Outline of Analysis of Dasein 4 страница

The Idealistic Misconception

Analysis of Dasein sometimes is thought to maintain that the particular beings which shine forth and come to their being in the luminating realm of man's Dasein are produced and created by man's mind and exist only as contents of his ideas. This would be as absurd as to state that the light I turn on in a darkened room to make its furnishings visible "produces" these furnishings. Nor does the preferred place that human Dasein holds, in Heidegger's view, have anything in common with schools of thought which hold that the meaning of all particular beings is created by the perceiving subject.¹ The Daseinsanalyst sharply rejects those interpretations which claim that in the perception of what is at hand, we experience an amorphous something extant at first—a factum brutum —that only later appears to us as an animal, as a house:

To claim that such is the case, amounts to a "misunderstanding" of the function of disclosure, [which is] the specific function of interpretation. To interpret does not mean to throw a "meaning," as it were, over the extant in its bareness. It does not mean affixing some value unto it. What is encountered in the world always appears in a context, which the understanding of world as such discloses.²

On another occasion, and no less energetically, Heidegger opposes the idea that man never has access to particular beings themselves, that he perceives them only through specific "designs" or projects, as if the meaningful connections of which "world" consists were a network with which the human subject overlays a merely extant

¹ M. Heidegger, SuZ, p. 14.

² Ibid,, p. 150.

The Most Common Misunderstandings about Analysis of Dasein 51

material. There, too, and in sharp contradistinction to Sartre's school of existentialism as well as to Ludwig Binswanger's sub-jectivistic revision of the "Daseinsanalytic" approach, Heidegger ex­pressly mentions man's immediate ability to understand himself and what he encounters (i.e., things and other human beings) in the unity of the "there," in the world-openness of his horizons. Man exists in the mode of being expanded into the whole realm of his luminated horizons, and this justifies analysis of Dasein to speak of man's very nature as being of an ekstatic character, i.e., as "standing out" into the world-openness.

An equally grave error, however, would be to imagine that the things which the luminating nature of man clears up and makes shine in their meaning are in themselves somewhere, independent of man's existence. Man's awareness, his elucidating nature, would then be a purely subjectivistic experience without any primary meaning for, and impact on, the coming-into-being of the objects which may or may not enter the realm of world-openness. Far from being of such a primary egotistical, subjectivistic concern only, it has to be repeated (cf. pp. 41-42) that man and what appears in his light are mutually dependent on each other for their very being.

The Platonic Misconception

No less a philosopher than Jean-Paul Sartre has officially pro­claimed that Martin Heidegger's descriptions of human being refer only to purely abstract, so-called "ontologieal" structures of human existence. He has further stated that these "ontologieal" structures belong to a completely different realm than to the level of the "ontic" givens of human behavior (the actually observable, con­crete actions) with which psychology deals. Sartre has even gone so far as to declare that there can be no communication between the two realms. Accordingly, he speaks of "two incommunicable levels"³ and believes that each level's problems demand separate solutions.

Quite to the contrary, each of man's concrete ways of handling something or of his becoming aware of something is inherently and essentially luminating and world-disclosing. Let us return to the

*J.-P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, New York, 1956, p. 248. Trans, by Hazel E. Barnes.

52 The Daseinsanalytic View of Man

example of the cobbler (p. 42) for a moment. This man's completely unreflecting, "automatic" taking of his hammer in his hand to repair a shoe would not be possible at all if Dasein were not of the nature of world-disclosing openness. If the cobbler's existence as a whole were not basically a luminating realm, he could never have become aware of a particular thing as being—e.g., a hammer, suitable for repairing a shoe. Although he did not reflect on the hammer's meaning at all or in any way, but made use of it "automatically," "reflexively" only, it was in and as this meaningful action that his existence in all its fundamentally luminating character came to pass, showed itself directly, took place at this particular moment as his ability to use the hammer as the tool it is.

The example of the cobbler demonstrates one of the fundamental insights of analysis of Dasein: the very essence of each particular, observable action or perception of man lies in the fact that every one of them is, as such, of luminating character. When we speak, in analysis of Dasein, of luminosity, we always have concrete actions or perceptions in mind, such as the ones in our example. It is clear that concrete, observable actions and perceptions belong to the same realm that psychological and psychopathological investigations deal with. It follows that the claim of Sartre and others is false—that is, the claim that the phenomena with which analysis of Dasein is con­cerned belong to a different level than the phenomena which are the subjects of psychology and psychopathology.

