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We, however, took great care not to make any such an allusion, since the phenomenon itself does not offer the slightest justification for such a speculation. True, the "transference" interpretation might even have proved to be therapeutically helpful to some extent. It would nevertheless have been a completely arbitrary action, in no

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way warranted by any demonstrable fact. We have no proof what­ever for the supposition that the boatman actually signifies or symbolizes anything else. He is and remains the boatman, as whom he shows himself in this dream world. The most we can say is that the analyst enters the picture only in that the patient, through his experience of the analyst's constant benevolence and care, has been able to open his existence to a more trusting relationship with his fellow men in general. This more friendly world-openness of his existence can now also call into its luminating realm correspond­ingly more friendly appearances, such as the clever leader, the kind boatman. Thus it can also be said that this boatman's entering into the dream world of our patient gives evidence of the newly acquired possibility of a trustful attunement of his Dasein.

What had made this opening up of his existence possible was not any of the unwarranted interpretations of psychoanalytic theory but, above all, the analyst's unshakable caring for the patient. Just because this attitude of the analyst contrasted so completely to the patient's former experiences with his parents, the analyst-analy-sand relationship had been able to offer him the necessary existential abode which his parents had failed to give him. A parent-child relationship, though, whose openness is sufficiently in accord with all of the child's genuine nature is the only realm into which his possibilities of existing can come forth in a healthy way.

The second reason was that whenever the patient's behavior, in either the waking or the dreaming state, showed the slightest evidence of his former attitude, the analyst tirelessly emphasized the "narrowed-inness" of this existence, which left him only open to distrustful, distant ways of relating to his fellow beings. With this went the repeated question, What was it that still made him afraid to exchange this way for a more open kind of relationship to his world?

Meanwhile, profound and striking changes could be seen in the patient's waking behavior. There could be no further suspicion of schizoid psychopathology, much less a schizophrenic psychosis. He had become much freer, more accessible and communicative. Even his relations with his parents, at one time so strained, had become friendly, and his attachment to his motherly friend lost its morbid fascination. His convulsive clinging to her yielded to much steadier judgment; he abandoned his original plan of persuading her to get a divorce so that he could marry her, since the difference in age

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was, after all, too great. His attitude toward her was much more independent and he would not let her mother him. Above all, his sadism had completely disappeared. In his sexual relations with her he experienced a satisfying orgasm with complete mental and physical relaxation and no urge to sadistic practices. He could hardly believe that he had once taken pleasure in them; they now seemed subhuman. Nor did any of his compulsive states return. His work also showed considerable improvement.

In the spring of 1951, after eight months of analysis, the patient fell ill with slight exudative pleurisy, which made a stay of several weeks in the mountains advisable. It would be as irrelevant to the main problem to discuss the psychosomatic aspects of this illness here as it would have been to trace the psychosomatic connections in the auto accident preceding the analysis. However, it is note­worthy that the patient recovered quickly and entirely from this illness and was able to resume his work in town. He also felt so far recovered mentally that after his return from the mountains a con­tinuation of the analysis seemed unnecessary, both to him and his doctors.

Subsequent History

We learned not long ago that the patient had not only been able to part without difficulty from his older woman friend but that ten years ago he had married a girl some years younger than him­self and is living happily in a normal love relationship with his young wife and is already the father of a child.

The "Narcissistic" Neuroses

Melancholia

Freud distinguished between "narcissistic neuroses" (melancholia and the schizophrenias, particularly paranoia) and "transference „^.^heuroses" (hysteria, phobias, and obsessional neuroses). He thought of the melancholic as having regressed to the libido organization of narcissism characteristic of infants. At this earliest stage of libido organization, oral instincts are dominant; consequently, the melancholic is fixated on these instincts. He has introjected the parental images, i.e., he has "swallowed" them whole and made them into his own superego. This, in turn, results in the melan-cholic's conflict being purely internal—a conflict between ego and superego.

