The Human Meaning of Care: Phenomenology, Daseinanalysis, and the Art of Healing

Thank you, Danilo, for this occasion to share some thoughts with your readers—who should perhaps first know how we met. It was my discovery of a book in Italian by Vincenzo Caretti that comprised previously unpublished conversations between Caretti and R.D. Laing, conversations that no longer can be found in manuscript in English among Laing’s papers but had been translated into Italian in 1979. Danilo secured the rights to the Italian text and we went about exchanging his translations and my suggested revisions, each of us fine-tuning the substance and tone of what Laing said. The project was a success and our small book was published by the Society for Existential Analysis in 2022. Here we are, four years later, and now we can having a conversation of our own, in this instance, not on madness and wisdom, which was the theme of the Laing book, but daseinanalysis.

My interest in phenomenology and existential thought broadly conceived began in 1965 when as an undergraduate majoring in philosophy, I was fortunate enough to have had a somewhat renegade professor who offered a special topics course for majors on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, which had been published only three years earlier. This was a time when philosophy departments in the States were was dominated entirely by the ethos of logical positivism. Little attention was paid to Continental philosophy. By the end of the semester I had become acquainted with phenomenology and names such as Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre. The following semester I began a two-semester-long tutorial on Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. At the time I declared my major, I had disaffiliated myself from the pre-medicine curriculum which I was on track for as directed by parents who wanted me to become a doctor. My own interest in medicine, such as it was, leaned toward psychiatry, and I had a strong interest in psychotherapy. I had never envisioned myself treating vomiting babies, sore throats or cancer, or performing surgery. In connection with psychiatry I had heard about psychoanalysis, which in those days was dominated by psychiatrists. After an initial period of skepticism about it, I was thoroughly drawn into and worked my way through the Freud Standard Edition and much of the first-generation psychoanalytic literature. Your readers should know that to become a psychoanalyst then meant first studying medicine and specializing in psychiatry, followed by another eight years or more of training in a psychoanalytic institute. Non-medical (lay) analysts were few in number and not at all respected by “real” psychoanalysts. They were mostly to be found in New York and hardly anywhere else. It occurred to me that if I were to study medicine it would be to eventually join that super-elite. But interest in Continental philosophy ruled the day. Eventually, I completed a doctorate on Heidegger’s philosophy of translation. So, there were two strong interests for me early on: first, psychoanalysis, and then, after the Merleau-Ponty seminar, phenomenology. I was 19 years old and two seemingly very different fields of research and practice were having a contest in me for my interest.

As it happens, two years before my encounter with Merleau-Ponty, a book had been published by the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Medard Boss called Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis. I became aware of it around the time of the Merleau-Ponty seminar in some bibliography or other, ordered a copy through the bookstore, and found in it a resolution for me of the confrontation between psychoanalysis and phenomenology lurking in the exotic term (to me and probably to most of my professors) daseinanalysis. As I learned, the influence of Martin Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology had led Boss to a “refinement” of psychoanalysis, which had been named daseinanalysis in the 1940s by Jacob Wyrsch and taken up by his colleague, the sanitarium psychiatrist and friend of Heidegger since their youth, Ludwig Binswanger, for whom it referred to a means of working out a broad anthropology and psychopathology in order to understand the “world project” of those who were in his care in Switzerland at the Bellevue Sanitarium in Kreuzlingen, which had been established for the rich and famous by Binswanger’s grandfather just one year after Freud’s birth. His research led to a psychiatric daseinanalysis.

After college, I returned home to a small town thirty miles from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Entirely by chance, Pittsburgh was one of only two or three cities in the States where a graduate philosophy department had embraced the study of phenomenology. That was Duquesne University. While I taught English literature to adolescents to earn money and pay for tuition, I began philosophy classes there. There I came under the influence of my first mentor, André Schuwer, a Dutch priest who taught the first courses on Heidegger that I attended. He was a remarkable person and was completing some of the first translations of Heidegger’s lecture courses. I completed a master’s degree there. The doctorate I mentioned was earned at Fordham, where my second great mentor (also a priest), William J. Richardson, taught before moving on to Boston College.

