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270 Impact of Daseinsanalysis on Traditional Psychoanalytic Techniques

ness." Here he would no longer be hemmed in by feelings of guilt, but would be guaranteed the capacity for guiltless enjoyment.¹

In contrast to Freud, Daseinsanalysis acknowledges more than guilt feelings, certainly more than the secondary, externally de­termined ones which can be removed by psychoanalysis. In the view of analysis of Dasein, man is primarily guilty. His primary guilt starts at birth. For it is then that he begins to be in debt to his Dasein, insofar as carrying out all the possibilities for living of which he is capable is concerned. Throughout his life, man remains guilty in this sense, i.e., indebted to all the requests that his future keeps in store for him until he breathes his last. Also, as we have pointed out, every act, every decision, every choice, involves the rejection of all the other possibilities which also belong to a human being at a given moment. For man can engage his existence in only one of the myriads of his possible relationships at a time. In this twofold sense, he must always remain behind, so to speak. This is as much a part of fundamental human nature as the other existentialia (cf. pp. 40 ff.). Man's existential guilt consists in his failing to carry out the mandate to fulfill all his possibilities. Man is aware of existential guilt when he hears the never-ending call of his con­science. This essential, inevitable being-in-debt is guilt, and not merely a subjective feeling of guilt. It precedes all psychologically understandable feelings of guilt, no matter what neurotic guise these may appear in. Because of existential being-in-debt (ex­perienced as guilt), even the most skillfully conducted psycho­analysis cannot free man of guilt. Actually, not a single analysand could be found in the whole world who has been transformed into a really guiltless person by psychoanalytic treatment. The most—and the worst—an analysis can accomplish in this regard is to deafen a patient to his pangs of conscience, and this is not to his advantage. The ideally new man, liberated from guilt by psychoanalysis, is an antiquated myth: charming and beautiful but, alas, incapable of realization.²

Psychoanalysis, however, can accomplish something else. It can

¹ For Freud's views regarding the topics alluded to in this paragraph, see, for
example, New Introductory Lectures in Psycho-Analysis, New York, 1933, pp. 89,
112, 223, trans, by W. J. H. Sprott; The Ego and the Id, London, 1957, pp. 47-50,
trans, by Joan Riviere; Totem and Taboo, in SE, Vol. XIII, pp. 68, 144.

² See M. Boss, "Anxiety, Guilt, and Psychotherapeutic Liberation," Review of
Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, Vol. II, 1962.

Further Daseinsanalytic Corrections in Therapy 271

elucidate the past, present, and future of a patient's life to the point where he becomes thoroughly aware of his existential being-in-debt. This in turn enables him to acknowledge his debt, to say "yes" to it and take it upon himself. He becomes aware of his possibilities for living through listening to the call of his conscience; he can take them over responsibly, stand by himself, and thus make them part of himself.

Once a person has been freed for his essential and existential being-in-debt, he no longer experiences neurotic feelings of guilt. These latter did not originate in himself, but derive from a foreign and crippling mentality which his educators forced upon him. He had fallen prey to modes of life which were alien to him, but he could not shake them off. Such neurotic feelings of guilt continually increase existential guilt as well, since they result in a steadily increasing debt in regard to a fulfillment of one's own existence. As a result, the call of conscience becomes increasingly persistent. But the patient, caught in acquired moralistic concepts, misunderstands this voice as a demand to follow ever more rigidly a mode of living essentially foreign to himself. A vicious circle results. Only analysis can break its spell.

If a patient reaches the goal of Daseinsanalysis, that is, if he freely accepts his debt to his existence, he reaches at the same time the goal Freud had in mind—full capacity for work and enjoyment. But he will no longer use these capacities in the service of egotistic, power—or pleasure—tendencies. Rather he will let all his possibilities of relating to the world be used as the luminated realm into which all he encounters may come to its full emergence, into its genuine being, and unfold in its meaning to the fullest possible extent. Man's option to respond to this claim or to choose not to do so seems to be the very core of human freedom. Once this kind of basic freedom is reached, the former burdens of a bad conscience and of guilt feelings give way without further ado to a happy readiness for being thus needed by the phenomena of our world (cf. pp. 47 ff.).

