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Outline of Analysis of Dasein 1 страница




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16 The Daseinsanalytic View of Man

she had been tormented by almost insufferable headaches, as though the dome of her skull were laid open and the raw, exposed brain wrought with pain. Now her head was free of pressure and felt quite light. She also had, for the first time, a feeling of being at one with herself, complete and whole. But this celestial bliss of early infancy lasted only a few days. It was abundantly evident that the therapist's permissive attitude, combined with the virtual redemption vouchsafed her by this beatific infant interim, was beginning to evoke in the patient feelings of love and gratitude for him. Occasionally, when she was sucking her bottle, she would raise her eyes and look at the analyst. At such moments, the warm brightness of a small child lighted up what had been but a glassy vacancy. These feelings involved her directly. They had no bearing whatever on her scientific studies, nor could they be related to the rigidly dutiful altruistic attitude enforced by her upbringing. Hence they could only be felt as something alarmingly strange, dangerous, and even sinful. Accordingly there followed a series of highly pain­ful and disturbing experiences.

She had bought a concert ticket, and on the evening of the per­formance, while waiting at the streetcar stop on her way to the auditorium, she encountered a sophisticated lady dressed in black. She could feel that woman's disdainful eyes upon her. It gave her an uncanny feeling. She wanted to keep the lady in view, but lost sight of her in the crowd. As she was getting out of the streetcar she felt someone pull on her arm. She turned around to see who it was; no one was there. It must have been that diabolical lady in black. In the concert hall, who should sit right next to her but this same lady who had thrown her into such a fright on the way down! The patient was horror-stricken, went quite rigid, and heard prac­tically nothing of the music. As soon as the program had started she was certain that, the very next minute, either this lady beside her or the conductor from his podium would release the signal for the annihilation of the world. She fled from the hall with the greatest alacrity. Next day a friend from out of town wanted to visit her, but the patient refused to see her. She felt convinced that the friend was implicated in a plot which aimed at her destruction.

The day after, the patient went to her usual restaurant. She had to put on dark glasses because the supposed malefactors had done something to her eyes and made her quite blind. She had scarcely tasted a bite when she was seized with a cramp in her stomach.


***■



A Patient Who Taught the Author to See and Think Differently 17

This she took as a sure sign that she had been poisoned. Then the mask-apparitions returned. They had left her in peace during the time she was in her infant paradise. Again the analyst urged her to draw the faces. Pretty soon, among the sullen features of the prud­ish old aunts and the twisted devil faces, there began to appear the first suggestion of a sensuous, seductively beautiful woman, dis­guised with a black eye mask (Figure 8).

The patient herself had not noticed this new element. The analyst bad to draw her attention to this delightfully healthy detail. She excused herself for having overlooked it by saying that none of her drawings really emanated from her, but came, rather, only through ber hands. When she drew, she never had a distinct impression in mind which could be transmitted to paper. Rather, she said—thus confirming once again her earlier statements—it was as though the faces flocked toward her from somewhere in the space beyond the white expanse of paper in front of her. Her hand would begin draw­ing, and the faces would start to appear and to look at her from the drawing pad. She couldn't say where they came from. Patient and analyst together found a name for this beautiful mask: "Carni­val Lady." Could it be, the therapist ventured to ask, that in this new face, a realm of life which she had completely shut herself off from was trying to disclose itself (the side, that is, which had to do with those feminine, erotic potentialities that belong to a grown-np woman)? Thereupon she was flooded with hazily defined faces of girls with an open-for-anything look about them, which her hand automatically transmitted to paper; then, to her own amaze­ment, outright strumpet-characters shaped -themselves (Figures

As with the earlier small-child manners of behaving, so this present opening of herself to a more mature feminine realm brought

e patient, at least initially, an incalculable measure of relief. She felt a tremendous surge of new energy, started making expeditions, attended courses, could read again, was not afraid to talk to strangers, slept at night for nine hours consecutively, without medication, for the first time in twenty years. But the tyrant might of ascetic parental mentality is not likely to acknowledge defeat that easily. And so it was that the patient, after a short five days, began skulking about very timorously, complaining that church ladies were after her again; they were whispering that she was a


18 The Daseinsanalytic View of Man

street hussy and that, the first thing one knew, she would be masturbating in public.

Despite this evidence of resistance (and after a dream in the same session had pointed him the way) the analyst ventured an­other step.