In 1975 I determined to go to Freiburg to perhaps catch a glimpse of Heidegger. Tickets in hand by the end of the year, only days before I was scheduled to fly to Europe in May 1976, Heidegger died. I visited his grave only a few days after his interment. My trip, however, had another item on its agenda, and that was to meet Medard Boss in Zurich. This also happened in June. I have written about the encounter. Needless to say, the meeting, brief as it was, was life-changing. Then 73 years old, Boss welcomed me at noon for an hour between sessions with analysands. We talked about Heidegger, R.D. Laing, and daseinanalysis. I told him about my early interest in psychoanalysis and my unwillingness to follow the path of medicine to prepare as a psychoanalyst but wanted to take the daseinanalytic approach he had written about. Boss’s institute was then only six years old. Interestingly enough, he had little interest in it. Building it would turn out to be the project of his successor, Gion Condrau. In any case, I explained to Boss my understanding of what he written about his therapeutic daseinanalysis, which differed so much from Binswanger’s psychiatric daseinanalysis, and whether he thought my understanding conformed to what he had written and whether he thought I could do such work with appropriate preparation. It was a bit like Georg Groddeck asking Freud whether he could number himself among psychoanalysts even though he had not yet had formal training. Freud gave Groddeck his blessing and Groddeck never formally trained at a psychoanalytic institute. Boss gave me his. I went away energized. The only problem was that there was no daseinanalytic institute in Pittsburgh or anywhere in the States to return to.

My solution was to move to New York, where during the 1980s I completed a five-year orthodox psychoanalytic preparation program, so that I could have an entrée into the network of word-of-mouth referrals. The whole experience was disappointing. Again, thanks to a bit of luck, during the time of the psychoanalytic experience I found one of the few daseinanalysts in the States, someone who had been prepared by Leslie Farber, who had spent three years with Boss in Zurich in the years before the Swiss institute had opened. This man, who, like Boss, came from a background in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, had also become disenchanted with orthodox psychoanalysis. My third great mentor, he passed along the daseinanalytic approach to me during a period of another five or six years. I gladly engaged in it, even though it meant traveling to Philadelphia, where he lived, on a regular basis and meeting with him when he was in New York, which was quite often. In those days, in the absence of a formal institute, we did not count hours of analysis, but I can tell you that while the psychoanalytic training program required 600 hours of analysis on the couch, my daseinanalytic experience, also on the couch, far exceeded that number. As a few remaining European daseinanalysts who worked with Boss or Condrau have reported to me in recent conversations, no one counted hours in those days at the first daseinanalytic institute. It was all very informal, albeit rigorous and demanding. The element of mentorship was not missing. Indeed, I would say that this is still the only way to transmit the art of daseinanalytic therapy. There are now a half-dozen daseinanalytic institutes in Europe and the Americas and, given that times have changed, all have adopted formal training requirements. Sadly, my experience in the 1980s could not be replicated in today’s world of standardized curricula for would-be psychotherapists, overseen by a national monitoring body, the American Psychological Association.

So, that, briefly, is how I became familiar with phenomenology and daseinanalysis. Beginning then and now, sixty years later, I continue to read Heidegger and have spent a fair amount of time writing on Boss so that his legacy will not be lost. I have now for the most part retired from seeing people in my consulting room but devote several hours each week to online work with individuals, teaching and supervising candidates in the American Daseinsanalytic Institute, which I co-founded in 2021. I also work with a few individuals online in daseinanalysis, but only because I had started to work with them in person. COVID made “hybrid” arrangements inevitable for several years for even the strictest daseinanalysts, who would never have dreamed of anything but the one-on-one, immediate, personal setting of the consulting room as a space and place in which to meet for daseinanalysis. I have followed suit, but am not convinced it is best practice.

As, unknown to us, COVID was about to be in full fury, in 2020 with Tamás’s encouragement I (like Boss) was nevertheless at first reluctant to found what is the first daseinanalytic institute in North America. By the way, there has been a very active daseinanalytic tradition in Brazil since the 1970s. Why Brazil? Boss’s son and daughter moved there to become farmers in the 1960s. When he went there to visit them, he was introduced to psychiatrists and psychotherapists and in formal lectures and informal venues told them about daseinanalysis. Some heartily embraced it! But, you have asked, what is this “it”—what is daseinanalysis?

