The Ethics of Daseinsanalysis
Copyright © Anthony Stadlen 2019
This is a very slightly revised version of a statement I wrote in 2018 at the request of the International Federation of Daseinsanalysis (IFDA). It was approved in November 2018 for inclusion in IFDA’s manual of policies and as its ethical-deontological statement for the European Association of Psychotherapy.
I thank Hans-Dieter Foerster, Carlos Eduardo Carvalho Freire, Thanasis Georgas, Salomé Hangartner, Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Ado Huygens, and Frank Schalow for their constructive suggestions.
Anthony Stadlen, 26 November 2019
This statement has now been published in Heidegger Studies, Volume 36 (2020: 51-55) and in Existential Analysis, Volume 33.2 (July 2022: 356-360), as well as in The Manual of Policies and Procedures of The International Federation of Daseinsanalysis (2023-6).
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The term ‘Daseinsanalysis’ as we shall use it denotes a phenomenological therapeutic practice
informed by the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s thinking of the human being as ‘being-in-the-world’ or ‘Da-sein’ (usually untranslated, but
sometimes tentatively translated as ‘being-here’, ‘being-there’, ‘being-disclosure’,
etc.).
Ludwig Binswanger
introduced the term ‘Daseinsanalysis’
towards the end of the first half of the twentieth century to indicate a
‘research direction in psychiatry’, but Heidegger warned that Binswanger had in
some ways misunderstood his thinking.
After the second world war, Heidegger himself
collaborated with the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Medard Boss in developing a
new therapeutic practice which they termed ‘Daseinsanalysis’. It was intended
as a ‘purified’, phenomenological form
of psychotherapy or psychoanalysis, grounded in Heidegger’s philosophy, which
seeks to allow human beings, living creatures and things to ‘show themselves
from themselves’.
‘Psychotherapy’
means that one person gives ‘attention’ (‘therapy’) to the ‘soul’ (‘psyche’) of
another. The ‘soul’ or ‘psyche’ means, according to Aristotle, the ‘ground and
manner of one’s relation to all that is’. ‘Analysis’ means ‘loosening’, ‘setting
free’, ‘unknotting’.
But the existing language of psychotherapy
and psychoanalysis had become dehumanised, reifying, reductive, and ‘technical’.
It obscured rather than revealing the human reality. The language corrupted much
of the practice. Boss and Heidegger set out to ‘purify the dialect’ (Mallarmé, Eliot) of the
practice. Boss and his colleague Alice Holzhey wrote: ‘Daseinsanalysis itself wants nothing other than to be
a purified psychoanalysis.’
The rethinking of the foundations meant
that the very terms ‘psychotherapy’ and ‘psychoanalysis’ were thrown into question,
or took on a new meaning, together with virtually all ‘technical’ terms used by
all schools of ‘psychotherapy’ or ‘psychoanalysis’. At the same time, Boss
emphasised that he was not setting up yet another such school, in opposition to,
and competing with, these existing ones. He insisted that much existing
psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic practice
was still valuable. But this was despite, rather than because of, the
prevailing ‘theory’.
The ‘purification’ required for
Daseinsanalysis is ontological and ethical in nature. It is concerned with the
being of human beings. The overcoming of the dehumanising of the human being
through technical language is not a technical reform, but an ethical one.
Moreover, the corrupted language of psychology,
psychotherapy and psychoanalysis has itself contributed to a corrupt and
reduced conception of what it is to be human in the larger society. The concept
of ethics itself is corrupted.
The ethical purification entailed by
Daseinsanalysis thus calls for a reciprocal purification, a purified
understanding, of the very nature of ethics.
Freud already touched on this when he said
that the person who had undergone psychoanalysis would be likely to have a
stronger moral sense, but it might differ from the prevailing morality.
However, Daseinsanalysis requires an ethical transformation of psychoanalysis,
and of the psychoanalytic idea of morality, itself.
The crux of the corruption that
Daseinsanalysis seeks to remedy was well stated by Heidegger’s teacher, the philosopher Edmund Husserl, the
founder of phenomenology, who, in his book The Crisis of the European Sciences,
recalled how Galileo had founded modern natural science by excluding from it
any trace of the human. This enabled the flowering of many sciences, such as
physics and modern natural-scientific medicine. However, when an attempt was
subsequently made to study the human being scientifically, so-called human
sciences such as psychology were developed using the methods appropriate to the
natural sciences. This resulted in dehumanised human sciences. Husserl
characterised this as a bizarre duplication, a strange result of Cartesian
dualism.
An example of this may clarify the ethics
of Daseinsanalysis.
Before the division of the world between
natural science and human science, the Greeks spoke of ethos, pathos, and logos. The logos (understanding) of pathos
(experience or suffering), the ‘pathologia’,
was the human understanding of experience or of suffering. It might be called
existential or daseinsanalytic ‘pathology’, if this word were not so corrupted
by modern usage. One might even speak, when appropriate, of ‘psychopathology’, where ‘psyche’ is understood in Aristotle’s
sense as described above. In modern medicine, a tiny sample of a human being’s
bodily material composition is sent to a ‘pathology laboratory’ for
physico-chemical investigation. The pattern of the material sample is now
called the ‘pathology’. In modern psychiatry and psychotherapy, this
natural-scientific medical concept of pathology is reprojected back into a
reduced, reified, supposedly human ‘double’ of the laboratory realm called the ‘psyche’,
and is called ‘psychopathology’. But this is a completely corrupted version of
original, authentic logos of pathos of psyche as studied and transformed by Daseinsanalysis.
