Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminars
A 60th-anniversary revaluation
Seminar 6 (11 and 14 May 1965)
‘We now make a leap to the body-problem.’
Anthony Stadlen
conducts by Zoom
Inner Circle Seminar No. 300
Sunday 11 May 2025
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
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| Martin Heidegger Medard Boss Boss’s home, Zollikon |
Anthony Stadlen writes:
Today, 11 May 2025, we try to reexperience, without having actually been there, the sixth Zollikon seminar in the home of his friend and colleague the Swiss psychiatrist Medard Boss. This seminar was on the evenings of 11 and 14 May 1965, the first of which was 60 years ago to the day.
During the second evening of the previous seminar, on 12 March 1965, Heidegger had invited the participants to ‘make-present the Zürich main railway station’. He asked them to confirm that ‘In making-present the Zürich main railway station, we are directed not to a picture of it, not to a representation...’.
Heidegger implied, on the second day, 7 September 1973, of his very last seminar, not in Zollikon, and not for psychiatrists, but for five French colleagues in his own home in Freiburg
(see https://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/2023/01/285-heideggers-last-seminar-10.html),
that this was one of his most fundamental ‘teachings’, though it was no teaching, just something to be discovered or confirmed by everyone’s everyday experience, provided one was not an ‘intellectual’, a psychiatrist, or a philosophy professor. Heidegger now asked:
‘When, in my memory, I think of [his friend, the poet] René Char at the Busclats [Char’s home in Provence, which Heidegger loved], who or what is thereby given to me? René Char himself! And not God knows what “image” through which I would be mediately related to him.’
This is so simple, says Heidegger, that it is extremely difficult to explain ‘philosophically’.
Heidegger is here explaining, in response to a question from Beaufret, how his own thinking differs from Edmund Husserl’s. He points out that both started from the philosopher Franz Brentano, but from different books of his: Husserl from Psychology from the Empirical Standpoint and Heidegger from On the Manifold Meaning of Being in Aristotle. Heidegger’s single-minded quest, since a teacher lent him this book when he was 18, had been to answer the question: What is the fundamental meaning of Being?
He does not discuss this question in the light of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s question at the start of Philosophical Investigations (1953): is there, necessarily or contingently, a single essential meaning of, rather than ‘family resemblances’ between, the manifold instances of, for example, the word ‘game’?
But in his previous seminar with his French colleagues, in le Thor, Provence, in 1969, he had cited (slightly misquoting, but essentially correctly) the first assertion of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1921), ‘The world is all that is the case’, calling it ‘ein gespenstischer Satz’ (‘an eerie [or uncanny] sentence’), presumably because it represents the world as a set of ‘atomic facts’, each represented by an ‘atomic proposition’. For Heidegger, this epitomised the radical falling-away of Western philosophy from the ancient pre-Socratic Greek experience:
‘For the Greeks, things appear.For Kant, things appear to me.’
For Heidegger, the world was more a question of questioning than a proposing of propositions corresponding to facts. Truth was not – or, better, not only – the correspondence of proposition to fact, but what the Greeks called aletheia, unconcealedness.
This was the kind of thinking into which Boss had invited Heidegger to initiate a collection of clinical psychiatrists and some psychotherapists in Zollikon. A quixotic enterprise if ever there was one! Clinical psychiatrists? These were, in a sense, the most alienated people, the last people in the world likely to understand what Heidegger was talking about! No wonder that Boss said it was as if a man from Mars was addressing them.
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 his no doubt 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 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.
Today, 11 May 2025, we shall explore Zollikon seminar No. 6 (11 and 14 May 1965), exactly sixty years later. It was the third of no fewer than five Zollikon seminars that Heidegger conducted in Boss ’s home in 1965, the most active year of the decade of seminars. In this seminar Heidegger tries to help his audience make what he calls a ‘leap to the body-problem’. He laments the blindness to phenomena in the supposedly scientific accounts of the relation between ‘psyche’ and ‘soma’. He gives an exemplary, lucid analysis of the logical contradictions in a recently published lecture by Hegglin on ‘psychosomatic medicine’. He contradicts Hegglin’s claim that, while sadness cannot be measured, tears ‘can be investigated quantitatively’. Tears, insists Heidegger, cannot be measured, although drops of fluid can. This ‘simple’ thinking is indispensable if psychotherapists want to think at all.
We shall explore seminars 7 and 8 in our seminars later this year.
Our seminar on 6 March 2026 will examine seminar No. 9 of 1 and 3 March 1966.
Finally, after a gap of three years, on 18 March 2029, we shall discuss the last Zollikon seminar, No. 10, held on 18 and 21 March 1969.
Subsequent Inner Circle 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.
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 explicitly told Boss that he was collaborating with him 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, 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, the issues raised are very complex. Heidegger mentions in seminar 9 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 sprout 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 certainly 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 now 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 (Heidegger, M., 2001 [1994], Zollikon Seminars: Protocols – Conversations – Letters, edited by M. Boss, Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press) 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.
(Inner Circle
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?’
19 January 2025
(Inner Circle
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 3 (2 and 5 November 1964) and 4 (18 and 21 January 1965)
‘Socrates: The hardest is to say the same about the same.’
16 March 2025
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 ?)
Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminar 10 (18 and 21 March 1969)
These will be online seminars, using Zoom.
Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £140 per seminar or £500 the subseries of the next four Zollikon Seminars seminars (discussing Heidegger’s seminars 5-9), others £175 per seminar or £625 the subseries of five; some bursaries; payable in advance
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue , London N22 7XE
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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