Earlier I referred to it as a “refinement” of orthodox psychoanalysis. That is Boss’s expression and by it he meant a purifying of psychoanalysis of its metaphysical, natural science-oriented philosophical baggage, namely, Freud’s metapsychology. As a young man in the early 20s on his Wanderjahr, while in Vienna Boss met Freud and had a few weeks of sessions of psychoanalysis on Freud’s couch. He had limited money and his father would not pay for analysis, so Freud saw him for a reduced fee and even gave him some money for his living expenses. Freud the man impressed Boss tremendously, but when he went on to read Freud’s publications, he found that the way Freud practiced was not reflected in what he had written, especially in the papers on technique. Boss eventually thought of Freud as a closet daseinanalyst, much I do, adding to the list, by the way, Georg Groddeck, R.D. Laing and Jan van den Berg, the last two named, like Boss, having been profoundly influenced by Heidegger. Groddeck, you may know, was the source of the basic element of Freud’s second model of the psyche—the topographic—having proposed the existence of what he term the Es or the It. This It, the I (the Ich) and the Over-me (Überich) comprised Freud’s second model. The famous drawing of it found in The Ego and the Id was first sent to Groddeck in one of his letters to the founder of psychosomatic medicine. (We should recall that Freud did not use the Latin terms id, ego and superego. These were inventions of James Strachey, who supervised the first authoritative English translation of Freud’s work and wanted terms that sounded more “scientific” than the homely pronouns Es and Ich and the curious Überich.)

Back to Boss. After completing his medical and hospital psychiatric training, overseen by Eugen Bleuler (the inventor of “schizophrenia”) and Carl Gustav Jung (with whom he worked for ten years), Boss entered the Swiss Psychoanalytic Institute and completed his preparation there with Hans Behn Eschenberg and later worked in supervision by others of the first generation of psychoanalysts in Berlin and London. But then came his fateful encounter with a book, Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit while he was stationed during World War II in the field as a medical doctor. He wrote to Heidegger in 1946 about the book, highlighting especially a passage in it which describes the existential caring for [Fürsorge] another human being. Heidegger, who had been forced out of his teaching position in Freiburg and was living for the most part in his ski hut in Todtnauberg, replied, noting that Boss had hit on an essential passage. They met in 1949, and beginning in 1959, Heidegger first undertook regular trips to Zurich, first to lecture and eventually to present seminars to Boss’s residents in psychiatry. The protocols of the seminars and other materials (conversations Boss had recorded and some heavily redacted correspondence) were published in 1987 as the Zollikoner Seminare, even though the agreement between the two men had been that the material should not see publication until after the deaths of both men. Boss died in 1990, but not without having been prevailed upon by Heidegger’s family and last assistant to release the text. Among the last words he wrote, in fact, were for his preface to the English translation of the seminars, which finally appeared only in 2001. In this volume we see the background of what had been in the works for Boss since the late 1940s brought to full explication in challenging pronouncements and interchanges with psychiatrists. So, what, then, was being grounded, explored and described? What is daseinanalysis? To be glib—daseinanalysis is psychoanalysis without the psyche. A few words about the term might lend my shorthand some clarity.

You do not see the word “psyche” in daseinanalysis. That is because Heidegger’s fundamental ontology had been about disclosing what makes anything like a psyche possible in the first place. He concludes (as Boss agrees) that there it makes no sense to talk about an encapsulated, isolated thing such as the psyche, no matter where it might be found. Today, psychologists locate it in the brain. Why? Because there is something more fundamental that makes such a notion superfluous, and that is the starting point of the disclosure of anything whatsoever, what Heidegger termed Dasein. Anything whatsoever includes, of course, human beings as well as all the rest, inorganic, organic and spiritual beings. Note that there is for Heidegger only one Dasein. It comes about, one might say, in each instance of the existence of a particular human being. The human being is unique among all other beings (rocks, roses, cats, God). It is from an ontological perspective, that is from the perspective of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, the ground of the possibility of any actualization of that ground. The latter brings into view what Heidegger calls the ontic perspective, that of everyday life.

