Outline of Analysis of Dasein 5 страница

Furthermore, Freud as early as 1900 had started his Interpreta­tion of Dreams with a most "daring assumption," to use his own expression. His fundamental work began with the proud announce­ment that, if his technique of dream interpretation is employed.

The Intrinsic Harmony of Psychoanalytic Therapy and Daseinsanalysis 65

"every dream reveals itself as a psychical structure which has a^ meaning... ~T Soon Freud gained the insight that not only dreams ЬйТ~5Й human phenomena were meaningful, including the most bizarre mental and physical symptoms of neurotics. By this dis­covery Freud opened a completely new dimension of thought to~ the healing science and lifted our understanding of illness from the conception of "meaningless" natural causal connections and se­quences of "facts" to a level where everything makes "sense.'',⁶ This all-decisive deed of Freud's genius, however, again presupposes the basic Daseinsanalytic insight that there is a luminated realm into the lucidity of which the meaningfulness of our world's phenomena can disclose itself, shine forth, and that it is nothing else than the human existence itself which serves as this necessary, elucidating, world-openness.

Freud's proud introduction to his Interpretation of Dreams, however, did not stop by asserting only the meaningfulness of every dream. It asserted also that every dream also can "be inserted at an assignable point in the chain of the mental activities of waking life." To regard human phenomena as having their par­ticular, meaningful spot in the course of a man's unfolding is not the attitude of a natural scientist but exactly that of a genuine historian, if "history" is understood in the Daseinsanalytic sense. For "history," in analysis of Dasein, always means a sequence of meaningful world disclosures as they are sent into being by destiny, engaging, in an equally primordial way, human existence as the lucid world-: ermess as well as the emerging particular phenomena shining torth therein.

Freud, it is true, restricted his historical interest almost exclusively to the individual life histories of his patients whenever he made the transition from pure natural scientist to historian. It is even more true that he was always in a hurry to become a natural scientist again as soon as he began to theorize about his patients' life histories. In his role as a natural scientist he felt he owed it to himself (as a serious investigator and searcher for truth) to transform intellec­tually the temporal succession of experiences and actions occurring during the course of a life into an assumed sequence of cause and effect His procedure shows plainly that he had not yet reached a full understanding of the original historicity and temporality of

*S. Freud, "Psychoanalysis: Exploring the Hidden Recesses of the Mind," in По* Eventful Years, Vol. II, London, 1924, p. 515. Trans, by A. A. Brill,

66 Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of Psychoanalytic Therapy and Theory

man's existence in the Daseinsanalytic sense. He was still a long way from the insight that each man's life history occurs by way of a continuous disclosure of the particular beings which are sent to shine forth, to come to pass, in the light of the meaning-disclosing relationships which constitute human existence. Nevertheless, Freud was able to get glimpses of man's fundamental temporality, an insight which later was to become the turning point of Heidegger's analysis of Dasein. These glimpses occurred with particular clarity when Freud realized that even the seemingly most meaningless phenomena of dreams have their place in the sequence of events of the total life history of a man. They also occurred when Freud talked of the necessity to regard the past of man not as a piece of him which has fallen off, like something which no longer belonged to him and was merely a matter of history (in this word's ordinary, classifying sense), but as a force pervading the present.⁶ In the case of neurotic patients, Freud had even discovered that the power of the past is indeed so great that it pushes both present and future aside, a dismissal evident in the patient's symptomatology and behavior. Therefore, he could state that these patients "suffer from their reminiscences." If, then, the intention of the psycho­analytic cure is to make an analysand aware of the historic occur­rence of the symptoms, how can it be anything else, fundamentally, than an attempt to heal neuroses by an elucidation of the life history? Such an elucidation, however, must make it possible for the patient to recapture his past openly, to bring it into the present and make it his own by possessing the memory of it; it thus liberates the analysand for a free acceptance of his future. *" These statements of Freud contain nothing less than the discovery that any single feature of a man's existence can be comprehended fully only if it is regarded, not as merely momentarily present in a chain of separated "nows," but as a phenomenon embedded in an individual's life history, including his past, present, and future. - This understanding of time and history in human life, which pervades all of psychoanalytic therapy more or less implicitly, corresponds to a great extent to the original temporality of human existence which Heidegger elucidated explicitly for the first time.⁷

⁶ S. Freud, "Recollection, Repetition, and Working Through," in CP, Vol. II, pp.
369-371.

⁷ For details of the paramount practical importance of this original temporality
of human existence for an adequate comprehension of a great many normal, neurotic,
and psychotic phenomena, see chapters 5 and 6.