The patient dreamed that a colleague of hers underwent a series of insulin shock treatments in the course of which she had an epileptiform seizure and then felt particularly well. The therapist reminded her that when she was awake she had often asked to have insulin shock, so that she could have a medically induced seizure— an explosion, but pharmacologically determined—where she could release herself in wild passionate abandonment, provided it were kept non-personal and she herself were exempted of any respon­sibility in the matter. Why could she not, even in a dream, let her­self go for once of her own accord, in an honest-to-goodness raving mad fit? Why was it she seemed to begrudge herself anything more than this substitute, this artificially contrived thing, this sur­rogate, this artificial insulin shock? And besides, she didn't even yet dare to shoulder responsibility herself for these insulin-induced seizures. She let them transpire outside herself, imputed them to someone else, let her colleague be convulsed by them.

As a lightning reaction to this question came the first impulsive outburst. "Shut up, you fool. I want to shout." Why didn't she do it, then? broke in the analyst. "People would come and would think someone was being killed if I screamed the way I want to," was her retort.

Did she really find it necessary to accommodate herself to that extent to other people's opinions? "Wasn't that being overcareful and a little too considerate?" the therapist asked.

"Yes, actually everything I ever did was only what others ex­pected of me," she admitted. "I never dared act spontaneously, not the way I really felt."

The therapist gave her a little more courage by remarking, "So terribly good, always." Thereupon the patient actually did manage to squeeze out a half-stifled scream.

The therapist dared one final incentive—"Fine! Almost as loud as a real child!"

"Shut up!" she shouted again, this time somewhat more angrily than before. Then, after a brief silence, "I almost feel a bit sexually aroused now."


Л Patient Who Taught the Author to See and Think Differently 19

"Almost?" came back the therapist, incredulously. As answer, she;.n tossing herself about on the couch. But she had to get up i^iost immediately, because the analytic session was over. As she was leaving, she said, "I don't recognize myself any more. •Ъо am I?" "That's what you came into analysis to find out," replied the

§t. The patient began the next analytic session two days later with le remark that if she drank from the baby's bottle today (which -je had been doing day after day for months) it would mean she ns running away from the sexual feelings in her pelvis. "I would -1<Ј to excuse myself for my behavior in the last session, for having oi "Shut up' to you." ~ле analyst countered this new apprehensiveness and propriety the question, "Do you really find such an apology necessary railed for between us? After all, it is I who asks you to be.•-=._ lutely, unreservedly, open and honest here."

Tbereupon the patient gave a great relaxed stretch, and said, "I

i-iven't felt so strong and at one with myself for decades." There

not been a trace of feelings of being influenced, or of auditory

ations for the past two days. She had been able to meet

:n the street, in restaurants, and in the theater quite naturally

-jo. with composure. She even laughed over her "silly rubbish," as

hat dow called her psychotic symptoms. But she laughed far too

•юё. In the middle of the session her feeling of well-being was

~tly interrupted by a tense, apprehensive silence. After a long

e. she brought out haltingly that she had just felt an urge to

rself naked and thus to run out into the street. She had been

.-docked to death by this impulse. "I am going to sit up," she went

- 'A horrible feeling comes over me from below. If I sit up I can

■r it down better. I realize I'm anatomically perfectly normally

: down there, but I have the feeling that there's nothing but a

risting great hole there."

e left the analytic session very depressed and tense. During

:' 1 she had to phone the analyst to complain, "There's such a

:'. tension in me, it's more than anyone can bear. I just can-

ndure it" The physician advised her to get rid of some of the

in bv drawing. In a second call later that night, the patient

: imed into the phone, "I want to rip my belly open with a big

waning knife. I want to slash my arteries and suck my own blood.


20 The Daseinsanalytic View of Man

Just thinking about it makes my mouth water." The therapist hur­ried to her without delay. He found her with a distracted expression sitting beside her disheveled bed. She barely noticed his entrance, and was listening intently first here and then there, as hallucinating schizophrenics are wont to do. With the slightest sound she started back in alarm. Eventually she made it clear to the analyst that every single sound had again an uncanny meaning.

The intolerable dread of inchoate disaster and nameless cat­aclysmic doom called for immediate intervention. "How could any­one get better," the therapist asked reassuringly, "without the old neurotic world collapsing in the process? It is far too narrow and rigid to survive. And if this sort of destruction of the old neurotic prison is happening to you, is that really so dreadful? To be so filled with apprehension as you are, and to hear nothing but death and destruction on every hand, can only mean one is still im­prisoned in the error of believing one's own neurotic egocentric world to be the sole possibility of existence and that when this shows signs of cracking, it means the crack of doom. For the real, essential being that is you, what is happening now is very far from being an end. It is merely a change taking place in its way of ap­pearing."