At the same time as this Daseinsanalytic understanding of man's existence reveals its deep and inexhaustible meaningfulness, it is also able to define man's basic morality. Mankind's ethics becomes self-evident on the basis of such an understanding of man's essence. No so-called ethical values need be added a posteriori.

In the next, and final, chapter a patient of ours articulates in his

272 Impact of Daseinsamlysis on Traditional Psychoanalytic Techniques

own language his maturing into this kind of essential human free­dom. His statements may be of even greater concern to psycho­therapists and psychoanalysts because of the fact that he was suf­fering from that neurosis which seems to be emerging as the specific and most frequent illness of our time—what may appropriately be called "a modern neurosis of dullness or boredom."

Daseinsanalytically Modified Treatment or a Modern Neurosis or Dullness and the Patient's Comments on tne Modifications

The patient was a physician, aged thirty-two, of good middle-class background, single, and the adherent of no particular religious faith. The account of his life revealed that, as far back as he could remember, the patient had been dogged by severe and unremitting feelings of guilt which had made his whole existence a continuous succession of self-punitive and self-destructive acts. He had already undergone, from his twenty-fifth to twenty-eighth year, a four-hun-dred-and-twenty-hour comprehensive analysis, which the therapist had endeavored to conduct entirely in the spirit of the original orthodox theory of Freud. His so-called free associations and his dreams in the course of this first therapy led the patient to an ever more self-evident conviction of a crass Oedipus and castration complex.

He had often dreamed of a sensual relationship with a maternal figure, several times with his actual mother. Each time a punish­ment ensued, at the hands of a paternal dream figure aiming at the utterly wanton destruction of typical, wholly phallic symbols. Neither the dreamer nor the analyst could avoid the conviction that the self-destructive actions of his waking life merely served to materialize his intent to mollify his guilt feelings and his castration anxiety. Amid the multiplicity of possible phallic symbols, the choice gradually narrowed more and more exclusively to church towers, especially those of high Gothic style. Once, for example, the dreamer found himself on the ground floor of a church tower of this sort, where an old man who bore the unmistakable features

Translated by Elsa Lehman, M.D.

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274 Impact of Daseinsanalysis on Traditional Psychoanalytic Techniques

of his former anatomy instructor, wielding a curious, enormous, knife-like instrument, struck at the foundations of the tower in an effort to demolish it and to bury the dreamer in the rubble. The instrument resembled an incredible enlargement of just the sort of dissecting scalpel that the dreamer had used in the first semester of his medical studies.

Although the patient, through the cautious references of the analyst, learned to see a penis symbol in this sort of dream church tower, and to recognize in the anatomy instructor his castrating father in symbolic disguise, nothing changed during the three-year analysis, in either the dreary monotony of his dream life, the stereotyped character of his waking life, or the chronically,mpjrose_ climate of his state of mind.

His guilt feelings were alleviated somewhat by his decision, reached sometime during the fourth year of analysis, to change his analyst. The patient felt much more secure in the new therapy, because he no longer was required to He on a couch, but could sit opposite his doctor, enveloped in the companionable atmosphere of a cloud of cigarette smoke. The second analyst, in contrast to his predecessor, saw the patient's dream churches as religious images. In weekly dialogues, sometimes lasting several hours, in which the analyst took the main part (again in sharp contrast to the Freudian method) the patient was led, under the persuasive burden of evi­dence of innumerable mythological and ethnological references, to the conviction that religious thoughts and notions in general cor­respond to a primordial psychic function. He learned to see that there was as much "psychic reality" attached to these as to his sexual fantasies.

The patient seized all too eagerly upon the concept that his religious dreams had their fundamental origin in archetypal struc­tures, common to humankind, in the collective unconscious of his psyche. There ensued the reassuring awareness that his thoughts, which had often seemed peculiar and absurd to him, no longer isolated him from the general company of mankind.

