Essay Review
Anthony Stadlen
Copyright © Anthony Stadlen 2003, 2020
[Existential Analysis 14.1: 162-178 (January 2003)]
This
book has a modest, even amateurish, appearance. It reads oddly in places,
partly because of the patchy English. It has many misprints, is poorly
referenced, and has no index. However, this small book, published in his
eightieth year, is the only one written in, or even translated into, English by
Prof. Dr. med. et phil. Gion Condrau, the leading contributor to the Zurich
‘school’ of Daseinsanalysis after Medard Boss and Martin Heidegger himself.
I
might not have learned of its existence for some time had Gion Condrau not sent
me a copy on its publication in 1998. I would have read Dr Holger Helting’s
enthusiastic and respectful review, in English, in the Daseinsanalyse yearbook (Helting 2000); and I would have
hurried to find a copy. However, students have always told me it is impossible
to find. The few people I know in England
What
is going on? This review will try to answer this question and explain why this
book is, despite Dr Condrau’s embarrassment, an important one.
Gion
Condrau was born on 9 January
1919 in Disentis, in the Romansh-speaking canton
of Graubünden , Switzerland
He first
trained in psychiatry, neurology, and neurosurgery. He studied the outcome of
lobotomy and leucotomy, and as Walter Fritzsch puts it, ‘the findings were not
encouraging’. Fritzsch (1999: 60) comments (my translation):
‘Remarkably, as Condrau admits today, one did not at that time trouble oneself
about the ethical dimension.’ Condrau also started a training analysis with a
Jungian. But he explains that Boss’s 1947 book on the sexual ‘perversions’
almost decided him against a career as a psycho- or Daseinsanalyst. He wondered
whether a psychotherapist ‘ever had to treat other patients than the sexually
perverse’. Boss’s language seemed like ‘Kauderwelsch’
(‘double-dutch’) and one of Condrau’s former teachers told him Boss was a
‘Dadaist’ (Condrau 1999: 48).
Condrau
was, however, sufficiently impressed by Boss’s ‘fascinating personality’ to
enter training analysis with him in place of the Jungian he had started with.
And then (Condrau 1999: 49, my translation and brackets):
In acknowledging my own tightrope-walking
through life, it dawned on me that the ‘world’ had much more to offer if one
showed oneself more openly to it. Only an immense arrogance could lead a
‘trainee analysand’ not to treat his own ‘training analysis’ as a necessary
therapeutic path to the greatest possible world-openness and freedom. The
motivation to become a Daseinsanalyst thus sprang, first, from my personal
experience during my training [analysis] years with Medard Boss. In the second
place, however, it was based on the difference in supervision with Medard Boss
and Gustav Bally. But decisive was the encounter with Martin Heidegger, whose
Zollikon seminars I attended with my colleagues for ten years, from 1959 to
1969.
Condrau
was a prime mover of the Swiss Society for Daseinsanalytic Anthropology, the
Daseinsanalytic Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics (as Director),
and the International Federation for Daseinsanalysis (as President). He is a
member of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and an Honorary Visiting
Fellow of Regent’s College School of Psychotherapy and Counselling, London Zurich Korea
‘If
calculation were permitted here,’ as Heidegger (1993 [1959]: 63; 1982
[1971]: 182) says, permitting himself to calculate more than thirty
references to ‘stone’ in Trakl’s poetry, Condrau has published more books and
papers than Boss. The Festschrift for
Condrau’s eightieth birthday in 1999 lists one hundred and ninety-five of his
publications (Condrau Verzeichnis 1999),
compared to the one hundred and twenty-four of Boss’s listed in the Festschrift for his eighty-fifth birthday in 1988 (Boss Verzeichnis 1988).
Condrau’s
books cover an astonishing range: general psychotherapy (Condrau 1963a), daseinsanalytic psychotherapy (1963b,
1965a), anxiety and guilt (1962), psychosomatics (1968), women’s
illnesses (1965b), death (1984), Daseinsanalysis (1998a [1989]), Freud and Heidegger (1992), the heart
(Condrau and Grossmann 1989), the
skin (Condrau and Schipperges 1993),
and politics (Condrau 1972,
1976). He has edited a book on his
birthplace, Disentis (Condrau 1996).
His two-volume work (Condrau 1949),
on fatal flight accidents of the Swiss Flugwaffe,
remains unpublished. He has edited, and co-edited, books, and series of books,
on many themes, as well as the journal, Daseinsanalyse.
