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ON TRADITIONAL TECHNIQUES

complete portrayal of the Daseinsanalytic theory of neuroses is still to come. At present, the most important task is to discuss psycho­analytic therapy in terms of the Daseinsanalytic view of man. Only in this way can we determine whether Daseinsanalytic thinking is of immediate and practical value for the therapeutic endeavor.

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The Daseinsanalyst's Attitude Toward. His Patients

The psychotherapist who permits himself the insights of analysis of Dasein makes fundamental discoveries that are important for his therapeutic behavior.

First of all, he finds out that analysis of Dasein does not teach him—and cannot teach him—a single new phrase or concept which might serve to formulate his reflections on or investigations of psychopathology; nor does it teach him any terms to use when dealing with patients. He will, for instance, never try to define \ psychotherapeutic phenomena by talking of this or that specific \ mode of being-in-the-world. The term ^eing-in-the-world," as I used by analysis of Dasein always refers exclusively to the very essence of all possible variants of actually occurring human percep-_ tions and modes of behavior. There are myriads of different modes of human relationships and patterns of behavior toward what is encountered, all of them constituting man's one fundamental nature, i.e., his unique way of being-in-the-world as the disclosing, rum­inating realm of world-openness. For this reason, the person who. speaks of different "modes of being-in-the-world" or "modes of \ Dasein' has failed to grasp the very essence of man's existence. \ There are thousands of differently shaped tables possible, for in- ' stance. But inherent in all of them is just one particular kind of being, i.e., the essential nature common to all possible tables and different from the essential kind of being of, for example, all churches.

This knowledge limits the psychologist and psychotherapist to the description and investigation of all the immediately observable modes of human behavior and their equally perceptible underlying moods, and to talking of them in everyday language.

The discovery that man is essentially one in whose meaning-

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234 Impact of Daseinsanalysis on Traditional Psychoanalytic Techniques

disclosing relationships the phenomena of our world make their.- appearance, develops in the Daseinsanalytic therapist a basic

] respect for the intrinsic value and essential content of everything that shines forth and comes into its being in the light of a Dasein. Because he has realized that the meaning and context of everything that comes his way shows itself directly to him, he has no need to destroy what he actually sees and hears from the analysand and to replace it with assumed forces supposedly underlying the patient's behavior and perception. Daseinsanalysis thus enables the practi­tioner to dispense with the tedious intellectual acrobatics required by psychoanalytic theory. He is free to discard the psychoanalytic libido theory as well as the labored psychoanalytic interpretations of symbols, both of them obstacles to an immediate understanding between physician and patient.

It is hardly to be expected, though, that such a challenge will be met sympathetically by the average psychoanalyst. He has exerted himself for years in his training analysis and in his seminars to learn these theoretical conceptions, and he cannot possibly be happy with the idea that they are completely superfluous.

Nevertheless, there is at least one great advantage in being rid of the theoretical and speculative ballast of Freudian theory. The psychotherapist becomes less prejudiced. He can devote himself fully to the analysand in the "evenly-hovering attention" that Freud always demanded. He does not approach the patient from the point of view of a scientific theory (which, by the way, cannot supply the therapist with a conscious motive for his undertaking); nor is his attention distracted by the observation of assumed anonymous forces within the patient. Instead, the analyst's behavior rests on the insight that, being human, he is called upon to disclose both things and men. This knowledge increases his sensitivity to all the obstacles which generally reduce the potential relationships of a patient to a few rigid and unauthentic modes of behavior. Such sensitivity in turn enables the Daseinsanalyst to carry out an (^'analysis of resistance," wherein the patient is tirelessly confronted with the limitations of his life and wherein these limitations are

4 incessantly questioned, so that the possibility of a richer existence is implied. As a rule, neurotically reduced people regard their wretched interpersonal relations as the only ones possible. They do not know that greater freedom is available. If their restrictions are repeatedly questioned, previously non-admitted possibilities of

The Daseinsanalyst's Attitude Toward His Patients 235

behavior regularly appear, along with perception of the things and fellow human beings who belong to these world-disclosing possi­bilities. The analyst practicing in this fashion will not try to per­suade patients that much of what they feel and mean is only a cloak for opposite wishes and tendencies. He will thus avoid giving the impression of devaluating their experience, thereby confusing them and arousing unnecessary anxiety. However, the Daseins­analyst's respect for phenomena should not be confused with an exclusive concern with those phenomena of which the patient is already fully aware. He knows that the patient's being includes, apart from overtly admitted and accepted modes of behavior, a great many other modes of being, some of which the patient is trying hard not to become aware of, and many of which contrast with the overtly expressed modes. He also knows that these possi­bilities for relating have to be acknowledged by the patient as his own before he can get well. Nevertheless, all of the patient's modes of behavior—those openly carried out and those so far warded off— are considered autonomous by the therapist; he must treat all as valid. He must never try to deny the reality of a phenomenon.

