Psychology & Buddhism.pdf

144 Belinda Siew Luan Khong
every particular being (including possibilities) to come forth. Although human
beings have this responsibility, Boss (1963) is cognisant that not all possibilities
can be fulfilled or realised. Throughout a person’s life, he or she has to select one
possibility to the exclusion of others. So Being-guilty signifies to the individual
the necessity of having to choose, and the realisation that the choices are finite.
From a daseinsanalytic perspective, to be responsible means to take responsibility
for the particular basis in which one finds oneself, and the particular choice
that one makes on that basis (Muhall, 1996).
In Boss’s view, although people are free to choose which life possibilities
they wish to appropriate, some people are closed to specific possibilities. What
gives rise to the ontic inability or the failure to take responsibility? According to
Boss (1963), one reason for this is that Da-sein interprets its possibilities from the
perspective of the “they,” that is from what is conventional and comfortable. This
brings us to the notion of “levelling down,” which refers to the human tendency
to gloss over the ontological with what is ontically familiar and public
(Heidegger, 1927/1962). For example, Heidegger and Boss perceive human
beings as “Being-unto-Death,” meaning that mortality is an ontological characteristic
of human beings. Yet ontically, people flee from this by rationalising death
into something that will happen but not yet. Daseinsanalysts believe that if they
can help their clients to comprehend how the ontological has been levelled
down, clients can be assisted in taking responsibility for their present way of
Being-in-the world.
This notion of responsibility is related to the idea of authenticity. For Boss
and Heidegger, being authentic means being open to all possibilities but remaining
content with the development of one. According to Heidegger (1927/1962),
Da-sein exist authentically when its choice of existence does not hinge upon what
is public and familiar, but upon its taking the responsibility to decide for itself
how it wishes to live. Daseinsanalysis believe that by cultivating an attitude
of seeing things as they are really are, people learn to differentiate between an
“ontological self-understanding” which includes all knowledge about myself as a
human being and an “ontical self-understanding,” which is the understanding
about myself as an individual in specific situations (Holzhey-Kunz, 1996, p. 97).
This insight can assist people in comprehending what is changeable (the ontic
situation) and what is not (the ontological situation) (Holzhey-Kunz, 1996).
Daseinsanalysis also recognises that the ability to take responsibility may be
impaired in “neurotically troubled individuals” (Boss, 1988, p. 70). According to
Boss, this lack of responsibility discloses an inability on the part of the individual
to be addressed by a multiplicity of phenomena and to respond to them adequately.
Take the example of schizophrenia. The daseinsanalytic understanding of
this illness takes as its starting point that the human being is fundamentally a perceptive,
responsive openness, and that in schizophrenic patients, this openness is
impaired (Boss, 1979). In daseinsanalysis, illness is perceived as a privation or