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Our attempt to understand Daseinsanalytically the fact that man is capable of "hallucinating" under certain circumstances, is coupled with an awareness of the highly preliminary character of our re­flections. The only justification for our attempt lies in the present situation of psychiatric science. Anatomical, physiological, endo­crinological, and pharmacological research into the problem of schizophrenia in general, and into that of "hallucinations" in par­ticular, are still very far from any understanding of these phenomena. They are, in fact, fundamentally incapable of reaching the goal in question. Certainly, all these "scientific" investigations are neces­sary and they produce therapeutic procedures that will be helpful in many respects. They will, however, never lead to any basic understanding of the "hallucinating" way of man's existing, because such findings will always refer only to the partial somatic phe­nomena which take place concurrently with "hallucinatory" per-

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ception. They will always refer only to one of the many conditions under which the emergence of "hallucinations" become possible, but never to the essential one. For (if we may repeat this point once more) no meaning-disclosing human perception and under­standing of something as something—be it "normal" or "hallucina­tory"—can ever be derived from, or comprehended by, the knowledge of the physical processes which occur simultaneously. An assumed transformation of the latter into a mental grasping of meaningful phenomena remains pure magic. Strictly speaking, therefore, it is incorrect to call somatic investigation "basic research" in psychiatry.

The psychological distinction between "normal" and "hallucina­tory" perceptions as "real" and "unreal" ones holds as little promise as do the somatic findings of furnishing a basic starting point for an adequate understanding of "hallucinations." For we know that there is no "reality" in and for itself but only and always in relation to human existence.

Under these circumstances the discussion of the birth process of a concrete schizophrenic "hallucination" may be the best way to find clues to a better comprehension of this paramount psychopatho-logical "symptom."

A Schizophrenic Hallucination "in Statu Nascendi." It was in the middle of April 1961 that an intelligent young man of small physical stature had to be hospitalized in the psychiatric clinic of the University of Zurich because of an acute nervous breakdown. The administration of tranquilizers brought about recovery so rapid that even in the course of his first week's stay at the clinic the following conversation between his doctor and him was possible.

Doctor: Why were you in a state of such severe anxiety?

Patient: Shortly before I came to the hospital, I went through one entire night in which I saw the sun. I lay in my bed; the shutters were closed and it was quite dark in the room. Suddenly, around half past nine, the sun appeared on the wall opposite the bed.

Doctor: Can you describe that a little more precisely?

Patient: It was a round disk about fifteen or twenty centimeters in diameter. It was on the wall at about head level and it moved slowly during the night from left to right, gradually rising higher.

Doctor: Of what was the disk composed?

Patient: It was nothing but intense light, brilliant yellow in color. There were no solid parts.

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Doctor: Did you see that in the same way you would have seen, let us say, the lighted lamp on the ceiling?

Patient: No, my attention was wholly taken by this sun. It aroused a feeling of anxiety in me. I could not let it out of my sight for one second, or something terrible would have happened. It was something stronger than man. I had to be on my guard lest it come after me.

Doctor: Didn't you wonder a bit when you suddenly saw this thing?

Patient: No, because I knew from the very first moment what it meant. I know that you perhaps would have gone up to it if you too had been in the room; you would have followed the disk with your eyes and touched it. How­ever, I knew at once what it meant. I was in a state of fearful anxiety and did not venture to get out of bed.

Doctor: Just why do you use the word "sun" in referring to this phenomenon?

Patient: I had just that day been compelled to think continu­ously of the sun. Ah the time I had the feeling that my sex organ was connected with the sun in the sky and was being excited by it. If I had lost sight of the sun on the wall, the real sun would have come close to the earth and the earth would have gone up in flames. I was becoming more and more anxious about that.

After only a few weeks the acute schizophrenic attack had sub­sided to such an extent that the patient could be released and could return to his job in a factory. During a follow-up examination one year after the outbreak of psychosis he first stated that he felt very well and now had himself under control. He was working again regularly and was earning very good wages. He still lived with his parents and got along fine with them. He spent most of his free time alone cycling or climbing mountains. Except for his parents and closest relatives, he had no acquaintances. He said he still re­membered very clearly and in great detail what he experienced during his illness. Most of it remained incomprehensible to him, although he sensed that everything had a very great meaning. He then added, and these are his actual words, "It was something that is always there in ordinary everyday life as well, but I cannot apply it to specific individual situations." He went on to say that he could tell the doctor, because the doctor understood him and did not think he was still going around in circles, that the illness had not been a waste of time and had helped him in his inner development. "Because of the illness I have above all come to see clearly that

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one depends on others. If one neglects his relationships with others, one gets nowhere and one's life lacks all direction." Thus during the illness there had been nothing for him to hang on to any longer. He said he had felt at the mercy of everything and no longer knew what was real and what was unreal. When for the first time after the breakdown he was allowed to go walking in the hospital park, the trees in the grove, for example, appeared to him to be quite different from what they had been before; they now seemed like shadows, uncertain, fluctuating, unreal.

