Psychologists investigating dreams in non-Western cultures have generally not considered the meanings of dreams within the unique meaning-structure of the person in his or her societal context. The study was concerned with explicating the indigenous system of dream interpretation of the Xhosa-speaking people, as revealed by acknowledged dream experts, and elaborating upon the life-world of the participants. Fifty dreams and their interpretations were collected from participants, who were traditional healers and their clients. A phenomenological methodology was adopted in explicating the (...) data. Themes explicated included : the physiognomy of the dreamer's life-world as revealed by significant dreams, the interpretation of significant dreams as revealed through action, and human bodiliness as revealed in dream interpretations. The participants' approach to dreams is not based upon an explicit theory, but upon an immediate and pathic understanding of the dream phenomenon. The understanding is based upon the interpreter's concrete understanding of the life-world, which includes the possibility of cosmic integration and continuity between personal and trans-personal realms of being. (shrink)

Drawing on Ludwig Binswanger’s work, this paper seeks to reconstruct historically and theoretically his relationship with Freud and Psychoanalysis and to trace his ideas with regard to the Unconscious. Tied to Freud by a friendship lasting thirty years, it started mainly from his encounter with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Alexander Pfänder, Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Martin Buber that Binswanger developed an original system of thinking and clinical application. The issue of the unconscious, beginning from this theoretical (...) shift, underwent a radical reformulation. First, Heideggerian thought allowed him to recognize the importance of different World-Projects, intended as existential a priori characterized by a specific internal normativity. Subsequently, the return to Husserl’s thinking lead Binswanger to rethink again the unconscious issue in light of the field of Passive Synthesis. In this paper we will examine all these issues and reconsider their importance for psychotherapeutic practice. (shrink)

This article assesses a realm of psychoanalytic social theory that is relatively under-discussed – existential psychoanalysis – in order to gain further insight into the relationship of psychoanalytic ideas to humanism. I offer a reading of certain influential thinkers in this tradition, namely Jean-Paul Sartre, Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss, presenting conceptual clarifications while highlighting a cluster of important aspects of their respective repertoires relevant to humanism. I do so with the intention of teasing out how contributing voices to existential (...) psychoanalysis negotiate humanism’s foundational ideas, specifically the notion of ‘the individual subject’, with the bed-rocks of psychoanalytic thought, namely the unconscious. Finally, I conclude with critical commentary on the existential-psychoanalytic project drawn from what is often thought of as the anti-humanist tradition, with specific attention paid to Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault. (shrink)

Argument“The Case of Ellen West” was published by the Swiss psychiatrist, Ludwig Binswanger, in 1944–1945. The case-history depicts the illness and suicide of a young woman who was his patient twenty years earlier. It came to be considered one of the paradigmatic studies of the newly established discipline ofDaseinsanalyse, an attempt to synthesize existential philosophy and therapeutic practice. This paper analyzes the case-study, employing newly uncovered archival material to expose important details regarding the treatment of Ellen West and the posthumous (...) writing of her case-history. The richness of the archival sources and the various historiographical characteristics they exhibit raise methodological questions about the potentialities and limitations of historical representation. The new data will thus serve as a platform from which to explore and discuss more generally the problems involved in historical reconstruction – of both subjective experience and clinical knowledge – and the questions of authorship and intertextuality in the genre of the case-history. (shrink)

Individuals operating within the scientific paradigm presume that the world is made of matter. Although the perspective engendered by this presupposition is very powerful, it excludes value and subjective experience from its fundamental ontology. In addition, it provides very little guidance with regards to the fundamentals of ethical action. Individuals within the religious paradigm, by contrast, presume that the world is made out of what matters. From such a perspective, the phenomenon of meaning is the primary reality. This meaning is (...) revealed both subjectively and objectively, and serves—under the appropriate conditions—as an unerring guide to ethical action.The ancient stories of Genesis cannot be properly understood without viewing them from within the religious paradigm. Genesis describes the primary categories of the world of meaning, as well as the eternal interactions of those categories. Order arises out of Chaos, through the creative intermediation of Logos, and man is manifested, in turn. Man, a constrained Logos, exists within a bounded state of being, Eden. Eden is a place where order and chaos, nature and culture, find their optimal state of balance. Because Eden is a walled garden, however—a bounded state of being—something is inevitably excluded. Unfortunately, what is excluded does not simply cease to exist. Every bounded paradise thus contains something forbidden and unknown. Man's curiosity inevitably drives him to investigate what has been excluded. The knowledge thus generated perpetually destroys the presuppositions and boundaries that allow his temporary Edens to exist. Thus, man is eternally fallen. The existential pain generated by this endlessly fallen state can undermine man's belief in the moral justifi0ability of being—and may turn him, like Cain, against brother and God. (shrink)