In everyday German, Dasein refers to the being on hand somewhere of something, but in daseinanalysis it has Heidegger’s special sense just described. The most basic meaning of analysis is also preserved in the term daseinanalysis, that is, not as the taking apart of something into its component parts (as in chemical analysis) but rather the liberating, loosening from its moorings of Dasein in one of its actualizations, Dasein that has become tied up and is held fast as it were. In daseinanalysis, the analysand always takes the lead in finding a way to such a loosening up and resulting greater freedom, while the analyst follows wherever the conversation goes that, little by little, brings into the open what has receded into the shadows become among the analysand’s given possibilities.

The two key words of daseinanalysis are freedom and possibility. Other modalities of therapy are directed at a psyche, an ego, I, or person, construed as isolated from the analyst (and typically from others in his or her life), which implies that a relationship must be formed with the equally isolated psyche, ego, I or person of the analyst. The goal of interactions that follow is for the therapist to make right something that has been deemed wrong with the other, using the relationship formed as a means of influencing the client or patient. By contrast, in daseinanalysis, human beings come to discover what is right about them, articulate it and bring it out of the shadows as it were. The daseinanalyst provides a model of openness to do so. No relationship between the two has to be first established, since a feature of Dasein is that it is always together-with others. There is already a relation—Dasein to Dasein—between analyst and analysand. It is in the context of this relation that the therapeutic conversation takes place. This is its ontological nature. Of course, from an ontic perspective, it is also a unique relationship, unlike nearly every other relationship that an analysand might experience. This is best appreciated by recalling that nothing is expected in return by the analyst when he offers the other his time. The only comparable relationships I can think of are that between a priest and his communicant and that between a mother and her very young child. Perhaps I can say more about this later.

So far, as we have seen, daseinanalysis is fundamentally different psychoanalysis and any modality that begins with notion of a psyche—and that obviously includes the branch of medicine we know and love as psychiatry. But it is also different from the other existential psychotherapies, which ultimately have their source in humanistic psychology, the so-called “third force” in the history of modern psychotherapy. Here, once again, the hypothesis of the isolated person, self, ego, I, or soul sets these modalities apart from daseinanalysis. That the existential modalities take a phenomenological perspective is admirable and a step in the right direction, but that they begin with the notion of isolated, encapsulated psychic monads rather than Dasein makes for a world of difference when compared to daseinanalysis.

Perhaps we should begin with the opportunistic historical moment of the COVID years I alluded to earlier, since it informs the other motivations you mentioned. In 2020, we had no idea that there would soon been the sudden isolation of individuals from their therapists. This led in many cases to decompensations, dissociations, heightened anxiety, recollection of experiences of abandonment and loss. Some clients spoke by telephone with their therapists, but most quite naturally went to virtual zoom (or other platform) sessions. When it was again possible to meet in person, many decided not to do that since it was more convenient to go virtual. Years of doing so had passed. At this time, by the way, most therapists I know are see people half in-person and half online. I should add that another change that occurred when all therapy was online. Individuals started more aggressively to market themselves through large organizations and began to see more individuals who were lived far from them, even in other countries. With the advent of the online platforms, entrepreneurs had already seen an opportunity to make such pairings possible. Alternatively or alongside belonging to “panels” of available therapists practitioners also crafted elaborate webpages. This proliferated in the COVID era and continues now. Were I a young therapist, I suppose I would do this, but given my generation’s traditions and having been retired for seven years, I can boast at never having had a prospective analysand find me other than by word of mouth.

But to our broader motivations, since we did not anticipate COVID when we were planning to found ADI. The mission of ADI was to establish New York as the center for preparation in daseinanalysis in North America, much as New York had been the home for psychoanalysis when it crossed the Atlantic a century ago. The goal was to cast a wide net internationally, outside of Europe, where there were institutes in Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Greece, to locate individuals in English-speaking countries–the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand–and even more distant places where individuals wished to have the experience of preparation in English. Since there were no institutes in other English-speaking countries, ADI would be unique in being the first among them to offer preparation for preparing to practice daseinanalysis in English. Currently, our candidates live in Singapore, Hong Kong, the UK, Poland and Chile, as well as in the States. ADI stresses the broad, cross-cultural appeal of daseinanalysis, for let us not forget that apart from being without gender or age, Dasein is without ethnicity or political orientation. We look forward to applicants from China and Russia and Southeast Asia. That has not happened yet, but we have been at this for only five years, years in which much has changed across the globe. Another way of thinking about ADI is seeing it as moving out of its essentially German-oriented ethos to one that is English-oriented. This has been reflected, by the way, in an increasing number of articles published in English in the journal Daseinsanalyse, which Tamás co-edits. It published its fortieth issue two years ago.