He has contributed many papers to books and journals.
He is a lively, independent thinker. He expounds Boss and Heidegger, with
careful attention to detail, but with a critical appraisal of Boss’s arguments.
He is also concerned to correct Boss’s tendency to romanticise the
history and prehistory of Daseinsanalysis. Condrau is no respecter of what he
calls, adopting Anglo-Saxon nosography, ‘bullshit’ (personal communication).
But
not one of the fourteen German books of which Condrau is sole author, or any of
those he has co-authored or edited, has been translated into English (or
French). Some have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Hebrew,
Czech, Serbo-Croat. The last two of these languages are the only ones into which Condrau’s magnum opus, Sigmund Freud und Martin Heidegger (1992), has been translated.
By
contrast, seven of the thirteen books of which Boss was sole author have been
translated into English: The Meaning and
Content of Sexual Perversions (1949 [1947]), The Analysis of Dreams (1957 [1953]), Anxiety, Guilt and Psychotherapeutic Liberation (1962 [1962]), Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis (1963
[1957]), A Psychiatrist Discovers India
(1965 [1959]), “I Dreamt Last Night…”
(1977 [1975]), Existential Foundations of
Medicine and Psychology (1979 [1971]). But all have long been out of print,
with the exception of the last, which is occasionally in print in paperback, in
a poor and incomplete translation, ever more expensively priced.
An
English translation (Heidegger 2001 [1987]) of Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminars edited by Boss (Heidegger 1987) has recently been
published. I have explained in detail (Stadlen 2002, 2003) why
this translation is unsatisfactory.
Of
the other Daseinsanalysts, Erna Hoch has published a number of books in
English, in India and Switzerland, including the excellent Sources and Resources: A Western Psychiatrist’s Search for Meaning in
the Ancient Indian Scriptures (1991); but her book, Das Irrenhaus am Lotos-See (2000), has not been translated. None of
the books of Holger Helting, Alois Hicklin, Alice Holzhey-Kunz, Hanspeter
Padrutt, or Augustinus Karl Wucherer-Huldenfeld has been translated into
English. These are all spirited and thoughtful writers, who argue intelligently
and creatively, not least with each other. Their absence from the
English-speaking world is a serious loss.
This,
then, was the situation that Gion Condrau tried to remedy by writing his new
book in English. But the book’s publishing history has been a disaster.
Condrau’s other books are professionally produced, carefully annotated,
scrupulously referenced and indexed; but this one looks like a draft. Dr
Condrau tells me it is a draft. The
publisher, a Tibetan, seems to have used no readers, editors, or copy-editors,
at least for this book. He failed to keep an appointment for which Dr Condrau
travelled to Vienna
It
is a disgrace that a man of Condrau’s stature had to resort to such a
publisher. In a letter to the editors, published in this Journal, Condrau
(1994: 47) wrote: ‘I have a book in store, already written in English. The
problem is that I have to find a publisher, either in England or the USA UK
This
is why Dr Condrau ‘can’t really stand by’ his book. It was rejected by the
publisher who should have published it, and sloppily produced by the one who
did. There is no question of his not standing by what he wrote.
It
is to be hoped that a professional publisher will now produce a second edition
that has been read, re-read, edited, copy-edited, annotated, referenced,
indexed, proof-read, and corrected for infelicities of English idiom.
In
the mean time, we can be grateful to the late Tibetan publisher who, unlike the
‘international publishing house in the UK
What
will readers lucky enough to get hold of one of the few surviving copies find?
Condrau states clearly what he is trying to do (p. X):
Daseinsanalytic psychotherapy is, as yet, not
too widely known in the English-speaking world. This book therefore shall be an
introduction for those who heard the term Daseinsanalysis for the first time or
who want to know how it actually works.
As
one who has studied Daseinsanalysis for four decades, it seems to me that the
book works at a number of levels, and might well open up the field for a
beginner. It can be easy or difficult to read, depending on how much work one
puts in. One will not get much from it if one finds it easy, or even only
moderately difficult. A beginner may well understand it better than a
‘specialist’. What I am sure of is that it is a perpetual provocation even for
the ‘specialist’ who is still open enough. A lifetime of experience and
thinking has gone into the book. It is a distillation of four decades of
Condrau’s writing. His is an individual voice; not an institutional recycling
of themes already expounded by Boss. As Holger Helting (2000: 201)
writes, Condrau’s book ‘moves well beyond Boss’s groundbreaking work [Existential Foundations]’. I value the
book, not because I agree with it, nor because I disagree with it, but because
it constantly moves me to ask whether I agree with it or not. This is an
extremely rare experience for me when reading the literature of
‘psychotherapy’, about most of which I am in no doubt at all.
