Absent at the Creation: The Existential Psychiatry of Ludwig Binswanger 9780872121751, 0872121755

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ABSENT AT THE CREATION The Existential Psychiatry of Ludwig Binswanger by Bradley Seidman

First Edition Library of Congress Catalog No. 83-90254 Copyright © 1983 by Bradley Seidman All rights reserved Libra Publishers, Inc. 391 Willets Road Roslyn Heights, New York 11577 Manufactured in the United States of America ISBN 0-87212-175-5

CONTENTS

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Introduction ............................................................. 1 Ludwig Binswanger’s "Fruitful Misunderstanding” of the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger ................................... 12 The Case of Ellen West ..................................... 45 Food, Air and Ground in the Short Stories of Franz Kafka and Ludwig Binswanger’s The Case of Ellen W est............................... 56 Binswanger’s Theory of Extravagance.............. 100 Index .................................................................. 109

ABSENT AT THE CREATION

INTRODUCTION The existential school of psychiatry is the most comprehen­ sive attempt to conceptualize the nature of man. Existentialism attempts to understand man by cutting below the cleavage between subject and object, one of the most treacherous dicho­ tomies in all of psychiatry. When the question of truth is raised in an objective manner, reflection is different from the truth raised subjectively. In the words of Kierkegaard, "An objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation process of the most passionate inwardness is the truth.”1 For example, if one is concerned over whether the world is round, that is a concern over objective truth. But the subjective truth of that statement is that you would have been willing to sail on the boat with Columbus. When Nietzsche says that "all truths are bloody truths for me,”2 he means that one will come to a bloody end if the world is flat. Existentialism stresses that every truth should be met by the question, "Can we live it?” It is important to understand man in his own frame of ref­ erence. How can we ascertain when we have understood the subjective truth? When Columbus sailed he was doing some­ thing public in acting as if the world is round. This we call engagement. But are the only subjective truths those that the individual is prepared to act upon? Truth becomes reality only as the individual produces it in consciousness. The way to do is to be. We must have some criteria for knowing whether we understand man in subjective terms. Rollo May has pointed out the difference between something true and something that is psychologically irrelevant or unreal. Statistical truths are irrelevant to the individual who is about to die. May even quotes from Spence, a leader of behaviorism and an opponent of existentialism, who says in effect that it does not matter whether the subject of study is real or not, as long as it leads to abstractions about the nature of man: "Lest it seem that we are setting up an artificial, straw-man issue, let us point out

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that this chasm between truth and reality is openly and frankly admitted by sophisticated thinkers in behaviouristic and con­ ditioning psychology. Spence, distinguished leader of one wing of behaviour theory, writes, 'The question of whether any par­ ticular realm of behaviour phenomena is more real or closer to real life and hence should be given priority in investigation does not, or at least should not, arise for the psychologist as scientist.’3 That is to say, it does not primarily matter whether what is being studied is real or not. What realms, then, should be selected for study? Spence gives priority to phenomena which lend themselves to the degrees of control and analysis necessary for the formulation of abstract laws.’4 Nowhere has our point been put more unabashedly and clearly—what can be reduced to abstract laws is selected, and whether what you are studying has reality or not is irrelevant to this goal.”5 Spence is content to pile abstraction on top of abstraction, so that the branches and flowers of the tree are beautiful, but the trunk is rotten to the core. An impressive system has been erected, but it has no foundation in human reality. We must be wary of being fraudulent: better trivial things with a solid foundation than conjectures. We must not forget the Sufi tale of the man who lost his keys in a dark alley, but looked for them under a street light because there the light was better. Man lacks the courage to do, the courage to be, and the courage of his convictions. A man is existentially neurotic if he lacks the courage of his convictions, and is in even deeper trouble if he has no convictions at all. Existentialism addresses itself to man’s innate capacities. There are three modes of Dasein, or Being-in-the-world. There is the umwelt, the mitwelt, and the eigenwelt. The Umwelt is the "objective” world, where man is regarded biologically as homo sapien. Mitwelt, when translated from the German, means "with-world,” or the com­ munal world of man amongst other men. The Eigenwelt, when translated, means "my own world,” or my personal subjective world. The Umwelt calls to mind terms such as "adjustment,” and includes those transactions with the environment that do

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not require awareness. Carrying out successful transactions with this world leads to biological survival. The Mitwelt refers to the mode of interaction which occurs with other human beings. Of the three, it is the Eigenwelt which is the least understood. This is the transcendent sense of one’s own iden­ tity, or the self as the self sees the self. This has recently been symbolized by Laing in the following manner:6 p ----- ►( p ----- » p) Binswanger says that every individual lives in these three world-regions simultaneously. Therefore, these three worldregions are three simultaneous modes of existence rather than three separate worlds. Natural science psychology is deficient in that it concentrates on the Umwelt at the expense of the Mitwelt and Eigenwelt. Psychoanalysis especially falls prey to this mistake. For example, Freud excelled at explicating in­ stincts, drives, and needs in the framework of biological de­ terminism, and his descendants have investigated man’s social interactions, but these social interactions, which make up most of the substance of social psychology, are explained in terms appropriate to the Umwelt but not to the Mitwelt. When the latter is derived from the former, the Mitwelt becomes a mere epiphenomenon. Natural science psychology and psychoanal­ ysis have only a vague picture of the Mitwelt, and even less of a conception of the Eigenwelt, which is either completely ignored or confined to the role of a meta-epiphenomenon, a victim of double or compound alienation. At any rate, natural science psychology does not research the Eigenwelt in its own right. Consequently, existential analysis is the only school of psychiatry which undertakes an authentic investigation of all three regions, and in this respect it is unique. In Binswanger’s later analyses, he organized his research around the larger frame of reference of the "existential modes,” which are more sociologically oriented, and drew distinctions between interactions with the Other. The four existential

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modes are the "singular mode,” the "anonymous mode,” the "dual mode,” and the "plural mode.” The singular mode is nar­ cissistic and self-centered. There are certain things that only I can do, and that no one can do for me. For example, only I can die my own death; no one can do it for me. The anonymous mode is typified by bureaucracy and inconspicuousness. A per­ son who lives in the anonymous mode doesn’t want to take any kind of responsibility for his actions. When such an individual is blamed for something, he gives an excuse which renders his responsibility inconspicuous. He takes refuge behind the in­ authentic "we” or "they,” or in the original words of Heidegger, "das Man ” The most common characteristic of the "plural mode” occurs when people treat each other as objects of ex­ ploitation—for example, in the business world, where each per­ son is out to get the best possible deal for himself or the lowest price. But Binswanger says that when every relationship one has is on that level, this is existential sickness. In the plural mode, the intimacy of Buber’s I-Thou relationship gives way to formal competition and struggle between "one and the other.” Finally, the "dual mode” corresponds to Buber’s inti­ mate I-Thou relationship, and designates a "we” relation whereby every decision that two people make is predicated on the equal distribution of pleasure, rather than each person out to get all he can at the expense of the other so that one person’s profit is another person’s loss. To Binswanger, health is typified by acting in the dual mode. May says that we are born with the ontological potential for living in the dual mode. It is not something that can be learned—like physics. But it is often repressed. An individual who does not exercise the capacity for the dual mode which is inherent naturally in all of us becomes a conformist, because such a person tries to avoid becoming conspicuous, and is avoiding ex-istence, which literally trans­ lated means "to stand out.” All that the plural mode has to offer man are conventional truths, conventional goals, and so­ cial roles. In the biological realm, such a person lives according to the lowest common denominator, so that love and passion