Daseinsanalytic understanding of man imbues the analyst with a deep respect for everything he encounters. In the psychoanalytic situation, such respect means that the Daseinsanalyst can follow the basic rule of psychoanalysis even more consistently than could Freud, who was hampered by his theoretical prejudices. The analyst's respect for everything that he encounters makes it possible for him to take seriously and to regard without prejudice all behavior and all utterings the patient produces. He is able to accept all the ways in which his analysands begin to relate. He has no need to put new obstacles, arising from his personal censorship based on theoretical prejudices, in the patient's way. The Daseinsanalyst's conscience is clear when he consistently refrains from declaring that one kind of behavior (for instance, instinctual reactions) is more real or fundamental than another. Such impartiality is of great practical importance. It eliminates the danger of so-called unbreak­able transference. This therapeutic difficulty often arises when the analyst attempts to reduce (by means of interpretation) a new mode of behavior on the part of the patient to an earlier relationship in the patient's life, a relationship considered primary and causal because it took place earlier. If this budding possibility of relating is not permitted to unfold in its own fashion, it remains fixated on

236 Impact of Daseinsanalysis on Traditional Psychoanalytic Techniques

the embryonic level of the transference relationship. It is unlikely that this will happen if the patient's feelings are regarded as actually directed toward the analyst and thus accepted in their full reality, even though the patient's perception of the analyst is still distorted and restricted because of earlier experiences. The Daseinsanalyst's attitude toward patients' feelings in the transference situation is characteristic of his attitude toward all happenings during the analytic cure. What belongs to the creatural realm, for example, is permitted to be just that. The realm of the divine is similarly granted its authenticity; it is not regarded as a product of sublimation of infantile, libidinous strivings and thereby degraded to unreality.

Daseinsanalysis admits all phenomena on their own terms. Hence the therapist avoids a second danger—that of "curing" the patient's initial symptoms then inducing a new neurosis best called "psy-choanalytis." This syndrome (by no means rare) leads its sufferers to ritualistic thinking and talking in psychoanalytic terms and symbols. Circles and sects are formed of similarly afflicted persons. While many such adherents may lose old symptoms, the neurotic nature of their new conduct is easy to detect. Instead of staying close to the immediately observable appearances of the world, they disregard them and speculate about what is "behind" them, unaware that their observations do not support their deductions. Instead of dwelling in openness toward the things and people they encounter, they "interpret" these same phenomena, human and material. Gen­erally such people cling rigidly to their theoretical convictions and take great pains to avoid people with different ideas. Their symptoms indicate their inability to penetrate beyond the concepts and inter­pretations of psychoanalytic theoryj-they have failed to arrive at an open and immediate world-relation. Their fear of being contami­nated by other ideas betrays their neurotically restricted mode of living, where genuine freedom and openness is always experienced as a threat.

Daseinsanalytic Handling ot "Transference" ana "Acting Out"

We have frequently mentioned the extent to which psycho­analytic therapy relies upon fundamental insights into human nature. These insights, although unexpressed in psychoanalytic theory, actually support psychoanalytic procedures. We have fur­ther stated that these insights have been explicitly developed since Freud's day in Heidegger's work. Therefore, it is no surprise that most of Freud's concrete suggestions concerning psychoanalytic technique seem unsurpassed to the Daseinsanalyst. As a matter of fact, Daseinsanalysis enables psychotherapists to understand the meaning of Freud's recommendations for psychoanalytic treatment better than does his own theory. It is by no means unusual to find Daseinsanalysts who adhere to most of Freud's practical suggestions more strictly than do those psychoanalysts whose theoretical orien­tation remains orthodox. There are only a few (though important) realms of therapy where Freud's secondary theories have nega­tively influenced therapeutic procedures. It is in these areas that the Daseinsanalyst meets therapeutic problems differently than does the orthodox analyst.

Perhaps the most significant area in which Daseinsanalytic think­ing differs from psychoanalytic thinking is in the conception of transference, to which we have already alluded (cf. pp. 122 ff.).

