphatic in his distinction between "Daseinsanalytik" and "Daseinsanalyse".
Being and Time is, to a great extent, the analysis of the Being of human being witch Heidegger sees as radically different from the Being of other beings. It is just because human beings can be aware of their Being, and have always already some understanding of it, however vague, that they are also able to forget it. This is hardly true of rocks and roses.
Dasein
To emphasize this special way of being, Heidegger does what he often does- he uses familiar words in a new way. He does not speak of 'human beings' but of "Dasein", and dasein's way of being he calls 'existence'.
The German word "Dasein" is quite commonly used and is translated as 'presence' and 'existence'. It does not necessarily apply to human beings alone. Heidegger, in using it to characterize human beings, pays attention, as he frequently does, to the literal meaning of the word: this is "there-being" or as we usually say 'being there'.
Heidegger's emphasis on there does not refer to a location in space –a rock has this too. Rather Heidegger's 'there' is that place of openness in which we encounter other beings as well as our own involvement with the world. In a later development of Heidegger's thinking, this 'there' becomes the place where Being appears, it becomes the 'there of Being'.
What I am trying to stress is the centrality of human beings and their relation to Being in Heidegger's exploration of his 'crucial question', and that the question could not even be asked without "Dasein" to ask it – a "Dasein" that is concerned with Being.
In Being and Time, Heidegger introduces "Dasein" to us in the following way:
Dasein is an entity, which does not just occur among other entities. Rather it is… distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it… this implies that Dasein, in its Being, has a relationship towards that Being… And this means further that there is some way in which Dasein understands itself in its Being, and that to some degree it does so explicitly … Understanding of Being is itself a definite characteristic of Dasein's Being.
(Heidegger, 1962, p.32; emphasis in the original)
Existence
This leads to Heidegger's introduction of his specific use of the word 'existence': 'The kind of Being towards which Dasein can comport itself in one way or another, and always does comport itself somehow, we call "existence"(Ibid., p.32)
Then there follows a passage that tells us a great deal about how Heidegger understood 'existence':
Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence- in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself. Dasein either has chosen these possibilities itself or got itself into them, or grown up in them already. Only the particular Dasein decides its existence, whether it does so by taking hold of or by neglecting. The question of existing never gets straightened out except through existing itself. (Ibid., p. 33)
This passage touches on some of the central themes of Heidegger's thinking. Dasein is not static – it has possibilities. It either find itself thrown into them, or it has chosen them, but in either case it can realize them or put them aside. Possibilities suggest a temporal framework; they are not yet but may be in the future. Dasein alone has possibility and choice: this is the radical difference between human and other beings.
This is the reason why Heidegger uses the word 'existence' only for the Being of human beings. The word is derived from the Latin 'existere' which means 'standing out'. Human Being reaches out beyond itself, it is not fixed in itself like a rock is. It relates to its own existence, to the dimensions of time, to others, to the world.
Summary
In September 1959Heidegger started his seminars for Medard Boss's colleagues and psychiatric students with a drawing that showed five half circles, each entered by an arrow:
Heidegger chalked this drawing onto the blackboard of the big auditorium of the Burghlzli Hospital where the first seminar took place. He wrote a short commentary about it that is worth looking at:
This drawing is meant to show that human existence is essentially never just an object that is somewhere present, least of all an object closed in itself. Rather this existence consists of 'mere' potentialities- neither visible nor tangible- to perceive and be aware of all that encounters and addresses us. (Heidegger, 2001, p.3)
The emphasis is on fluidity, potentiality and openness of existence, its basic incompleteness, and Heidegger goes on to compare this view with the more object-like, mechanistic "re-presentations' which dominate most psychological systems:
All the usual capsule-like representations (common at present in psychology and psychopathology) of a psyche, a subject, a person, an Ego, a consciousness have- in an existential approach- to be relinquished and give way to a fundamentally different understanding. (Ibid.)
Heidegger next outlines how he perceives the essence of human existence and reaches, with the well-know term "Being-in-the-world", a formulation which deviates more radically from the generally accepted view of Western thinking may at first appear.
References
1-Binswanger, L.(1963)Being-in-the-world. Selected Papers. Trans. J. Needleman. New York.
2-Boss, M.(1979)Existential Foundations of Medicine and Psychology. Trans. S. Conway and A. Cleaves. New Jersey.
3-Cohn, H. W.(1997) Existential Thought and Therapeutic practice. London.
4-Cohn, H. W.(2002) Heidegger and the Roots of Existential Therapy. London.
5-Heidegger, M.(1962) Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford.
6-Heidegger, M.(2001) Zollikon Seminars. Trans. Franz Mayer and Richard Askay. Northwestern University.
7- Heidegger, M. (1971) poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. A. Hofstadter. New York.
8-Heidegger, M. (1982)The Basic problem of phenomenology. Trans. A. Hofstadter. Indiana University.
9- Heidegger, M. (1985) History of the Concept of Time. T. Kisiel. Indiana University.
10- Heidegger, M. (1998) Pathmarks, Ed. W. Meneill, Cambridge university press.
11-Heidegger, M. (2000) An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. G. Fried and R. Polt, Yale University.
12-Heidegger, M. (1977)The Question Concerning Technology and other essays, trans. W. Lovitt, New York.
13-Heidegger, M. (1972)The end of philosophy and the task of thinking, in Stambaugh(ed), On Time and Being, New York.
14-Heidegger, M. (1972) On Time and Being, in Stambaugh(ed.), On Time and Being, New York.