Sartre's distortions of the Daseinsanalytic findings are due to his preconceived belief in a neo-Platonic philosophy which differentiates between a world of "ideas" and the "physical" world we perceive with our sense organs, a differentiation Daseinsanalysis explicitly re­jects. For all so-called thinking, perceiving, feeling, acting, and so forth are the different modes in which Dasein's luminating takes place. The fact that Dasein exists as these concrete and directly observable modes of behaving and relating to what is encountered is no justification for postulating different levels, worlds, or any­thing else to correspond to these modes. Unfortunately, Sartre's fundamental error has led to a widespread misunderstanding of analysis of Dasein, because for a long time Daseinsanalytic thought was accessible in French and in English only via references, in the works of Sartre, to Heidegger's descriptions of man's existence and his being-in-the-world.

The Most Common Misunderstandings about Analysis of Dasein 53

The Subjectivistic Misconception

The fourth misunderstanding occurs whenever students of analysis of Dasein stop thinking as soon as they have learned the first, merely preliminary, and purely formal characterization of Dasein, imprecise as yet as to content—i.e., its designation as "being-in-the-world." To stop there is completely to miss the essence of analysis of Dasein. As early as the introduction to Sein und Zeit, Heidegger himself called this formula only a first and provisional approach.⁴ He stated that all understanding of human existence would depend on a care­ful elucidation of the specific nature of this being-in-the-world. The whole book, so fundamental for all modern existential analysis, aims solely at such an elaboration of the particular nature of man's being-in-the-world. This being-in-the-world of man is first described there as "primary awareness of Being-ness," and later on more fully elaborated as being the realm of light in which all appearance takes place. Unless this qualitative designation of being-in-the-world is constantly kept in mind, being-in-the-world is cut off from its life-giving source, isolated, and left in a vacuum. Then being-in-the-world becomes an empty shell, an imprecise definition without character of any kind. As such, it no longer has anything in common with Heidegger's analysis of Dasein except the term itself. No wonder that such a subjectivistically misunderstood Daseinsanalyse suffers also from an absolute sterility as to new therapeutic stimuli. For this "castrated" kind of analysis of Dasein, the criticism of A. Mitscherlich and others holds only too true: that Daseinsanalysis gains access to the unity of human existence only at the price of losing all psychotherapeutic possibilities.⁵ This same judgment, how­ever, gives evidence—as already shown in our case study in Chap­ter l and as will be demonstrated in still more detail in the follow­ing chapters—of a complete ignorance of the undistorted and full content of analysis of Dasein.

Once such misunderstanding occurs, it is inevitable that tradi­tional subjectivistic conceptions push aside the real meaning of being-in-the-world. Being-in-the-world is then pictured as a prop­erty, or as a character trait, of a subject "in" whom this property resides or who "has" it. In such cases, the meaning of man's being-

* M. Heidegger, SuZ, pp. 53, 133.

⁵ A. Mitscherlich, "Probleme der Psychosomatik," in Psyche, Vol. XV, 1961, p. 99.

54 The Daseinsanalytic View of Man

in-the-world (in Heidegger's usage) must necessarily change. Being-in-the-world turns out to be merely a somewhat wider and more useful version of the concept of subjectivity. It remains concep­tually within the traditional frame of reference of the subject-object dichotomy. Sometimes this subjectivistic misunderstanding of the Daseinsanalytic characterization of man's Dasein goes so far as to call Daseinsanalytic existentialism a "subjective psychology"; this really makes the confusion in modern existentialism complete, and any possibility of increased understanding of man is lost from the outset. All that happens is that the traditional conception of subjectivity has been endowed with a new attribute, namely, the capacity for being in the world. Subjectivity, the bearer of this new property, remains as usual in the background as an unknown X. The nature of this attribute (i.e., the problem of how X is capable of actually being in the world, of climbing out of the immanence of the subjectivity and over to the things of the world) remains com­pletely indefinite. The difficulties which stem from a misinterpreta­tion of being-in-the-world as subjective—i.e., the problem of the relation between object and subject and the problem of how to bridge the gap between them—do not even arise (or are eliminated as such) if we actually see Dasein as the luminous realm of Being-ness.

If one does not lose sight of this crucial fact, he does not need C. G. Jung's "archetypes," either, to help Dasein with his being-in-the-world, as do so many who have fallen victim to a subjectivistic misunderstanding of the Daseinsanalytic approach. Jung thought he had to assume archetypal structures in every subject's psyche to account for the independent occurrence of the same phenomena here and there, now and in the past. He even believed he had "proved" the existence of such archetypes by, e.g., the observation that one of his patients dreamed of an apparition which corre­sponded perfectly to the "primitive" and "archaic" image of a "pneumatic" divine being, in spite of the fact that the patient could not read Greek and was not familiar with mythological problems. Far from being proof for the existence of anything within a subject, these phenomena simply give evidence of the fact that it pleased the Divine to show Itself to the archaic individuals of past ages in the same fashion as It may appear to some dreamers of the twentieth century. Both times it is but the question of the immediate revela­tion of the Divine in the light of a Dasein who—without having any

The Most Common Misunderstandings about Analysis of Dasein 55

archetypes in store—is open enough for the immediate appearance of the Divine.