Freud believed that in transference the patient's buried and for­gotten emotions of love or hate become actual and manifest.¹ According to him, patients want to express in action—reproduce in the real Ufe relationship with the therapist—infantile feelings for their parents which have been repressed. They want to "act them out," but they do not know what they are doing. Their acting-out

¹ S. Freud, "The Dynamics of the Transference," in CP, Vol. II, p. 322.

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238 Impact of Daseinsanalysk on Traditional Psychoanalytic Techniques

is an indication that they resist any consciousness of feelings they had for their parents early in life. These repressed feelings now hide behind the feehngs for the analyst. The psychoanalytic cure is designed to uncover this aim of acting-out. The patient is to be encouraged to remember feehngs he had for infantile love objects, but to remember only. He is "to retain [them] within the mental sphere."² In other words, the transference must be overcome. This is accomplished

by showing the patient that his feelings do not originate in the current situation, and do not really concern the person of the physician, but that he is reproducing something that had happened to him long ago. In this way, we require him to transform his repetition into recollection.³

The implication is that only by frustrating the acting-out can the patient be brought to remember infantile love objects and thus to detach himself gradually from the transference situation. The therapist's role in the situation is described by Freud as follows:

I cannot recommend my colleagues emphatically enough to take as a model in psycho-analytic treatment the surgeon who puts aside all his own feelings, including that of human sympathy, and concentrates his mind on one single purpose, that of performing the operation as skillfully as possible. Under present conditions the affective impulse of greatest danger to the psychoanalyst will be the therapeutic ambition to achieve by this novel and disputed method something which will impress and convince others. This will not only cause a state of mind unfavourable for the work in him personally, but he will find himself in consequence helpless against certain of the patient's resistances, upon the struggle with which the cure primarily depends. The justification for this cold­ness in feeling in the analyst is that it is the condition which brings the greatest advantage to both persons involved, assuring a need­ful protection for the physician's emotional life and the greatest measure of aid for the patient that is possible at the present time.⁴

The Daseinsanalyst cannot agree with the handling of transfer­ence and acting-out suggested by Freud. The reason is simple: he does not believe that the theoretical assumptions leading to Freud's

² S. Freud, "Observations on Transference-Love," in CP, Vol. II, pp. 384-385.

8 S. Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Garden City, N.Y., 1943, p. 461. Trans, by Joan Riviere.

⁴ S. Freud, "Recommendations for Physicians on the Psycho-Analytic Method of Treatment," in CP, Vol. II, pp. 327-328.

Daseinsanalytic Handling of "Transference" and "Acting Out" 239

suggestions are correct. Nowhere does Freud prove convincingly that the patient's feelings for the analyst do not arise from the present situation, that they are directed, not toward the analyst, but "really" toward the patient's father or mother. He even proves the contrary. First, he admits that "one has no right to dispute the genuine nature of the love which makes its appearance in the course of analytic treatment" (cf. p. 123). Secondly, he confesses, in a different context, that a correct interpretation of an emotional attachment to the analyst as "transference" from somewhere else, or of acting-out as "transference resistance," does not produce the results we expect from correct interpretations of neurotic behavior— namely, the cessation of it.

... naming the [transference] resistance [does not] result in its immediate suspension. One must allow the patient time to get to know this resistance of which he is ignorant, to 'work through' it, to overcome it, by continuing the work according to the analytic rule in defiance of it.... The physician has nothing more to do than wait and let things take their course, a course which cannot be avoided nor always be hastened.⁵

In contrast to Freud's opinion, the Daseinsanalyst knows before­hand that so-called transference does not "transfer" anything. He also knows that cures are not effected by months of "working through," during which the supposed meaning of the patient's relationship to the analyst and of his acting-out are drilled into him. The Daseinsanalyst admits "transference love or hate" as the genuine interpersonal relationship to the analyst as which the analysand experiences them. The fact that the analysand behaves in an infantile manner, and therefore misjudges the actual situation to a large extent (because of his emotional immaturity, which in turn is due to faulty training in his youth), does not detract from the genuineness of his present feelings. The analysand begins to love the analyst as soon as he becomes aware that he has found someone—possibly for the first time in his life—who really under­stands him and who accepts him even though he is stunted by his neurosis. He loves him all the more because the analyst permits him to unfold more fully his real and essential being within a safe, interpersonal relationship on the "playground of the transference." As we have said before, all genuine love of one person for another

5S. Freud, "Recollection, Repetition and Working Through," in CP, Vol. II, p. 375. Italics added.