We have found that without exception the six individuals who are currently our candidates had become disenchanted with the system of preparation and practice in clinical psychology and psychiatry, no matter where they live. This is because the illness-care system of psychotherapy has undergone important changes in the past decades, rendering its approach to practice more impersonal, even distancing, than it had been before when psychoanalysis dominated. These changes  are the result of the medicalization of psychotherapy. A critique of psychiatric practice was first made by Thomas Szasz almost seventy years ago, but in the late 1970s he also wrote The Myth of Psychotherapy, which spoke directly to the dehumanization of psychotherapy, clinical psychology and counseling I have been talking about. To the best of my knowledge he did not write about daseinanalysis, although seems to have been familiar with the work of Medard Boss. I wish he had, since I think he would have supported the outlook and ethos of daseinanalysis with its focus on the freedom of the individual as focus of any therapeutic encounter.

Daseinanalysis challenges the establishment’s perspective on what is therapeutic. The partnership at the heart of our practice is the basis of its therapeutic effectiveness, and this is a different sort of arrangement than we find in medicine (especially psychiatry), clinical psychology, and psychotherapy, whether its orientation is cognitive-behavioral, humanistic, or even existential.

Your question gives me an opportunity to say a bit more about Martin Heidegger, who is the central figure in the background of daseinanalysis as a “refinement” of psychoanalysis. As mentioned earlier, it is Heidegger’s realization about the unique being of the human being that made daseinanalysis possible. The traditional categories, which apply to other beings, has been abandoned by Heidegger and replaced by what he termed the existentials of Dasein. This is not the place to review them, although I should mention that two new translations of his major work, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), by Thomas Sheehan and Cyril Welch, respectively, have brought about a deeper understanding of the perhaps thirty or forty existentials that was not at all clear in the English translations of 1962 and 1996. I cannot speak about the Italian translations of Heidegger (Chiodi, Marini), but I suspect how Heidegger has been received in Italy has depended to a great extent on their renderings of the key terms, especially the existentials. In response to your question, such a radical revision of our understanding of human being cannot help but deeply affect the way doctors, nurses, psychologists, and therapists work. Here I should mention two books your readers might want to find and read. One is the Zollikon Seminars mentioned earlier and the other is Medard Boss’s ground plan for a new kind of practice in medicine and psychology, first published in 1971, and translated as Existential Foundations of Medicine and Psychology. I believe it has also been translated into Italian. It concludes with comments on practice, but then there is a coda on preventive medicine in our technological age. This brief text will be of special interest to those want a sense of the broader social perspective Boss took. Other daseinanalysts have also taken up the theme.

The important point to stress again is that the human being is existentially (that is, at an ontological level) together-with others. There was never just one human being. I know this may offend readers of the opening chapter of Genesis. But it seems conclusive that, no matter how life began and in one of its incarnations became homo sapiens sapiens the embryo forms within the body of its mother. After birth, it comes to meet its father and, one after another, members of its family, neighbors, and the planetary community of human beings living in diverse geographic, linguistic and cultural places and spaces. In our time, the closeness of every human being to every other human being is no longer an optional reality. Although this is only beginning to sink in, it is real. It is hard to say whether the cell phone has made this possible or that as a result of exploration and, yes, colonization, those who decided not to live out their lives where they were born but instead to search beyond the horizon may be identified as the source of the eventual need for something like the technology of instant global communication that is now a fact.