The Egotistical Misconception

The fifth objection avers that analysis of Dasein is concerned only with the elucidation of an individual's own existence and its own relation to the things of his world, that it cannot account for man's possibihties of interpersonal relationships. However, the primary world-openness of human Dasein, apart from discovering extant things, discovers beings who not only are completely different from things but who are in the world in the same way as I am—that is, as Dasein. Other men also exist along with us. It is important to realize what "other," "also," and "with" mean in this context. "Other" does not mean "all the rest except myself," i.e., those from whom I am set off. The others are, rather, those from whom one does not differ most of the time, the ones among whom one exists. "With" refers to the fact that Dasein, qua Dasein, exists with others of its own kind (i.e., with other beings whose mode of being is of the kind characterized by Heidegger as Dasein). "Also" refers to this same­ness of mode of being. Every individual human Dasein participates with all others essentially—and from the beginning—in the lumi­nous world-openness, each in its own way, according to its possibil­ities for world-disclosing relationships. This world-openness, this "Da," may, therefore, almost be compared with the brightness of a day, where all the sun's rays participate in being-with—and illumi­nating—the same things of the world. The fact that human existence is in every case "my" existence does not exclude "being-with" others of my own kind. On the contrary, it is of the essence of Dasein to "be with." The "world" of man's being-in-the-world is ever and primordially one which I share with others. The world of Dasein is essentially Mitwelt. For we never exist primarily as differ­ent subjects who only secondarily enter into interpersonal relations with one another and exchange ideas about the objects all of us perceive. Instead, as any direct observation shows, we are all out there in the world together, primarily and from the beginning, with the same things shining forth in the common hght of all our existences.⁶

* M. Heidegger, SuZ, p. 118. For a detailed discussion of Mitwelt, see R. May, "Contributions of Existential Psychotherapy," in R. May, Б. Angel, and H. F. Ellen- berger, eds., Existence, New York, 1958, pp. 6i f.

56 The Daseinsanalytic View of Man

However, if Daseinsanalysis discovers this "being-with" as a pri­mordial and essential feature of human existence, it cannot possibly be accused of preaching an egotistical individualism. On the con­trary: if Daseinsanalysis enables us to see that every human exist­ence consists of a primordial being-with all the other human existences concerned with the same fellow men and things of the world, it provides us for the first time with sound fundamentals for all the sociological sciences in general and for a social psychiatry and social psychoanalysis in particular. For only this Daseins-analytically discovered primordial "being-with" of human existence also makes us really understand how meaningful, comprehending social relationships between man and man are possible at all. This Daseinsanalytic discovery is even an uncompromising challenge to reach the insight that no psychopathological symptom will ever be fully and adequately understood unless it is conceived of as a dis­turbance in the texture of the social relationships of which a given human existence fundamentally consists, and that all psychiatric diagnoses are basically only sociological statements.⁷

⁷ See M. Boss, "Why Does Man Behave Socially After All?" Proceedings of the Third World Congress of Psychiatry, Montreal, 1961, pp. 228-233.

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PART II

DASEINSANALYTIC PSYCHOANALYTIC

W;

e hope to be ready now to com­pare Daseinsanalytic thinking about human existence, as outlined in our initial chapters, with the understanding of man prevailing in psychoanalysis—as demonstrated in Freud's encompassing writings—and to elucidate the relationship which, we believe, exists between the two. To avoid unnecessary con­fusion, however, we think it wise to distinguish from the outset be­tween two entirely different matters, both of them labeled "psycho­analysis." On the one hand, and this primarily, psychoanalysis denotes a specific method of medical treatment, with its own— though unreflected-upon—tacit understanding of man; on the other hand, the term refers to a psychplogical theory derived secondarily from the method of treatment. The two ways of understanding man inherent in psychoanalytic therapy and psychoanalytic theory differ so much from each other that they amount, at times, to clear-cut contradictions, especially in regard to their most important features. (See, for example, pp. 78 ff.) This is the reason why we have to study their respective relationships to analysis of Dasein separately.