The Intrinsic Harmony of Psychoanalytic Therapy and Daseinsanalysis 67

We need only recall Heidegger's statement that man's existence always emerges in the unity of the three temporal "ekstases," i.e., man's past, present, and future (see p. 45).

The intrinsic harmony of psychoanalytic therapy and analysis of Dasein becomes particularly evident in their common underlying conception of human freedom. Heidegger discovered that man's existence is a realm of lucid openness, so that all that is to be and to become finds its necessary realm of lucidity into which it can shine forth, appear, and become a "phenomenon" (in this word's original Greek meaning). In other words, human existence emerges only through and as man's possibilities of meaning-disclosing re­lationships to the particular beings of our world. Man's freedom, then, consists in his being able to choose either to obey this claim and carry out his possibilities of relating to, and caring for, what he encounters, or not to obey this claim.

If Freud had not had this Daseinsanalytic insight into human being when actually treating his patients (regardless of whether he put it into words or not, and regardless of his theoretical formula­tions), he could not have gone beyond Breuer and Janet to become the father of modern psychotherapy. Only because Freud sensed what human freedom really means was he able to overcome the objective and purely biological theory of repression of his predeces­sors. Freedom in the Daseinsanalytic sense is the condition for the 1 possibility of psychoanalytic practice as taught by Freud. Freud's ' writings, insofar as they deal with practical psychoanalytic tech­nique, abound with references to freedom.⁸ These references differ grossly from the strongly deterministic point of view he proclaims in his theoretical works. It is at least as true to call Freud the dis­coverer of the importance of human freedom for the etiology of man's illnesses as to see in him the scientific discoverer of sexuality. Both Heidegge r and F reud define human freedom as being able to chooseT"They mean choice between two decisions. One choice consists in the responsible, conscientious adoption of all "functions," "abilities," "character traits," and "behavior possibilities" consti­tuting man's essence. Such adoption amounts to a congregation of all possibilities for relating to the particular phenomena of our world. It leads to an independent self. The other choice consists in denial and non-recognition of essential manners of behaving. Man

⁸C/., for example, "Recollection, Repetition, and Working Through," p. 373, and "Observations on Transference-Love," pp. 387 and 390.

68 Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of Psychoanalytic Therapy and Theory

then falls prey to the anonymous, unauthentic mentality of "tradi­tion," to "authoritarian commands" foreign to him. Thus he misses assembling all his possibilities of relating toward the world into the wholeness of an authentic, free selfhood. If man does not choose the first of these alternatives, he cannot reach the goal of therapy as Freud formulated it: full capacity for work and enjoyment. For both capacities presuppose that any given person has all possibilities of living at his disposal. For this reason, Freud explicitly states the human qualifications he considers to be indispensable for psycho­analytic treatment. He mentions factors such as natural intelligence and ethical development; deep-rooted malformation of character and traits of a degenerate constitution he considers counterindica-tions.⁹ In Daseinsanalytic terminology, such statements amount to an insistence that one select patients capable of choosing in terms of human freedom.

Heidegger's analysis of Dasein led him to regard man as one who basically and customarily avoids independent, responsible selfhood. Freud's development of his psychoanalytic therapy into an analysis of resistance indicates that secretly he must have shared Heidegger's insights in this respect. Obviously, both of them knew that the abilities to be free and to be unfree belong necessarily together. Man is inclined to flee from being his real own self in responsibility. He is prone to let himself be swallowed up by the anonymity of his surroundings and everyday pursuits. It is for this reason that Freud is so insistent that psychoanalytic therapy must focus, in the begin­ning and throughout the whole cure, on the patient's resistances against standing openly and four-square with all that he actually is.

Freud did not, however, consider his discovery (that Dasein is historical and that it is capable of either freely taking over or deny­ing given possibilities of behavior) to be the decisive characteristic of his new psychotherapy. To him, the departure from Breuer's hypnotic technique and the institution of free association in its place marked the birth of psychoanalysis; the consistent application of this method was its basis. Source and center of Heidegger's think­ing is the insight into man's primary awareness of Being-ness, the basic dimension of non-objectifiable human Dasein. Nothing could be further from Heidegger's thinking than a method directly result­ing from the domination of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century

»S. Freud, "Freud's Psycho-Analytic Procedure," in SE, Vol. VII, p. 254.