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become sex, fulfillment means physical survival, and so forth. This is inauthentic because such an individual always "plays it safe” and never takes any risks or exhibits what Tillich calls "the courage to be.” This was part of the problem of Freud’s patients also: how to achieve pleasure in the dual mode after adopting stultifying puritan social roles which were prevalent in turn-of-the-century Vienna. The ideal person according to May lives up to his full ontological potential for the dual mode, and is an individualist. The inauthentic man does not under­ stand truths as bloody truths. Other characteristics besides the inevitable ways of beingin-the-world are our inevitable experiences of time and space. According to Bergson and Minkowski, time is always lived time. Time passes by slowly when we are bored, and quickly when we are excited, even though the same amount of clock time would have passed if we were in the opposite mood, or no matter what mood we were in. But the prime concern of ex­ istential psychiatry is with time as it is experienced by the individual subjectively. Those who are morbidly concerned with death avoid excitement because excitement makes time pass by faster. Thus, by understanding lived time, we can ren­ der such an individual’s behavior intelligible. Kierkegaard in Either-Or describes how some people relish boredom because they are desirous of longevity. In a depression, because of the present, and how the immediacy of the present loses meaning, people either talk about the past or the future. If one can employ only two temporal modes and not three, one is existentially ill. Dread, despair, and anxiety have the capacity to shrink one’s world. In such cases of neurotic constriction, the past and the future are subsidized by the present. Just as time is always lived time, space is always lived space. For example, space is subjectively experienced as empty when we are in despair, even though geographically it remains the same. And in time of sorrow, space is tightened. So Binswanger says that in order to understand pathology, one must under­ stand spatiality as a prerequisite. Many neurotics live out their

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lives within a highly circumscribed geographical diameter from which they seldom venture. This brings to mind the story of the child who ran away from home but stayed on the corner because he wasn’t allowed to cross the street. Space thus has a personal meaning which transcends its objective, physical properties. In later chapters, we shall see how Ellen West ex­ panded and contracted her life-space, and lived in a world of dread which would not retain its physical boundaries. Another characteristic of Dasein which is inevitable is caus­ ality. The realm of causality is divided among three principles: determinism, chance, and intentionality. We can see an event as occurring in any one of the three ways. Children are not taught intentionality. Rather, they tell us whether they meant or did not mean something that they did. Depending on the world view of the individual, one type of causality may pre­ dominate. For example, determinism predominates in the sub­ jective experience of the melancholic, while chance predominates in the manic. The manic lives in a world of complete irrespon­ sibility where he is not bound by the past or the future. Instead, everything happens through pure chance. The melancholic feels smothered under the oppressive weight of his own past, and acts without feeling that he has it in his power to change anything. He sees nothing left to the domain of chance or free will. Paranoiacs, on the other hand, hardly notice determinism or chance at all. Instead, they are almost completely concerned with intentionality, and see little other than human intentions, even in inanimate objects. An existential analysis involves an attempt to understand time, space, causality, and other relevant characteristics, which are invariant in the life of man. All symptomatology is characteristic of subjective experience. Every healthy individ­ ual has ontological guilt, which Heidegger calls facticity. This is the guilt that goes along with being-in-the-world. This ontological guilt manifests itself in three major ways. First of all, we each know invariably, either consciously or unconsciously, that of all the things we can be, we must make

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a choice, and that each choice seals us off from an alternative choice that we could have made at the same moment. There is no such thing as not choosing, for even this is a choice not to choose. At any given moment, we are flooded which choices and possibilities. In making a choice one is guilty, because one cannot be everywhere: part of you lives and part of you dies. Second, there is an inevitable bias with which we see other people. One can never see one’s fellow man veridically. And finally there is guilt in being separated from nature. We have been separated from nature through technology. We have all these guilts, and if an individual feels that he is exempt from them, he has either resolved or is repressing the guilt. But existentialism does not view guilt as morbid. Guilt is mor­ bid only if it is repressed. Nihilism seeks to escape the question of guilt by saying that everything is meaningless. Rollo May indicts the entire twentieth century for its repression of on­ tological guilt. He explains that ontological guilt is nothing to be afraid of. An awareness of guilt leads to a sharpened sen­ sitivity to others. By being aware that one is guilty for just being-in-the-world, one becomes more open to change. There is a sense of excitement and exhilaration whenever we make a choice. Along with this goes the philosophical humility of realizing one’s finite limitations. The concept of neurotic guilt put forward by existential psychiatry is no different from Freud’s. Where existentialism goes further is in showing us that a healthy individual confronts his ontological guilt, while a neurotic never even gets to it. Anxiety is closely connected to guilt in that like guilt, it has to be resolved and distinguished from neurotic anxiety. Anxiety is the awareness that one is finite and can cease to be. Exis­ tentialism succeeds where Freudian psychoanalysis fails in­ sofar as Freud rationalizes away guilt and anxiety which are real, and which the individual actually suffers from. Freud can deal only with the anxiety and guilt that fit his own dynamics. Free-floating anxiety, which is anxiety that is not attached to any object, always was a mystery that escaped Freud’s libido

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theory. It was even more ironic that those people who should have been anxious according to the libido theory were not. The greatest form of anxiety comes from inauthenticity and the unfulfilled life. Anxiety lies between the self and the selfs expectations. Binswanger thus rephrased the fundamental an­ alytic question of mental conflict to one of "to be or not to be.” Burton has compiled an excellent summary of what Bin­ swanger set out to do in his new existential analysis. In ad­ dition to what we have already mentioned, some of Binswanger’s goals were: a. To experience the patient phenomenologically rather than categorically. b. To change the goals of psychoanalysis so as to be more syntonic with the patient’s "internal” existence and less with the needs of the analyst. c. To give the subjective, or dynamic, being of the patient parity with organic postulations in formulating diagnosis and prognosis. d. To deny psychopathological manifestations as culturally or personally special, and to return them to the human con­ dition. e. To recognize the splitting in schizophrenia as a reaction to untenable life modes and to the world as less than an ideal­ istic experience. f. To make possible personal freedom and rebellion in the sphere of the mental. g. To demythologize transference and resistance as sole heal­ ing conceptions in psychoanalytic treatment. h. To focus on the patient’s interpersonal moment, its passion and meaning, rather than on the historical trauma or phantasy of trauma in treatment. i. To establish newer concepts of existential anxiety, guilt, and depression, and relate them more exactly to the total hu­ man condition. j. To refuse to provide the analyst professional refuge from