Such an authentic study and transformation
of pathos and logos necessarily entails the study and transformation of ethos also. Heraclitus calls ethos man’s daimon, embracing violent destruction and festive celebration. Heidegger
interprets it as naming ‘the open region in which the human being dwells’.
The laboratory study of pathology, and the
derived pseudo-scientific, natural-scientistic concept of ‘psychopathology’, are independent of ethos, and of ethics. Of course, the
laboratory worker, the physician, and the psychiatrist or psychotherapist are
supposed to behave ethically, according to agreed ethical standards.
But the very heart of what the
Daseinsanalyst does is, in the true sense, ethical. Daseinsanalyst and Daseinsanalysand
together search for what is ethical. Each daseinsanalytic couple is engaged in
a creative venture, in which ethics are discovered anew each time.
Thus the
ethics of Daseinsanalysis are twofold.
There is the
practice of Daseinsanalysis, between ‘analyst’ and ‘analysand’,
which is regarded in other forms of psychotherapy as a technical matter but in
Daseinsanalysis as itself an ethical one.
And there
are the external matters, which in ordinary psychotherapy are acknowledged as
ethical, as they are in Daseinsanalysis, though there may be some respects in
which the daseinsanalytic ethics differ from the ethics prevailing in society.
Daseinsanalytic institutes have to negotiate agreements on ethics within the
legal system of the larger society. (This may not be possible. In communist Czechoslovakia
The
Daseinsanalyst does not impose his or her own ethics on the other, but
facilitates what is ultimately an ethical exploration by the other of how to
live. The analyst has to learn to let the other learn. This is a subtle
discipline: a lifetime’s work. The other leaves when he or she
feels ready to continue learning without this particular Daseinsanalyst’s help.
It is
crucial that Daseinsanalysis is a voluntary activity, between consenting adults,
or, if children are involved, with parents’ or
guardians’ consent. The Daseinsanalyst
does not seek out his or her daseinsanalytic partner or client. If the person
is not already, however vaguely, seeking, there is no basis for starting. And,
when the person has started, the appropriate ethical actions of the
Daseinsanalyst take the form of, in Heidegger’s terms,
‘leaping ahead’, not ‘leaping in’: that is, facilitating the person’s
own quest of discovery rather than proposing solutions.
Daseinsanalysis
is not a study of individual ‘subjects’ or persons. Rather, the person is understood as
always already being-in-the-world-with-others. This in itself has radical
ethical implications. Pathos and logos are not aspects of an isolated
subject. They arise in the play of Mit-sein,
being-with, as described by Heidegger.
Psychiatry,
psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis have been largely concerned with the
individual ‘psyche’ and with
attributions about supposed intrapsychic ‘psychopathology’. But when the person is seen as being-in-the-world-with-others,
the attributed ‘symptomatology’ even of such a supposed ‘illness’ as ‘schizophrenia’
may become intelligible as ordinary human responses within an interpersonal situation.
Conventional
psychotherapeutic concepts such as ‘empathy’ are seen to be corrupted versions of being-with. A
person may experience him- or herself and others as encapsulated subjects or
egos, whose only way of relating to others is, at best, ‘empathy’. But Daseinsanalysis may facilitate
the awakening of the realisation of one’s primordial being-with-others. And
this realisation is ethical.
The ethical
exploration is ‘existential’, in accord with the nature of human existence,
which cannot ultimately be grasped by any system or science. ‘Existence’ is
related etymologically to ‘ecstasy’. Human beings are not entities of the kind
which can be adequately studied by the natural sciences of statics, kinematics
or dynamics, or even biology, psychology or sociology. Rather, as Heidegger put
it, the human being is ‘ecstatic’, in the sense that our very being is in
question for ourselves. The study of human reality has to be a kind of ‘ec-statics’.
Human beings,
traditionally thought of as ‘made in the image’ of the Ineffable, are therefore
themselves ineffable. And so authentic psychotherapy, and Daseinsanalysis above
all, is ultimately ineffable. Any attempt to describe what happens in
Daseinsanalysisis is best made in everyday, down-to-earth prose or even poetry.
And the people
best qualified to attempt a description would seem to be clients, not
therapists.
With this proviso,
it is possible to discern a pattern in the proliferation of narratives of the
daseinsanalytic adventure. Although the nature of the human being is ‘ecstatic’, it is a common experience that, as
Mallarmé put it, ‘the child abdicates its ecstasy’.
This entails what
Freud called ‘repression’, but not just a psychodynamic repression
of sexual instincts; rather, in Heidegger’s terms, ‘an ecstatic-intentional world-relationship
to things, living creatures and human beings’.
This has profound
implications for therapy. For example, sexual abuse in childhood often leads to
the child repressing, not necessarily factual memory or sexual feelings, but
the ethical dimension of what happened, which is the most unbearable.
Through
Daseinsanalysis, both client and analyst have an opportunity for rediscovery
and renewal, together, of the ecstatic nature of being human. Heidegger has
described this as ‘das Ereignis’,
the calling of be-ing (Seyn) and the
human being (Da-sein) for each other,
the grounding of the human in the source of all beings.
This then forms
the foundation of an originary ethics, more profound than a mere system of
rules, but in accord with such ancient ethical precepts as love of the
neighbour and the stranger, and respect and awe for all aspects of creation.
[Added by IFDA:]
The above considerations are
intended to clarify that authentic Daseinsanalysis specifically entails for
both analyst and client an implicit or explicit engagement with the core of all
ethical questions. As we have explained, this takes place within a societal
ethical-deontological framework, and we concur with the fundamental principles
stipulated by the European Association of Psychotherapy:
https://www.europsyche.org/contents/13134/statement-of-ethical-principles
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