Abstract
The relation between Heidegger and psychology has long been a neglected theme. Outside narrowly professional circles — particularly the school of Daseinsanalyse inaugurated by Binswanger — the implications of Heidegger’s thought for psychology and psychotherapy have tended to be deemphasized if not entirely discounted. One reason for the neglect has been the scarcity of relevant source materials in this field. During the last few years this situation has dramatically changed, mainly due to the publication of the so-called (Zollikon Seminars Zollikoner Seminare) in 19870.1
This is a sharply condensed and revised version of an essay which appeared as a chapter in my Between Freiburg and Frankfurt: Toward a Critical Ontology (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991).
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Notes
Martin Heidegger, Zollikoner Seminare: Protokolle-Gespräche-Briefe, ed. Medard Boss ( Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1987 ).
Heidegger’s opposition to psychologism can actually be traced back to his doctoral dissertation of 1914 (on The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism). Regarding the fervor of this opposition compare Boss’s comments: `Even before our first encounter, I had heard of Heidegger’s abysmal aversion to all modern scientific psychology. To me, too, he made no secret of his opposition to it. His repugnance mounted considerably after I had induced him with much guile and cunning to delve directly for the first time into Freud’s own writings.... He simply did not want to have to accept that such a highly intelligent and gifted man as Freud could produce such artificial, inhuman, indeed absurd and purely fictitious constructions about homo sapiens.“ See Medard Boss, ”Martin Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminars,“ in Keith Hoeller, ed., Heidegger and Psychology, Special Issue of Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry (1988), p. 9.
Heidegger, Sein and Zeit,llth ed. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1967), par. 9 and 10, p. 45.
Zollikoner Seminare,pp. 3–4. The above citations are paraphrases due to the absence of a verbatim protocol.
Zollikoner Seminare,pp. 197–199. An aggravated case of reductive scientism, in Heidegger’s view, is the resort to physiological or chemical explanations of behavior (p. 200): “From the fact that chemical interventions in the human organism (itself chemically construed) produce certain effects one concludes that chemical physiology is the ground and cause of human psychic life. But this is a fallacy.”
Zollikoner Seminare,pp. 217–219.
Zollikoner Seminare,pp. 207–210, 228–229.
Zollikoner Seminare,pp. 204, 207, 220, 232–233, 235. Compare also the comment (p. 215): “The lived human body can in principle never be regarded as a mere being-at-hand (Vorhandenes),if one wishes to treat it properly; if I regard it in this manner, I have already destroyed it as a lived body.”
Zollikoner Seminare,pp. 7–8, 20–21.
Zollikoner Seminare,pp. 14–16, 30–32, 35–37, 40.
Zollikoner Seminare,pp. 42–44, 47–48, 54–55, 60–61, 77, 84–85. In this context, Heidegger offered a detailed phenomenological analysis of representation (Vergegenwärtigung) seen as an existential “being-with” (Sein bei) things in the world (pp. 86–96).
Zollikoner Seminare,pp. 102–104, 106, 115–116, 118. Heidegger applied this notion of gesture also to the phenomenon of blushing. Rather than simply expressing an inner condition, he stated (p. 118), blushing too “is a gesture insofar as the blushing person relates to fellow humans.... I emphasize this so much in order to lure you away from the misconstrual as expression. The French psychologists also misconstrue everything as an expression of inner-psychic states — instead of seeing the body-phenomenon in its interhuman relatedness.” Regarding psychosomatics compare also these comments in a discussion with Boss (pp. 248–249): “The term `psychosomatic medicine’ attempts to synthesize two entities which do not exist.... Soma and psyche are related to Dasein not in the way that red and green relate to color, because psyche and soma are not two types of the genus `man.”’
Zollikoner Seminare,pp. 150–151, 155–156.
Zollikoner Seminare,pp. 180–185, 187.
Joseph J. Kockelmans, “Daseinsanalysis and Freud’s Unconscious,” in Hoeller, ed., Heidegger and Psychology, pp. 22, 24–26. Among relevant literature, Kockelmans refers primarily to Ludwig Binswanger, “Heidegger’s Analytic of Existence and Its Meaning for Psychiatry,” in Joseph Needleman, ed., Being-in-the-World: Selected Papers of Ludwig Binswanger (New York: Basic Books, 1963 ), pp. 206–221; and Medard Boss, Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis ( New York: Basic Books, 1963 ).