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his own humanity, and to force him into the interpersonal human condition at large. k. To recast libido theory to include pleasure as only one mode of the ego being-in-the-world and to provide room for needs dominated by spirit, soul, or meaning. 1. To reinterpret the neuroses as the self-surrender of Dasein. m. To refuse genetic, organic, and hereditary interpretations of existence across the board as analytically self-serving. n. To interpret consciousness and intentionality as specifi­ cally human consciousness.7 To see the far-ranging implications that this across-the-board change in stance had for the practice of psychiatry, we need only look at traditional psychoanalysis to make note of the new era that existentialists such as Binswanger ushered in. Just to elaborate on one example from Burton’s list, let us take g, the demythologization of transference and resistance as sole healing conceptions in therapeutic treatment. Anna Freud writes, "Where a little girl is described by her parents as 'an affectionate, understanding, uncomplaining little thing,’ the analyst will note the conspicuous absence of the usual greed and aggression of childhood. Where the parents stress an older sibling’s love for babies, the analyst will look for the fate of the absent jealousies. Where a child is correctly described by the parents as ’incurious and not interested in matters such as differences between the sexes, the origin of babies, the rela­ tionship between the parents,’ it is obvious to us that an in­ surmountable battle has been fought which has led to the conscious extinction of normal human curiosity.”8 Anna Freud is assuming here that greed, jealousy, and cur­ iosity are universal givens and inherent characteristics of childhood. If they are absent, she assumes that they exist never­ theless and sets about looking for what happened to them! This represents a double bind of the most treacherous order, and orthodox psychoanalysis is filled with them. Bateson says that therapy is merely the effective use of therapeutic double binds,

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but how much therapy can be accomplished when the model one uses suffers from the same "can’t win” malady that one is trying to heal? Certainly, ample time has been given to psy­ choanalysts to answer this question, but they have remained curiously, but understandably, silent. At this point 1think it beneficial to define some of the unique terminology that Binswanger uses, since it will crop up often in the text. Inconsistency refers to the holes in the existence of the client. Chasing after the ideal means the moral need of the patient for a more sublime world. By the term laying aside of oneself, Binswanger implies the Dasein’s refusal to accept the leap into life. The Either/Or split, so evident in the case of Ellen West, is an analogy to the ambivalance in being-in-the-world which can turn into manic depression or schizophrenia. The horrid designates the loss of beauty in continued despair. The terrible is Binswanger’s way of defining an untenable position, or the impossibility of a way out for the Dasein. The wearing away o f existence, as exemplified by the case of Ellen West, refers to the grinding down of one’s being-in-the-world so that suicide becomes plausible and desirable. Dread denotes the presence of psychic danger in every conceivable act of pleasure. And finally, despair refers to the Dasein being closed in upon itself.

References ‘Kierkegaard, Soren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1855. 2Nietz8che, Friedrich. The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Viking Press, 1955. 3Spence, Kenneth. Behavior Therapy and Conditioning. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956. 4May, Rollo. Existence: A New Dimension in Psychology and Psychia­ try. New York: Basic Books, 1958. 6Laing, Ronald. The Self and Others: Further Studies in Sanity and Madness. London: Penguin, 1961.

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•Burton, Arthur. Operational Theories of Personality. New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1974. 7Freud, Anna. Normality and Pathology in Childhood. New York: International Universities Press, 1965.

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LUDWIG BINSWANGER’S "FRUITFUL MISUNDERSTANDING” OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARTIN HEIDEGGER In the past, numerous critics from varying schools and back­ grounds have voiced complaints regarding the philosophy of Martin HeideggerKproclaiming that the weakness of his brand af existentialism is that he fails to give criteria for authenticity. Heidegger on numerous occasions, in public addresses and in his writings, has told of the planetary phenomenon of un­ leashed technology, so that everywhere man is spreading in time and space, as well as expanding his control over nature. But man himself is not aware of what he really is. The ultimate goal of philosophy from the time of Socrates and the ancient Greeks has been to "know thyself.” This is what philosophy is striving to attain, and it is the role of existentialism to present the problem as inside each existing individual. We have yet to gain any clarity about ourselves. Man is always man as situated-in-the-world. All existentialists have laid stress upon man and the world, but Heidegger places the stress upon isolated individuality in attaining authenticity. Heidegger says that we should not conform to our neighbor, who represents a de­ generate form of mob society, where the ignorant masses rule by majority vote. Rather, the individual should decide alone, for democracy presupposes an enlightened mass, not the fol­ lowing of the herd without reflection. Immediately after Being and Time was published in English, Sidney Hook asked how one could be authentic to oneself. For in the absence of public criteria, one might become a lunatic or a fanatic if left to oneself to make all the decisions. According to Heidegger, Hook asked, does it not follow that Hitler and Stalin were authentic to themselves? And one Hitler or Stalin who is authentic to him­ self is enough to enslave half the world, and throw the entire

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planet into chaos. So the question of public criteria must always be raised. Existentialism has come a long way in incorporating this criticism, thus eliminating such complaints. But still, accord­ ing to Heidegger, to become authentic one must first divorce oneself from das Man. In looking back at the philosophy of the last century, we note that Hegel saw selfhood as someone being related to someone else. Hegel was acutely aware that apart from society there can be no genuine fulfillment of selfhood. But Hegel stressed the nation too strongly. Kierkegaard in the last century, in his vicious, lifelong at­ tack upon Hegel and everything he stood for, set the clock back. Among twentieth-century philosophers, Jaspers, Marcel, and Buber all stress the importance of the I-Thou relationship in one way or another. Each individual is a Thou to a subject. Therefore, man is a relational term. When man is alone, how can he prove that he is good? There must be something he should be good towards, such as society. Lonely contemplation and the disdain of worldly material possessions where the in­ dividual does no evil in isolation is hypocrisy. One must become actively involved in improving an imperfect society so that one may pull oneself and life up. In utter isolation from society, the only freedom that is realized is inward freedom, nothing more than one’s subjective ideals which never leave one’s own skull to become objectively realized in the concrete and material world. But according to Heidegger, we must work to overcome alienation only in the individual. Authenticity is blocked by authenticity. Your concern for the future in the face of death, psychologically expressed as dread, is neutrally expressed as care, in that your time is limited and finite. We are always time conscious as to what to do next, and are unable to carry out anything thoroughly. There is always some lukewarm com­ mitment, so we are concerned. We must selectively choose and wisely use our time, so that our decision making becomes the overriding aspect of the future which we must always worry about, and this worry is termed care. Heidegger says, "The

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transcendental 'universality’ of the phenomenon of Care and all fundamental existentials have a broadness on which every ontic exposition of Dasein is based.”1In examining the writings of Ludwig Binswanger, however, it is not quite accurate to say, as some critics have propounded in the past, that Binswanger’s Daseinanalysis is the extension or application of Heidegger’s ontology to the ontic level. Needleman explains this point in great detail: "If Heidegger’s restatement of Kant’s Copemican Revolution consists in placing the Dasein as Care as the ontologically a priori condition of beings, then what we have termed Binswanger’s Existential A Priori must represent ide­ ally the most complete or only possible extension of Heidegger’s thinking to the ontic level. Although Binswanger’s studies are ontic in that they concern particular individual human beings, they are more than ontic in that as far as each individual studied is concerned, his analyses refer to that which makes possible the experience of the particular individual.”2 To what extent does Ludwig Binswanger’s Daseinanalysis come from the ontology of Martin Heidegger and to what extent is it adapted from the philosophy of figures such as Martin Buber? In asking this question, we are really asking whether a genuine social theory can be derived from Heidegger’s phi­ losophy. If Heidegger does in fact lack a genuine social philos­ ophy, even though he claims that our being with others is a fundamental trait of our being, and we know for a fact from Binswanger’s writings that Binswanger has accorded primacy to positive and genuine interrelationships among human beings, how can an idea so anti-Heideggerian be accommodated into a framework which claims to be Heideggerian in concep­ tion and terminology, and has Heideggerian terminology and expressions interwoven within it? To arrive at a thorough, ac­ curate answer to this question, we must first compare the phi­ losophy of Heidegger to that of Buber, and then inspect the Daseinanalysis of Binswanger to discover which concepts were retained from Heidegger’s philsophy, and what had to be changed to provide a genuine foundation for social interaction.

