Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminars
A 60th-anniversary revaluation
Seminars 1 and 2 (January and July 1964)
‘How does Herr Rohr relate to this table here?’
Anthony Stadlen
conducts by Zoom
Inner Circle Seminar No. 293
Sunday 6 October 2024
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
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| Martin Heidegger Medard Boss Boss’s home, Zollikon |
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 two seminars, in November 1959 (on 4 November 1959, according to Erna Hoch) and on 3 February 1960, were in the Bürghölzli mental hospital in Zürich. 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. These ten were the Zollikon seminars proper.
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 it does; but these rather humourless (to put it mildly) translators render it as ‘rather humorous’, thereby misrepresenting Heidegger’s biting humour and justified contempt as bland praise.
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:
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 trying to appear to know what it means. Nobody dares ask. Is the ‘burgher prince’ a figure in a German or Austrian or Swiss Novelle or fairy-tale that a cultured person ought to know? 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 throughout the time of the Zollikon seminars, he was referred to by the participant on 9 July 1964 as an eminent authority.
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.
In 2015 I was invited to attempt an Inner Circle Seminar on the Zollikon Seminars as part of the ninth Forum of the International Federation of Daseinsanalysis in Athens.
We are now (since November 2019) engaged on a second series, sixty years after Heidegger’s original seminars. On 10 November 2019 and 3 May 2020 in Inner Circle Seminars Nos. 253 and 257 we discussed the first and second seminars respectively, both held in the Bürghölzli.
In Inner Circle Seminar No. 293 on Sunday 6 October 2024 we explore the first two Zollikon seminars proper, held in Boss’s Zollikon home on 24 and 28 January and on 6 and 9 July 1964.
We have the advantage now that Zollikoner Seminare, Volume 89 of the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe, the largest volume in the 102-volume edition of his collected works, was published in 2018. This contains an extraordinary quantity of very detailed notes by Heidegger to himself for his Zollikon seminars, including 53 pages for these two seminars of January and July 1964.
The seminar of 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. Our seminar today thus takes us to the heart of Heidegger’s amazing seminars.
On 3 November 2024 we shall revisit Heidegger’s seminar of 2 and 5 November 1964.
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 shall devote one seminar to each of his five seminars of 1965, on their 50th anniversaries almost to the day. These five seminars of ours will 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 1 March 2026 will examine the seminar 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, held on 18 and 21 March 1969.
Whatever else Heidegger did in his long life, his Zollikon seminars were 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, 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 on 3 November, 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. 292, 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 used to recall his 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 seminars, has told us that Boss insisted that daseinsanalytic trainees should study, even more than Heidegger, Freud’s papers on technique. If Boss 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 elucidation
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.
(Inner Circle
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminars Nos. 1 (24 and 28 January 1964) and 2 (26 and 9 July 1964)
‘How does Herr Rohr relate to this table here?’
(Inner Circle
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 3 (2 and 5 November 1964)
‘Socrates said: The hardest is to say the same about the same.’
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 4 (18 and 21 January 1965)
‘Can we disregard the human being altogether?’
9
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 ...’
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 6 (11 and 14 May 1965)
‘We now make a leap to the body-problem.’
6
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?’
(Inner Circle
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
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)
These will be online seminars, using Zoom.
Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £140 per seminar or £1,000 the subseries of the first eight seminars (discussing Heidegger’s Zollikon seminars 1-9, excluding 10 which we shall not discuss until March 2029), others £175 per seminar or £1,250 the subseries of eight; some bursaries; payable in advance; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 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 colleges.
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