Anthony Stadlen writes:
Between 1959 and 1969 the German philosopher Martin Heidegger conducted seminars for psychiatrists and a few other professionals at the invitation of the Swiss psychiatrist Medard Boss, mostly in Boss’s house in Zollikon near Zürich.
The first seminar, in November 1959 (on 4 November 1959, according to Erna Hoch) was in the Bürghölzli mental hospital in Zürich. The second was in the Bürghölzli on 3 February 1960 and in Boss’s house in Zollikon on 5 February 1960. The two men also discussed the daseinsanalytic foundations of psychoanalysis during their holiday together in Taormina, Sicily, in the summer of 1963. There were then ten seminars in Boss’s house between 1964 and 1969.
Boss, with Heidegger’s collaboration and consent, published in 1987 a book containing reports of the seminars, and of his own conversations and correspondence with Heidegger (Heidegger, M., 1994 [1987], Zollikoner Seminare: Protokolle – Zwiegespräche – Briefe, herausgegeben von M. Boss, second edition, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann).
Fourteen years later, in 2001, an authorised American translation of the second edition was published (Heidegger, M., 2001 [1994], Zollikon Seminars: Protocols – Conversations – Letters, edited by M. Boss, Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press).
I showed in detail (Existential Analysis, 14.2, July 2003) that this American translation is not trustworthy. While some passages are tolerably translated, others are highly incompetent and give a grossly distorted picture of what Heidegger is saying.
A simple but telling example: Heidegger says the title of a congress of psychologists is ‘reichlich komisch’. Even if you know no German you will probably guess this means ‘richly comic’, and indeed it does; but these (to put it mildly) rather humourless translators render it as ‘rather humorous’, thereby misrepresenting Heidegger’s biting humour, and no doubt justified contempt, as bland praise.
Another example: According to the American translation, a Zollikon seminar participant on 9 July 1964 mentions ‘the burgher prince’. I have heard this read aloud by a lecturer who was trying to appear to know what it means. Nobody dared ask. Is the ‘burgher prince’ a figure in a German or Austrian or Swiss Novelle or fairy-tale? Actually, the original just reads ‘Bürger-Prinz’. No article, definite or indefinite. Prof. Dr. Hans Bürger-Prinz (1897-1976) was a Nazi psychiatrist and judge, who at the Hereditary Health Court in Hamburg decided which people with a hereditary disease should be forcibly sterilised. Still alive at the time, he was referred to as an eminent authority by the participant in the Zollikon seminar on 9 July 1964 .
Ten years ago, a subseries of our Inner Circle Seminars sought to explore the Zollikon seminars, at a distance of fifty years, as nearly as possible to the day, and – among other things – to remedy these and similar farcical mistranslations together with others much more serious, based on a failure to understand what Heidegger actually means.
We are now (since November 2019) engaged on a second series, sixty years after Heidegger’s original seminars. In Inner Circle Seminar No. 253 on 10 November 2019 we discussed the first seminar, held in the Bürghölzli on 4 November 1959; and in Inner Circle Seminar No. 257 on 3 May 2020 we discussed the second, ‘lost’, seminar, held in the Bürghölzli on 3 February 1960 and in Boss’s Zollikon home on 5 February 1960.
In Inner Circle Seminar No. 293 on Sunday 6 October 2024 we made a start on the first two Zollikon seminars ‘proper’ – that is, the first seminars recorded as held entirely in Boss’s Zollikon home, both in the original book Zollikoner Seminare (1987) and in the more recent volume Zollikoner Seminare (2018), Volume 89 of the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe. We shall call them No. 1 (24 and 28 January 1964) and No. 2 (6 and 9 July 1964).
We have the advantage now that the 2018 Zollikoner Seminare, the Gesamtausgabe, the largest volume in the 102-volume edition of his collected works, contains an extraordinary quantity of very detailed notes to himself by Heidegger for his Zollikon seminars, including 53 pages for these two seminars of January and July 1964.
The seminar No. 2, on 6 and 9 July 1964 in Boss’s house, is remarkable as the only seminar where the awkward and fascinating dialogue between Heidegger and the baffled participating psychiatrists, including Boss, was taken down in shorthand and reported in full verbatim – by Dr Erna Hoch, a person of great honesty and integrity. This takes us to the heart of Heidegger’s amazing seminars.