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If we find that Binswanger had to modify Heidegger’s position in Being and Time and iqject new conceptions into Heidegger’s original thoughts in order to derive a positive social theory from it, then we know that Being and Time suggests a view of interpersonal relations that is negative in character, and that Heidegger merely pays lip service to positive social inter­ action, while in actuality making it contradictory to the defi­ nition of the authentic individual. Heidegger’s first mention of Being-with in Being and Time occurs in Section 26, after Heidegger says that Dasein’s pri­ mordial relation to the world is as equipment ready-to-hand. We find that this use of the world as equipment contains within it a primordial relationship with other Daseins. For when I deal with the world as equipment, I recognize that, as equip­ ment, part of the world is of service to other Daseins. Even in an innocent walk along a country path, I expose my primordial sharing of the world with others: "When, for example, we walk along the edge of a field but ’outside it’, the field shows itself as belonging to such-and-such a person, and decently kept up by him; the book we have used was bought at so-and-so’s shop and given by such-and-such a person, and so forth. The boat anchored at the shore is assigned in its Being-in-itself to an acquaintance who undertakes voyages with it; but even if it is a ’boat which is strange to us’, it is still indicative ofOthers.”3 By not trampling the farmer’s crops as I take my walk, I re­ cognize their service to the farmer as Dasein. But such consid­ eration of the farmer’s fields is not Being-with. Rather, Beingwith is the a priori which makes consideration of the farmer’s rights a possibility, since my capacity to respect his crops is prior to any particular act of consideration for the farmer that is a manifestation of my being-in-the-world with him. That I can be aware of Dasein’s use of the world as equipment is possible only because as Dasein I am essentially Being-with. To be Dasein at all means to be-with. In this example, Hei­ degger has not reduced other humans to mere tools. As Gelven points out, "It is through the analysis of Dasein’s use of the

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world as equipment that we come across the realization that there are other Daseins who use the world as equipment. This demands that, as Dasein, my mode of Being, my ontological relating, to another Dasein is basically different from my re­ lationship to the world as equipment. The a priori possibility of such a relationship is called Being-with.”4 We see that in Section 26 of Being and Time, Heidegger claims that man is inherently Being-with, and Being-with in the same fundamental ways that he exists as an individual human being. Indeed, if a third mode of Being, Being-with, is as primary as the other two modes of Being, then there is no gulf between one man and another. Unfortunately, Heidegger mentions this type of Being, but pays very little attention to it. The dissatisfaction with Heidegger on this point runs through numerous secondary sources. For example, Poggeler expresses his dismay at the way Heidegger has dealt with social being: "It is beyond doubt, of course, that Heidegger’s inquiry into social being belongs to the most unsatisfying among his work. This must be said even if we take into account that Heidegger never worked out this question concretely; that in fact, he dealt with it only with the intention of doing ’funda­ mental ontology’.”5 It is Poggeler’s opinion that Heidegger never intended to deal with the concrete social sphere in which men live—rather, only its onotological foundation, an excuse with Poggeler finds inadequate to explain the lack of a concrete social theory from Being and Time. Medard Boss is a Daseinanalyst who is content to defend Heidegger from "the egotistical misconception” by merely ex­ plaining that Heidegger asserts that man is equally and always Being-with. But Boss never delves further than this so that he might explain to us a concrete theory of social relations. He simply paraphrases Heidegger and says that the critics have distorted the concept of Dasein as primarily my Dasein, making egotistical rather than altruistic inferences from this. There is no deeper analysis of Being-with from Boss than there is in Being and Time. Therefore, the question arises as to how Boss

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gets around the dismal view of social relations that Heidegger presents us with in Being and Time. To Heidegger, the subject cannot be thought of apart from his world, nor the world apart from the subject who is there in it. Boss founds his Dasein­ analysis upon Heidegger’s view of the self as existing precisely through its continual transcending of itself in relation to its world. Whereas Binswanger stresses the "world-design” that results from this self-transcendence throughout his works, Boss chooses to reject the "world-design” as an unduly subjectivist reading of Heidegger. Instead, Boss stresses the later teachings of Heidegger that man is the shepherd of Being who brings all things into the light of Being through his relationship to them. Boss says, "Heidegger expressly mentions man’s immediate ability to understand himself and what he encounters in the unity of the ’there’, in the world-openness of his horizons.”6The way man handles or becomes aware of something discloses and illuminates the world. The fact that the world is my world does not stand in the way of my existing with others and of my becoming immediately aware of them as what they are. My Being-there discloses the meaning of what I encounter, and Dasein is always found with what it encounters. As a result, says Boss, "Man depends upon what he encounters as much as the encountered depends upon the disclosing nature of man for its appearance.”7It is the essence of existence to be with others, and my world is one which I necessarily share with others. Boss continues, "We never exist primarily as different subjects who only secondarily enter into interpersonal relations with one another and exchange ideas about the objects which all of us perceive. Instead, as any direct observation shows, we are all out there in the world together, primarily and from the beginning, with the same things shining forth in the common light of all our existences.”8 We note from this condensed ex­ plication of Boss’s original text that he gives a more basically social interpretation of Heidegger than do other existential analysts such as Rollo May. Boss had an exalted view of the therapist, who becomes in effect the very image of Heidegger’s

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authentic man. In order for an adequate interhuman relation­ ship between Daseinanalyst and patient, the analyst must have matured into the freedom of selfless concern for his patients, so that the analyst has all his own sensual and egotistical tendencies at his free disposal, and can keep them from inter­ fering secretly or openly with his genuine concern and selfless love for the patient.”9 Being human, the analyst is called upon to disclose both things and men, and bring them into the full light of Being, in accordance with the philosophy of Heidegger: "This knowledge increases his sensitivity to all the obstacles which generally reduce the potential relationships of the pa­ tient to a few and rigid inauthentic modes of behavior. Such sensitivity in turn enables the Daseinanalyst to carry out an analysis of resistance, wherein the patient is tirelessly con­ fronted with the limitations of his life and wherein these lim­ itations are incessantly questioned, so that the possibility of a richer existence is implied.”10 Boss compares man’s special manner of being-in-the-world to the shining of a light in the brightness of which all things can appear and reveal them­ selves in their own proper nature. This openness to the world facilitates the direct, immediate understanding between hu­ man beings. Even the mere act of perceiving the Other already involves us in his particular world relatedness. Therefore, from the very first encounter between the therapist and the patient, the therapist is already together with his patient in the pa­ tient’s way of existing. It is when Boss comments upon existential guilt that his relationship to Heidegger emerges most clearly. Freidman writes, "Boss eliminates the necessity for the distinction that May makes between guilt as the result of a failure to realize one’s potentialities and guilt as the result of the failure to meet the needs of one’s fellow men. To Boss, there would be corol­ laries of one basic existential indebtedness. On the other hand, although Boss says of one’s fellow men that as human beings, they are altogether different from things and are encountered as Being-in-the-world even as I am, he does not really offer an