From the point of view of Daseinsanalysis, however, the melan­cholic is a person who has never unfolded into being himself, in the sense of taking responsibly upon himself the possibilities of living which are his and with which he is entrusted. He has not been able to appropriate them to a strong, genuine, authentic, inde­pendent, and free self-being. Psychoanalytic theory speaks in this connection of an ego weakness. This is, in our view, a most in­adequate conception, for it is impossible to find an isolated particle, function, or authority such as "ego." It is always the whole existence of the melancholic patient which has failed to take over openly and responsibly all those possibilities of relating to the world which actually would constitute his own genuine self. Consequently, such an existence has no independent standing of its own but con­tinuously falls prey to the demands, wishes, and expectations of others. Such patients try to live up to these foreign expectations as best they can, in order not to lose the protection and love of their surroundings. But the longer these patients allow others to govern their ways of feeling, acting, and perceiving, the more deeply

209

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indebted they become in regard to their fundamental task in life, which is to appropriate and carry out, independently and respon­sibly, all their authentic possibilities of relating to that which they encounter. Hence the terrible guilt feelings of the melancholic. His incessant self-accusations derive from his existential guilt. The severity of his symptoms varies according to the degree in which he fails to exist as the world-openness in whose light everything encountered can unfold and shine forth in its full meaning and content.

Within the framework of such a patient's unauthentic ways of relating to the world, so completely adjusted to the demands of others, there is no room for him openly to await his own future, to leMt come to him, to meet its demands; there is no room, in other words, to carry out his own Dasein and let it emerge in its wholeness. Existentially, the melancholic has come to a standstill; he is related^either to the future nor to the present. The stagnation of his Daseins unfolding shows itself in his exclusive attachment to his past. As water in a stagnant pool starts to rot, so the stagnant Dasein of a melancholic shows signs of decay. His relations to those around him are fraught with fears of impending doom for which he is responsible.

Many contemporary psychopathologists stress the importance of the existential guilt we have just described. However, such exis­tential guilt is not the only thing to be taken into consideration, particularly not if psychotherapy is considered. Again, we are well advised to remember one of Freud's observations, which he described with the (theoretically inadequate) concept of "oral fixa­tion." This psychoanalytic concept justifiably refers to the time when the infant's relationships toward his world consisted almost exclusively of sucking, in both the physical and psychic sense. At this time, when the child's existence was still inseparably bound to his mother, a fundamental rupture of the basic trust in this relationship must have taken place. Here, as always, it is by no means clear in a given case whether the disturbance is due to an exaggerated sensitivity and excessive love requirement on the part of the child, or whether it stems from a lack of love on the part of the people who took care of him, or whether both factors are to blame. At any rate, it is the disturbance—by too severe a frustration—of this basic way of existing in an intimate infant-mother relationship which inhibits further development and is responsible for the

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existential guilt that eventually develops. For this reason, all depres­sive patients in therapy (whether their illnesses are the so-called reactive or the so-called endogenous type) show a tremendous desire to make up for what they missed during infancy in regard to the sucking infant-mother relationship. If they are to be cured at all (three patients under our observation who had been repeatedly diagnosed by experienced clinicians as endogenous melancholies have been cured in the course of long-term analysis), they need to remain in the "oral-erotic" infant-mother relationship for long phases of therapy. A highly permissive attitude on the part of the therapist is indicated with these patients, because—as we have mentioned—their illness originates essentially from their having given in ever since infancy to the demands of the people around them and from their consequent inability to discover their own genuine demands and expectations.

Manic patients, who seem to behave in exactly the opposite way as depressive people, have not yet been studied and treated Daseins­analytically in sufficient number. The author, therefore, does not feel entitled to describe the essential character of their illness. How­ever, even today it must be kept in mind that the existence of these patients can never be adequately characterized Daseinsanalytically if their Dasein is called a "jumping" or a "skipping" one, or if then-basic mood is misinterpreted as happiness. The first description has nothing whatever to do with Daseinsanalytic understanding of man, because only a thing, or matter, extant within a pre-existing space is able to jump or skip in three-dimensional space. Human existence, however—Daseinsanalytically understood—is "only" of the nature of lumination, belongs essentially to the world-openness, and can, thus, never be said to jump or skip. The second definition, which ascribes to these manic patients a mood of happiness, gaiety, or joy-fulness, is simply wrong. The manic patient's existence seems to be entirely reduced to an understanding and disclosure of the essence of floating, rapidly disappearing, matter. This seems to compel them to devour everything greedily and as fast as possible. The existence of the manic is so completely engaged in this one world-relationship that he is perhaps as far from genuine happiness and joyfulness as the depressive patient. He is constantly threatened by the assault of nothingness, which shines all too strongly through all the objects of his world.