Today, 3 November 2024, we shall explore what we are calling Zollikon seminar No. 3, of 2 and 5 November 1964; but we shall also recapitulate some of the fundamental points Heidegger tries to convey in that year’s earlier seminars.
1965 was Heidegger’s most active year in relation to the Zollikon seminars. He made no fewer than five visits. In 2025, as we did in 2015, we devote one seminar to each of his five seminars of 1965, on their 50th anniversaries almost to the day. These five seminars of ours thus have the same structure and time-scale as his: two three-hour sessions (with coffee and tea breaks) separated in our case by a lunch break and in his by a day or two.
Our seminar on 6 March 2026 examines seminar No. 9 of 1 and 3 March 1966.
Subsequent seminars, to be announced in due course, will continue to explore the important Boss-Heidegger conversations and correspondence reported in the book, including their fundamental Taormina conversations of 1963 to which we have already devoted many seminars.
Finally, on 18 March 2029, we shall discuss the last Zollikon seminar, No. 10, held on 18 and 21 March 1969.
Whatever else Heidegger did in his long life, his Zollikon seminars seem an act of decency and piety – even if he and Boss were naive in thinking that clinical psychiatrists, of all people, would be receptive to his radical questioning of the foundations of psychotherapy. Heidegger travelled from Freiburg in Germany to Zollikon in Switzerland, took no payment (according to his trusted assistant, the late Professor Dr. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann – personal communication) and put an enormous amount of work and thought into preparing and conducting these seminars. He collaborated with Boss explicitly because he hoped to help troubled people. The protocols of, and Heidegger’s notes for, the seminars can be a force for great good if we are prepared to take them slowly and seriously, and open ourselves to their profound simplicity. They are revolutionary in their return to beginnings, saying ‘the same thing in the same way’ – which, as Heidegger points out and we shall discuss today, Socrates said was the hardest of all.
This does not mean there is nothing to criticise in Heidegger’s or Boss’s approach to, or in, the Zollikon seminars. Boss limited the participation to medical doctors with only a few non-medical professionals. As I showed in my paper ‘Medical Daseinsanalysis’ (Existential Analysis 16.1, January 2005: 169-177), Heidegger colluded with Boss’s aspiration for, and teaching and practice of, Daseinsanalysis as a medical discipline. We have explored the implications of this in many recent Inner Circle Seminars, including Inner Circle Seminar, No. 293, on 15 September: ‘“Is the madman mentally ill? No.” – Heidegger 1953’.
Moreover, if we confine ourselves to one exchange in one seminar, we can see that the issues raised are very complex. Heidegger mentions in the seminar on 1 March 1966 , which we shall explore on 1 March 2026, that Boss, at the start of the seminar, has compared the seminars to a kind of ‘group therapy’, in which participants, ‘as in a Freudian analysis’ develop ‘resistance’ to the ‘Heideggerian cure’.
Boss claimed to have had analytic sessions with Sigmund Freud as a young student in Vienna in 1925, although (as Gion Condrau and I have shown) he exaggerated their number. Aleš Wotruba, who with his wife Sarka participated as young students in the final Zollikon seminar, has told us that Boss insisted that daseinsanalytic trainees should study, even more than Heidegger, Freud’s papers on technique. If Boss really believed the seminars were a form of therapy, should he not have been true to Freud’s ‘fundamental rule’ that ‘one should communicate without criticism all that comes to mind’? But Condrau, who was in turn Boss’s army comrade, colleague, deputy, and successor, reported that Boss told participants in the Zollikon seminars that they must not ask Heidegger about his Nazism. Are we to presume that, as a result of Boss’s prohibition, they were able to ensure that during the seminars this question never once crossed any of their minds? (See p. 167 of my review of Condrau’s book Martin Heidegger’s Impact on Psychotherapy (Existential Analysis 14.1, January 2003: 162-178.))
However, Boss is making a serious point in speaking of group therapy and resistance. He says that ‘resistance’ has arisen, in the form of the objection that Daseinsanalysis is anti-scientific: first, because Heidegger’s discussion of natural science is (allegedly) valid only for classical, not nuclear, physics; second, because psychotherapy is in any case not a procedure like physics.