An
excellent chapter-by-chapter summary of the book can be found in Dr Helting’s
review in Daseinsanalyse, mentioned
above. I shall try to complement his account by seeking, in Heideggerian
spirit, to enter into a dialogue with the book.
Is
the title not rather out of tune with Heidegger? ‘Impact’ suggests the
collision of solid bodies. Perhaps we should be thankful it is at least not
used as a verb. Boss proposed that Heidegger’s Zollikon seminars were a kind of
‘Heideggerian cure’ by group therapy. This sounds gentler than ‘impact’, but it
was not gentle enough for Heidegger. He questioned whether the seminars were a
‘therapy’, and reminded participants that, in Latin, ‘semen’ means ‘seed’. He hoped ‘in these evenings to scatter a grain
of reflection, that here and there will sprout some time’ (Heidegger 1987: 174; 2001
[1987]: 132–133; my translation).
Dr
Condrau’s Foreword begins (p. IX):
The contents of this book are not just a
translation of some (German) reviews of Martin Heidegger’s influence on
psychotherapy and psychosomatic theory and practice by the author. It is,
however, clear that most of the thoughts included in this volume have first
been written in various papers and publications.
But how can this be clear to
readers unfamiliar with Dr Condrau’s many ‘papers and publications’ in German,
as he does not, for the most part, indicate in which of them his thoughts have
‘first been written’?
Next,
Dr Condrau laments: ‘It has become a major issue to talk about Martin Heidegger
being a Nazi and having been involved with National Socialism.’ He continues
(p. IX):
It is obvious that the persistent and tiresome
reference to this chapter of Heidegger’s biography prepared by different
authors (Farias, Ott, and others) … seems to be nothing other than an excuse
not to have to engage in the great philosopher’s thinking.
Does this do justice to the
careful researches (Ott 1993) of the Freiburg
historian, Hugo Ott? Is this reductive attribution of psychological motives
true to the spirit of Daseinsanalysis? And, if it is irrelevant to notice that Heidegger was a Nazi, why is it
relevant to claim, as Condrau does (p. IX), that ‘after 1938, he was one of the
few, fundamental critics of Nazism at a time when it was life-threatening to
question NS philosophy’?
Moreover,
if Heidegger’s application of his thinking to politics was, as Condrau says he
said, a ‘mistake’, is it not pertinent to ask whether the ‘mistake’ was in his
thinking or in its application? Either way, would it not be irresponsible not to ask what he learned from his
‘mistake’, and how he, and we, can be sure that the application of his thinking
to psychotherapy is not also a ‘mistake’?
However,
as Dr Condrau has told us, Medard Boss told the participants in the Zollikon
seminars that they must not ask Heidegger about his Nazism (Condrau 2000: 31; also
confirmed by Gion Condrau at the third Forum of the International Federation
for Daseinsanalysis, 28–29 September 1996, London).
Does this not make nonsense of Boss’s comparison of the seminars to group
therapy? What of Freud’s ‘fundamental rule’ that ‘one should
communicate without criticism all that comes to mind’ (Freud GW 8: 373; SE 12: 107; my translation), which Boss (1963 [1957]: 61) cites as the first proof of the ‘intrinsic harmony of
psychoanalytic therapy and Daseinsanalysis’? And is
Boss’s prohibition consistent with Heidegger’s (1954a: 44; 1977a [1954a]:
35) dictum that ‘questioning is the piety of thinking’ (my translation)? Is
Dr Condrau, who is in other respects so clear-sighted about Boss, here
deferring to his old Hauptmann’s
orders?
Why,
finally, does Dr Condrau himself devote a whole section of his book, Daseinsanalyse (1989: 29–37), to
Heidegger’s politics, and expand it, adding copious footnotes and a heading, ‘Politischer Irrtum’ (‘Political Error’), in the second edition
(1998a [1989]: 34–44) published the same year as Martin Heidegger’s Impact on Psychotherapy?
