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| Martin Heidegger at home in Freiburg |
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| Martin Heidegger and Medard Boss on the Feldweg south of Messkirch |
Heidegger's Zollikon Seminars
A 50th-anniversary revaluation
5. Seminar of 6 and 8 July 1965
‘Is the body and its bodying ... something somatic or something psychic or neither of the two?’
Anthony Stadlen
conducts
Inner Circle Seminar No. 217
Sunday 19 July 2015 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Between 1959 and 1969 the German philosopher Martin Heidegger conducted
seminars for psychiatrists in the Swiss psychiatrist Medard Boss’s house in
Zollikon near Zürich. Fifty years later almost
to the day, we focus on his seminar of 6 and 8 July 1965, the
fourth of his five that year.
He begins with ‘a whole sack full of questions arising from the previous
seminar’ – sixteen of them – which Boss has given him on his arrival. He
continues to bewilder his psychiatrist listeners by invoking a way of ‘bodily’ thinking that precedes any split into ‘soma’ and ‘psyche’.
He asks how such a ‘clever’ and ‘reasonable’ person as Descartes could come up with such a ‘strange’ theory, in which ‘the human being exists at first only for him- or herself alone without a relation to things’. (This is yet another of Heidegger’s pregnant observations made nonsense of by the authorised American translation, which mistranslates the last phrase as ‘alone by himself in relationship to things’. One of the purposes of these Inner Circle Seminars on the Zollikon Seminars is to correct some of these bizarre and confusing mistranslations for existential therapists and others who do not know German.)
He asks how such a ‘clever’ and ‘reasonable’ person as Descartes could come up with such a ‘strange’ theory, in which ‘the human being exists at first only for him- or herself alone without a relation to things’. (This is yet another of Heidegger’s pregnant observations made nonsense of by the authorised American translation, which mistranslates the last phrase as ‘alone by himself in relationship to things’. One of the purposes of these Inner Circle Seminars on the Zollikon Seminars is to correct some of these bizarre and confusing mistranslations for existential therapists and others who do not know German.)
He invokes a more primordial meaning of ‘count’ and ‘measure’. He points
out that, although the theory of relativity refers to ‘the position of the
observer’, natural science cannot understand or even ask what this means. He
invites the astonished participants to experience bodily the simple act of
measuring the diameter of a table.
This is an extraordinarily rich seminar, in which Heidegger covers a
great deal of ground, fundamental to what we try to do as psychotherapists. We
shall seek to recapture some of the spirit of this great seminar by trying to
re-think some of the questions he asks. We shall, for example, ourselves
meditatively reenact the measuring of a table while trying to maintain awareness
of ‘the body and its bodying’.
Heidegger says there is a need for doctors who think. Professor Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann
praises Boss as just such a ‘thinking doctor’. But we shall ask whether, in his
focus on doctors, Heidegger is himself colluding unreflectingly with Boss’s
vision of Daseinsanalysis as a medical enterprise.
Most of us – even if we call ourselves existential therapists and
phenomenologists – have been corrupted and confused by the ideology of
scientism. In this seminar we shall strive, through dialogue, to do justice to
Heidegger’s clarifying vision. If we cannot, then our ‘therapy’ remains
technological tinkering and our righteousness is as filthy
rags.
Venue: ‘Oakleigh’, 2A
Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £120, others £150, some bursaries; coffee, tea, biscuits, mineral water included; payable in advance; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 E-mail: stadlen@aol.com
The Inner Circle Seminars were founded by Anthony Stadlen in 1996 as an ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy. They have been kindly described by Thomas Szasz as ‘Institute for Advanced Studies in the Moral Foundations of Human Decency and Helpfulness’. But they are independent of all institutes, schools and colleges.
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