Thinking 1923
Martin Buber: I and Thou (1923)
Sigmund Freud: The Ego and the Id (1923)
Georg Groddeck: The Book of the It (1923)
Martin Heidegger: Ontology: Hermeneutics of Facticity (1923)
Centenary investigations
Anthony Stadlen
conducts by Zoom
Inner Circle Seminar No. 282
Sunday 23 April 2023
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
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| Sigmund Freud 1856-1939 |
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| Georg Groddeck 1866-1934 |
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| Martin Buber 1878-1965 |
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| Martin Heidegger 1889-1976 |
A century ago, in the single year 1923, three important books were published and an important course of lectures was delivered, books and lectures all in German.
In 1923, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) published Das Ich und das Es (later translated as The Ego and the Id) and Martin Buber (1878-1965) published Ich und Du (later translated as I and Thou).
Freud’s book, published in the third week of April 1923, is a statement of his later, ‘structural’, psychoanalytic theory. Buber’s book, published the same year, is a paradigmatic, if idiosyncratic, exposition of his dialogical existential thinking.
Both titles contain the word ‘Ich’ (‘I’), and both books are also concerned with ‘Es’ (‘it’). But the books, and even the titles, are strikingly different.
Freud reifies ‘ich’ and ‘es’ as ‘das Ich’ (‘the I’) and ‘das Es’ (‘the It’). There is phenomenological and common-sense validity in distinguishing between ‘ich’ (‘I’) and ‘es’ (‘it’), as one can say in German, for example, ‘ich träumte’ (‘I dreamt’) or ‘es träumte mir’ (‘it dreamt to me’); and these are different ways of speaking of dreaming. But is there such an entity as ‘das Ich’ or ‘das Es’ (‘the I’ or ‘the It’) to ‘do’ the dreaming? (Of course, ‘I’ and ‘it’ have different roles as pronouns referring to specific persons or objects, just as ‘there’ may refer to a specific place, but does not do so in ‘there is...’.)
A psychoanalytic committee in England supervised the translation of Freud’s works to try to ensure, among other requirements, that they would appear sufficiently ‘scientific’. To Freud’s dismay, but in line with the committee’s ideology, Joan Riviere translated ‘das Ich’ and ‘das Es’ into Latin: the book became, in her ‘English’ translation, The Ego and the Id (1927). This Latinised reification was retained in James Strachey’s (1961) revision of her translation in the English Standard Edition of Freud’s works.
Also in 1923, the psychoanalyst Georg Groddeck (1866-1934), an admirer and friend of Freud, published his own book Das Buch vom Es (The Book of the It). It was Groddeck who coined the term ‘das Es’ (‘the It’), which Freud adopted. But Groddeck was perhaps clearer than Freud that ‘das Es’ should not be reified as a pseudo-entity.
Peter Rudnytzky, who conducted Inner Circle Seminars Nos. 175 (1 April 2012: The Aetiology of Psychoanalysis) and 256 (1 April 2020: Mutual Analysis) and participated in the recent No. 280 (3 March 2023: Peter Lomas), has written that Groddeck’s The Book of the It is ‘by far the most profound and important’ of the four psychoanalytic works (the other three being by Sándor Ferenczi and Otto Rank) that constitute a contemporary ‘collective counterweight’ to the intrapsychic focus of The Ego and the Id, tending towards the dialogical discourse of Buber’s I and Thou.
Buber speaks straightforwardly of ‘Ich’ (‘I’) and ‘Du’ (‘You’). He contrasts Ich-Du with Ich-Es (I-it). Ronald Gregor Smith translated Buber’s book in 1937, rendering ‘Du’ as ‘Thou’; but Walter Kaufmann translated it in 1970, rendering ‘Du’ as ‘You’ throughout the book, while retaining ‘Thou’ in the title to avoid confusion. We shall discuss, among other things, Kaufmann’s profound introduction to his own translation of Buber’s book.
In the summer of the same year, 1923, in which Freud, Groddeck, and Buber published these books, the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) gave a course of lectures, Ontologie: Hermeneutik der Faktizität, at Freiburg University. The lectures were published in book form in 1988, and translated by John von Buren as Ontology: Hermeneutics of Facticity (2008).
Heidegger understands the genitive ‘of’ in ‘hermeneutics of facticity’ as subjective as well as objective, or perhaps as a genitive that transcends both subjective and objective: hermeneutics and facticity are, for him, inseparable. This lecture course is remarkable for, among other things, ‘tarrying for a while’ at the table in Heidegger’s house which he reveals not as a secondarily derived and abstracted object, but, primordially, through hermeneutic-phenomenological description and interpretation, as the site of many activities of himself, his wife, his young sons, and their guests. We shall compare this with Jane Austen’s account of the table in Fanny Price’s original family home in Mansfield Park (1816).
