Outline of Analysis of Dasein 8 страница

Suppose a subjectivistic psychologist happened to be visiting me while I was thinking of Notre Dame. He might raise strong objec­tions against my statements. He might argue that, hard as I may think of Notre Dame, he still notices my presence in my home in Zurich. How can you then, this psychologist would ask, pretend to be with Notre Dame in Paris? The simplest answer to this objection would be another question. Are you sure, I would have to reply, that the body you see moving around in front of you is actually what I, myself, would call my true and complete existence, fully absorbed in my thinking of Notre Dame at this moment? Does vour statement not violate the reality of my whole being by pressing it into a partial observation, perceived by someone outside myself? Who has the right to equate my physical body with my whole existence when in actuality I am completely absorbed in my think­ing of Notre Dame? My existence extends at the same time into,

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and throughout, the whole realm of my world, as disclosed in the light of all my luminating relationships. It reaches as far as all these relationships, and it may include my being in Zurich in body and in Paris in thought at the same time. Right now it moves emphati­cally toward closeness in thought to Notre Dame in Paris.

Once this luminating and primarily ekstatic nature of man's existence is understood, there is no longer any need for the un­provable concepts of ideas and images which whirl around in the brain or mind. On the other hand, if our Daseinsanalytic description is correct, then it is perfectly natural that, after having been open to the appearance of Notre Dame in the way of thinking of it for a moment, I become closed to this perception the next moment and admit another thing or fellow human being into the world-openness, the elucidating, meaning-disclosing clearing which I am essentially. Our example shows that if we do not depart from the immediate experience of what is commonly called an idea or psychic repre­sentation "of" something, we need no construct of an unconscious in the sense of an inner psychic locality. All we need to do is talk of the concrete, meaning-disclosing object relations in which, and as which, our Dasein exists at a given moment.

Bernheim's experiments in post-hypnotic suggestion, cited by Freud as further proof of the existence of the unconscious, also appear different when viewed Daseinsanalytically. The hypnotic state reveals itself as the hypnotized man's "having fallen prey to" the hypnotist (see pp. 51-52). Man's ability to fall prey in this particular fashion is based on primary being-with, one of Dasein s essential characteristics (see pp. 55-56). The hypnotized one has given up his own self to such an extent that he exists only through the hypnotist, undivided from him. When he carries out the com­mands given during hypnosis by the hypnotist, thinking that he is acting on his own accord, he shows that he has not extracted himself sufficiently from the hypnotist and that he has not yet really come to himself. For this reason, when someone who has been hypnotized says "I," this "I" refers indiscriminately to his and the hypnotist's Dasein. All those who fall prey to tradition, or to anonymous "everybody," present a related phenomenon. Such persons are un­aware of their authentic existential possibilities. In thought and action, they behave according to ancestral attitudes and/or ac­cepted ideas. Yet even they say "I approve of this or that" or "/ disapprove" when uttering an opinion.

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Freud further founded his assumption of the unconscious on the parapraxes of daily life, such as when a club president, opening a meeting, declares the session "closed."⁴⁴ Freud concluded from this slip of the tongue that a counter tendency, hidden in the uncon­scious of this man, broke through to consciousness on this occasion. Consciously he had wanted to open the session, as he himself testified.

To understand an occurrence of this sort, it is not necessary to picture this man as an apparatus inside of which independent tendencies, motives, and ideas run their course. We regard this man as the total of all his past, present, and future possibilities of relat­ing to bis world. This enables us to discover that his relationship of rejection to this particular meeting was by no means buried in some psychic locality within him. On the contrary, he himself was to a very large extent "outside," so to speak, namely in his rejecting relationship to those attending the meeting. At the moment when the lapse occurred, he did not reflect on his containment, but carried it out without thinking in the form of his slip of the tongue. He may, indeed, have closed himself thoroughly to any recognition of his negative relationship to the meeting. Even then he did not repress an isolated tendency or idea into a preconscious or unconscious. It is precisely when an individual defends himself against his be­coming aware of a certain world-relationship that he is contained in it all the more and adheres to what he defends himself against. Secretly Freud knew that this is so. Otherwise he could hardly have stated that we can get pointers for the understanding of parapraxes "from the mental situation in which the error arose, from our knowl­edge of the character of the person who commits it."⁴⁵ Certainly a person's mental situation and character are not hidden inside a psychic locality or system, but present themselves within a human being's relationships toward his world.