It may appear that a confrontation of psychoanalysis and Daseins-analysis would only widen the notorious gap between psycho­analytic practice and psychoanalytic theory in a disastrous way. There is some truth in this. The Daseinsanalyst arrives at completely different attitudes toward psychoanalytic theory on the one hand

TIC I RE-EVALUATION OF TIC I THERAPY AND THEORY

and psychoanalytic therapy on the other. Yet this differentiation is not detrimental to psychoanalysis. On the contrary, the spirit of Daseinsanalysis emphatically arrests the dangerous scientific tend­ency to flee from the immediately given phenomena of psycho­analytic practice to speculative ideas concerning supposed psychic structures and dynamisms "behind" what we actually perceive. The analyst who thinks in terms of Daseinsanalysis does not want to be more philosophical than his strictly "empirical" colleagues. Rather, as we have stated before (pp. 29 ff.), he aspires to greater em­piricism and "objectivity" than that which the natural scientist can achieve. His prime aim is to adhere to the immediately given objects and phenomena of man's world, to гещат with man's undistorted perceptions, and to let the phenomena speak for themselves and show us their essence and meanings. This means that the criticism to which Daseinsanalysis subjects the basic concepts of psycho­analytic theory in general, and the psychoanalytic conception of neuroses in particular, is positive. The insights of analysis of Dasein will restore the original meaning and content of Freud's actual, immediate, concrete, and most brilliant observations, to which his theoretical concepts point from rather distant and abstract positions.

The Intrinsic Harmony of Psychoanalytic Therapy ana Daseinsanalysis

Even a superficial and general comparison of the descriptions Freud gave of the events during a psychoanalytic cure and of our foregoing portrayal of analysis of Dasein leads to an unexpected discovery. All important passages in Freud's work pertaining to practical advice for the analyst contain the same basic terms which Heidegger, twenty years later, used to characterize human being. Both Freud and Heidegger talk again and again of "understanding," of "meaningfulness," "openness," "clarity," "language," "truths," and "freedom." To be sure, Freud speaks here from the basis of his "natural," unreflected-upon, everyday experience of man, while⁴ Heidegger has deliberately worked his experience of man into a fundamental ontology and has articulated the basic nature of man most carefully. Nevertheless, these two pioneers of the science of man are talking about exactly the same phenomena. Therefore, their findings and interpretations are certainly comparable, unless one is still caught in the neo-Platonic, artificial dichotomizing of the world into two "ontic-ontological" levels, which we have already refuted (see pp. 51 ff.).

In order to enter into particulars as to the intrinsic harmony of the tacit understanding of man on which Freud's practical thera­peutic activities are based and of the Daseinsanalytic insights into man's very nature we had best recall first Freud's fundamental ^x' therapeutic rule, which stands above all other rules in psycho­analytic therapy: the patient must be absolutely honest and truthful with himself and the analyst. He is obliged to confess everything, whatever may pass through his mind or through his heart, and this without any exception. If this rule is followed, it means that all those possibilities of awareness, all feeling, thinking, imagining, dreaming, and acting relationships with the world which either had

61

62 Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of Psychoanalytic Therapy and Theory

been fought against until then, or had not even been discovered up to then, are now accepted, realized freely, and appropriated with responsibility as constituting one's own existence, so that they may then be at the analysand's disposal and may be carried out in the future, "if... after her cure life makes that demand on her."¹ In other words, all of Freud's practical advice aims at enabling the patient to unveil himself and to unfold into his utmost openness.

Freud, however, would never have been able to create this basic rule of his treatment at all if he had not secretly shared the Daseinsanalytic insight into man's existence as being of the nature of a primordial openness and lucidity. No thought of unveiling hidden phenomena could have occurred in Freud's mind without his tacit awareness of man's existence as an open, lucid realm into which something can unveil itself and shine forth out of the dark.

The same basic rule of psychoanalytic therapy implies a specific conception of truth. Current epistemologies are apt to define truth in terms of the adequacy of the representation of the external world in man's consciousness. In psychoanalytic therapy, however, truth­fulness is clearly understood to be the shining forth of the emerging, unveiled phenomena in the specifically Daseinsanalytic sense of the ancient Greek aletheia, to which analysis of Dasein always refers when speaking of the essence of "truth."