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is based on the possibility which the loved one offers to the lover for a fuller unfolding of his own being by being-in-the-world with him. On the other hand, the patient will hate his analyst as long as he is still (because of his childhood experiences) open only to a child-father or child-mother relationship which limits his percep­tion of adults to frustrating experiences. He will hate him even more—and with good reason—if the analyst, because of his own so-called countertransference (i.e., his own neurotically restricted emotional attitude toward the patient) actually behaves like one of the formerly hated parents.

Freud has given us a masterful description of the way resistances against the acquisition of hitherto feared possibilities of living melt in the "fire of transference love." But when the patient wants not only to think or talk about his relation to the analyst, but wants also to experience his newly discovered possibilities in the language of his emotions and his body, Freud calls this the "acting-out of resistance." The Daseinsanalyst thinks otherwise. To him, the desire for emotional and physical acting-out appears as much a part of the newly sprouting possibilities for relating as do the thoughts which belong to these possibilities. Therefore, the Daseinsanalyst cannot regard such acting-out as a repetition—in action—of repressed infantile emotions of love toward a parent, or even as resistance against becoming conscious of such old "love objects." He will carefully avoid transforming the so-called acting-out into "psychic material," namely into remembering and verbal expression. On the contrary, he will let the acting-out continue to the greatest extent possible without violating his own integrity, inner freedom, and selfless concern for the analysand.. He will do this because he regards acting-out as a genuine phenomenon—as, more often than not, the very opposite of an attempt to repress. Acting-out may indicate that something is unfolding for the first time in the analysand's life. He dares to behave in a manner which has never before been permitted him (at least not sufficiently). Acting-out in these cases can be neither a remembering nor a repetition. Thus the only therapeutically effective action by the therapist is permis­sion to act out. With this permission is it possible for the patient to experience again and again, to practice, and eventually to acquire modes of behaving which had not been permitted in the relation­ship to his real parents and educators. It is harmful to attempt to "transform" acting-out into remembering, especially if the therapist

Daseinsanalytic Handling of "Transference" and "Acting Out" 241

tries to accomplish this by calling the behavior of the analysand "infantile"; this has the derogatory implication that the patient should have overcome and abandoned such behavior long ago. But, on the contrary, the child-like modes of behavior which sprout for the first time in the analysand-analyst relationship should be valued as the precious starting points from which all future develop­ments will arise. The analysand's being-himself will mature into ever more differentiated forms of relating if (and only if) the more primitive forms of relating are first permitted to unfold themselves fully. If this is allowed, maturer forms of behaving appear spon­taneously. Thus the gradual detachment from the analytic situation happens because acting-out is permitted; it is not produced by a misinterpretation of acting-out as renewal of childhood memories.

Actually Freud knew this although, seduced by his theoretical assumptions, he did not mention it explicitly in his recommendations for the practical handling of so-called transference. He contradicted his own definition of transference (as an "erroneous linkage of an affect and an object") when he stated that "one has no right to dispute the genuine nature of the love which makes its appearance in the course of analytic treatment." Freud the therapist, moreover, behaved in actual treatment as if he were cognizant of these Daseinsanalytic insights. We have noted before (cf. p. 239) that he admonished the analyst to "wait and let things take their course," because in all patients capable of sublimation, the process of healing usually "takes place from within as soon as their inhibitions have been removed by the analysis."⁶ These phrases imply that the concept of "working through" is primarily a theoretical screen for permis­siveness in regard to the trying out and practicing of newly admitted ways of behaving in the analyst-analysand relationship. Incidentally, these same words of Freud show how pointless it is of some critics of psychoanalysis to demand that "psychosynthesis" must follow psychoanalysis. Obviously, what takes place of its own accord need not, in addition, be accomplished by something else.

Of course, acting-out—like any other phenomenon of psycho­analysis— can be used for purposes of resistance and of hiding. Occasionally, an analysand uses in analysis manners of relating which he has practiced for some time and taken over responsibly, in order to resist acceptance of still more feared ways of living. If

^eS. Freud, "Recommendations for Physicians on the Psycho-Analytic Method of Treatment," p. 332.