The Intrinsic Harmony of Psychoanalytic Therapy and Daseinsanalysis 69

associational psychology. The positions of the two thinkers seem incompatible. On the one hand, a conception based on the simplest, immediately given, and indisputable phenomenon—the primary awareness of Being-ness and the freedom it grants to man; on the other, a completely unfree, deterministic psychology based on un­real intellectual abstractions. We need hardly mention that associa-tionism was proven untenable long before Heidegger; it was, indeed, refuted almost simultaneously with Freud's basic discoveries.

Is it possible that the method of free association and the associa-tionism of nineteenth-century psychology are related only semanti-cally? If "free association" (psychoanalytically understood) and as-sociationism agreed with each other, the analysand would be ex­pected to produce material based on engrams resulting from accidental coincidence in time and space. Freud, however, well knew that nothing of the kind ever happened in psychoanalytic practice. He stated that the associations of a patient in psycho­analysis remain under the influence of the analytic situation through­out,¹⁰ a situation which is totally oriented toward the goal of making hitherto unconscious material conscious. We must conclude that Freud regarded free association simply as an approach by which the essential content and the meaningful relationships of things, as well as the patient's own relationship potential, disclose themselves to him to a much fuller extent than he had known before. The full reality of things and fellow men must be permitted to disclose itself to each patient; this reality contains both so-called naked facts and so-called symbolic content. In such a fashion, the analysand permits the whole truth of everything he encounters to speak to him and is able to become aware of such verities,. How could such a thing happen if not on the basis of primary awareness of Being-ness? Only an existentially luminated being can have access to extant things in the "physical" light of day, or to the non-objective existential possibilities of man in the light of the human spirit. On the other hand, only to such a being can things be hidden in the darkness of night, or in the spiritual darkness of forgetting and "repression." Freud must have had a tacit confidence in man's primary openness to the world, a condition which analysis of Dasein has brought to light. Why else would he have thought it so important to demand of his patients an unconditional openness, with specific emphasis

¹⁰ S. Freud, Autobiography, New York, 1935, p. 78. Trans, by James Strachey.

70 Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of Psychoanalytic Therapy and Theory

on "affective" possibilities, i.e., on an engagement of the whole human being in such an openness? How else could one explain Freud's demand that the analyst himself undergo analysis, that he might eliminate all dark and blind spots in order to progress from a fettered mode of existing toward the freedom of a fuller knowledge of himself?

Open agreement exists between Freud and Heidegger insofar as both consider language to be man's habitat. Heidegger refers to language as the "home of Being-ness."¹¹ Freud admonishes the patients to put all thoughts and emotions into words, in detail and without selecting.¹² To do so is to assure that the process of becom­ing aware of myself does not stop at the halfway goal of a pseudo-honesty, confined to myself and therefore easily lost again. Instead, this process is to achieve an open, continuous adherence to being-whole, i.e., to accept and to take over all of one's possibilities of existing, to stand up to them—as one's own belongings—with responsibility. Freud emphasized verbalization again and again, because what is exists, in fact, only—and is undeniably preserved only—when it is verbally articulated.

Finally, Daseinsanalysis never loses sight of primary awareness of Being-ness and of the fact that man's existence is claimed to serve as the luminated realm into which all that is to be may actually shine forth, emerge, and appear as a phenomenon, i.e., as that which shows itself. These are the conditions for the possibility that man can permit (to the best of his ability) everything that claims him (by being encountered) to unfold in the light of his existence. To understand man in this fashion (namely, as servant and guardian of the truth inherent in things.as they are permitted to come into being) is to free him from the egocentric self-glorification, the autonomy and autarchy, of subjectivistic world views. The Daseins­analytic point of view gives back man's dignity: he is the emissary of the ground of everything that is; an emissary who is sent into his life history entrusted with the task of letting the truth of particular beings become apparent to the extent that this is possible at a given time and place. On the basis of this fundamental feature of man's existence, all so-called ethical values become self-evident.

Freud's analytic therapy implies the same view of man. We have

¹¹ M. Heidegger, t)ber den Humanismus, Frankfurt, 1947, p. 5.

¹² S. Freud, "On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena: A Pre­
liminary Communication," in SE, Vol. II, p. 6.