Still somewhat incredulous, but with confidence dawning, she managed a wan smile. But only for a brief moment; then her eye fell on the sanguinary drawings she had strewn about the floor during the night (Figure 12). That shocked her all over again, and she shrank back into herself.

"Oh," observed the therapist offhandedly, "you think you have to be afraid of those bloodthirsty, impulses. Well, that's only a second error on your part. Suicide is always only a mistake in seizing the wrong medium. You feel compelled to effect a physical cutting open of your body. You have an urge to see your actual blood run because you don't dare, as yet, to open your heart and let your feelings flow. You don't even trust yourself far enough to admit to either one of us that you like me because I try to stand by you."

These explanations were promptly followed by a tremendous lessening of tension in her. "If you say that, then maybe I can take my nose out of all this filth and breathe a little more freely. But may one really be fond of you? Isn't that asking far too much? If I grow dependent on you, won't I be a burden to you?"

"Doesn't a small child, every newborn child in the world, have a


A Fatient Who Taught the Author to See and Think Differently 21

; imate right to parental care? And you, who in your inmost ■-jig are a little child, don't you have a double right to be cared

r, because you were so painfully deprived of what you needed -cag ago? At the proper time when you were physically small, it was denied you. Wouldn't it be right to abundantly make up for it

BOW?"

In these remarks the therapist drew on biographical material she _d given him, which had revealed that her inordinately efficient mother had operated a sort of one-woman hotel. Needy strangers, eighty or ninety at a time, were taken in and cared for in the house-bold. It was only for her own children that the mother had had no time. The patient was reached by this invitation. The following day she brought her feeding bottle with her again and gave her­self up once more to being a little child. Her own comment was, "When I am like this then I'm really being myself. Now I don't have any noises and voices in my ears anymore. That was exhaust­ing, though, to have to listen to such a dynamo of sounds from bevond!"

For two weeks not much else happened in the analysis save that the patient lay in a fetal position and was fed with the bottle by the therapist. At night she slept marvelously, eight to nine hours and more of unbroken sleep. "This being permitted to be a small child is like a firm base for me, a solid ground where I can establish myself. If you hadn't made it possible for me last week, I know I would have gone crazy forever. I really do need to have a solid base like this before I can dare to let myself get involved in bigger feelings. And I have to know I can always come back to it if things get too difficult. Or am I going to have to. do without it altogether pretty soon, and do I have to grow up?" At this thought the patient's eyes opened wide in horror.

The therapist comforted her immediately. "Don't you bother about growing up. Just allow yourself to be exactly what you are, as fully as possible and for as long as you want. If you follow this advice, the growing up will take care of itself in good time."

Fear faded from her face once more at these words. "Now I am so open and so peaceful. I've never been like this before in my life." At the end of this phase she ended the session by saying with a mixture of amazement and apprehension, "Oh, now those feelings for you are cropping up in me again!"

The following night she had a grossly incestuous dream about her


22 The Daseinsanalytic View of Man

father. She told it the next day with a casualness and offhanded-ness that were highly suspect. She went on, what is more, quite abruptly to discuss a medical subject. A few hours later she phoned in a desperate state. "Already when I was leaving today I had an uncanny feeling. When I was talking about those medical things it wasn't I who was there at all. The one who was doing the talking was a huge, strange woman standing beside me. I got lost again in that unnatural role of the grown-up doctor. And worst of all I couldn't see you anymore, although you gave me your hand as I left. I had a feeling I had suddenly lost both my father and my mother. I was trying to cheat again, inside me, and to play the big adult. I went into the city after the session to buy some pretty clothes so I could be attractive to someone. But right in front of the shop I wanted to go to, there stood a man. He looked up at the building and wrote something down in a notebook. I know he wrote something about me and about what I was planning to do, and he had to report it to the police. I became terribly frightened and ran helter-skelter back home. Then that awful tension came in my ears again, and in the base of my skull—those excruciating head­aches, as though my head would burst. And I hear the dynamo noises again and I've got to listen to every car that drives by to find out what dreadful meaning it has. I'm all tied up in my ears again!"

Helped by his past experience with her, the analyst was able to say to her, "Perhaps those feelings toward me that came over you, and that you had for your father in that dream, and your wish to have pretty clothes and to be attractive, are still far too big and unmanageable for you. I don't think the little girl, who you really are, can yet even begin to cope with such feelings. Perhaps it will be best if you don't do anything, or start wanting to do anything, without first asking the little girl within you if it's all right with her." Hardly had she given herself up to being a child again than the secure feeling was once more there and the psychotic mani­festations had vanished.