En este artículo, la filosofía analítico-lingüística es identificada como la metodología predominante en la filosofía del deporte. Según esta propuesta metodológica, la búsqueda de la definición del deporte es la meta principal de la filosofía. La hermenéutica del deporte es opuesta a la de tipo analítico-lingüístico. Analizando el concepto de verdad de Heidegger, se comparan dos concepciones de la tarea de la filosofía: ontología y descrip-ción. La tarea de la hermenéutica del deporte tiene que ver con la descripción. Las expli-caciones (...) hermenéuticas del deporte son un intento de describir la facticidad del deporte, que está compuesta por tres momentos diferentes: corporalidad, capacidades, y tradici. (shrink)

While Freud and Heidegger were antipathetic towards one another’s ideas, a number of commentators have argued that the Freud–Heidegger relation is actually quite complementary. This paper contributes to this position by engaging with the relationship through the mediation of their respective views on the ‘origins’ of sexuality; a topic that is implicit to Freudian psychoanalytic theory and which is often taken to be absent from Heidegger’s, with the consequence that it has been ignored when bringing them into conversation. Having shown (...) that in the 1928 lecture course The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, Heidegger does in fact address the question of sexuality in relation to the neutrality of Dasein outlined in the previous year’s Being and Time, I bring Freud and Heidegger into conversation on the question of the ‘origins’ of sexuality to suggest that there is a strong affinity between the two on this issue, insofar as both argue against any form of sexual essentialism by depending upon a processual ontology and affirming an originary sexual indeterminateness, which in the case of Freud takes the form of an initial bisexuality and in the case of Heidegger an ontological sexual neutrality, before concluding that, while Freud’s initial bisexuality forecloses sexuality within a binary framework, Heidegger’s notion of an ontological sexual neutrality does not, and so goes furthest in laying the ground for a rethinking of sexuality in non-essentialist, non-binary terms. (shrink)

This article describes the origin and the work of a volunteer run nonprofit agency designed to provide low cost psychotherapy. The agency was developed by psychotherapists connected with the Seattle University graduate program guided by the vision of psychotherapy as a healing relationship and in response to a growing crisis in the mental health system. We address the benefits and the challenges of this collaborative effort, and especially the difficulty involved in successfully running an agency while staying true to a (...) particular vision of therapy, collaboration, and community. (shrink)

The community of psychiatrists and psychologists in early twentieth century Europe cultivated a strong interest in the phenomenologically informed accounts of human existence offered by Heidegger. The psychiatrists, Binswanger (1968) and Boss (1957/1963; 1970/1979), developed personal relationships with Heidegger, and while Heidegger ultimately rejected Binswanger’s work, Boss worked closely with him throughout his life in order to keep his own work on a sound phenomenological footing. This interest in phenomenologically informed psychological practice and theory continued into the latter half of (...) the twentieth century with psychiatrists and psychologists such as Erwin Straus, Eugene Minkowski, Hubertus Tellenbach, and Rollo May.Today this tradition is continued by a number of psychiatrists, psychologists, and philosophers, including Thomas Fuchs, Matthew Ratcliffe, Giovanni Stanghellini, and Robert Stolorow. However, Robert Stolorow’s contributions to this movement are distinctive for. (shrink)

The subjective experience of schizophrenia, its cause, and its course have been consistent topics of interest within the phenomenological tradition since its inception. After 80 years of study and the efforts of many investigators, however, phenomenological contributions have so far had only a modest impact on current understandings of this disorder. In this article, the author reviews the methodological and theoretical issues involved in the development of a phenomenological approach to understanding schizophrenia. Drawing examples from his own empirical research, the (...) author illustrates the three steps of description, understanding, and explanation required by an application of the phenomenological method to this empirical domain. He then considers obstacles to the acceptance of insights generated through this method by the mainstream psychiatric community. In conclusion, he suggests that the promise offered by a phenomenological approach will most likely be fulfilled when investigators appeal to the phenomenological conviction in intentionality to provide the guidelines for an empirical science of subjective life. (shrink)