The Intrinsic Harmony of Psychoanalytic Therapy and Daseinsanalysis 71

only to focus our attention once more on what separated Freud from his predecessors Janet and Breuer. At first glance the differ­ences may seem insignificant. Breuer had considered hypnoid states to be the causes of pathogenic forgetting of certain emotions and memories. To account for the same phenomena, Janet had assumed a constitutional weakness of the capacity for psychic synthesis. Both approaches may be said to have used naturalistic hypotheses. Freud, however, recognized that the true motive for repression of mental content was that such content could not be squared with the moral attitude or the self-esteem of the patient. He found that "repres­sion... [always] proceeds from the self-respect of the ego."¹³ "Everything that had been forgotten had in some way or other been painful: it had been either alarming or disagreeable or shameful by the standards of the subject's personality.... That was precisely why it... had not remained conscious."¹⁴

The discovery that repression always has something to do with moral values again opened up a completely new dimension to medical science. For to say that repression can result from a moral attitude, or from shame, is to imply that man can distinguish be­tween right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, good and evil. Good and evil in psychoanalytic therapy, however, are determined in a strict Daseinsanalytic sense. The analysand is called upon completely to relinquish his conceit, in particular his vainglorious conviction that either he or the pseudo-moralistic traditions of his environment have a right to determine who he is and how things should disclose themselves to 'him. From the analyst the practice of psychoanalysis demands above all selfless care and cherishing of the patient. For I months and years on end, the analyst must concentrate on just one fellow being, week after week, hour after hour, and all this mostly in receptive silence. He must accept the other fully the way he is, with all his physical Und mental beauties as well as blemishes. All the patient's possibilities must be given a chance to emerge. He must become free, regardless of the personal ideas, wishes, "or" judgments of the analyst. Such an undertaking, Freud stated, can' succeed only if the analyst allows the relation of analyst to patient to become an almost limitless "playground," [Tummelplatz] a place where all of the patient's possibilities for relating could freely come

¹³ S. Freud, "On Narcissism, an Introduction," in SE, Vol. XIV, p. 78.

¹⁴ S. Freud, Autobiography, pp. 52-53.

72 Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of Psychoanalytic Therapy and Theory

out into the open. This is the only_way by which the patie nt ca n achieve new confidence in his world. The analyst must, of course, restrain himself so as not to derive any personal advantage from any behavior of the patient in the transference situation. ¹⁵

Freud had, it is true, expressly said that the physician should 'Ъе impenetrable to the patient, and, like a mirror, reflect nothing but what is shown to him."¹⁶ The comparison of the physician to a mirror is one of the most frequently mentioned "proofs" for the dehumanization and mechanization of Freud's psychoanalytic prac-7tice. Those, however, who personally experienced the mirror called; "Freud" know beyond doubt that he was opaque only in his own; imagination and that to his patients and disciples his unusual kind­ness, warmth, and humaneness shone through even from a distance. ^Actually Freud thought, of the "opaqueness" of the analyst primarily as an extreme reserve which, in turn, was due to his respect For the individu ality of the an alysand. His concern was to enable the patient Cto b ecome foimsetfl totally out of his owojcesources, w ithout being influe nced by the p h ysician at all, and c ertainly without being over­powered by the therapist's personality.

It is unlikely that any analyst would ever be capable of such ethos if his morals were, as Freud declared (here again truly a child of his time) of utilitarian origin.¹⁷ We are convinced that even the most rabidly neo-positivistic psychoanalyst can endure the extreme hardships of psychoanalytic practice only because he, too, maintains a basic relationship to Being-ness, in spite of his superficial con­victions. He realizes, in some hidden way, that his existence belongs (like¹ that of all other human beings) to the world-openness and that for this reason he is called.upon to serve as the luminated realm into which all that has to enter into its being by encountering him may shine forth and emerge. By his continuing concern for the welfare of his patients he is obeying the claim of Being-ness in the special way of a psychoanalyst. If any further evidence is still needed for the intrinsic accordance) between the understanding of man implicit in psychoanalytic • therapy and explicitly articulated in the analysis of Dasein, we have but to summarize Freud's recommendations for the best therapeutic/'

¹⁶ S. Freud, "Observations on Transference-Love," p. 388.

¹⁶ S. Freud, "Recommendations for Physicians on the Psycho-Analytic Method of
Treatment," in CP, Vol. II, p. 331.

¹⁷ S. Freud, "Observations on Transference-Love," p. 382.

The Intrinsic Harmony of Psychoanalytic Therapy and Daseinsanalysis 73

Yattitu3e)of the psychoanalyst toward his analysands. Freud first gives a warning with a negative instruction, as is well known. The analyst, Freud would say, should never act in a way which we may best characterize now as "intervening care." This particular warning is perhaps what primarily distinguishes Freud's method of therapy from all others. To forget his admonition when dealing with patients is to misunderstand and betray the real spirit of Freud's practice. For to care for a patient in an intervening way means to take over wh atlsl o be done by him, to do it in his place. The patient is thus thrown out of his place, has to step back and take over what the therapist has taken care of. It is now a finished matter, to be used— or possibly disposed of—as a whole. In a caretaking of this kind the other person can become dependent and dominated, even though such domination may be silent and remain hidden to the one who is dominated.