The
latter book, after the Foreword, is divided into five parts: (I) Foundations; (II) Psychopathology; (III) Psychotherapy;
(IV) When there is no cure: doctors,
death, and dying; (V) Training.
There are twelve chapters: three in Part I, four in Part II, three in Part III,
one in each of Parts IV and V.
One
can, with a bit of detective work, deduce that all but the first of the twelve
chapters have titles. This is not immediately apparent, because nine of the
twelve are divided into sections, with titles; and the section titles are not
distinguished by print size or typeface from the chapter titles, either in the
table of contents or within the chapters themselves. Only from the spacing
after the titles in the body of the text can one discover that eleven chapters
do have titles. It is the task of the copy-editor, in this case non-existent,
to make plain what is going on, by choice of print size and typeface, as a
matter of elementary courtesy to the reader. It is a reviewer’s job to work it
out, but an ordinary good reader should not have to, and may simply feel
confused.
This
may explain one of the difficulties readers have had with this book. It gives
an unfortunate, and wrong, impression of having been thrown together haphazardly.
One
of the attractions of Martin Heidegger’s
Impact on Psychotherapy is that it is richly illustrated with case studies.
They repay close reading and re-reading. But where do they come from? When did
the events they describe take place? A virtue of Medard
Boss’s Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis
(1963) was that it included, in addition to a translation of his short book, Psychoanalyse und Daseinsanalytik (1957),
a number of case studies, including Benedetti’s case, supervised by Boss, of a
‘sadistic pervert’. It was disconcerting, though, that Boss did not explain
that, or where, his case studies had been previously published. In fact, ‘Dr
Cobling’ was first published in Boss’s paper, ‘Martin Heidegger und
die Ärzte’,
for Heidegger’s seventieth birthday (1959), and some of the other cases were
from Boss’s Einführung in die Psychosomatische Medizin (1954). Dr
Condrau’s case studies in his new book are, similarly, taken from various
works, in most instances published much earlier, as we shall see. It is of great
value to have them collected; but, without indication of their origin, do they
not float in a historical vacuum?
Would not readers benefit from the following information? (Some case
studies appear in several incarnations, and the tally may well be incomplete.)
- ‘Boris’, the thirty-five-year-old surgeon (pp. 42–47), was an anonymous surgeon in Sigmund Freud und Martin Heidegger (1992: 316–318).
- ‘Ernest’ (pp. 91–93) was ‘Thomas’ in Daseinsanalytische Psychotherapie (1963b: 111–114) and ‘Ernst Indermauer’ in Das verletzte Herz (1989: 121–117).
- ‘Odette’ (pp. 96–98) was in Daseinsanalytische Psychotherapie (1963b: 82–84, Abb. 1,2,3). The present book does not reproduce Odette’s artwork.
- ‘Annemarie’ (pp. 109–120) was in Daseinsanalytische Psychotherapie (1963b: 99–109, Abb. 4,5,6,7). Again, the present book does not reproduce Annemarie’s artwork.
- ‘Dr. Georgu’ (pp. 138–139) was in Angst und Schuld als Grundprobleme der Psychotherapie (1962: 175–176).
- The ‘South American millionaire’ (pp. 139–140) was in Angst und Schuld als Grundprobleme der Psychotherapie (1962: 176).
- The ‘son of an affluent North American family’ (p. 140) was in Angst und Schuld als Grundprobleme der Psychotherapie (1962: 176–177).
- The ‘farmer’s wife’ (pp.1 70–171) was in Daseinsanalytische Psychotherapie (1963b: 60).
- The dream of ‘a spinster about 30 years old’ (pp. 180–182) was in Sigmund Freud und Martin Heidegger (1992: 313–316), and in ‘Dream Analysis: Do we need the unconscious?’ in Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis 4 (1993: 6–7).
- The dream of ‘a young girl’ (pp. 182–185) was in Sigmund Freud und Martin Heidegger (1992: 312–313), and in ‘Dream Analysis: Do we need the unconscious?’ in Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis 4 (1993: 7–9).
- ‘Otmar’, The case of ‘writer’s cramp’ (pp. 192–207), was ‘Othmar’ in Zeitschrift für Psychosomatische Medizin 7 (1961: 255–267), in Angst und Schuld als Grundprobleme der Psychotherapie (1962: 162–164), and in Daseinsanalytische Psychotherapie (1963b: 67–77), and ‘Otmar’ in American Journal of Psychoanalysis 48 (1988: 211–234).