Heidegger questions whether the seminars are a ‘cure’. He recalls that ‘semen’ means a seed, and hopes these evenings may succeed in strewing a seed that will come up here and there. He says a philosophical seminar is always in the situation of Socrates, who said that what is most difficult is always to say the same thing about the same thing.
He now repeats his explanation that physics objectifies nature, and argues that this is even more so for nuclear than for classical physics. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle does not change this.
Heidegger demonstrates how a discussion of ‘stress’ in a journal of psychosomatic medicine is couched in the objectifying language of physics. He discusses how this negative critique can become a positive one by showing how the language of his own Being and Time can open up the discourse on ‘stress’ in a way appropriate to human science. He quotes Hölderlin: ‘... we are a conversation.’ ‘Stress’, he stresses, makes sense only as part of this ‘conversation’, whether as a ‘burdening’ or an ‘unburdening’.
On 3 March 1966, the second evening of the same seminar, Heidegger reiterates that ‘stress’ belongs to ‘the constitution of human existence determined by thrownness, understanding, and language’. He discusses Plügge’s account in the psychosomatic journal of being ‘stressed’ by the sound of his neighbour’s children but not his own. Heidegger summarises his paradigmatic daseinsanalytic opening up of the concept of ‘stress’ in the sentence: ‘Unburdening and burdening are possible only through the human being’s ecstatic being-outstretched.’
While we have discussed in many seminars this and similar revelatory elucidations by Heidegger, we have also acknowledged what the Finnish psychotherapist Martti Siirala called the
‘violent elements in the absolutist claims for “Daseinsanalysis” to a direct access to the phenomena in an adequate, undistorted way’
to be taught to the unfortunately defective client, who supposedly lacks this vision. Many have been seduced not only by scientism (technological tinkering) but also by this daseinsanalytic absolutism (patronising preaching). In these seminars we strive through our dialogue to do justice to Heidegger’s clarifying vision but also to transcend its avoidance of dialectic. Here we can draw on his own early, abandoned notion of diahermeneutics.
You can attend any or all of these seminars. Each is self-contained, but it would be advantageous to attend them all. And, of course, if you came to the previous cycle of Inner Circle Seminars on these Zollikon seminars ten years ago, this is an opportunity to deepen your thinking on, and through, them. Like any serious subject, they are inexhaustible.
Please do get hold of, and peruse, the text of the relevant Zollikon seminar each time. Preferably buy the book. The unsatisfactory American translation is good enough for this purpose; I will correct flagrant errors. I will not be showing the text on screen; I would prefer you to refer to your own copy. If necessary I can email you a photocopy of each seminar.
6 October 2024
(Inner Circle Seminar 293)
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminars 1 (24 and 28 January 1964) and 2 (26 and 9 July 1964)
‘How does Herr Rohr relate to this table here?’
3 November 2024
(Inner Circle Seminar 294)
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 3 (2 and 5 November 1964)
‘Socrates: The hardest is to say the same about the same.’
19 January 2025
(Inner Circle Seminar 297)
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 4 (18 and 21 January 1965)
‘Can we disregard the human being altogether?’
9 March 2025
(Inner Circle Seminar 299)
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 5 (10 and 12 March 1965)
‘In making-present the Zürich main railway station, we are directed not to a picture of it, not to a representation ...’
11 May 2025
(Inner Circle Seminar 301)
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 6 (11 and 14 May 1965)
‘We now make a leap to the body-problem.’
6 July 2025
(Inner Circle Seminar 303)
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 7 (6 and 8 July 1965)
‘Is the body and its bodying ... something somatic or something psychic or neither of the two?’
23 November 2025
(Inner Circle Seminar 308)
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 8 (23 and 26 November 1965)
‘Whence comes the insight that ... the Sein of the Da is ecstatic ... ?’
1 March 2026
(Inner Circle Seminar 312?)
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 9 (1 and 3 March 1966)
‘Unburdening and burdening are possible only through the human being’s ecstatic being-outstretched.’
18 March 2029
(Inner Circle Seminar 347?)
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 10 (18 and 21 March 1969)
‘The book lies here next to the glass. But how are two human beings, standing together, together?’
These will be online seminars, using Zoom.
Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £140 per seminar or £875 the subseries of the next seven seminars (discussing Heidegger’s seminars 3-9), others £175 per seminar or £1,095 the subseries of seven; some bursaries; payable in advance