What the relatives previously had told us about a ruined friend­ship the patient himself now supplemented, to the effect that the friend in question had from childhood been closer to him than any other person in the world. Even today he was greatly attached to this person. However, a few weeks before the nervous breakdown this friend had suddenly and without warning let him down. He simply did not appear at the place where they had arranged to meet and had not to this day bothered to get in touch with him. The patient said he was profoundly hurt by this betrayal and still worried a great deal about it. Surely, he said, this betrayal was mainly responsible for his falling ill. Probably his friend betrayed him on account of a girl. He, the patient, would, however, do nothing on his part to get in touch again with the friend. After all, friendship cannot be forced on one.

The patient became increasingly excited on recalling this be­trayed friendship, so the doctor changed the subject and asked what had been the most vivid experience during the illness itself. The patient said that it had been the night in which he had seen the sun. At that time the presence of the sun in- his room had been as real to him as anything could be. Yet he did not want to talk about it any more, because if he did, he would only get all involved in it again. He knew now that it had all been nothing but imagination. The doctor then asked him if he would tell him just one thing— what significance these so-called imaginations had had for him. The patient gave a rather embarrassed smile at this question and then parried it with this statement: "You must not get the idea that I idolize the sun. The sun was for me the highest power, from which proceeds all vital energy and growth."

"Why then were you in such a state of panic anxiety when con­fronted by it?"

"Just because it can at the same time scorch and annihilate every-

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thing." The patient immediately added, however, "Now I am going to stop talking. I do not want to become ill again."⁹

Naturally, concern for the maintenance of the health of this dangerously imperiled person had to take precedence over our scientific interest in the case. For this reason the interview was brought to an abrupt end at this point.

In spite of the premature termination of the interview, and aside from the great intrinsic significance of this sudden stop itself, we learned an astonishing amount from our patient. He himself con­ceded that it was only for the sake of the doctor, who had helped him so much, that he had revealed so many of his otherwise closely guarded secrets. The first thing that emerges clearly is that he was, "pre-psychotically," an intensely reserved factory worker who had remained in the parental household. No matter how narrow and constricted this world of his was, it was nevertheless that open space of world-relationships in which he was able to maintain him­self in security and contentment. However, from his earliest child­hood this world had been based mainly on the relation with a friend who was closer to him than anyone else. This friendship was the firmest ground he had had to stand on, the most unshakable thing he had had in his life to hold fast to. All the more cruel to him, then, was this friend's act of betrayal, which snatched away the supporting basis and very locus of his existence. He no longer had anything with which he could achieve a dependable relation­ship, which offered his existence a housing in the world and enabled his Dasein to occur as the former, limited kind of world-openness. In his own words, "If one neglects his relationships with others, one's life lacks all direction." He now felt delivered up to annihila­tion, because being-a-human-being never really occurs other than as an existing in and as this or that relationship with what at any given time succeeds in showing itself in the meaning-elucidating light of man's primordial nature.

Since his friend had been everything to him, the loss brought utter forlornness. It was a forlornness of such yawning emptiness that there was nothing at all left which he could hold fast to and in relation to which he could take a stand; he could no longer even

⁹ We owe this report to Dr. R. Furger, head physician, Psychiatric Clinic, University of Zurich. He very kindly made it available for two seminars with Professor Martin Heidegger in Zollikon-Zurich and for this publication.

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distinguish between "real" and "unreal"; not a single warm sympa­thetic voice could reach him any longer.