Thus,
eight of these case studies were published four decades or even longer ago, in
1961, 1962, or 1963. And there are at least five versions of ‘Otmar’, the
earliest (presumably) in 1961.
Is
not a historical perspective important to readers, even if they cannot read
German? Might it not facilitate discussion of what Martti Siirala calls the
‘absolutist claims for “Daseinsanalysis” to a direct access to the phenomena in
an adequate, undistorted way’ (see my introduction to Ann-Helen Siirala’s
account of her husband’s work, in this issue of Existential Analysis)?
Whether
or not the daseinsanalytic claim is ‘absolutist’, should not a daseinsanalytic
writer, like any writer of case histories, give some idea of historical
context? Even on the assumption that a kind of timeless daseinsanalytic
‘seeing’ is possible, does not daseinsanalytic humility itself require this
reasonable precaution, so that readers can allow for the possible clouding of
daseinsanalytic purity by socio-historically conditioned subjectivism,
psychologism, and plain prejudice? Is it not likely that different historical
epochs facilitate and frustrate ‘seeing’ in different ways?
Is
not Dr Condrau’s interpretation of Annemarie’s Dream 6 (p. 118) a case in
point? Is it still, or was it ever, ‘touching’, as he wrote in 1963, and
repeated in 1998, that Annemarie defends the seducer of ‘a small girl’ (‘ein kleines Mädchen’)? Does Annemarie’s
explanation that the girl is ‘cunning’, and that ‘this man has no nice home’
and ‘simply could not resist the clean and warm bed and the small girl in it’,
inexorably point to, or only to, her acceptance of existential guilt, as Dr
Condrau claims?
Could
not a second edition reproduce Odette’s and Annemarie’s paintings and drawings,
as in Daseinsanalytische
Psychotherapie (1963b: Abb. 1–7)? Are not the references to
them in the text of the new book (p. 97 and p. 117,
respectively) frustrating for readers? After all, art is particularly important
for Annemarie, who eventually ‘runs a well-frequented art gallery in her house,
an activity that corresponds both to her inclinations and talents and that has
given new meaning to her life’ (p. 120).
Would
it not also be helpful for readers to be told where other material in the book
first appeared? For example, in Chapter 4, ‘The Concepts of Neurosis and
Psychosomatics’, there is a section, ‘Daseinsanalytic Interpretation of
Schizophrenia’ (pp. 94–95). This discusses Binswanger’s ‘Ellen West’ and Boss’s
‘Dr Cobling’ cases, without, however, indicating that these are the cases in
question, or where to find them, or that the discussion first appeared in Daseinsanalytische
Psychotherapie (1963b: 80–82).
Again,
Chapter 6, ‘Guilt and Existence’, derives largely from Dr Condrau’s book, Angst und Schuld als Grundprobleme der
Psychotherapie (1962). This explains why some of the references, such as
Pope Pius XII’s address of 10
April 1953 , at first glance seem less than topical. However, the
issues Condrau discusses in this chapter are perennial ones. He speaks of
‘repressed’ desires, which he says, in Freudian spirit, ‘cover mainly two large
groups of human drives: aggression and sexuality’ (p. 136). But does his whole
discussion not imply that one can also ‘repress’ ethical sensibility and
striving? He asks (p. 126):
Can there be a higher aim and a more serious
task for the psychotherapist than to guide the patient entrusted to him or her
from a state of non-responsibility to responsibility, from apparent innocence
to living out his/her guilt? The purpose of the analysis seems to be fulfilled
when the patient has gained the capacity to face his or her personal guilt.
This
is the authentic existential tradition. Guilt here means, of course,
existential guilt, together with moral guilt if any. Condrau is in tune, in
this passage, with his contemporaries, Szasz (1920– ) and Esterson (1923–1999),
though there are differences, on which I shall touch below. Condrau seems to
have gone too far for even Boss to be able to follow him when he wrote (Condrau
1962: 167): ‘Every anxiety is ultimately guilt-anxiety – even death anxiety’.
But he stands by this assertion (Condrau 1998a [1989]: 87). He
writes (p. 137) that ‘there need not be an unbridgeable abyss between legal
guilt and existential guilt’. However, he goes on to repeat his now
four-decades-old stereotypical denunciation (1962: 167) of ‘those who in
apparent “innocence” (freedom from guilt) abided [sic] by the law self-righteously, but who in truth were simply
blind for their own profound guilt – the Pharisees’. Dr Helting (2000: 201) praises
Dr Condrau’s book for ‘encompass[ing] new research results’. Might not a second
edition take note of new research results on the Pharisees, as found, for
instance, in the writings of Hyam Maccoby (1989)?