A well-worn trope used by phenomenologists is that things that remain invisible or unnoticed in the course of our everyday being in the world reveal themselves in instances of breakdown. This paper borrows this trope to explicate one instance of breakdown, that of traumatic spinal cord injury (TSCI). We use the phenomenology of Heidegger, especially his formulation of ecstatic temporality presented in Being and Time, to illuminate the temporal issues surrounding this radical rupture in Dasein’s being in the world through (...) data collected from field observations of inpatient rehabilitation, interviews with persons with TSCI, and with their rehabilitation providers. Specifically, we explore the breakdown in temporality (the rupture on thrown projection) that occurs in persons who experience TSCI across three interconnected existential dimensions – understanding, attunement (mood), and falling. We conclude by discussing the value this approach to human temporality might have for both social scientists interested in human temporality and to practitioners interested in research related to the rehabilitation process. (shrink)

We have attempted to delineate various components of the researcher's participation in the reflection phase of descriptive psychology. The characteristic attitude or posture, operations for the comprehension of a particular event, and activities which achieve general knowledge have been touched upon. This presentation is a preliminary attempt to bring into view the complex process of analysis in descriptive research and is intended as an invitation to more faithful and detailed accounts of the process in the future.

From 1959 until 1969, Heidegger lectured to psychiatrists and psychiatry students at the University of Zurich Psychiatric Clinic and in Zollikon. The transcriptions of these lectures were published as the Zollikon Seminars. In these seminars Heidegger is highly critical of psychoanalysis, because of its causal and objectifying approach to the human being. In general, Heidegger considers it an objectification or even an elimination of the human being to approach a patient from a causal perspective. In our view Heidegger has overlooked (...) the peculiar nature and complexity of psychotherapy and psychiatry, namely that psychiatry is not just a discipline that combines a hermeneutical approach and a natural science approach on a theoretical level, but it also deals with psychopathology in practice. We argue, also referring to Strawson and Gadamer, that in psychiatric practice causal explanation and hermeneutic understanding are no mutually exclusive approaches. We conclude that the encounter of philosophy and psychiatry in matters of causality and motivation could be particularly fruitful when the practical situation is addressed, recognizing the special character of psychopathology. (shrink)

This article describes the origin and the work of a volunteer run nonprofit agency designed to provide low cost psychotherapy. The agency was developed by psychotherapists connected with the Seattle University graduate program guided by the vision of psychotherapy as a healing relationship and in response to a growing crisis in the mental health system. We address the benefits and the challenges of this collaborative effort, and especially the difficulty involved in successfully running an agency while staying true to a (...) particular vision of therapy, collaboration, and community. (shrink)

In this article, the philosophical-anthropology of St. Thomas Aquinas is examined. In particular, the non-dualistic aspects of his anthropology are explicated and shown to have the potential to provide an underpinning for a holistic approach to psychology. In the course of this examination, parallels are drawn between Thomism and existential-phenomenology. The article concludes with an exploration of the ways in which a dialogue between existential-phenomenology and Thomism might benefit both traditions of thought, particularly as regards their relevance to metapsychology.