But it was not long before the patient had once more arrived at a static condition. At the end of the second year of this psycho­therapy, the analyst explained that he had now taught him every­thing in his power to teach, and that little could be gained by a continuation of therapy. Henceforth, he added, the patient could rely on his own healthy understanding and need in no way regard

Daseinsamlytically Modified Treatment of a Neurosis of Dullness 275

himself as sick or deviant. The patient did his best. He tried to muster a livelier interest in his medical activities and he managed at the same time, through admirable tenacity and conscientious­ness, to thoroughly acquaint himself with psychological literature. However, an inexplicable dissatisfaction with himself and with the world in general never left him. He attempted to develop a hobby, in the hope that this would put more meaning into his life. He threw himself into collecting crystal. These precious items, how­ever, only beguiled him into a ceaseless cleaning and polishing of their sparkling surfaces. Within a few months this diversion had mushroomed into a rampant compulsion toward fanatic cleanliness. His clothing, as well, had to appear ever more immaculate, one indispensable detail being a pristine white handkerchief at all times.

He cursed himself for being an overbred aesthete, but his self-condemnation did nothing to help him—or his environment, which bore the brunt of his pedantry.

His search for a third psychotherapist, after a two-year interval, was prompted primarily by an inner lack of direction and an emptiness of feeling that made him regard everything with a jeer­ing and jaundiced eye.

At the onset of the new therapy, the patient let the therapist know that it was only faute de mieux that he had once more con­sulted a psychotherapist; his experience had amply shown him that |n psychology everything runs in a closed circle Astutely, he proved to his analytic partner with a nice clarity that it made no difference, essentially, whether something spiritual, like religious feelings, were regarded as a mere sublimation of an infantile libidinous fixation, or if one thought of it as created and shaped into a psychic function by an assumed (hypothetical) "archetype" in the "collective un­conscious." For if one postulates an A deducible from а В or а С or an X, one has already debased A as A to a derivative, non-autono­mous something. Where was there something genuine and real to be found which would make life worth living? Kleist had been thoroughly consistent in taking his own life when, after reading Kant's philosophy of the inscrutability of things in themselves, he saw himself as living in a world of unreal mirages. The world of modern psychologists, he maintained, was several degrees more spectral, for in it one reverted to a concept of "psychic realities" before having demonstrated the existence of a single "psyche."

276 Impact of Daseinsanalysis on Traditional Psychoanalytic Techniques

At this juncture the analysand was advised to try the thing with­out psychology. He was to lie down as he had done during the first ""analysis and, without reservation or any regard either for himself or the analyst, say everything that came to his mind—whether thoughts, ideas, fantasies, dreams, memories, emotions, or bodily sensations—however painful, shameful, seemingly out of place, or worthless they seemed to be. The patient was quite taken back by this challenge to clarify his being and find himself without psy­chology; however, he was willing to forgo further scientific dis­cussion and to comply unquestioningly with the new proposal. / The first major difficulty of his third psychoanalysis appeared /about six months after the therapy had begun. The analysand began I to idream, almost nightly, of locked toilets, which is always a re-I /liable indication that the person has something to release from L.the innermost depths of his being but is still disinclined to do so. At first the patient felt only annoyance, for these dreams seemed to take him right back to his first, Freudian analysis, which had at times been characterized by the same sort of nocturnal experi­ence. He was also highly displeased because the "old 'say nothing'" on the part of the doctor had begun again. The psychoanalyst, in accordance with the wise advice of Freud, restricted himself to drawing the patient's attention, in one or two sentences, to the resistiveness, the lockedness, of the toilet doors in his dreams, thereby questioning the inaccessibility of these dirty places for the dreamer. The analyst was prepared to precipitate a stormy resist­ance to the therapy in this painfully well-bred aesthete, this hyper-glea n crystal c ollector, by rattling at the doors of his locked toilets