Chapter
7, ‘The Daseinsanalytic-Phenomenological Approach to Narcissism’, is
exceptional in that a reference is given to its earlier version as a chapter in
the book, Narcissism and the
Interpersonal Self (1993), edited by J. Fiscalini and A. L. Grey. Dr Condrau makes the important point (p. 149): ‘… it is incorrect to talk
of “healthy” narcissism’. But, discussing ‘daily practice in dealing with
narcissists’, he writes (p. 153): ‘Genuine empathy on the part of the therapist
is possible only if he or she has managed, possibly with the help of a didactic
analysis, to reduce narcissistic sensitivity and frustration intolerance to a
“reasonable” level.’ Might he not have gone on to criticise here the notion of
‘empathy’ as itself narcissistic, as
is implied by Heidegger’s brief, but crucial, discussion of ‘empathy’ (‘Einfühlung’) in Being
and Time (1986 [1927]: 124–125; 1962 [1927]: 161–163; 1996 [1927]:
116–118)? Of course, Heidegger would surely
have said that the very concept, or experience, of ‘narcissism’ always already
presupposes being-with. In Sigmund Freud
und Martin Heidegger, Dr Condrau (1992: 153–175) gives a more complete treatment of ‘narcissism’, and says of ‘empathy’ that ‘with this rather artificial neologism
it is sought to give validity to a middle position between sympathy and apathy’
(1992: 173, my translation). But does this not still fall short of Heidegger’s
fundamental criticism?
However, Chapter
8, ‘Daseinsanalysis as Psychotherapy’, does start to tackle ‘empathy’ in a
business-like way (pp. 157–158):
Nobody needs to, or indeed can, “enter” into another person with the
help of any type of emphatic [sic]
feelings that supposedly aid in understanding that person emotionally. Based on
his or her original understanding of Being, things not only disclose themselves
in their thinghood, but other human beings disclose themselves just as
immediately, both intellectually and emotionally.
The chapter is
largely taken from Daseinsanalytische
Psychotherapie (1963b: 49–61), and the above passage is an almost verbatim translation of a passage
(1963b: 49–50) where the latter part was acknowledged as a quotation from
Boss’s Psychoanalyse und Daseinsanalytik
(1957: 126).
Chapter 9, ‘The
Role of Dreams in Daseinsanalysis’, is of central importance. Dreams are
discussed in many of the case studies in the other chapters, from ‘Boris’ to
‘Otmar’. Here he explains the daseinsanalytic understanding of dreams in
principle. He discusses the dreams of ‘a spinster about 30 years
old’ and ‘a young girl’ (pp. 180–185), which, as mentioned above, appeared
earlier in Sigmund
Freud und Martin Heidegger (1992: 312–316)
and in this Journal (Condrau 1993). Dr Condrau also discussed them in lectures
in London
Could this
chapter not be made a little clearer for a second edition? ‘Existential’
psychotherapists often suppose that the daseinsanalytic approach asks what a
dream ‘means to the dreamer’. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is
important that readers should understand what Dr Condrau’s position actually
is. Could he not include in this chapter his remarks in his letter (Condrau
1994: 46) to this Journal? He wrote:
If we did, indeed, base our thinking on the idea
that the dreamer decides on the meaning of his/her dream, this would open the
doors wide to a subjectivistic phenomenology. Isn’t it precisely the essence of
neurotic (or psychotic) perception, namely not to be able to distinguish
phenomena from personal prejudices or projections?
He, like Boss,
presents the understanding of dreams as paradigmatic for Daseinsanalysis, as
Freud did for psychoanalysis. Indeed, he chooses Dora’s first dream,
from Freud’s case study of 1905, as the best way to show ‘the difference
between the various dream interpretations’ (pp. 185–189).
But
he changes the dream itself! He changes its ‘manifest content’. This is how he
reports it (p. 186):
A house is on fire, father is standing in front
of my bed and wakes me up. I get dressed quickly. Mama wants to save her jewel
case, but Daddy says: I don’t want my two children and I to burn to death
because of your jewel case. We hurry downstairs and as soon as I am outside, I
wake up.