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Schizophrenia

Schizophrenics also regress, according to Freud, to the libido organization characteristic of infants. It is "the stage of primary narcissism, to which dementia praecox finally returns."¹ Through this regression of libido, the objects of the external world are decathected and the result is a loss of reality. The next step in a psychosis, on the other hand:

is an attempt to make good the loss of reality, not, however, at the expense of a restriction laid on the id —as in neurosis at the expense of the relation with reality—but in another, a more lordly manner, by creating a new reality which is no longer open to objections like that which has been forsaken.... [The difference between neurosis and psychosis is that] neurosis does not deny the existence of reality, it merely tries to ignore it; psychosis denies it and tries to substitute something else for it.²

Daseinsanalytic criticism of the psychoanalytic theory of schizo­phrenia must focus, first of all, on the belief in a supposedly "ob­jective," external reality existing independent of man. From the point of view of Daseinsanalysis, this "external world" is solely the specific mode in which what comes forth in the light of human existence presents itself to every waking member of a historically and geographically circumscribed group of people. The difference between the psychotic patient—so far as the psychotically altered realms of his thing-relationships are concerned—and average people is that the psychotic's existence is no longer open only to the sensory perception of those phenomena which present themselves in a physically tangible way to average people during their waking hours. Here the psychotic differs also from the hysteric and the obsessional neurotic. The existences of the hysteric and the obses­sional neurotic are open for disclosing the world in fundamentally the same way as that of the average person, although in a restricted manner. The things and human beings of a schizophrenic's world, on the other hand, address him in a different way from the way they address "healthy" people. We dismiss this manner in which things and living beings show themselves to the schizophrenic as hallucinatory" or "delusional." We know that the psychotic usually

¹S. Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Garden City, N.Y., 1943, p. 365. Trans, by Joan Riviere.

² S. Freud, "The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis," in CP, Vol. II, p. 279.

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feels threatened by the way he perceives the things and fellow men of his world. But we should not forget that the epithets "hallucina­tory" and "delusional" tell us only that the manner in which the encountered is disclosed in the light of the psychotic patient's existence is different from the customary manner of world-dis­closure which occurs with most of the people around him. About the specific quality of this difference, however, these words tell us nothing at all.

Freud's theorizing about schizophrenia becomes even less con­vincing when he tries to deal with specific aspects of this psychosis. A glaring example is his attempt to explain the "strangeness" of schizophrenic symptoms (the strangeness, that is, of the substitute formation characteristic of psychosis). Freud started out from ob­servations made on schizophrenic patients by Viktor Tausk.

A patient of Tausk's, a girl who was brought to the clinic after a quarrel with her lover, complained that her eyes were not right, they were twisted.... A second communication by the same patient was as follows: She was standing in church. Suddenly, she felt a jerk; she had to change her position, as though somebody was putting her into a position, as though she was being put in a certain position.³

In connection with her first utterance the patient remarked that her lover was a hypocrite, an eye-twister [Augenverdreher, used in German to mean a deceiver]; in connection with the second she voiced reproaches against him, stating that he had given a false impression of his own position [Sich verstellen, to feign, disguise oneself]; he was common and had made her common, too. He had changed her position [Verstellen —to change the position of].⁴

According to Freud, the word "to twist (which had originally referred to the fact that the patient had learned to see the world with "twisted eyes" under the influence of her lover) had now come to refer to the actual "twisting" of her eyes. In the second instance a similar thing had taken place. The word referring to the patient's new position in the world, forced upon her by her lover, had been displaced to refer to another thing, i.e., the actual position of her body.

Freud concluded that in both examples it had been the similarity of the words used, and not the identity of the things denoted, which

³ S. Freud, "The Unconscious," in SE, Vol. XIV, pp. 197-198. Italics added.

⁴ hoc. cit.

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dictated the substitution.⁵ This, in turn, led him to conclude that it is the predominance of the word-relation over the thing-relation which is responsible for the strangeness of schizophrenic symptoms. The final conclusion is that these observations necessitate a modi­fication of his formerly held views concerning the so-called con­scious representation of the object.