[

with his questions. But perhaps he overestimated the capacity of his patient, whose relation to the obtruding fecal sphere and to all "lowly" bodiliness rapidly took on a severely psychotic form once he could no longer ward off these realms of his world by the com­pulsive collecting and cleaning of "pure" crystal glass. ^A dream supplied the prelude to the psychosis. Once again, the patient founoThimself standing outside the locked door of a toilet. But this time his urge to defecate was so overpowering that he flung himself against the door with all his might and burst it open. But instead of getting through to the toilet, as he had expected, he discovered he was standing in the middle of a large church, directly in front of the baptismal font. A thick rope hung from the vault of the ceiling over the font. It was the rope with which the

Daseinsanalytically Modified Treatment of a Neurosis of Dullness 277

sexton tolled the largest bell in the tower. Now at his wit's end, he had no choice but to hoist himself, on the bell rope, high up to the baptismal font where, still clutching the rope, he relieved himself. His bowel movement would not stop; soon he was standing knee-deep in his own stool. He tried to escape the rising mass of excre­ment by scrambling up the rope to the church tower, but his feet were stuck fast in the feces. And somehow, with all this frantic scrambling, the bell rope had twisted itself inextricably around his neck. Besides this, his frenzied efforts to climb up the rope had meanwhile set the bell in motion in the tower. Worst of all, with each resounding peal of the bell, the rope, in some inexplicable way, wound itself around the revolving axis of the bell, so that, between the tug of the bell rope dragging him upward and the binding mass of feces tightening its hold on his feet, he was rapidly being torn in two. In the agony of this bodily torture he startled out of the dream.

From the moment he wakened, the patient heard "voices" which

_ vilified bim in abusive terms, calling him. "shitter." Worse even

than these ^auditory hallucinations^" he was distressed by folfactory-»

hallucinations." Wherever he went there was a noxious stench of

sewage and feces. He could scarcely be prevailed upon to eat. In

the days that followed, he raged against the analyst for having let

him feel the full filth of his bodiliness and having thereby robbed

him of his human dignity. In his fury he smashed two large flower

vases in the consulting room, dashing one on the floor and hurling

the other at the wall, narrowly missing the analyst's head. Before

he was through, the whole room was splashed with water and the

carpet strewn with bits of flowers and splinters of crockery. His

rage having spent itself against the imperturbable calm of his

doctor, he ran home weeping, crept into bed, closed his eyes, and

lapsed into a catatonic state for two days. Psychiatrically, the whole

clinical picture suggested a typical schizophrenic episode, rather

than a hysterical one. The analyst stood by hi s patien t now more

than ever. He sat withjii m the whole day long and throughout most,

of the nightjjie tubejЈe^him; and he could not be dissuaded from

taking oyjr^alone and with his own hands, the bill care of his

, patient. Forty-eight hours later, as he woke from his stupor, the

j patient flung his arms round the doctor tempestuously, like a very

(_^ small child hugs its mother, and called out a hundred times over,

Ј"Mummy, Mummy, dear, dear." -Then he opened his eyes wide, as

278 Impact of Daseinsanalysis on Traditional Psychoanalytic Techniques

if coming out of a profound sleep. By the end of the next day he had recovered his composure but was still terribly anxious. A few weeks later the therapist could resume the classical psychoanalytic technique, with the patient reclining. The patient thanked him, especially for having accepted him with all his earthy needs and for allowing him to experience, literally for the first time in his life, that one need not be ashamed of one's bodiliness, need not ve­hemently belie its existence and shut it out of one's sight.