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understanding of guilt that grows basically out of the inter­ human. Rather, guilt is for him the same whether it means the disclosing of the non-human phenomena or the human. So that if he overestimates Heidegger’s sociality in making Being-with so completely a corollary of Being-there, he nevertheless fails to see the encounter with me or things in any really mutual way comparable to Buber’s I-Thou relationship.”11 Boss’s ap­ proach to Daseinanalysis really means an aura of masterful imperturbability, an ineffable superiority over the tormented and needy patient. This "loving acceptance” is in actuality an inhuman context very different from that of a true I-Thou re­ lationship. It does not make the patient feel accepted in his real self. On the contrary: his deeper self remains tormented by loneliness, hatred, and a guilt which is all the more inten­ sified by the therapist’s expressions of goodwill and acceptance. To put it another way, it leads to the transformation of re­ pressed, destructive hatred into warm feelings of "love”—the grasping, voracious power and control-seeking love of the pos­ sessive mother or the seductive child. The primary characterization of Being-with is given by Hei­ degger as follows: "We use the term Dasein-with to designate that Being for which the Others who are are freed within-theworld. This Dasein-with of the Others is disclosed within-theworld for a Dasein, and so too for those who are Daseins with us, only because Dasein in itself is essentially Being-with. The phenomenological assertion that Dasein is essentially 'Beingwith’ has an existential-ontological meaning. It does not seek to establish ontically that factically I am not present-at-hand alone, and that Others of my kind occur. If this were what is meant by the proposition that Dasein’s Being-in-the-world is essentially constituted by Being-with, then Being-with would not be an existential attribute which Dasein, of its own accord, has coming to it from its own kind of Being. Being-with is an existential characteristic of Dasein even when factically no Other is present-at-hand or perceived. Even Dasein’s Beingalone is Being-with in the world.”12 Unfortunately, Heidegger

19

does not go very far beyond the assertion of this positive in­ terrelationship. Besides the fact that human being is Beingwith, and is essentially constituted as Being-with, insofar as man is at all, he possesses the mode of being-together-withothers. The very being of man is dependent upon the fact that he is Being-with Others. Others are necessary for man’s being, and they are also sufficient for it. "Not only is being towards others an autonomous, irreducible relationship of being: this relationship, as Being-with, is one which, with Dasein’s being, already is.”13 Human being is Being-with in so fundamental a sense that the very notion of human being contains within itself the notion of other human beings. As Heidegger says, "According to the analysis which we have now completed, Being-with belongs to the being of Dasein . . . Being-alone is a deficient mode of Being-with; its very possibility is the proof of this.”14 We see from this quotation that we are not merely Being-with, nor are we also Being-with; rather we are pri­ marily Being-with, originally Being-with, and our individual mode of being is merely a derived form of Being-with. The lack of Being-with, the absence of interrelatedness, is viewed as a lack—something that violates our most basic constitution. While the most general trait of individual being is care, the most general characterization of Being-with is solicitude: "Care is a characteristic of being with Being-with cannot have as its own, even though Being-with, like care, is a being towards entities encountered within the world. But those entities to­ wards which Dasein as Being-with comports itself do not have the kind of being which belong to equipment ready-to-hand; they are themselves Dasein. These entities are not objects of concern, but rather of solicitude.”16We see from this quotation that solicitude is not merely another way of handling the ma­ terial we come across. This is never the case where man is involved, for man is not an entity like any other entity. We dwell in another dimension altogether whenever man is in­ volved with other men. Heidegger is giving us nothing short of an a priori analysis of man and society. Individuals may

20

neglect one another, but this negative way of interacting still counts as an interaction, for it says something essential about man himself. So far, though, we have seen only the negative elements that characterize human interrelationships in that they can be like no other relationships. But what are the pos­ itive characterizations of solicitude? "With regard to its posi­ tive modes, solicitude has two extreme possibilities. It can, as it were, take away care from the Other and put itself in his position in concern: it can leap in for him. This kind of solicitude takes over for the Other that with which he is to concern him­ self. The Other is thus thrown out of his own position; he steps back so that afterwards, when the matter has been attended to, he can either take it over as something finished and at his disposal, or disburden himself of it completely. In such solici­ tude, the Other can become one who is dominated and de­ pendent, even if this domination is a tacit one and remains hidden from him. This kind of solicitude, which leaps in and takes away ’care,’ is to a large extent determinative for Beingwith, and pertains for the most part to our concern with tools. In contrast to this, there is also the possibility of a kind of solicitude which does not so much leap in for the other as leap ahead of him in his existential potentiality for being, not in order to take away his ’care,’ but rather to give it back to him authentically as such for the first time. This kind of solicitude pertains essentially to authentic care—that is, to the existence of the Other, not to a ’ what with which he is concerned; it helps the other to become transparent to himself in his care and to become free for it.” 16 Is the concept of solicitude tenable on a priori grounds? If solicitude is impossible, then I, for example, cannot jump in for you, nor ahead of you, because my wholeness is not your whole­ ness, nor can it ever be. Then the question arises: what does Heidegger mean by the terms ’’leap in for” and ’leap ahead o f’ somebody? Does he mean that human beings can facilitate life for one another in certain ways? Perhaps if men are Beingwith they can help each other to some extent in their lives, but

21

never in fundamental ways, so that only I can die my own death, and so forth. But were Heidegger to assert this, he would run into contradictions, for he also says that "Dasein is ever my own” and that "the being with which I am concerned is always my own being.” No one is substitutable for the indi­ vidual. To answer the questions we have posed, let us analyze in detail the two positive modes of solicitude. The first positive mode is termed "leaping in” for someone else, which in point of fact is negative in its effect upon the other. Certainly we might start out with good intentions to help another person, only to end up dominating and crippling him. We saw above that Medard Boss takes this "positive solicitude” as his starting point in his Daseinanalysis, only to end up with the "inherently grasping, rapacious power and control-seeking love of the pos­ sessive mother or the seductive child.” How could Heidegger term an act such as this a "positive” mode of solicitude, when we see its power to devastate the Other? Robbing a man of his care destroys his only chance for authenticity, and in usurping another’s role, do you not usurp his care along with it? For if care is that part of myself that leads me towards my inmost being and frees me from das Man, and recalls me toward my­ self, placing me face-to-face with my own possibility of Beingtowards-death, and my only way of grasping myself as a to­ tality; if care is the call of conscience leading me to the pos­ sibility of glimpsing Being, without which I would not exist in the first place, then how can anyone deprive me of my only chance of self-fulfillment? And even if I were to make this attempt to "jump in for” someone else, how could I succeed when Heidegger has already proclaimed that no one can pos­ sibly take over the function of care for someone else? After all, does not care speak only to the individual, never to the rabble? Perhaps the same criticisms that were made for "leaping in” also apply for "leaping ahead.” We saw from the previous quo­ tation that "leaping in” mainly applied to the manipulation of tools and objects, and our concern with the ready-to-hand. The concept of "leaping ahead,” however, refers to our ability to