The helpers, those who care for others (and let us not foget that care per se was for Heidegger the pre-eminent existential), those who exemplify the existential termed Fürsorge, cannot help but be affected by the daseinanalytic approach, once they have become aware of it. Alas, current medical practice and psychotherapy continue to move in the same direction they have followed from the start, however; namely, that laid out by natural science, in particular the application of the hypothetico-deductive method of research. When this is replaced by a hermeneutic-phenomenological approach, we do not lose rigor, since phenomenology is also a science, just not one based measurability and quantification. Daseinanalysts are fond of reminding us that nothing human is measurable. This does not mean we cannot have knowledge of the nature or essence of (the) human being, but only that it is a different kind of knowledge gained when the method is phenomenological. The challenge is to make all of this known to our colleagues in the natural science tradition. This will take some time, Danilo. I know I will not see it in my lifetime and perhaps you will not in yours, but your medical humanities project is clearly one that can include doing what we are doing in our conversation and passing it along, so that more and more of those who are called to help fellow human beings will at least hear about the daseinanalytic approach and, one hopes, read further in the area, or perhaps even consider candidacy in ADI!

May I be a bit contentious here? You noticed in an earlier response that I used the expression “illness-care profession.” I think there is a problem with the term “healthcare,” since doctors do not treat health. They treat illnesses, and only when the illness has been identified and a diagnosis has been made do they hazard intervening. On the other hand, the health of the person is in the hands of the person himself or herself, each of whom cares for his or her health on a daily basis, but especially ardently when they are feeling sick. The ambiguity of the notion of health has been discussed by Hans-Georg Gadamer, as you know, in his The Enigma of Health: The Art of Healing in a Scientific Age. Your readers should know that Gadamer was, like Boss, influenced by Heidegger. Indeed, he was his student.

But apart from my problem with the term “healthcare practice,” we agree about what the topic really is, and that is the Fürsorge, the caring for the other. In your question, you hit precisely on what is central to daseinanalytic practice: presence, listening, and encounter. (Who have you been talking to?) I have said something about the first, the ontological givenness of the Dasein-Dasein relation, our being-with that characterizes (the) human being’s presence. As for encounter, it is important to recall that there is no hierarchy in daseinanalysis, as there is, for example, in one’s relationship with an ophthalmologist who examines my eye or a surgeon who sets a fractured bone. Unfortunately, in contemporary psychotherapy, something like this is implied when considering the pair client and psychotherapist. As we saw earlier, this is the result of the medicalization of the field and has vitiated if not eliminated its possible effectiveness. The most egregious example of this is behavior modification, which treats the other as Pavlov treated his dogs, as reflex-bound creatures. But (the) human being is not such a thing. I may change my mind about something (a belief, for example). I, even at an advanced age, may decide that I have had enough of daseinanalysis and sign on as a cook’s assistant on a commercial ocean-going ship and sail out my remaining days. I may risk what I have for years thought I would never do. I may take up Boss’s famous imperative interrogative, “Why after all not?,” rather than searching for answers to “Why?” questions which probe in my past as I recollect it to find causes for why I am who I am and behave as I do. (Here is another place where daseinanalysis fundamentally departs from psychoanalysis.) This does not mean that I may abandon children I have procreated or beat up on someone I find annoying. And I may commit suicide. This last surprise to others is, of course, a very touchy subject, so complex that it must wait for another occasion to address. But, like the other acts, its source is my freedom and daseinanalysis has as its only goal the liberation of the other to realize possibilities, even one that interrupts our ontological being-toward-death.

Then there is encounter. Genuine encounter can happen only between equals. That is why, as I have said earlier, the transaction with a surgeon cannot be not an encounter. There I give up my freedom, stretch out on the operating room table, and willingly become an object (albeit a very special kind of object) for the surgeon to perform his skilled procedure on. Think of the little curtain–the anesthesia screen–that puts the patient’s face out of view of the surgeon. It is not there for the patient’s benefit. He or she is sedated and not aware of what is going on. Think also of the elaborate draping of the body so that it does not appear to be a whole body that is incised but only a surgical “field” to work within. By contrast, in therapeutic encounter, there is the whole existing human being with whom the analyst finds himself in relation thanks to which an immediate, that is, unmediated, mutually responsive meeting or engagement occurs. This is encounter in daseinanalysis. The energy of encounter is what Boss called the therapeutic eros, a term he borrowed from the Peruvian psychiatrist and friend, Carlos Alberto Seguín. An energy which emanates from the analyst, it is not sexual but, in the more basic sense of eros, generative. It is directed at the Dasein of the analysand. Unlike the erotic in other partnerships, however, it is unidirectional, again very much like God’s love mediated by the priest or mother’s love for her infant. Nothing of the kind is expected in return. Indeed, there is full expectation of ambivalence, perhaps anger, and the possibility of sexual feelings directed at the analyst is not uncommon. None of these expressions of feeling affect the analyst other than to prompt him to make possible as best he can the further production by the analysand of further feelings, thoughts, images, memories of past events and dreams, and the appearance of hopes for the future or, frightening expectations about what is to come.