At about this time, the patient's two-dimensional drawing and painting was replaced by three-dimensional modeling. At first she was continually obliged to model a female figure in the form of a rigid crucifix (Figure 13). Still, as soon as it was finished, it trans­formed itself (seemingly spontaneously in her hands) into a grace­ful dancing girl (Figure 14). Over and over, the cross and the dancer contended with one another for a place in her world. How


TsUent Who Taught the Author to See and Think Differently 23

I she solve this conflict in the medium of earthen clay? The _;юп came only much later in a meditative exercise devised by e patient herself, when she suddenly realized that God pervades r^-thing, even a whore dancer.

-. it was to happen again dozens of times that these two op-

: phases—the state of the happy, symptom-free child and that

т tormented psychotic—alternated with and followed one an-

The pathological phase could be predicted with empiric

-.«■:Ti tv each time the patient was confronted with the realm of

r sensual and emotional grown-up femininity. For instance, the

:st vehement schizophrenic exacerbation which the patient was

20 through during her analysis was anticipated by three dreams

-rteffing such a confrontation. In her first dream a large cobra

^ circling about her. "The snake kept coming closer," "like a cat

-Ja<? around a bowl of hot milk which she won't leave till she

: devoured. I was terribly afraid. I thought the only thing I

_,i do was to jump to escape this circling. I did jump, but the

>•? then stopped slithering in circles and came right after me.

—ged out at me over and over again, and every time I had to

into the air. Then it would swish forward underneath me and

rrl around in a flash and be after me again. I had to keep jump-

...to the air to avoid being pounced on. He kept up this game

me until I woke from sheer exhaustion and fright."

Ize therapist inquired whether it was so surprising to the patient

ut she was so weary all the time and had no strength for any sort

: work, if she had to expend all her energy in this incessant jump-

; out of the way of the snake—the messenger of the sensual and

. realm of her world. "Yes," she continued anxiously, "but wouldn't it be awful if snakes i coming out of me, or if I became a snake myself? Would be able to tell me then how I should behave?" xsrit it perhaps characteristic of you," the analyst intervened, ■_iat even when you imagine yourself as a snake, the first thing;:..»t comes to your mind is to ascertain the proper behavior?" The second dream had to do with the dictator Hitler, who came her room. He was particularly unattractive to her because of his **■ forehead, which gave him a doltish, brutish appearance. To e conversation, the dreamer began talking about statistical nidies of the incidence of mental illness in Germany. The dream


24 The Daseinsanalytic View of Man

ended on this note. It prompted the question, why of all possible men only an inferior dictator could be permitted to come into her dream world; on top of that, how curious that the only relation­ship to him was through a scientific discourse.

"Yes, men are still completely incomprehensible to me," the patient allowed. "I wouldn't dare, for instance, to take dancing lessons. I would be mortally afraid if anyone asked me to dance. And I only feel at ease with my colleagues if I can talk about medicine with them."

In the third dream, the dreamer saw fire break out in a depart­ment store. It was the shop to which she had taken her summer clothes to have them brought up to fashion. A few hours after waking from this dream, she broke out in a severe urticaria; it extended over her whole body, but the worst of it centered on the inner surfaces of her thighs. The analyst registered this bodily communication in silence and then recapitulated the dream with the remark, "Something has caught on fire and is burning, some­thing that is related in a way to your feminine wish to be attractive. But first of all it is not you, yourself, who burns with a desire to attract. That would be daring too much. The dream doesn't show you burning, only the department store, i.e., an anonymous some­thing. Secondly, the fire of vitality appears to you only in the form of a destructive conflagration, a danger."

Unfailingly the alternate phase of well-being could be restored by bringing the patient back within the pre-sexual compass of a little child. But this experimenting was far from being a scientific game. It was fundamentally the only and indispensable therapeutic measure by which one could' make accessible to her a genuine maturing, a slow assembling of all her life potentialities and their integration into a self-reliant, mature, and independent self. All that was needed was gradually to extend what one asked of her in the way of sustaining these exposures to the onslaught from areas of life native to phenomena of adult love.