Kockelmans, “Daseinsanalysis and Freud’s Unconscious,” pp. 28–31. The last citation is from Sigmund Feud, “The Unconscious” (1915), in Standard Edition (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), Vol. 14, pp. 166–167.
Kockelmans, “Daseinsanalysis and Freud’s Unconscious,” pp. 32, 34–35. Compare Needleman, ed., Being-in-the-World,p. 100; Boss, Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis, pp. 90–93.
William J. Richardson, “The Place of the Unconscious in Heidegger,” in Hoeller, ed., Heidegger and Psychology, p. 187; the article appeared first in Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, Vol. 5 (1965), pp. 265–290.
Kockelmans “Daseinsanalysis and Freud’s Unconscious,” pp. 32–34, 37–39.
William J. Richardson, “The Mirror Inside: The Problem of the Self,” in Heidegger and Psychologypp. 96, 98–99. Compare also Jacques Lacan Écrits: A Selectiontrans. A. Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 4.
Richardson, “The Mirror Inside,” pp. 101–107; see also Lacan Écritspp. 61, 66.
Richardson, “The Mirror Inside,” pp. 107–110; see also Lacan Écritspp. 166, 168, 171.
Zollikoner Seminare,pp. 189–191, 233.
Zollikoner Seminare,pp. 58–59. At a later point (p. 63) Heidegger characterizes our present age of technological “progress” as an age of privation.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis: Preface to Hesnard’s L’Oeuvre de Freud” (1960), in Alden L. Fischer, ed., The Essential Writings of Merleau-Ponty (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), p. 81. Regarding exegesis, the essay (p. 86) recommends that we “learn to read Freud the way we read a classic, that is, by understanding his words and theoretical concepts, not in their lexical and common meaning, but in the meaning they acquire from within the experience which they announce and of which we have behind our backs much more than a suspicion. Since our philosophy has given us no better way to express the intemporal,that indestructible element in us which, says Freud, is the unconscious itself, perhaps we should continue calling it the unconscious — so long as we do not forget that the word is the index of an enigma — because the term retains, like the algae or the stone one drags up, something of the sea from which it was taken.” The essay also contains a reference to “Doctor Lacan,” applauding him for going “beyond the limits of a philosophy of consciousness” and for thus “retracing the steps of a phenomenology which is deepening itself.”
Merleau-Ponty, “Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis,” pp. 84–87.
Zollikoner Seminare,pp. 123, 133, 139, 160.
Merleau-Ponty, “Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis,” p. 85. The paucity of references to “nature” in Being and Time has been duly noted by Graham Parkes who finds it “indeed disappointing that Heidegger failed to elaborate” on the notion in that work; see his “Thoughts on the Way: Being and Time via Lao-Chuang,” in Parkes, ed., Heidegger and Asian Thought (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987), p. 116. Parkes cites a “rather cryptic footnote” contained in an essay of 1929 which differentiates nature both from beingsat-hand and beings-to-hand: “The decisive thing is that nature lets itself be encountered neither in the surroundings of the environment (Umwelt) nor primarily as something to which we relate. Nature is originally manifest in Dasein insofar as the latter exists as disposed-attuned (befindlich-gestimmt) in the midst of what-is.” See Heidegger, “Vom Wesen des Grundes,” in Wegmarken (Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1967), pp. 51–52, note 55; trans. by Terrence Malik as The Essence of Reasons (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969), pp. 80–83, note 55.
Zollikoner Seminare,pp. 129, 143; also Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in David F. Krell, ed., Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 293. Regarding the status of nature in Heidegger’s work see the instructive essay by Manfred Riedel, “Naturhermeneutik and Ethik im Denken Heideggers,” Heidegger Studies,Vol. 5 (1989), pp. 153–172.
Merleau-Ponty, “Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis,” p. 83. Compare also Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955); Jürgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970); and Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy ( Boston: Beacon Press, 1979 ).
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Dallmayr, F. (1995). Heidegger and Freud. In: Babich, B.E. (eds) From Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire. Phaenomenologica, vol 133. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1624-6_33
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