SEVEN PAPERS ON EXISTENTIAL ANALYSIS ... - Wagner College

New York: Jason Aronson, p. 112. On the medicalization of everyday life, including psychiatric
"care," see Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis. The Expropriation of Health (New York: Random House,
1976) and Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Psychotherapy (Syracuse: University of Syracuse Press,
1978).
27. The Japanese understand this change in things when they write about pathos that things
have: mono no aware.
28. A great deal of attention has been given to the body in psychotherapy, and rightly so. The
Gestalt therapists, for example, have contributed a great deal in this area, yet they have dealt
only with the body one has. The existential body has eluded Gestalt therapists, because, like all
traditional psychologists, they begin with the so-called subjective experiences of the patient's
body. The patient's body is understood as a res extensa for the subject (a res cogitans) who is
out of touch with his body. The goal of Gestalt psychotherapy is to reunite the psychological
subject with its primary objects, the patient's body. But since these do not occur separated from
each other, there is nothing to reunite. See, for example, the classic statement in the field, Fritz
Perls, Ralph E. Hefferline and Paul Goodman, Gestalt Therapy. Excitement and Growth in the
Human Personality (New York:Dell, 1951).
29. The problem of the highly sexualized nature of the body for many patients has plagued
psychotherapists since Freud. Briefly, only when the body of the patient has become objectified,
does the sexual quality of the body become exaggerated. Nonetheless, the importance of
sexuality of the body one is remains paramount.
30. Freud recognized that the patient does not need to be changed, and this is why he
cautioned against encouraging the patient to make important decisions during psychoanalysis.
He did not see, however, that it is not enough for the patient to understand what he is. Freud
assumed that patients came to him to be helped, as they properly do when they visit a
physician (as Freud was by training). The idea of the psychotherapist as a "helper" and a
member of the "helping professions" (including nursing and social work) new pervades the field.
31. The autism and negativism of "schizophrenia" may be conceptualized as an extreme form of
world loss, as Binswanger realized a long time ago. Being-in-the-World. Selected Papers of
Ludzoig Binswanger (New York: Basic Books, 1963), p. 338. See also Henri Ellenberger, "A Clinical
Introduction to Psychiatric Phenomenology and Existential Analysis," in Rollo May et al. (eds),
Existence. A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1958), pp. 121-
123.
32. The meaning of the personal past is crucial for existential psychology. Remembering and
reading history are not the same sort of thing, however, even though they are often thought to
be. What I return to in memory is newly revised each time I return to it, because I return to it as a
different person. My existence has changed, albeit often in hardly detectable ways. The
continuity of personality is one of the grand illusions of psychology. Thus what I recall, let us say,
at age 10 of an event that happened the summer before is not what I recall at age 20 of the
same event. My personal past is to what a camcorder records as lived time is to what a clock
ticks off. I look with disbelief at the figures moving across the screen as a videotape plays back
images recorded 20 years earlier. This is because my memory has changed my past during the
intervening years, so that it no longer corresponds to what is in the archive, which the outsider
takes to be "what really happened." When I try to fix the past as if it were a documented history
which I might later read, I work against what memory does. I construct a mythic past (usually in
connection with a communal history) that controverts what my memory newly recreates in
forming my personal past, which, again, is something different each time I remember an event.