Forlornness, however, can be experienced only by a being which, by its inherent constitution, is intended for and dependent on a being-together-with-others. The insight into this fact was, indeed, as the patient informed us, one of the most important things he learned in his illness. The greater the forlornness, the stronger the appeal for the appearance of an Other. The forlornness of our patient had assumed such proportions that it no longer called forth ordinary everyday Others, other human persons or harmless, well-defined things out of his former "normal life"; only something "superhuman," "supernatural," could possibly correspond to the claim of his extreme forlornness—something which the patient, as soon as it had emerged, knew at once to be "stronger than man." Suddenly a weird sun broke into the emptiness of his Dasein. This occurred because with the friend's act of betrayal the entire inter­locking structure of the patient's everyday world had crumbled. The collapse of this structure resulted in such a de-constriction of his world that the sun could emerge into its boundlessness and reveal itself to him in a way that up to then had been entirely un­suspected. It was a wholly new reality—one, however, that was as "real" as his former "reality," if not even more "real," as shown by his answers when it was compared with his perception of the bedroom lamp. All at once the void of his gloomy, cold forlornness was filled with the unheard-of brightness of its light. However, he would never have been able to take in this phenomenon as a con­crete sun if he had not already had a more or less precise knowledge concerning the essence of the sun, of the sun-nature, its particular fight-being, warmth, and plenitude, and its destructiveness. How could anybody recognize anything as that particular something it is (let us say, for example, a coffee-cup as a tool for drinking purposes) if the constitutive world-openness as which he exists did not—among its other ways of being open for an essential under­standing of that which is disclosed in its light—also consist of a more or less articulated primary understanding of "toolness" as such? The same holds true for the perception of a sun. It is for this reason that through this sun revealing itself in this way, the patient, as he himself said, could take cognizance in the most immediate, over­whelming manner of the dominion of a solar "highest power, from which proceeds all vital energy and growth, but which can at the

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same time scorch and annihilate everything." The sun beset him with the knowledge of something, then, that holds in its hands, as it were, the being as well as the non-being of everything. He learned through it of the rising, the coming up, of everything that is, the "coming up" of things into their being and true nature and also their "going up" into non-being, into nothingness (as we say that "something goes up in smoke," i.e., is annihilated). Above all else, however, the sun spoke to him of a light-being, an "enlighten­ing," which is still a third kind of "coming up"—or rather the first kind, since it is the pre-eminent form of "coming up," of rising, of dawning. It is "coming up" as the enlightening, comprehending, elucidating perception of something as something. If human exist­ence did not by its origin participate in the nature of this kind of sun-like coming up, or rising, there never could have dawned on any person that there is anything at all, and no one could have perceived anything of the two above-mentioned "physical" kinds of phenomenal coming or going up in our real world.

However, this "sun knowledge" was granted to a person who was mentally ill and in a state of total confusion. Was it merely his madness that gave him all these illusions, which were just nonsense? The patient himself energetically protested against such an imputa­tion, even after the fading away of his "disturbance." He ascribed the utmost meaning to his psychotic experience and maintained that it enriched his life. And rightly so. Did it not enable him to sense something quite intangible (because it is in the background and so fundamental), "something which is also there in everyday life," but is "not applicable to specific individual situations"? Did not the sun of his psychotically de-constricted world reveal to him something of the deep underlying nature of that which rules behind everything, which simply is as this or that particular object? This "inapplicable" and intangible essence is by no means misunderstood by the psy­chotically clairvoyant patient as some nullity, an empty abstraction. He knows—to be sure, in a way that he can hardly articulate—that what is sensed in this way has to do with the emergence and "being-ness" of all things, with the Being-ness of all particular beings as such. It therefore cannot be just another definable thing. It surpasses in meaningfulness the importance of even the most meaningful of all discrete things.

It is more than probable, then, that the hallucinated sun did not befuddle our patient with a nonsensical illusion but, rather, dis-

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closed to him something more profound than the ordinary man is commonly privileged to become aware of. To be sure, our patient was not able to cope with such clairvoyance. This is not surprising, for he owed it, after all, not to an extraordinary autonomous maturity of his own self but to a breakdown and laceration of his dependent, precarious self-being after his friend's betrayal. For this reason he was not able to stand up to his perception of the "super-meaning" of the full nature of the sun-quality of the sun, revealing