242 Impact of Daseinsanalysis on Traditional Psychoanalytic Techniques

the patient does not make such behavior part of his relations out­side of the analytic situation, if he persists in acting out only with the analyst, we may assume that his acting-out serves to sabotage the responsible acceptance of certain realms which the patient still fears. It is easy to recognize such acting-out, for it has a counterfeit, playful, theatrical, and demonstrative character. However, Freud's technique of analysis of resistance gives us adequate means to surmount this difficulty.

It is important to remember that a neurotically inhibited person can attempt to open himself in his relationship to the analyst only if the latter meets him on a level which is genuinely his. With seriously ill people, this is seldom the conceptual, intellectual-verbal level. Therefore^ the analy sa nd-analyst relat ionship must often resemble that of an infa nt to his mothe r, if the relati onship is tn be genuine and a ppropriate to the patie nt's condition. At j time^j his relationship can grow only if it is confined to the silenT I Ianguag eof gestures, sometimes even exclusively to silence, so tha|, J Pg.&gi%jmay. c ome .mto Jffijfcandj^w. Child-analysis has long since renounced, by and large, any attempt to try to transform acting-out into thoughts and memories. But in the analyses of adults we have failed to recognize sufficiently that we are dealing with people who have remained small children at the very core of their existence, and to whom we can genuinely relate only if we meet them on that same child-like level.

The analyst who urges his patients to regard all their acting-out as a form of resistance against remembering their behavior toward former "love objects" wrongs his patients severely and endangers their chances of recovery. If the patients do what the therapist asks them to do, they demand either too much or too little of themselves. Either there is nothing to be remembered at all, because a patient is experiencing in his acting-out toward the analyst a new way of interpersonal relating, a way which had never been open to him before; or a patient actually can realize that he is behaving toward his analyst in exactly the same distorted way as he remembers behaving in his youth toward his father or mother, in consequence of this or that excessive frustration or overpermissiveness on their part. But no actual, convincing evidence has ever been presented as to the effect of this kind of remembering as such. On the contrary, Freud's conviction that the mere remembering of the occasion when neurotic behavior was first produced and stamped on a child's exist-

Daseinsanalytic Handling of "Transference" and "Acting Out" 243

ence will itself stop the compulsive repetition of such behavior is based on laws which can be applied satisfactorily only to physical objects. In the realm of physics, it is true, an effect will no longer be produced if its cause is eliminated; an electric engine, for in­stance, will come to a dead stop as soon as the current is turned off. Nothing that happens to a child, however, is capable of producing and maintaining any pattern of behavior in this causal sense. The experiences of childhood can only limit and distort the carrying out of inborn possibilities of relating to the world. They cannot cause and produce the relationships themselves. Nor can such a pseudo-cause be rendered ineffectual by simply remembering it, by making it "conscious" and thus liberating a so-called fixated amount of libido. We cannot repeat often enough that no amount whatever of "blind" energies can ever produce and build a lucid human world consisting of meaning-disclosing relationships with what is en­countered. Human existence is essentially not a physical process but primarily a historical event. This means that in every actual relation to something or somebody, Dasein's whole history is inherent and present, whether the historical unfolding of a certain kind of rela­tionship is remembered explicitly or not.

What matters most, therapeutically, is not the recalling of the occasion when a neurotic pattern of relating to fellow men was acquired in childhood, but finding the answer to two questions: WlrЈ has the patient remained, right "pjo the present tfmp, caught within~tKis~same, restricted way^5T^5^rmim^cating?~What is keeping Him a prisoneT"of his neurotic behavior patterns right now? The ^ener al~answer to TEese all-important questions is 1;hat neurotic I patients usually cannot even imagine that a'nother way of relating \ ^ to people is possible? Some may intellectually know of a greater freedom, but they do not trust it sufficiently to dare try it. Instead, they are most anxious to prove the contrary to themselves, by provoking their environment to continue the neurotically restricted way of communicating with them. For all neuroti cs, any change of the narrow perspective to which they are accustomed is terrifying, especially if it fs~a change toward greater freedom.

The last thing o^rranalysands need is a theoretical reduction of their acting-out to a transference phenomenon—or any other ra­tional explanation of it. Nor do they need to account for it in­tellectually (with or without the corresponding "affects"), to reflect on it "consciously," to articulate it verbally, or to assume full re-

244 Impact of Daseinsanalysis on Traditional Psychoanalytic Techniques

sponsibility for it. Their primary requirement is not some kind of conceptual recognition of their acting-out, but rather the oppor­tunity to live and to experience, over and over again, immediately and unreflectingly, their new ways of behavior within the safe relationship to the analyst.

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