In the ^initial dreamj) immediately before the outbreak of his confusion, ЈEe~patient had been completely overwhelmed by the С earthy, excremental realm. This had taken the form of his being stuck in the baptismal font and his panic-stricken efforts to climb out. During the subsequent psychotic waking state, his whole existence was equally absorbed in his relation to the excremental sphere. He was then even less able to relate himself to it as a free and in­dependent self; his relation to sewage had gained such complete sway over him that he was wholly delivered over to the shit realm, his whole being steeped in filth. This condition—his complete lapse into the realm of the excremental—accounted for the fact that he heard, tasted, and smelled only shittiness, that he could perceive nothing but this in everything he encountered, and that he suffered from "auditory and olfactory hallucinations." Such sensory "delusions" cannot be understood in the reverse sense— that is, as derived from a sort of inner affect or from stimuli within a sense organ, or as being localized in a cerebral area from which they are projected (cf. pp. 125 ff.). They can, however, be under­stood on the basis of the condition of this whole existence, of its having completely fallen prey to the realm of the excremental. The ( only thing required, then, was to grant the patient the possibility J of returning for a little while to a time before the false switch) point in his life history, of withdrawing into the behavior of a small) jL /child. This was the relation to the world which, in fact, corresponded ^! /to the actual state of his existence. Therefore it was here he could* ' consolidate himself, fairly rapidly, into a genuine self, could reach what he had hitherto failed to achieve—the ability to take over independently and to assume responsibly, all possibilities of related-ness, including relatedness to fecal, earthy realms of the human world. From this time on, he could gain a freer, more open, and more loving relation to ever-broadening regions.

Daseinsanalytically Modified Treatment of a Neurosis of Dullness 279

One thing remained very difficult for the patient to forgive. Over and over again, he asked what evil genius had allowed him to commit the blasphemy of bringing his stool into the church and into the baptismal font, of all places?

One question of his analyst helped him at this juncture: Is it not of the very nature of man that he must at all times reconcile himself to his essential state of being spread between heaven and ( earth? Perhaps it was precisely this tension that had driven him to distraction in his dream and in the subsequent psychotic crisis of his waking life, since he had never permitted either the earthy-excremental nor the heavenly-holy an entry into his world and had never accepted either in its own right. He had thrust them both away and had interposed an irreconcilable, oppositional distance between them and himself. The latter part of this assumption on the part of his doctor was vehemently contested by the patient. After all, he asserted, during his second analysis he had arrived at a comprehensive grasp of the psychic truth of an archetypal divine image in the collective unconscious of the human psyche. The analyst inquired why it was, then, that almost every night he dreamed of church interiors—how did he account for the curious and persistent alternation of these dreams with further excremental dreams and dreams of sexuality? The churches of his dreams were sometimes dark and sometimes luminous, with an unearthly bluish light radiating from the dome. Christ Himself had appeared bodily in a recent dream and had looked at him silently, filled with expec­tation. Another time he had heard the mighty voice of God reverberating throughout a vast cathedral like a sea of pealing bells, and saying, "I am who I am."

Since the time he had embraced his analyst on waking from the catatonic stupor, he had experienced no further auditory halluci­nations in his waking state. The patient could not argue the fact that all his dream experiences were intensely, shatteringly vivid, and sometimes so beatific that they illumined his whole waking life as well. Finally, he had to admit that, with all his deep psycho­logical ideas, he was at bottom utterly helpless in the grip of his religious experiences. In this way he could mature to face the question of why it was that he dared not let these appearances of the heavenly-divine be the immediate realities as which they pre­sented themselves to him. Why did he constantly have to shield

280 Impact of Daseinsanalysis on Traditional Psychoanalytic Techniques

himself from the challenge they offered by switching to a psycho­logical abstraction, such as a hypothetical archetype? While he had been wracked by his excrement dreams and his psychotic confusion, he had not for a moment doubted the immediate reality of bodili-ness.

After another six months of analysis, during which, to an increas­ing extent, the analyst needed only to be there, saying nothing, but open for him, the patient no longer needed to understand objects and fellow humans as enigmatic and ghostly reflections, as mere psychic realities thrust from an inscrutable something into his con­sciousness by means of sense organs which serve as an archetypal or other sort of refracting lens and are part of a complex psychic telescopic system. Nor did they appear to him as a purely extant something, inaccessible to direct approach and invested with mean­ing only in the light of world images and world molds [Welt-entwiirfe]. He was able to make room for, and take seriously, everything that came his way, from the most earthy to the most holy, as the immediate intrinsic realities they are, appearing in the light of his Dasein. In this way he had gained hisjreedom and felt / himself complete and whole.