I'Cscif to him -n-ich a.11 Л» -mJgit fjo mati-ei- T-m-w mn&h be f?©fended

himself against it, its summons overwhelmed him, deprived him of all autonomy and all freedom. He was helplessly delivered up to the excess of what he had newly perceived, succumbed to it entirely. It put all the other things that had made up his familiar world— the trees in the grove, for instance—entirely in the shadow of a quite uncertain reality. Such a succumbing of a given existence to what is perceived corresponds to a closeness to the perceived—a closeness so intense that the perceived meaning-content is con­densed into the appearance of a materially present phenomenon. Therefore, in the case of our patient, meaning revealed itself to him as a physical phenomenon, and as he succumbed ever more help­lessly to it this sensuously perceived object closed in on him ever more intimately. At first the sun-Uke power holding sway behind all being and non-being disclosed itself to him in the way of a compulsive thinking about the still distant sun in the sky. Very soon, however, this information seized upon the existence of the patient in such an overwhelming way that he became involved in a very strong "hallucinatory" attraction to the sun, which encom­passed even his genitals and caused him to be sexually excited.

Some would say, was it really the sun that attracted him sexually? Was it not rather the other way around? Was it not his own inner homosexual drives, which he was projecting from his former friend onto the sun? However, before we are entitled to maintain such a reversion of our patient's own statements, we must ask what "homo­sexual" really means in this connection. There is no single, constant thing known as homosexuality. The word "homosexual" is a super­ficial label for a great many ways of human behavior of very differ­ent intrinsic meanings. There is, for example, crassly homosexual behavior which has nothing to do with even an immature love partnership and which belongs, rather, to the pattern of behavior of entirely immature adolescents who have still so inadequately

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appropriated their own possibilities of masculine relationships that they can experience the masculine way of living only by partici­pating in the behavior of another, more masculine, companion. Thus one can see these people during a maturing process in psy­choanalysis regularly exchanging their "homosexual" friendships for heterosexual relationships to the exact extent that they themselves can gradually appropriate and take over masculine possibilities of behavior. It is not surprising that, among these adolescents, existing through another and thus merging with him includes the bodily erotic sphere.

We do not know whether manifestly homosexual practices formed part of the friendship relationship in our patient's particular case. Nor is this of any decisive significance. What is indispensable is an understanding of the nature of human sexuality as such. Fortunately, such an understanding is facilitated for us by the ex­perience of this patient. It permits us, first of all, to ask in all seriousness whether it is such a certainty that something like sexual drives exist within the human being which arise from the body and its "erotic spheres" and then, by pushing from behind, so to speak, drive the "ego" or the "subject" into the arms of a "sexual object," as all the current drive psychologies would have it. In any event, there is no proof that such an idea is more than a mere abstraction of a subjectivistic psychology. Our patient, in any case, experienced the exact opposite of being driven from within or from behind. He was at the mercy of an attraction exerted by the sun. How is it, then, that his sexuality was involved in such a pronounced way? Because the sun and the so-called sexuality of man belong to one and the same essence, to what the patient himself called the sun-quality, the sun-nature, of the sun. The sun, as he informed us, is the highest power, from which proceeds all vital energy and growth, as well as all scorching and annihilation. Is not sexuality also sun-Ике in the same sense, insofar as it generates, makes the individual transcend his limits, and at the same time lets a given autonomous existence come up and be annihilated—at least temporarily—in the unconsciousness of the orgasm? When two things share the same nature neither of them can be explained by the other one, nor can one be derived from the other.

On the night of the catastrophe, the sun drew much closer to the patient, as his existence increasingly fell prey to its power. It pene­trated into his room. What at first was merely an intellectual repre-

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sentation of the sun finally condensed into its "hallucinated," sensuously perceptible presentation on the opposite wall of the room. What we see here is that the "transition" from the deliberately fanciful representation of something to its hallucinatory," oppres­sive, tangible presence corresponds to the degree of the helpless sxsfre&fles of a hum<"* existence to the meaning-content which re­veals itself. The immediate ancf utter certam^ ^h^n* ihe full meaning-content of the perceived phenomenon is evident from the peculiar, all too oppressive nearness of what has become a hallu­cinatory materially visible thing. But this must not be taken to be the essential difference between the hallucinations of the mentally ill and the perceptions of the non-schizophrenic. Such unmediated openness to something perceived is far from being the sole privilege of hallucinating schizophrenics. Something can reveal itself in its full meaning just as immediately, and with just as much certainty, to every person, for instance, who is in an extreme state of anxiety. Only the healthy person can again rapidly make way for the relation­ships of a freer, more autonomous self-being. But the so-called pragmatic, objectively detached, discursive, gradual analysis and criticism of a thing showing itself is far from being the only possibility that the healthy person has of relating to the phenomena of his world.