22

help another by helping him to see the truth of his human condition. In other words, it is possible to warn another Dasein that he is in danger of losing himself to das Man. We can tell him that his inauthenticity will remove from him any chance of ever glimpsing Being in the clear light of nonconcealment. We can then encourage him to take the path which ultimately ends in the resolute stand of the situation. Of course, we can neither give nor force this stand—we can only induce the Other to aim for it. Heidegger terms this type of help "authentic relationship.” Unfortunately, Heidegger never goes into any more detail in Being and Time concerning this mode of positive solicitude, and this is a great hindrance and impediment to the building of a genuine social theory from the philosophy put forth in Being and Time. Perhaps if Heidegger could provide us with a concrete example of Being-with, we could arrive at an idea of what he has in mind as "positive solicitude.” But Heidegger rejects any such examples as are usually covered by the word empathy when he says, "But just as opening oneself up or closing oneself off is grounded in one’s having being-withone-another as one’s kind of being at the time, and indeed is nothing else but this, even the explicit disclosure of the Other in solicitude grows only out of one’s primarily being with him in each case. Such a disclosure of the other, which is indeed thematic, but not in the manner of theoretical psychology, eas­ ily becomes the phenomenon which proximally comes to view when one considers the theoretical problematic of understand­ ing the "psychical life of others.” In this phenomenally "prox­ imal” manner, it thus presents a way of being with one another understandingly; but at the same time it gets taken as that 'which, primordially and " ’in the beginning,’ constitutes being towards others and and makes it possible at all. This phenom­ enon, which is none too happily designated as empathy is then supposed, as it were, to provide the first ontological bridge from one’s own subject, which is given proximally alone, to the other subject, which is proximally closed off.”17 Heidegger tells that ordinary psychological analysis, unfortunately, underesti-

23

mates the linkage that exists between man and man. Ob­ viously, the ordinary connotation of the word "empathy” is insufficient for our purpose, since empathy seems to imply that I can feel as if I were the other, presupposing that I am not the Other and postulating a distance between myself and Other, a chasm that must be bridged by means of putting myself in his stead. Heidegger instead chooses to posit a radical inter­ human oneness, even attacking the notion that we might pos­ sibly understand the Other because we conceive of him as similar to ourselves. But if we said this, there would first have to be separate selves who can afterwards relate to one another. Heidegger says, "The presupposition which this argument de­ mands—that Dasein’s being towards another is its being to­ wards itself—fails to hold. As long as the legitimacy of this presupposition has not turned out to be evident, one still may be puzzled as to how Dasein’s relationship to itself is thus disclosed to the Other. Not only is being towards others an autonomous, irreducible relationship of being, this relation­ ship, as Being-with, is one which, with Dasein’s being, already is.”18 Heidegger here says that Dasein and Being-with are structurally one. Psychology, sociology, anthropology, and po­ litical science cannot help us to determine how an entity that is so obviously joined can become so disjointed in the world of the herd and the everyday. If we think that these ontic realms can lend us some understanding, we are wrong: "Of course it is indisputable that a lively mutual acquaintanceship on the basis of Being-with has made itself transparent and has not disguised itself. And that is possible only if Dasein, as Beingin-the-world, already is with others. 'Empathy’ does not first constitute Being-with; rather, empathy is possible only on the basis of Being-with: it gets its motivation from the unsociability of the dominant modes of Being-with.”19 We see from this that Heidegger is unable to furnish us with a single concrete example of Being-with. However, he does provide us with many examples of Being-with in the concrete that are masked and inauthentic.

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Other philosophers, too, are bewildered by Heidegger’s social theory—among them Jean-Paul Sartre, who observes that no conceivable way can be found which will allow the passage from an ontological to an ontic inference; from an inference that is a priori to a factual one; from a logical to a concrete inference about my fellow iqan. Sartre observes that all Hei­ degger has said about Being-with can be a necessity for me, and I still may be left with solipsism as far as real people are concerned. Sartre writes, "To say that human reality, even if it is my human reality, 'is-with’ by means of its ontological structure is to say that it is-with by nature—that is, in an essential and universal capacity. Even if this affirmation were proved, it would not enable us to explain any concrete beingwith. In other words, the ontological co-existence which ap­ pears as the structure of 'being-in-the-world’ can in no way serve as a foundation to an ontic being-with, such as, for ex­ ample, the co-existence which appears in my friendship with Pierre or in the couple which Annie and I make. In fact, it would be necessary to show that 'being-with-Pierre’ or *beingwith-Annie’ is structure constitutive of my concrete-being. But this is impossible from the point of view which Heidegger has adopted. The Other in the relation 'with,’ taken on the onto­ logical level, cannot in fact be concretely determined any more than the directly confronted human-reality of which it is the alter ego; it is an abstract term and hence Unselbstandig, and it does not contain the power of becoming that Other—Pierre or Annie. Thus the relation of the Being-with can be of abso­ lutely no use to us in resolving the psychological, concrete problem of the recognition of the Other. There are two incom­ municable levels and two problems which demand separate solutions. It may be said that this is only one of the difficulties which Heidegger encounters in passing in general from the ontological level to the ontic level, in passing from being-inthe-world in general to my relation with this particular in­ strument, in passing from my being-unto-death, which makes of my death my most essential possibility, to this 'ontic’ death

25

which I shall experience by encountering this or that external existent. But this difficulty can be disguised, if need be, in all other cases since, for example, it is human reality which causes the existence of a world in which a threat of death to human reality is hidden. Better yet, if the world is, it is because it is mortal in the sense in which we say that a wound is mortal. But the impossibility of passing from one level to another bursts forth when we meet the problem of the Other. In fact, even if in the ecstatic upsurge of its being-in-the-world, human reality makes a world exist, one cannot, for all that, say that its Beingwith causes another human reality to rise up. Of course I am the being by whom ’there is’ being. But are we to say that I am the being by whom ’there is’ another human reality? If we understand by that that I am the being for whom there is for me another human reality, this is a pure and simple truism. If we mean that I am the being by whom there are in general Others, we fall back into solipsism. In fact, this human reality 'with whom* I am is itself ‘in-the-world-with-me’; it is the free foundation of a world. Human reality is its own possibilities. It is then for itself without having to wait for me to make its being exist in the form of the 'there is.’ Thus I can constitute the world as ’mortal,’ but I cannot constitute a human-reality as a concrete being which is its own possibilities. My beingwith, apprehended from the standpoint of ’my’ being, can be considered only as a pure exigency founded in my being; it does not constitute the slightest proof of the Other’s existence, not the slightest bridge between me and the Other. More precisely, this ontological relationship between me and an abstract Other, due to the very fact that it defines in general my relation to others, is far from facilitating a particular ontic relationship between me and Pierre; in fact it renders impossible any con­ crete connection between my being and a particular Other given in my experience. If my relation with the Other is a priori, it thereby exhausts all possibility of relation with others. Empirical and contingent relations can be only the specifica­ tions of it, not the particular cases. There can be specifications