Finally, there is listening, which is the analyst’s most important function. When the other has taken her position on the couch, out of sight of the analyst, every session of daseinanalysis begins with silence. At some point, the analysand begins to speak. One might be surprised to know that rarely is the initial silence long. Analysands are eager to speak openly, without being distracted by the facial expressions, posture or gestures of the analyst, which in other face-to-face modalities may inhibit the other. The style of listening is very much a function of the personality of the analyst. So is the way of describing it. I like to talk about it in terms of the way one listens to music. There is a cellist, say, who is playing. I am not concerned with who the cellist is but rather with the line of melody (the words), their tone and timbre, that is, its mood or attunement (comparable to the key in which the music that is being performed was composed). I try to discern the narrative as it is played out as so many variations on a theme that open out session and after session. By the way, for daseinanalysts, any session is understood to be the first session, while knowing that it may also be the last session. On the matter of each session’s being the first session, I am guided by the words of the British psychoanalyst, Wilfred Bion, who spoke of entering each psychoanalytic hour “without memory, desire or understanding.” Remember, in daseinanalysis, one is not interested in reconstructing the past by decoding symbols, as in the Freudian interpretation of the manifest content of a recollected dream to determine its latent thoughts, understood as wishes. Instead, for daseinanalysts, in listening one brings full attention to the present in its unfolding between the Dasein of the analysand and the Dasein of the analyst, a present understood as Heidegger did that is always being brought to life from out of the impending future that draws Dasein’s present toward it. Eventually, the analysand will begin to speak primarily of what is coming about and coming to pass in the present he shares with the analyst, in a shared world of things. When this has become the analysand’s way of seeing herself, one will very likely soon hear from her that she is ready to end the work and move on without the need of the daseinanalytic partnership. This may happen after relatively few meetings, but usually it takes a fairly long time, especially since most daseinanalysts meet people their respective hours only weekly. One wonders if it would be desirable to meet more frequently, as in psychoanalysis. For some individuals, it might be more beneficial, but this is not early twentieth-century Vienna or Berlin. People’s lives are more crowded and hectic in general, which precludes more frequent meetings but is also very likely why more people now seek therapy than did in Freud’s time and through the end of the last century.

I hope I haven’t been too long-winded at times, Danilo, but it has felt to me to be all too brief an interview, especially since there is so much more to say about daseinanalysis, including the influence on Medard Boss of Vedanta Hindu practices in the development of therapeutic daseinanalysis. This may come as surprising to readers, who think of Heidegger as the sole influence in the development of therapeutic daseinanalysis. If it is evocative, let me suggest that readers begin their further exploration of daseinanalysis with Boss’s “memoir,” A Psychiatrist Discovers India, which was published the year before the Zollikon decade began. In it we hear of the double source of daseinanalysis.

My message to young scholars and those in practice in one of the areas devoted to caring for others is that there is a great deal to be learned about the human being than the natural science method can provide and access to such knowledge is accessible by taking a phenomenological perspective on our fellow human beings. It is a humanizing perspective. Rest assured, I would add, that taking such a perspective and following its way will enhance one’s way of caring for the other, understood very much as Levinas understood the other, very much as Buber understood the other as a Du, a Thou. Medicine in our time is very much in need of a pharmakon. I would suggest a dose of Boss and see how well it is tolerated and if there are no undesirable side-effects, I would suggest increasing the dosage, understanding that it will likely be habit forming.

What a pleasure to be again concerned with a conversation, Danilo! This time it is our own. I hope our exchange will serve your readers well. And by all means ask them to be in touch with me if they are so inclined. I look forward to hearing from individuals who are searching for something new, engaging and even challenging to ideas they have long held.