On the other hand, attempts have been made to understand the appearance of such a schizophrenic hallucination by proceeding from a so-called theme of a concrete situation in the life history of a patient. In our case, the central theme of the relationship of our patient to his boyhood friend would have been the starting point of such an explanation. This approach would then maintain that this "theme" had "autonomized" itself in our patient, had ever more comprehensively taken possession of his total existence and had finally embraced his entire world. According to this theory it could be maintained that the "theme" of friendship had dominated the still normal everyday life of our patient and had admitted no other personal contacts. At the onset of the psychosis, so the reasoning would run, this same love "theme" had already expanded to em­brace the sun in the sky and to be absorbed by it, so that the patient was henceforth able to think only of the sun and was compelled to feel erotically excited by it. During the following night, this "theme" had swallowed up and overwhelmed the entire existence and world of the patient, to such an extent that it could

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be absolutized to a demented perception of an all-absorbing, hallucinated sun in his room. However, such a formulation leaves completely unclarified the question of how a "theme," in and of itself, could exist somewhere out there or in the subjectivity inside a person, and how it could then be hypostasized to a kind of autonomous personality until finally it was in a position to take increasing possession of the existence and the world of a given human being.

In the case of our patient, at any rate, we see exactly the opposite, namely, that it was the particular quality and intensity of the attunement of his total relationship to the world, the constitution of his entire existence, that determined the sphere of openness, the range of what is allowed to reveal itself to him in the way of "themes." It was a high degree of dependence—a lack of freedom with its ensuing anxiety—that characterized and molded our patient's entire way of existing from childhood on, that left him open, before the outbreak of the psychosis, only to the "theme" of friendship for a stronger man. In exactly the same way at the climax of his psychosis, it was again the de-constriction of his total existence and its peculiar attunement that had opened it up to the "sun." There is not the slightest basis for maintaining that this was only a cosmogonic expansion and autonomizing of a "theme."

The "theme" theory which we have just had to discard may be considered as a somewhat changed and broadened psycho-genetic doctrine. It is essential, therefore, to point out that our Daseins­analytic understanding of a schizophrenic hallucination has nothing whatever to do with any psycho-genetic theory, nor has it any relation to the so-called somato-genetic approach. To be sure, our patient himself was convinced that it had been the betrayal of his friend which had brought about his nervous breakdown, and we, too, felt this was important. Nevertheless, no psychic, somatic, constitutional, or hereditary condition can ever be regarded as the actual cause of a psychopathological or non-pathological human phenomenon—at least not in any meaningful sense of the words "cause" and "genesis" (i.e., in the sense of an agent which produces or originates something). The most we can say of psychic or somatic conditions is that they are limiting factors. They can conceal the carrying out of one or another of the possible world-relationships which a human existence consists of. In the case of a schizophrenic

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patient there is also—as we have seen—a de-constriction, a dis­closing of ways of discovering phenomena and of relating to them which are completely covered up in the waking state of an average existence. Concealing something or disclosing it, however, is far from producing it or being its basis, its genesis, or its cause.

PART IV

THE IMPACT OF

DASEINSANALYSIS

PSYCHOANALYTIC

F:

Ireud entertained doubts about his theory of neuroses. He expected it to be overthrown, and thought that the biological sciences would accomplish its destruction. Today, we know that neither physiology nor chemistry—however "efficient" they may become in other respects—will ever be able to contribute anything of importance to the understanding of man qua Dasein. On the contrary, the find­ings of physiological chemistry, endocrinology, and neurology in man will disclose their full meaning only if they are seen against the background of the fundamental nature of Dasein. They can be adequately understood only as those partial phenomena of the world-disclosing relationships of a given human being which take place within the bodily realm of his existence while these relation­ships occur. It is impossible to comprehend this essential world-openness of Dasein in terms of chemical substances and biological processes; it is equally impossible to attempt to understand, derive, or reconstruct it from "instincts" and "libido"; it would thus be folly to expect that the natural sciences will ever be able to over­throw the artificial structure of Freud's theory of neuroses. It seems to us that what is necessary to bring the thinking about neurosis into accord with the realities of neurotic phenomena is the approach based upon Daseinsanalytic thinking. The Daseinsanalytic approach to the neuroses is still in its beginnings, and a more systematic and

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