This paper focuses on the question concerning the nature of human illness in Heidegger’s thought according to the Daseinsanalytic approach to psychology in its broadest sense. In this regard, we will first clarify the relationship between illness, as a phenomenon of privation in Heidegger’s own words, the state of health, and the human specific mode of being in this framework which determines how being healthy is to be understood appropriately. Then, the importance of the general existential structures of human being, (...) according to Heidegger, such as human spatiality and the temporal feature of human Da-sein, for the Daseinsanalytic illustration of different forms of pathological being-in-the-world will be considered. Finally, we will bring into focus a theoretical challenge related to the Daseinsanalytic understanding of human health, concerning the problematic link between the standard of human openness to the highest degree, freedom for the possibilities of life and existential awareness on the one hand, and the ordinary normal experience of responding to the basic human existential traits as a touchstone of the state of health and the deviations from it, on the other. Keywords: Heidegger, Boss, Human Illness, Health, Daseinsanalytic Psychopathology 1. Introduction Clinical psychologists, psychiatrists and medical practitioners work on the basis of specific concepts of human health and illness. While the question concerning the nature of health and illness, as a philosophical question, is beyond the scope of the scientific research, it is the philosopher’s task to ask about what has been taken for granted in advance in this regard. Bringing into light the significance of the mentioned question can be considered as one of the significant contributions of the collaboration of the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, with the Swiss psychiatrist, Medard Boss, in the development of the Daseinsanalytic movement. 2. Illness as Privation Following Heidegger’s discussion of illness as a privative phenomenon, it is argued that in order to understand being ill appropriately, we must first determine what it means to be healthy, for illness is nothing but the lack of health that is to be recovered through the therapeutic process. The meaning of health itself as a mode of being would depend upon the way we approach human being. Therefore, Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein can be of considerable importance in this connection. 3. Health and Human Existence From the Daseinsanalytic perspective, existing as a realm of openness, we are essentially our possibilities of relating to what shows itself to us. Human health is to be considered as being human in its fullness with respect to such a way of being. Accordingly, health in this context would be described as being free for the life possibilities, sustaining our openness to the world to the highest possible degree. Illness, then would be essentially the constriction of one’s own possibilities and what the therapeutic process can do would be to help the clients overcome such problematic constrictions. 3. Daseinsanalysis and Pathology Daseinsanalysis as a phenomenological approach to pathology is concerned with the life-world of the clients, considering the altered structures of human existence. It focuses on the clarification of the way one carries out a disturbed form of being-in-the-world in pathological experiences. Here, the description of the structural aspects of the way we normally relate to the world provides a basis for the characterization of different forms of human illness. This approach offers a specific classification of pathological problems based on the noticeable disturbances in the normal form of responding to the existential traits. 4. The Problematic Link Daseinsanalysis has difficulties in coping properly with a theoretical issue related to the link between its prescriptive pattern of human health that can be characterized by the terms such as the openness to the highest degree, freedom for the possibilities of life, full human way of being, and existential awareness, and its phenomenological approach to pathological experience that has its point of departure in the description of normal form of being-in-the-world. Though the roots of the problem can be traced back to specific elements in Heidegger’s philosophy, thinking about the problematic link appropriately is a necessity for the reassessment of the Daseinsanalytic notion of health and its theoretical strength when the relationships between the issues such as the existential awareness, authentic creativity, being-satisfied with one’s own life, and the so-called mental illness are under consideration. 5. Conclusion Although Daseinsanalysis generally deepens our understanding of pathological experiences, it suffers from the mentioned theoretical problem as a result of the application of a double standard regarding human health. Two possible solutions to the problem can be as follows: 1) the idealization of the notion of health, with the recognition of its implication that the domain of illness, as a deficiency in being human in its fullness, may include both normal and abnormal forms of experience, and 2) taking a mere descriptive stance similar to the alternative phenomenological approaches in this field with the acceptance of the normality as its base for the illustration of the experiential modifications, rather than the commitment to the both at the same time, which may give rise to ambiguity and confusion. Depending on what we are seeking for, each approach has its positive aspects. A mere descriptive approach would be of great importance when the aim is to have a better understanding of clinical data, keeping the connection with the medical concepts and classifications. But in a different context, the idealization of the notion of health would enable us to move beyond the boundaries of the common notion of health and its limitations to clarify the possibility and significance of strengthening the richness of our life in accordance with human capacities, and to bring into focus the possibility of making reference to a broader range of human illness References: - Askay, Richard and Farquhar, Jensen. Of Philosophers and Madmen: A Disclosure of Martin Heidegger, Medard Boss, and Sigmund Freud, Amsterdam: Rodopi. - Becker, Ernest. the Denial of Death, New York: The Free Press. - Boss, Medard. Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis, L. B. Refebre, New York: Basic Books. - Boss, Medard. Existential Foundations of Medicine and Psychology, S Conway and A. Cleaves, New York: Jason Aronson. - Boss, Medard. Martin Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminars, B. Kenny, in: K. Hoeller, Heidegger and Psychology, Seattle: Promethean Press. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to retrieve the work presented in on the transcendent function and complexes as well as an ontological interpretation of Jung’s work on the Rosarium Philosophorum to project a new meaning of the phenomenology and ontology of the transcendent function. This article enables complexes and the Rosarium Philosophorum to be understood in connection to the ontology of the transcendent function that was presented in. This article can hermeneutically retrieve the transcendent function because when complexes and (...) the Rosarium Philosophorum are explained ontologically they unconceal new possibilities that were not available in. By retrieving the transcendent function in this way, this article will explain more detail of the phenomenological and ontological meaning of the transcendent function which will include complexes and the Rosarium Philosophorum. (shrink)