Freud,
however, says (GW 5: 225; SE 7: 64) that Dora says she dreamed her
father said: ‘Ich will nicht, daß ich und
meine beide Kinder wegen deines Schmuckkästchen verbrennen.’ In my translation
(emphasis added): ‘I do not want that I
and my two children should burn to death because of your jewel case.’ He
puts himself first, ‘his’ children second. Freud at least discusses with Dora
how her dream opens up the issue of the relationship between her parents, and
of her relationship to that relationship, but Dr Condrau speaks only of her
separate relationships with father, mother, brother. He concludes (p. 189):
‘The patient’s relationship with her father seems to be healthier in this dream
than that with her mother.’ Is this the culmination of daseinsanalytic
understanding? Freud’s approach to Dora’s dream has been criticised, not least
by myself (Stadlen 1985: 31; 1989 [1985]: 201–202; 2000), but is it not in some
ways more phenomenological, more daseinsanalytical, than Dr Condrau’s?
Condrau is, in
fact, rather more accommodating to psychoanalysis than Boss. In Chapter 3, ‘The
Significance of Language in Daseinsanalysis’, Dr Condrau points out (p. 74)
that, while Boss ‘dismissed the idea of psychodynamics
hook, line and sinker’, Boss was neglecting ‘the daseinsanalytic claim that it “reveals and
appropriates Freud’s actual intentions”’. The word
‘psychodynamics’, incidentally, nowhere appears in Freud’s writings, as can be
seen by checking the Konkordanz (Guttman et al. 1995).
As Condrau writes (p. 74): ‘If it is the case that human beings can be
motivated, then this clearly and emphatically implies that they are dynamic.’
He similarly defends the psychoanalytic concepts of ‘projection’ and
‘regression’, which Boss and Heidegger dismissed, though he endorses their
critique of ‘introjection’. Walter Fritzsch (1999: 82, my
translation) writes that Condrau was ‘more generous than Boss
towards other dream interpretations, particularly where it was a matter of
therapeutic consequences’.
Dr Condrau’s
reference to Dora’s allegedly ‘healthier’ relationship with her father raises
another question. In the light of how her father was treating her, it would
have been odd enough if Condrau had merely said her relationship with him was
‘better’ than with her mother. But what is a ‘healthy’ relationship? Do not the practitioners of Daseinsanalysis
tend to medicalise morals, even if this is not a necessary consequence of its
basic principles?
Eckart
Wiesenhütter
wrote (1979: 158, my translation):
One thing is certain: far more than neurosis-theory
and psychotherapy, Heidegger was interested in psychiatry, especially with
schizophrenics, with whom he sought contact and conversations when this was
possible for him. On walks he regularly remained standing ‘lost in thought’ for a while before the villa of the Freiburg
psychiatrist Ruffin and before the Parapsychological Institute of Bender. Once he said frankly that he was not convinced of
the correctness of the exclusively medical interpretation of schizophrenia as
illness. Could it not even simply be a question of an ‘other’ kind of
thinking?
As Zollikon Seminars and many of his
writings show, Heidegger did not have the courage of his lack of conviction.
While he loved the ‘mad’ writing and poetry of Nietzsche, Hölderlin, and Trakl,
exploring what he called its ‘site’ with extraordinary sensitivity, he took
care not to contradict the ‘medical interpretation’, and on occasion endorsed
it. To Hannah Arendt, Heidegger wrote that his son Jörg’s wife, Dorothea, was
‘ill’; an editorial note explains that her ‘illness’ was ‘schizophrenia’ (Arendt
/ Heidegger 1999 [1998]: 132–133, 296). Heidegger called Celan, the poet of the
Holocaust, with whom he was friendly, and whose poetry he revered, ‘sick’ (Safranski
1998: 423, citing Baumann 1992: 80). In Zollikon
Seminars, Heidegger refers to Boss’s ‘Sun Man’ (Heidegger 1987: 196; 2001
[1987]: 152) and Binswanger’s ‘heel phobia’ girl (Heidegger 1987: 256; 2001
[1987]: 206) as ‘sick’. While criticising a ‘Dr M.’ for wanting a ‘technical’
psychotherapy that could produce only a ‘polished object’, Heidegger (1987:
270; 2001 [1987]: 215) thinks what should
‘come out’ of psychotherapy is a ‘healthier
human being’ (my emphasis). It is not clear whether Heidegger questioned the
right of psychiatrists to incarcerate and forcibly ‘treat’ the ‘mentally ill’.