In the opening stages of the final phase of therapy a dream ap­peared which pointed a new direction to the patient. The dreamer entered her house. It was large and spacious, but empty, and looked rather dilapidated and tumbledown. At first the dreamer was very dispirited. Then she noticed that two workmen were busy with renovations. To her enormous surprise she recognized them as no


! Who Taught the Author to See and Think Differently 25

j;er personages than the artists Michelangelo and Picasso. Now t --v thin g was going to be all right, she felt.

7 1 swing this dream she ventured in her waking life to take i:-3unt of her very considerable drawing talent, to regard it seri--nd look on it as her best. She started on her training as a jd_-::ess.

м«е also ventured increasingly to appropriate and make her own -_ se sensual-erotic life potentialities which up until this time had: -л so dreaded and repelled. It happened much as one sees this pen in every prospering, straightforward neurosis therapy con-..:ed along classical analytic lines. Once again it was a dream.: most impressively enlightened the therapist on this develop-nt The patient dreamed, "I am a university lecturer and I am Г-ve a lecture to a class of women medical students on Amphioxus zeolatus. As I come into the lecture room I realize at once that v are all students to whom I have already given my lecture. 7 ere is no point in repeating it. I start to laugh, and immediately -.--.- are all laughing with me. We all forget about the lecture. A r warm, cordial atmosphere prevails, and we chat gaily to­gether about sexual life."

It is true that, to begin with, the relation in the dream to even -.be rudimentary beginnings of sexual life (Amphioxus lanceolatus _> the most primitive of vertebrates) is still a remote, intellectual,: ectifying one, eventuating as topic of a scientific lecture. But z rty soon the patient abandons this old, been-here-before, no-;er-any-point attitude; she relaxes and opens up quite consider-ioly toward the sphere of sexuality.

A year earlier an approach to this area of our world would with­out a shadow of doubt have precipitated a fresh relapse into severe psychotic hallucinations. Witness thereto is the dream about Hitler, for whom the patient held a lecture, a dream followed by a severe z chotic break. On the contrary, the present dream encouraged -_be hope that very shortly the patient would be able to relate to -Jie sensual-erotic phenomena of the world in an open and free manner in her waking state also, and that this realm of reality -.vould thereafter appear in the light of her existence, too, but in the form of the corresponding phenomena of our common everyday world and never again as hallucinated" things. Seven years of observation have intervened since this dream, and thus far no vestige of schizophrenic symptomatology has reappeared.


26 The Daseinsanalytic View of Мая.

Toward the end of her last analytical session the patient askec her physician spontaneously, "Do you know what it was in you: treatment which actually cured me?" Immediately she gave thr ["answer herself: "First of all it was the simple fact that you were J always available for me, that I could telephone you and come t you at any time, day and night, whenever I found it to be neces­sary. For a long time I did not believe that somebody actuall; would always be there for me. Slowly I learned to trust you, because dozens of experiences proved to me that you did not let me down Only then I dared to live through you, so to speak, until I felt m; own strength growing. Out of this trust in your reliability grew at increasing faith in the whole world, as I had never experienced before. Formerly I lived by my will power only, always pulling myself up by my boot strings till I was suspended in the air. The faith in you gave me the courage to settle down inwardly to the very ground of my existence. The second but equally important therapeutically efficient factor was your understanding of my paranoid delusions and hallucinations, your taking them seriously. Your knowledge of their genuine value and meaning enabled me to realize the wholeness of my own self and the oneness of myself and the world."

"" It may be objected that many good psychotherapists and psycho­analysts would have dealt with such a patient intuitively in a similar manner without being acquainted at all with the Daseinsan­alytic approach. We do not deny that this may occur, although the author, for his part, would have been completely at a loss with this case if the Daseinsanalytic understanding of man had not come to his aid just in time. At any rate, so far only the Daseinsanalytic in­sights are capable of providing us with an explicit understanding of why such intuitively arrived at therapeutic techniques meet the genuine needs of our patients better than more traditional ones. By doing so, the Daseinsanalytic understanding of man makes us much more independent of our occasional intuitive ghmpses and thus considerably increases the reliability of our treatment.

This fact may well justify our asking the reader now to stay with us as we try to outline the main features of Daseinsanalytic think­ing in a more systematic way, even though the respective ap­plicability of each of the outlined steps will only gradually become apparent in the succeeding chapters. We suggest that those readers who do not wish to reflect first on the basic issues read the fol-


* ftHemt Who Taught the Author to See and Think Differently 27

—g four chapters only at the end, or not at all. These readers

idvised to go straight to Parts II through IV of this book. They

::Л even restrict their reading to the study of the concrete case

ries and still learn something about the Daseinsanalytic ap-




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