What we have permissibly called the conscious representation of the object can now be split up into the representation of the word and the representation of the thing; the latter consists in the cathexis, if not of the direct memory-images of the thing, at least of remoter memory-traces derived from these.⁶

Freud now believed that the process which produces schizo­phrenic symptoms had been explained. The schizophrenic does not give up the whole representation of the object, but only the cathexis of the memory-traces of the "representation of the thing"; the cathexis of the "representation of the word" corresponding to the object is retained. This word representation is subject to the same process as that which makes dream images out of dream thoughts— the "primary process," with its condensations and displacements. Hence the strangeness of schizophrenic symptoms.

When we read Freud's explanation of psychotic symptoms, the picture which readily comes to mind is that of binaural recordings. One track carries the replica of sensory stimuli emanating from the external, unnamed objects themselves—tins would be the "repre­sentation of the thing." The other track carries acoustic vibrations caused by the sounds of the word which once had been heard in connection with the object, in Freud's language the "representation of the word." If the whole "representation of the object" is to be­come conscious, it is necessary that both tracks be synchronized.

Freud's theory presupposes that a "pure," unconscious "representa­tion of the thing" exists somewhere in a "psychic system." It al­legedly consists of sensory traces which in themselves are nameless, wordless. There is not the slightest evidence, however, for the existence of such a wordless "representation of the thing." All evidence seems to indicate that the perception of a "thing" and 'language" in its basic meaning belong together from the begin­ning—unless we arbitrarily restrict the concept of language to mean nothing but the sounding out of words. But it is more than this.

⁵ Ibid., p. 201.

⁶ hoc. cit.

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Even if a small child, for instance, knows no other names but "papa" and "mama," it is still capable of perceiving and understand­ing a table standing in the middle of the room as being something different from the parents. It will be able to point to it, indicate it, if only by stretching out its forefinger toward it without uttering a sound. This child would not, however, be able to indicate a thing as something particular if he did not already exist in the realm of language." For understanding something as something, marking it, spotting it, denoting it, indicating it, necessarily presupposes lan­guage, even though the perceived characteristic of the thing cannot be named as yet by audibly perceptible names. We need only recall the origin of the very word "indicate." Its root is the Latin dicere, to say, to tell, to speak. No saying, no telling, no indicating could ever occur if not on the basis of language.

Many other phenomena, too, clearly demonstrate the fact that language and the thing it denotes belong together. We are thinking, for instance, of the everyday experience of perceiving a thing, the specific meaning of which we are fully aware of but the name of which does not come to mind. I may have the word "on the tip of my tongue." Yet I cannot find it. To be able to hunt for this word, to know that a specific word denotes this particular thing, is pos­sible only within the realm of language.

These phenomena reveal the superficiality of all those modern theories about human language which demote it to a derivative product of the primitive sounds of animals and to acoustic signals secondarily attached to the objects only for informative purposes. For the use of words as informative signals always presupposes an understanding of a thing's meaning which has to be signalized as that something. This understanding of its meaning already pre­supposes the phenomenon of "language." Apart from this general insight we also become aware in particular that Freud's theory of "unconscious representations of things" which exist independently of and separated from "representations of words" can arise only within an immensely reduced conception of the nature of things and of human language. We have touched on both subjects before: Freud's conception of words was discussed in the section on the unconscious (pp. 85ft.); his inadequate conception of things (shared by the scientific world of his time) was discussed in the chapter on symbols in an earlier book.⁷ In this connection it will

⁷ M. Boss, The Analysis of Dreams, New York, 1958.