Besides his negative warning against "intervening" care, Freud
also characterizes the analytic attitude positively, as essentially^
having to be aif "anticipating" care., In this mode of care the analyst
does hot intervene or interfere in behalf of the patient. He is, rather,
ahead of the patient in his existential unfolding. He does not take
over for the patient but tries to hand back to him what has to be
cared for so that it becomes an actual concern. This taking care (on
the part of the analyst) consists in his concern for the "basic" care
(i.e., the existence) of the other person and not to a particular item
he has to care for. It helps the other person to become, in his caring,
transparent to himself and free for his existence. -———..-

Such antici pating caretaking an d being ahead necessitates the analyst's prior \'analytic purification^ ' continues Freud. Only then will the analyst be able to keep the ^playground" of the transference situation free of obstructions and limitations which are due to his own unresolved "complexes." And only if the analyst succeeds in thus clearing away the obstacles to psychoanalytic cure within him­self, will the patient have an opportunity to try out all his own possibilities of living in almost total freedom within the realm of the analyst-analysand relationship.

No one who is really experienced and well versed in psychoana­lytic therapy will be able to deny, we believe, that our summary of Freud's statements about the correct attitude of a psychotherapist reveals their essential meaning and content. Freud's description of the proper and improper attitudes of the therapist toward his

74 Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation of Psychoanalytic Therapy and Theory

patients we have characterized as "anticipating" and "intervening" care respectively. In thus summarizing Freud's recommendations for the best possible therapeutic attitude, however, we have quoted from Heidegger's description of the two main ways of man's care-taking for a fellow being.¹⁸ Could anything give more striking evidence of the intrinsic concordance of Freud's tacit understand­ing of man—inherent in his practical advice to psychotherapists— and Heidegger's elaboration of the basic features of man's existence than the fact that it is possible to let one author speak for the other in this matter?

In Freud's theoretical work, however, the humaneness. sou-ap­parent in his way of conducting therapy was not reflected. It could not have been. His theoretical thinking always remained within a mechanistic framework. The discoveries of analysis of Dasein are needed to give the analyst insight into the meaning and justifiability of his actions, to enable him to re-evaluate the human phenomena that Freud's theoretical conceptions described only inadequately, and finally to liberate his psychoanalytic therapy from the damaging restrictions and distortions which have been wrought—through "feedback," so to speak—upon psychoanalytic therapy by an in­adequate psychoanalytic theory.

¹⁸ M. Heidegger, SuZ, pp. 122 ff.

Daseinsanalytic Re-evaluation or the Basic Conceptions or Psychoanalytic Theory

Psychoanalysis as a psychological theory is, according to Freud's own statements, a "speculative superstructure," a "rational founda­tion for... medical efforts, gradually developed,"¹ any part of which "can be abandoned or changed without loss or regret the moment its inadequacies have been proved";² it is an "artificial structure of hypotheses" which would probably be "blown away" in globo by the progress of science.³ Above all, however, psycho­analytic theory is expressly meant to belong to the realm of the natural sciences. Freud's intentions in this regard are unequivocal. Indeed, as we have pointed out, few if any have ever been able to formulate the general working principle of the traditional natural sciences in keener terms than he.

The philosophical faith which supports Freud's assertions consists in the prescientific presuppositions which, indeed, form the basis of all natural sciences. They may be summarized as follows:

1. There is an external, "real" world, existing in itself, independent of man.

2. "Real" can be only what can be measured, calculated, and thereby established with certainty. Reality is the totality of those objects which constitute the world.

3. The relations between the particles of every object as well as the connections between one entire object to all the other ones are predictable causal connections; thus the chain of these relations of causes and effects is always an unbroken one.

4. Finally, everything that is "real" fits into the three dimensions

¹ S. Freud, "Psychoanalysis: Exploring the Hidden Recesses of the Mind," in
These Eventful Years, Vol. II, London, 1924, p. 515. Trans, by A. A. Brill.

² S. Freud, Autobiography, N.Y., 1935, p. 61. Trans, by James Strachey.

³ S. Freud, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," in SE Vol. XVIII, p. 60.

Дата добавления: 2015-06-04