SEVEN PAPERS ON EXISTENTIAL ANALYSIS ... - Wagner College

15. See Part II of Heidegger's Die Grundbegiffe der Metaphysik. Welt-Endlicheit-Einsamkeit (1929-
30), translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker, as The Fundamental Concepts of
Metaphysics. World-Finitude-Solitude (1996) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 176-276.
This is a detailed phenomenological analysis of the organism. Incidentally, it show's Heidegger's
familiarity with biology and the other natural sciences.
16. The body I have is the body which, since the time of Descartes, has been distinguished from
the mind. For more than two centuries, it has been thought of as a highly complicated machine.
This view of the human body as a machine was first presented by Julian Offray de la Mettrie in
1748. See L’Homme Machine, first translated, in 1921, as Man a Machine by G. C.Bussey and M.
W. Calkins, Chicago: Open Court.
17. Pleasure also brings the lived body into focus, but does not reduce it to the body one has.
Here the physiological explanation of pain and pleasure fails to account for the existential
experience of the body.
18. Erik Erikson, The Life Cycle Completed. A Review (1982) New York: Norton.
19. This basic feature of existence is, of course, the reason for I Heidegger's close attention to the
etymology and spelling of the word Dasein.
20. It seems to me that among groups of people something very different is going on which
requires a phenomenological analysis of its on. Here pioneer work was done in the late 1940s
and 1950s by the British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion. See Experiences in Groups. New York: Basic
Books, 1959.
21. Donald W. Winnicott, "Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena" (1951), in Through
Pediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (New York: Basic Books, 1975).
22. Sein und Zeit (1927), Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 2, §§ 12-38, pp. 71-239.
23. Here the work of Jan van den Berg on metabletics or historical psychology has been very
influential on my existential psychology. See, for example, Things. Four Metabletic Reflections
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1970) and "Phenomenology and Metabletics", in
Humanitas 6(3), 1971, pp.279-290.
24. A world is not the product of lived time, because there is no difference between one's
existence and lived time. From an other's point of view, my existence and my world are the
same. From my perspective, however, the distinction between my existence and my lived time
never comes up, since I do not have access to my own existence as something to compare to
my lived time. For access to my existence (if I may repeat this again), I rely on others.
25. The physical suffering that results is a problem of living. The existential therapist is not
concerned with everyday problems of living, but with a change in one's existence.
26. Psychotherapy was never meant to reduce the ambiguity of life, although many who now
practice clinical psychology seem to believe that they are in the business of leveling down or
eliminating the ambiguities that characterize human life. Heidegger's insights into the structure
of existence included the observation that anxiety [Angst] is a positive element of existence. On
anxiety, see Sein und Zeit § 40, and the lecture Was ist Metaphysik? (1929), in Wegmarken, Martin
Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 9, pp. 111 ff. See also Medard Boss, Existential Foundations of
Medicine and Psychology ( 1979 [1970]), translated by Stephen Conway and Anne Cleaves,