One might think that hermeneutics entail a dialectical interplay of interpretations, but these lectures include one of Heidegger’s most impassioned denunciations of dialectic as an approach to truth, a theme to which he was to return often elsewhere, for example in Being and Time (1927), where he describes dialectic as ‘a real philosophical embarrassment’. In these 1923 lectures he denounces dialectic as ‘double-sidedly unradical’, a ‘madame [Prokuristin] for the public whoring of the spirit’. We discussed this in Inner Circle Seminar No. 279 (27 January 2023).
Does this mean that Heidegger opposed Buber’s dialogical thinking? Clearly not; he reports or imagines a number of dialogues, for instance in his books Unterwegs zur Sprache (On the Way to Language) and Gelassenheit (Discourse on Thinking); and he likes to quote Hölderlin: ‘Seit ein Gespräch wir sind’ (‘Since we are a conversation’). He did say the Ich-Du relationship should be more accurately called a Du-Du relationship, but he had great respect for Buber; and after the second world war Heidegger wrote to his wife about Buber’s ‘wisdom’, and told a friend that he had ‘just had a beautiful conversation with Martin Buber’.
However, Heidegger does seem to have valued silence even above dialogue. Is this why Buber, perhaps paradoxically, chose silence by declining subsequent invitations to visit Heidegger and continue their conversations in his mountain hut?
Thus there were conversations between the psychoanalysts Freud and Groddeck and between the philosophers Buber and Heidegger.
The only meeting (or perhaps ‘mismeeting’, to use Buber’s term) between one of the psychoanalysts and one of the philosophers seems to have been when Buber visited Freud in 1908, only a year after Carl Jung and Ludwig Binswanger’s first visit to Freud, which we examined in Inner Circle Seminar No. 110 (4 March 2007). Buber was editing a series of books, Gesellschaft (Society), and hoped Freud would write a book, Neurosis as a Social Institution, for it. Freud, however, disdained philosophy, although he had attended Brentano’s lectures as a student. In any event, he did not write a book for Buber’s series; nor did he write a book with that title; but a number of his subsequent books, such as Totem and Taboo (1913), The Future of an Illusion (1927), and Civilisation and its Discontents (1930), do indeed discuss neurosis as a social institution, and religion as, in Freud’s view, one of that social institution’s major aspects.
Buber had spent a year as a young man studying with psychiatrists including Bleuler. In 1957 Buber gave the William Alanson White Memorial Lectures for psychiatrists and others and also engaged in a remarkable recorded and published dialogue with the psychotherapist Carl Rogers, as we discussed in Inner Circle Seminars Nos. 112 (22 April 2007) and 124 (10 February 2008).
Heidegger had discussions both with psychiatrists, including Binswanger, and with ‘schizophrenics’, who fascinated him. Heidegger had a ‘breakdown’ after the second world war and spent time in the Badenweiler sanatorium of the existential psychiatrist Viktor von Gebsattel. Between 1959 and 1969 Heidegger conducted the Zollikon Seminars for psychiatrists, psychotherapists, and others in the house of the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Medard Boss, to which we have devoted many Inner Circle Seminars.
It would be remarkable, though in a sense not surprising, given Boss’s deviousness, if in the course of his intensive conversations over more than two decades with Heidegger he had not described his revelatory personal experience as a student in Vienna in 1925 when he was a patient of Freud. Boss was, to be sure, as his colleague and successor Gion Condrau wrote, a ‘fantasist’: a spinner of tall tales, who, as proved by the research of Condrau and Anthony Stadlen, increased and multiplied the length of his brief analysis with Freud over the years of (literally) recounting it. But his report of how he was astonished by Freud’s warm, direct, non-‘technical’ way of relating to him has the ring of truth, and surely describes one of the founding experiences from which Boss’s vision of Daseinsanalysis sprang.
It is also entirely possible that Boss told Heidegger how Groddeck had taught him about dying, by his personal example and words when in 1934 he had come, as a patient, to die in Boss’s sanatorium at Bad Knonau near Zurich.
A century on, basing ourselves on the evidence of these four books, and on what we know of these later discussions, we shall explore and try to extend the dialogue, dialectic, and interplay between these extraordinary four thinkers and their thinking, from 1923 to 2023. Your contribution will be most welcome.
This will be an online seminar, using Zoom.
Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £140, others £175, some bursaries; payable in advance; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue , London N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 7809 433250
E-mail: stadlenanthony@gmail.com
For further information on seminars, visit: http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.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 universities.
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