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suffice to point out that the supposed separation of thing and word in schizophrenic phenomena cannot be found in any of the examples Freud gives if one leaves intact the full meaning-content of the different "things." For instance, the somatic state of Freud's patient as she described it was reduced by him from the start to an isolated "representation of the organ." In doing this Freud cut off an im­portant part of the meaningful (incorrectly called "symbolic") con­tent of the phenomenon itself. If one abstains from Freud's artificial, intellectual reduction of the state as reported by this patient, it seems clear that all her words, and the "things" she referred to in saying them, belonged to one and the same meaning-content of her world, namely, to that of twisting and changing position. The patient had perceived only one thing that was meaningful to her. Her existence had begun to be engaged in a different relation to her world, a rela­tion that was twisted and changed in position when judged from the point of view of her previous condition. She became aware of her changed and twisted attitude toward the world in the way and in terms which Freud called "organ-speech." Other schizo­phrenics might have perceived the same fact through their "hal­lucinatory" voices. The basis, however, for the possibility of such "organ-speech" is to be sought in the fact that our physical being is only a partial sphere of our total existence; as such it participates directly in our relationships to everything we encounter. The so-called sense organ "eye," for instance, belongs to the seeing way of our world-disclosing relationships—so directly that we do not see because we have eyes, but, rather, we can have eyes only be­cause we are primordially seeing, meaning-elucidating beings. It is the same basic constitution of Dasein which enables us to use "somatomorphic" language, and the same which makes possible hysterical symptoms. Freud, therefore, pointed out that "organ-speech" is common to both hysterics and schizophrenics. He also pointed out the different way in which the two types of patients use "organ-speech" when he stated, "A hysterical woman would, in the first example, have in fact convulsively twisted her eyes, instead of having the impulse to do so or the sensation of doing so."⁸ A hysterical woman also would have changed the position of her body herself instead of having felt "as though somebody else was putting her into a position" (see p. 213).

⁸S. Freud, "The Unconscious," pp. 198-199.

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We believe that the decisive difference between hysterics and schizophrenics lies precisely in the fact that schizophrenics do not actually carry out such movements themselves, and not in the as­sumed splitting of "representation of the word" and "representation of the thing." This decisive difference indicates that the hysteric has less fallen prey to other people, or is less involved in their ways of existing than the schizophrenic; the hysteric has achieved a com­paratively more authentic being-himself, although he has by no means reached a normally independent and free state appropriate to his own self. The greater authenticity of hysteric patients and of healthy people is a result of the greater freedom they have in their meaning-disclosing relationships to what they encounter compared to what schizophrenics have at their disposal. This is why the hysteric rolls her eyes herself, even though she does not want to admit to herself the reason why. A schizophrenic, on the other hand, feels that this is being done to him, that it comes from some­where else, from something or someone outside himself. This means that schizophrenic patients are even less able than hysterical ones adequately to assemble their possibilities of relating to what dis­closes itself in the light of their existence into an independent and responsible selfhood of their own. All this belongs to the phe­nomenon which present-day psychopathology reduces to the highly abstract conception of schizoid or schizophrenic "ego weakness." This notion is as inadequate as the conception of the ego weakness of melancholies. A psychic thing like an ego cannot be said to be weak, because no such thing actually exists. Conceptions such as ego, ego weakness, or ego strength are nothing but intellectual and artificial reifications of certain ways of relating to disclosed world phenomena. It is the way and the manner of an entire existence's relating to the world which, in the case of schizophrenics and melancholies, lacks independence and freedom. One of the most important differences between melancholic and schizophrenic pa­tients lies in their respective reactions to this non-authenticity and lack of freedom. Whereas the melancholies openly give in to it, the schizophrenics try to withdraw themselves as much as possible from the others to whom they would so easily fall prey.

What in our view appears as a difference between psychotic and hysteric patients—a difference, that is, in the degree to which all possibilities of relating of a Dasein are taken over into an inde­pendent selfhood—did not escape Freud's attention either. But

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his theory imposed barriers on him, so that he could differentiate between schizophrenia and hysteria only by postulating a more or less thorough "flight of the ego" in schizophrenia, a flight accom­plished by the withdrawal of "conscious cathexes" in both instances. Freud's understanding appears less adequate to us than ours for two reasons. It is not clear, given the "ego's" essential constitution as described in psychoanalytic literature, how the ego could "flee." Nor does the concept of "conscious cathexis" provide a basis for an understanding of human perception.

However, we have not yet arrived at a satisfactory understanding of the specific schizophrenic way of existing. All the schizophrenic characteristics which we have so far tried to demonstrate cannot, for example, account for the rise of those very typical schizophrenic phenomena which psychiatry calls "hallucinations" and "delusions." Many a healthy child, for instance, is as dependent on, and dissolved in, his parents' existences as schizophrenics are lost to the persons or objects to which they are relating in a hallucinatory way. Never­theless, not even the most immature infants suffer from debilitating hallucinations (unless we mistake certain authors' theoretical as­sertions and hypothetical inferences for actual facts). Is it because the existence of even a very small child is already—on the whole— assembled to a more independent selfhood as compared to the schizophrenics? Or is it rather because schizophrenics—being no longer wholly children—are claimed by phenomena which a child is spared?

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