In this connection even Freud's insistence on the patient's re­clining—making it impossible for him to see the therapist—reveals his deep, though unarticulated, awareness of man's basic condition, as Daseinsanalysis has brought it to light, regardless of the seemingly extraneous reasons he gave for this rule.² For to let the patient he down in the analytic situation takes cognizance of the human body itself as a sphere of human existence; it is not merely an apparatus or an organism attached in some enigmatic way to a psyche.³ For this reason an analysand does not comply fully with the demand to let himself become aware of all his characteristics without censoring them beforehand (as being of higher or lower value) unless he loosens up physically, too, while lying horizontally, so that all his limbs are also on the same level. The conventional arrangement in which physician and patient sit facing each other corresponds—as

¹ S. Freud, "Observations on Transference-Love," in CP, Vol. II, p. 389.

² S. Freud, "On Beginning the Treatment, etc.," in CP, Vol. II, pp. 354-355.

³ For further details about the Daseinsanalytic conception of "the body," see
chapters 6, 7, and 8.

The Intrinsic Harmony of Psychoanalytic Therapy and Daseinsanalysis 63

far as the respective bodily spheres of their existences are concerned —to the traditional conception of two subjects, separate and stand­ing opposite each other. Thus the physical juxtaposition implicitly preserves the conceptions of rank and value systems which the patient brings into the therapeutic situation. Sitting opposite the therapist enforces the patient's tendency to resist the basic rule of psychoanalytic therapy, by leaving "above" (in the widest sense) what always has been "above," and leaving "below" what always was "below." Furthermore, erect stature is the position par excellence of self-assertion. It accentuates self-glorification, as much as the supremacy of everything that belongs to the head, the elevation of the spirit (the higher and lighter) raised above the lower and sensual pole (base, animalistic, abysmal).⁴

The mutual control of two individuals who sit opposite each other also often robs the patient of the opportunity to be, for once, totally delivered up to himself, without getting support from the behavior (particularly the facial expressions and gestures) of another. Many patterns of behavior which the patient tries to ward off will not emerge into his reflections at all if he sits facing the therapist. But if they do not show themselves openly, it is impossible, of course, that they can be uttered, be admitted to full reality thereby and in so doing be overcome. However, it goes without saying that the rule to lie down, like all other psychoanalytic rules, must never be rigidly enforced. Lying down robs the analysand of the visual support of the physician, and leaves the patient to himself. For this reason, it often constitutes a frustration. According to Freud's in­structions, the whole analytic cure has to be carried out in an atmosphere where immediate satisfactions are frustrated. But such frustration must stay within the realm of the possible and must not overtax the limitations of a given analysand. The more immature a patient is emotionally at the beginning of treatment, the more the treatment has to resemble a child analysis at the start. In the analysis of a child, lying down is not possible either. We have, however, rarely encountered an analysand for whom it did not turn out to be beneficial to lie down during long phases of the analytic process.

Freud himself had pointed out that the mere visual perception of the concrete presence of the therapist who sits opposite the

* See Th. Spoerri, Tier Weg гиг Form, Hamburg, 1954, p. 44.

64 Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of Psychoanalytic Therapy and Theory

patient insurmountably obstructs the rise of all possibilities of behaving which are too infantile, and are therefore repulsed. Ac­tually the situation then appears to be a dialogue between two equally grown-up partners. This means that the position of the partners' bodily realms of existence in no way corresponds to the child-like nature of much of the patient's being, which is especially in need of psychotherapy and which needs to be openly and re­sponsibly integrated and appropriated into an essential being-myself. For this reason, a situation in which the two partners in the dialogue conventionally face each other prevents in itself the less mature partner from becoming aware of his more child-like strivings. *~ Freud objected to sitting and facing the patient for yet another reason. He felt that the mutual observation inevitable in such an arrangement leads to self-control on the part of the therapist as well, thereby interfering with his ability to maintain his evenly hovering attention. But precisely this attitude is the indispensable basis for the psychoanalyst's ability to be silent. In silent listening, the analyst opens himself to, and belongs to, the patient's as yet concealed wholeness; and this silence alone can free the patient for his own world by providing him with the necessary interhuman mental openness. The less a physician is capable of being silent in such a fashion, the more he is in danger of setting up obstacles to the unfolding of the patient's own potential, of pressing him in pseudo-pedagogic fashion into the physician's own matrix.

When we take into account the real meaning of lying down during therapy, the counterarguments of those psychotherapists who, on principle, treat a patient only if he sits facing them sound shallow indeed. They claim that letting the patient lie down makes him feel all the more sick; one should appeal to what is healthy in him, above all to his common sense. But is it not, often, the first therapeutic task to enable the patient to acknowledge his being ill, so that he may realize with full awareness the nature of his illness? Once an individual has been cured by responsibly and honestly accepting his wholeness, he will also be well when he lies down. The counter­arguments apparently stem from the same attitude of concealing and covering up that the old persuasion therapies were based upon.

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