Boss excluded non-medical psychotherapists and psychologists from the Zollikon
seminars, although an occasional professor of philosophy was admitted (Gion
Condrau, personal communication). Heidegger
does not appear to have questioned this. Boss writes, in his Foreword to the
first edition of Zollikon Seminars
(Heidegger 1987: XI; 2001 [1987]: xvii; my translation, emphasis, and
brackets), of Heidegger’s having given a ‘load-bearing spiritual foundation for
our medical practice and preserve [für unser
ärztliches Tun und Lassen]’. Non-medical people were not allowed to
train as Daseinsanalysts, long after Freud and Jung had encouraged and trained
non-medical analysts (Gion Condrau, personal communication).
Does
Dr Condrau transcend this ambiguous history? He certainly discusses the harm
done by natural-scientism, reification, objectification, and so on. He also
describes how he robustly challenged Balint’s absurd commendation, in a ‘Balint
group’, of a gynaecologist who concluded, without examining the patient, that
her severe lower abdominal pain was ‘“obviously” of neurotic origin and due to
an emotional conflict between the daughter and her hysterical mother’ (p. 87).
But
he does not ask the simple question asked by Szasz and Esterson in their books
(Szasz
1961, Laing & Esterson 1964, Esterson 1970) published at the
time of his own first books and during the decade of the Zollikon seminars: is
the ‘neurotic’ or ‘schizophrenic’ ill at all? Dr Condrau approaches
‘schizophrenia’ in a ‘holistic’, ‘daseinsanalytic’ way; but he still takes it
that it is an ‘illness’ that he is approaching. He
writes that Wyrsch, Binswanger, and Boss talked to the patient ‘as if s/he were
healthy’ (p. 94); thus he implies that, in fact, she or he was not. If
this is questionable for ‘schizophrenia’, how much more so is it for the
‘neurotic’ clients he still calls ‘ill’? Again, he says of Odette (p. 96), that
her ‘symptoms were not severe enough to require hospitalization in a closed
institution’. But he leaves little doubt that, had they been, this
‘require[ment]’ would have been met, as part of the ‘intervening care’ that, in
cases such as Odette’s, must in his view supplement ‘anticipatory care’, these
two kinds of ‘care’ being the ‘extreme possibilities’ of ‘solicitude’ or
‘concern’ (‘Fürsorge’)
that Heidegger distinguished in Being and
Time (1986 [1927]: 122; 1962 [1927]: 158–159; 1996 [1927]: 114–115).
Did Dr Condrau, who attended the Zollikon seminars in his fifth decade, never
question Boss’s and Heidegger’s medicalising of ‘Da-sein’?
Students
who worry about what questions, if any, they should ask a client could learn
from Dr Condrau. He writes: ‘it is common for patients in daseinsanalytic
therapy to find themselves faced with the question and challenge of why they do not take up certain new possibilities for relating and behaving’
(p. 70). Like Boss, he extols the virtues of ‘Why not?’ rather than ‘Why?’ (p.
166). Since these questions have become something of a fetish and a taboo,
respectively, for ‘existential’ psychotherapists, it is amusing to see that, in
his very first, exemplary, case study, Dr Condrau asks Boris, who had reported
a dream of being paralysed from the hips down, ‘[W]hy were you so afraid of
what happened?’, and follows this up by asking Boris why he had become ill, and
why he had been stricken with such a paralysis (p. 43). It is good that Dr Condrau
does not turn these rough and ready guidelines into rigid rules.
All
in all, this is a book by a human being, written for human beings, not for
technologists or time-servers. It is filled with concentrated thinking, sound
sense, and wisdom, born of a lifetime’s practice and teaching of
daseinsanalytic therapy. It is a book of rare qualities: a book to reflect on,
question, and argue with. Given its accidental additional rarity, due to the
destruction of most of the first edition, who would not want to find a copy?
But let us insist on a second edition too.
Note
Gion Condrau, introduced by
Anthony Stadlen, will conduct an Inner Circle Seminar, in the centenary month
of Medard Boss’s birth, on Sunday
26 October 2003 in the Tuke Common Room at Regent’s College, London
[Note 2020
Gion Condrau was unwell and had to cancel this planned seminar.]
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Anthony
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