SEVEN PAPERS ON EXISTENTIAL ANALYSIS ... - Wagner College

psychoanalysis) or invisible, unapproachable authority (as in behavior modification). In
existential analysis both participants retain their autonomy. Its primary goal is illuminating the
“client’s” way of existence or being-in-a-world with a view to the affirmation of her authenticity.
[7] I sometimes think we should abandon the term client. Instead of client and existential analyst,
we should speak of a therapeutic partnership. Instead of psychotherapy, we should speak of a
therapeutic venture, a way of working, an approach or mode of encounter in which two human
beings participate in a co-operative undertaking. The image that comes to mind is of two highwire
artists who depend each other for balance and support but who are both in a precarious
place. One of two remains more or less stationary while the other changes his orientation in
space. Both are performing without a net! [8]
There is nothing new about the use of the term encounter in psychotherapy, but I would
stress that in my usage there is no implication of confrontation between the two participants in
the therapeutic venture. I would ask the reader to recall instead the original sense of encounter
as a serendipitous occasion (which Heidegger considered in his fundamental ontology under
the heading of the Jeweiligkeit of Da-sein), with all of the uncertainty, surprise and
unpredictability of a chance meeting.
The concept of authenticity in existential analysis may be best understood in the context
of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. To be sure, the concept of authenticity in psychotherapy was
not explicitly discussed by Heidegger in his analytique [Analytik] of existence [Da-sein) in Sein
und Zeit (Be[-ing] and Time (1927), but authenticity played an important role in his way of
thinking about existence at that time and in the following years, including the period of the
Zollikon seminars with psychiatrists at the home of Medard Boss towards the end of Heidegger’s
life. Without his work on human be-ing [Seiende], the kind of be-ing for whom its be[-ing] [Sein] is
at issue and for whom it is ever in question, it is doubtful that Kierkegaard would have been
remembered as more than a critic of the Hegelian system or the author of edifying discourses on
the religious way of life [Existenz]. Nor might Husserl’s phenomenological psychology have been
more than a part of his vast project of re-envisioning the acts of consciousness. As it is, however,
the centrality of authenticity in Kierkegaard’s examination of “the exister” [den Existerende] [9]
runs as an undercurrent throughout Sein und Zeit and emerges vividly in the work of psychiatrists
who responded strongly to Heidegger’s philosophy.
While working out the categories of the unique kind of be-ing we are, Heidegger often
referred to what is eigentlich (authentic). In his path-making book about the be of any kind of
be-ing, his purpose was not to produce a philosophical anthropology, although many early
commentators and the first psychiatrists who were influenced by Heidegger’s analytique
[Analytik] of existence believed they had found just that in his book. Although it is neither
philosophical anthropology nor psychology, what Heidegger says about what is “most its own
[eigenst]” for existence can serve as a basis for understanding authenticity in the ontic sense it
has in existential analysis. In Heidegger’s ontology, that is to say, with respect to possibility and
what lies as yet undiscovered about any phenomenon, the notion of what is authentic
[eigentlich] undergoes a process of decontamination of its metaphysical interpretations.
Revealing what is “most its own” about a phenomenon first relieves it of the veneer of actuality
that has settled on it and disfigured it in the course of its history and then allows the scope of its
possibility to emerge, perhaps for the first time, or after a long period of having been
overshadowed by distortions imposed on it by the program of metaphysics that according to
Heidegger began with classic Greek philosophy. [10]
It is well known that Heidegger was opposed to making inferences from his fundamental
ontology of existence [Da-sein] to psychology and psychotherapy, but they were made
nonetheless, first, in Ludwig Binswanger’s approach to psychiatric practice and, later, with
Heidegger’s blessings, in Daseinsanalyse, the work of Medard Boss, the Swiss psychiatrist who
collaborated with Heidegger over many years and convinced him that a form of therapeutic
encounter could be construed in light of Heidegger’s analytique of existence. [11]