Freud's conception of the pathogenic factors in neuroses again employs the unconscious. Repressed strivings and ideas are assumed to be responsible for symptoms. Daseinsanalysis is able to see these phenomena in terms of the given world-relations of neurotic patients. Daseinsanalysis thus stays close to the reality of the phenomena involved. Patients' symptoms are understood by asking

** Ibid., p. 38. **1Ш., р. 47.

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how their relations to what they encounter are carried out: whether in an open, free, and independent manner or in the unfree manner of non-admitted defenses. We will deal with this question in greater detail in our discussion of the different "defense mechanisms" which Freud considered specific for symptom formation. Here it may suffice to repeat that when neurotic symptoms appear they do not originate from strivings and ideas within a patient's unconscious. The assumptions of an undemonstrable unconscious and of ideas and strivings within it arise from the need of psychological in­vestigators to "explain" what they observe. If we renounce the natural-scientific urge to explain and try to rely, instead, on our immediate observations, the situation of the neurotic patient turns out to be the opposite of the way it is pictured in psychoanalytic theory. The patient is "outside" from the start, i.e., he exists from the outset within and as his neurotic behavior toward his world (a relationship which may or may not also involve the bodily realm of his existence).

The phenomenon which, above all others, made the assumption of an unconscious imperative to Freud was dreams. If one departs from the immediate experience of the dream and tries to explain dream phenomena with the help of abstract concepts developed in working with different subject matter, it is almost inevitable that one arrives at some such conclusion. This is what Freud did. He tells us so himself, in the following passage:

We... borrow the following thesis from the theory of hysteria: a normal train of thought is only submitted to abnormal psychical treatment... if an unconscious wish, derived from infancy and in a state of repression, has been transferred on to it. In accordance with this thesis we have constructed our theory of dreams on the assumption that the dream-wish which provides the motive power invariably originates from the unconscious—an assumption which, as I myself am ready to admit, cannot be proved to hold generally, though neither can it be disproved.⁴⁶

Dream phenomena do not enable us to recognize infantile wishes as sources of dreams, nor the transformation of a wish into a dream, nor the dream-work which supposedly accomplishes the transforma­tion. It is not surprising, therefore, that all of these suppositions have to be placed in the unrecognizable darkness of a psychic interior, i.e., the unconscious.

⁴⁶ S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 598. Italics in original.

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To demonstrate his theory of dreams as clearly as possible, Freud used the following example at the end of The Interpretation of Dreams:

A fourteen-year-old boy came to me for psychoanalytic treatment suffering from tic convulsif, hysterical vomiting, headaches, etc. I began the treatment by assuring him that if he shut his eyes he would see pictures or have ideas he was then to communicate to me. He replied in pictures. His last impression before coming to me was revived visually in his memory. He had been playing at draughts with his uncle and saw the board in front of him. He thought of various positions, favorable or unfavorable, and of the moves that one must not make. He then saw a dagger lying on the board—an object that belonged to his father but which his imagi­nation placed on the board. Then there was a sickle lying on the board and next a scythe. And there now appeared a picture of an old peasant mowing the grass in front of the patient's distant home with a scythe. After a few days I discovered the meaning of this series of pictures. The boy had been upset by an unhappy family situation. He had a father who was a hard man, liable to fits of rage, who had been unhappily married to the patient's mother, and whose educational methods had consisted of threats. His father had been divorced by his mother, a tender and affec­tionate woman, had married again and had one day brought a young woman home with him who was to be the boy's new mother. It was during the first few days after this that the fourteen-year-old boy's illness had come on. His suppressed rage against his father was what had constructed this series of pictures with their under­standable allusions. The material for them was provided by a recollection from mythology. The sickle was the one with which Zeus castrated his father; the scythe and the picture of the old peasant represented Kronos, the violent old man who devoured his children and on whom Zeus took ^uch unfilial vengeance. His father's marriage gave the boy an opportunity of repaying the reproaches and threats which he had heard from his father long before because he had played with his genitals (cf. the playing of draughts; the forbidden moves; the dagger which could be used to kill). In this case long-repressed memories and derivatives from them which had remained unconscious slipped into con­sciousness by a roundabout path in the form of apparently mean­ingless pictures.⁴⁷

This example contains a great number of interpretive conclusions concerning affective and instinctual "derivatives" from the boy's unconscious. Apart from the fact that the essence of such "pictures"

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