26

of a law only under two circumstances: either the law is derived inductively from empirical, particular facts, and that is not the case here; or else it is a priori and unifies' experience as the Kantian concepts do. Actually, in this latter case, its scope is restricted to the limits of experience; and it therefore escapes from the domain of being-with. But the law precisely constitutes its own domain; it excludes a priori every real fact which it has not constructed. The existence of time as an a priori form of my sensibility would a priori exclude me from all connection with a noumenal time which had the characteristics of a being. Thus the existence of an ontological and hence a priori 'beingwith’ renders impossible all ontic connection with a concrete human reality which would arise for-itself as an absolute tran­ scendent. The being-with, conceived as a structure of my being, isolates me as surely as the arguments for solipsism.”20 Given the revelations of Heideggerian critics, Sartre being one, how then would we go about classifying Binswanger’s Daseinanalysis? It is not enough to say that Binswanger’s Das­ einanalysis is simply the extension of Heidegger’s ontology to the ontic level. This is because Binswanger’s Daseinanalysis claims to be the only possible extension to the ontic level of Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology. We see implied in Bin­ swanger’s work a necessary relationship to the ontology of Heidegger, and although Daseinanalysis makes ontic state­ ments concerning factual findings about actually appearing forms and configurations of existence, these statements are simultaneously propositions as to the possibility and the ground of experience of particular human beings. Needleman says, "Thus, while not ontology, Binswanger’s Daseinanalysis might be said still to be 'meta-ontic’ in the sense that these same statements as to the possibility of experience are also and more accurately to be understood as referring to the possibility o f real, human existence itself: this is, in fact, one general way of understanding the term 'Existential A Priori.’ In other words, any discipline that concerns itself with the transcendentally a priori essential structures and possibilities of con­

27

crete human existence is, strictly speaking, neither ontological nor ontic, but lies, rather, somewhere in between.”21 So we see that although Binswanger’s studies are ontic in that they con­ cern particular individual human beings, they are more than ontic in that as far as each individual studied is concerned, his analyses refer to that which makes possible the experience of the particular individual. The Daseinanalyst Medard Boss is the most vicious critic of what he sees as Binswanger’s mis­ understanding of Heidegger. Boss remarks, "Transcendence as that one fact which defines the essence of being human and its Being-in-the-world in Heidegger’s sense never means a kind of relation, realized through a primary immanence, which can be 'modified’ to this or that mode of Dasein. Transcendence and Being-in-the-world in Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein are rather names for the same thing: that unmodiflable and basal essen­ tial structure of the Dasein which lies at the basis of all re­ lations.”22 To Boss, the Dasein is the in-itself, the unobjectifiable receiver of objects. One could practically say that Boss sees the Dasein as the "pure subject.” To Boss, the Dasein is in no sense a reflective, bipolar structure, but rather a pure out-going endower and receptacle. For Boss, in no case can that which is encountered be spoken of as part of the essential structure of the Dasein. Boss claims that in Heideggerian terms, the formal structure of Care is invariable and that all individual differ­ ences are to be viewed as falling within the same strictly de­ fined a priori rule of the interrelation of existentials to which the name of Care is given. Care is an "empty formula” in its strictest sense. To Boss, the dichotomy of ontological/ontic is exhaustive. For Boss, the Dasein as Care illuminates Being by receiving beings in the ontological meaning-context strictly defined by Heidegger. All further specifications of meanings are to be viewed as emanating from beings, not from the Das­ ein. Contrary to Boss, Binswanger claims that the ontological structure of Care can vary from individual to indiviudal, so that the unique and particular Dasein determines or consti­ tutes his world to a greater degree and in more detail. For

28

Binswanger, the overall structure of Heidegger’s ontology is mirrored in each individual. Boss on the other hand can make no room for a distinction between an ontological and an exis­ tential a priori, and does not admit that the concept of the existential a priori is legitimate from a Heideggerian point of view. Boss, quite unlike Binswanger, refutes the meta-ontic level of inquiry, the reasoning to transcendental preconditions of a given, concrete world. Needleman writes, "From the stand­ point of Heidegger’s avowed purpose in Being and Time, Boss’s criticisms of Binswanger appear to be just. What the concept of an Existential A Priori does, in effect, is to render 'existentialistic’ a doctrine that purports to be mainly a study of Being and not of man. Binswanger, for example, does not speak of this or that self, but of this or that particular Dasein, whereas Heidegger limits himself to speaking of the Dasein. The im­ plication is that there is something in the being of a concrete individual that the Heideggerian account of Dasein omits. This something can only be the particular Existential A Priori and the particular world-design. This is not to say that viewed from Binswanger’s perspective, Heidegger has omitted the individ­ uality of the Dasein, or the multiplicity of the Dasein’s man­ ifestations in the world.”23 If the works of Binswanger were solely an application to the ontic level of Heidegger’s ontology, then Binswanger’s task would involve mere eidetic-descriptive phenomenology; all im­ plications as to the function of the Dasein would have to be avoided. A faithful application of the ontology of Heidegger to the ontic level would not deal with the Dasein as constitutive, this being reserved for the strictly ontological level. The ap­ plication to the ontic level would rather require a discipline of phenomenological apprehension of the essences of emotion, desire, conflicts, and so forth. The Heideggerian element in such an attempt would probably result in the apprehension of categories similar to those of Binswanger, with the difference being that no sense of these categories as constitutive of the world would emerge. It is on this point that Boss is faithful to

29

the philosophy of Heidegger, while Binswanger is not. This is because Boss’s level of inquiry is ontic, while Binswanger’s level of inquiry is meta-ontic. We note that Binswanger has moved more in the direction of Sartre. Before exploring in greater depth the social theory of Ludwig Binswanger, we must first briefly examine the ontology of Buber, so that we will know what aspects of Binswanger’s social theory belong to Buber and which to Heidegger. The starting point of Buber’s ontology is not man in himself, nor the world in itself, but rather the relation between man and the world. I and Thou distinguishes two basic forms of relation: the IThou and I-It into which all of man’s relations, both with other men and with things in the world, can be divided. The I-Thou relation is characterized by mutuality, openness, directness, and presentness; the I-It by the absence of these qualities. The I-Thou relation is a true dialogue, in which both partners speak to one another as equals. The I-It relation is not a true dialogue in that the partners are not equals; rather, one uses the other to achieve some end. It is impossible to sustain an I-Thou re­ lationship indefinitely, and it is inevitable that every Thou will at times turn into an It. The I-It relation is not evil in itself, for it is only through the I-It relation that objective knowledge can be acquired, and technical advances achieved. In the healthy man and culture, there is a dialectical relation between the I-Thou and the I-It, so that they interact. As a result of this dialectical interaction, I-Thou relationships be­ come I-It relationships, which find their expression in knowl­ edge and art, and these relationships in turn contain within themselves the possibility of becoming once again I-Thou re­ lationships. So we see here that Buber begins by holding that man has two attitudes towards the world, and these two atti­ tudes are determined by two "primary words”—I-Thou and IIt. These words refer to relations, not to their component parts. An I-Thou relation is one between two subjects, or persons, and is marked by mutuality and reciprocity. An I-It relation, on the other hand, is one between a subject, or person, and an