For a long while before this, however, he had been constantly

tormented by the dream of the Gothic church tower and his

anatomy instructor which, during the first stage of his analysis, had

been comprehensible only as a symbolically disguised representation

of his castrating father. The dream ceased tormenting him only

when the patient had become able to dare to let the church tower

be the church tower, and the man the anatomy instructor, and to

allow both to approach him in their full genuine meaning and

-content. It dawned on him that a Gothic church tower, in and for

I itself, is a mighty gesture toward heaven. As he put it, "The church

| tower directs the gaze of men from far around to the site of God's

(jhouse."

For a very long time, in fact since the beginning of his medical training, the patient had closed his mind to the beckoning call of I the church tower. It was the anatomy instructor, the object of his i admiration, who through his enlightenment and cynicism had j brought about the collapse of the patient's faith in God. An im-- portant hfe potentiality—namely, his basic religious relationships-had thereby been entombed and buried for the patient. As has been

Daseinsanalytically Modified Treatment of a Neurosis of Dullness 281

pointed out, a denial and a closing of oneself to any possibility of behavior brings the failure to attain one's true self and wholeness, and thus man is inevitably left with an indebtedness in regard to what had been originally entrusted to him. All guilt feelings are deeply rooted in this indebtedness, however multifarious the guises and disguises in which they may appear (cf. p. 48). This indebted­ness also underlay the guilt feelings of our patient. The original and ultimate cause for their emergence was his evasion of his full bodily as well as religious possibilities of behavior. But he had not fled merely from an encounter with a psychological symbol of libidinous or archetypal nature. He had closed himself to the very disclosure of the earthy and the divine itself in their whole immediacy.

About eleven years have passed since the menacing psychotic incident which this analysand went through during the final section of his analysis. He has since married and had four children. The marriage is an unusually animated one which has brought abundant human enrichment to both partners. In his profession he is known as a man of more than ordinary willingness and capacity for work who radiates a warm cordiality and an imperturbable cheerfulness. He himself is thankful for each new day, because the slightest perception, the smallest act, has acquired new and richer meaning for him.

Not long ago this exceptionally intelligent and emotionally highly differentiated man attempted, in a letter to his third analyst, to explain why he had failed to get further in his two previous analyses. The fecal sphere already occupied him tremendously in the first analysis, and it certainly could not be said of the first analyst that he had failed to draw his patient's attention to the prevailing anality of his dreams. "I didn't dare, however," he wrote,

to let myself go into this area of filth without reservation, because I somehow sensed from the beginning that the spiritual, religious sphere had no sustaining strength for my analyst. He continually tried to reduce my dream churches to genital symbols. The entire domain of the holy seemed to him to be merely a sort of sub­limated haze. That explains why there was no rope in the psychic compass of that first analytic situation, like the one fastened to the ceiling in my church-excrement dream, to which I could cling and anchor myself in my descent into the earthy, fecal region. The danger was far too imminent that I would be plunged into filth and chaos beyond recall. I must admit that it's only quite recently

282 Impact of Daseinsanalysis on Traditional Psychoanalytic Techniques

that I've been able to see this clearly. I'm quite convinced, though, that this was the reason for the first failure.

I think of the time I spent with my second analyst as a very pleasant sojourn in an elegant roof garden, decked with flowers and well fenced in, atop an American skyscraper. Not the faintest breath of the buried earth could penetrate the asphalt layers of the streets below to reach me at that height. Not a single fecal dream turned up in those two years, and in the psychotherapeutic discussions we were miles from the small-child state to which I was hurtled back in that confusion I experienced when I was with you. It was only through it, though, that I could find my rebirth and reach the starting point of my way to maturity. Since every­thing below remained sealed over, I could not genuinely expand upward either. It is only now that I fully understand how it was that during the last part of the analysis, with you, there was a continuous interweaving of sexual and excremental themes with the religious experiences w hich gripped m, e so profo nnrlly ^TT^n't Nipb^cbf. sav some w here₁ \ The higher one will ascend toward!

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