30

object, or thing, and is one in which the subject dominates and uses the object. Buber also propounds that there can be I-Thou relations between man and animals, and even between man and inanimate things, while I-Thou relations between men often deteriorate into relations of I-It. Buber considers human life dynamic in that I-Thou relations deteriorate into I-It re­ lations, and a new effort is made to make them I-Thou relations once more. In the modern world, human relations have often sunk to the level of I-It. While certain I-Thou relations cannot be sustained continually, Buber postulates an I-Thou relation that suffers no deterioration—the relation between man and the Eternal Thou, which can only be recognized by one who is sensitive to it and is not philosophically provable. The philos­ ophy of Buber can be traced back to the last century, when Feuerbach effected a pivotal step in philosophy by discovering that philosophy up to that point had been exclusively oriented around "I.” No one had realized yet that "you” is as primary as "I.” Many philosophers and psychologists continue to theo­ rize from an egoistic standpoint. For example, in Freud’s theory there is the "I,” or ego; the "over-me,” or superego; and the "it,” or id, but no "you.” More and more, people have come to the realization that social life is not made up of a myriad of I’s and me’s only, but of you, he, she, them, and we also, and that the experience you or he or them or us may indeed be as primary and compelling, or more so, as the experience of "me.” The critical realization here is that I am not the only perceiver and agent in my world. The world is peopled by others, and these others are not simply objects in the world: they are centers of reorientation to the objective universe. Nor are these others simply other Fs. The others are you, him, her, them, and so forth. The presence of these others has a profound relative effect upon me. This has been expressed in a number of different thinkers besides Buber, among them Marcel, Scheler, Feuer­ bach, and Husserl, each in a different way. Philosophically, the meaninglessness of the category "I” without its complementary category of "you” was first stated over one hundred years ago

31

by Feuerbach, and later developed by Buber, Scheler, and Hus­ serl, who incorporated the primary experience of intersubjec­ tivity into their philosophical reflections. Buber’s "dialogical knowledge” is an epistemology based upon the I-Thou relation. Buber, like Kant, maintains that we cannot have objective knowledge of the universe as it is in itself, and that we know the world only through the categories which are imposed upon it. But Buber contends that in I-Thou relationships we can have direct contact with objects in the world, although we can never know them in themselves. Our sense perception is built upon this direct contact, and the IThou relation is therefore the basis of all knowledge of the world and of all art. Buber says, "Kant expressed the essential principle that one’s fellow man must never be thought of and treated merely as a means, but always at the same time as an independent end. The principle is expressed as an 'ought’ which is sustained by the idea of human dignity. My point of view, which is near to Kant’s in its essential features, has another source and goal. It is concerned with the presuppositions of the interhuman. Man exists anthropologically not in his isolation, but in the completeness of his relation between man and man; what humanity is can be properly grasped only if in vital re­ ciprocity. For the proper existence of the interhuman, it is necessary, as I have shown, that the semblance not intervene to spoil the relation of personal being to personal being. It is further necessary, as I have also shown, that each one means and makes present the other in his personal being. That neither should wish to impose himself upon the other is the third basic presupposition of the interhuman. These presuppositions do not include the demand that one should influence the other in his unfolding; this is, however, an element that is suited to lead to a higher stage of the interhuman. That there resides in every man the possibility of attaining authentic human ex­ istence in the special way peculiar to him can be grasped in the Aristotelian image of entelechy, innate self-realization; but one must note that it is an entelechy of the work of creation.

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It would be a mistake to speak here of individuation alone. Individuation is only the indispensable personal stamp of all realization of human existence. The self as such is not ulti­ mately the essential, but the meaning of human existence given in creation again and again fulfills itself as self. The help that men give each other in becoming a self leads the life between men to its height. The dynamic glory of being of man is first bodily present in the relation between two men, each of whom in meaning the other also means the highest which this person is called, and serves the self-realization of this hu­ man life as one true to creation without wishing to impose on the other anything of his own realization.”24 Can a genuinely interpersonal social philosophy be derived from the work of Heidegger? It is this question to which we now turn our attention. What basic structures did Binswanger retain from Heidegger’s ontology and which did he throw out? Binswanger retained the concept of being-in-the-world, which abolishes once and for all the Cartesian dichotomy between subject and object, something that both Binswanger and Hei­ degger agree upon. A Heideggerian concept that Binswanger threw out is the notion that authenticity can be achieved only in isolation from one’s fellow man. For we see that with Bin­ swanger, when a human being is most genuinely himself, he is also most genuinely the world. Love is the state that leads to a world of authenticity. In examining Binswanger’s writings, we find no world of Care, tasks, projects, roles, and escape ruled by death and time, but rather a world of love that is contra­ dictory to all this. Binswanger writes, "The existential analyst will always stand on the same plane with his patients—the plane of common existence. He will therefore not degrade the patient into an object toward which he is subject, but he will see in him an existential partner. He will therefore not consider the bond between the two partners to be as that of two electric batteries—a 'psychic contact’—but an encounter on what Mar­ tin Buber calls this 'sharp edge of existence,’ an existence which

33

essentially 'is in the world’, not merely as a self, but also as a being-together with one another—relatedness and love.”28 The structural moment of loving encounter cannot be under­ stood, according to Binswanger, from Dasein’s proximity to others as beings who are bound by care and solicitude. Rather, loving encounter is an original phenomenological and ontolog­ ical essential feature of Dasein which cannot be derived from any of its other features. This world is more akin to Buber’s I-Thou world, where everything is perfect, nothing needs changing, and tasks do not obtrude their time-bound demands upon the dwellers. We see that space, time, and love are re­ defined according to love rather than Care. This world exists and interpenetrates our everyday one. Obviously, this world is not a different place in terms of spatial configurations; a chair, for example, remains always what it has been until a person is seated in it, and then the chair is no longer "in-theworld,” but "in-the-world-beyond-the-world.” A new region has been created: the region where the beloved one dwells. Here is the beloved; here "is” all the world. According to Binswanger, space is created, time has vanished, and the chair becomes atemporal. The chair is seen only as perfection and sheer Being. Here Binswanger is very close to Heidegger’s view of Being as expressed in his discussion of paintings. Heidegger says, "We choose a well-known painting by Van Gogh, who painted such shoes several times. But what is there to see here? Everyone knows what pertains to a shoe.. . . The peasant woman wears her shoes in the field. Here they are for the first time what they are. They are such all the more genuinely the less the peasant woman thinks about the shoes while she is at work, or sees them at all, or even takes any heed of them. She stands and walks in them. This is how the shoes actually serve. It is in this process of the use of equipment that we must actually encounter the character of equipment. On the other hand, as long as we only imagine a pair of shoes in general, or simply look at the empty, unused shoes as they merely stand there in the picture, we shall never discover what the equipmental

34

being of equipment in truth is. In Van Gogh’s painting, we can not even tell where the shoes stand. There is nothing surround­ ing this pair of peasant shoes in or to which they might belong, only an undefined space. There are not even clods from the soil of the field or the path through it sticking to them, which might at least hint at their employment. A pair of peasant shoes and nothing more. And yet, from the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the wearer stands forth. In the stiffly solid heaviness of the shoes, there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the farspreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field, swept by a raw wind. On the leather there lies the dampness and the saturation of the soil. Under the shoes there slides the lone­ liness of the field-path as the evening declines. In the shoes there vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening com and its enigmatic self-refusal in the fallow des­ olation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by un­ complaining anxiety about the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, the trembling before the advent of birth and shivering at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman.”28 In the latter work of Heidegger of which this passage is a part, Heidegger does not accord our fellow beings a status so exalted that through them and with them we can touch the very foundation of ourselves, which is Being. Rather, others are obstacles in our path towards Being, and the greatest thing they can do is to cease blocking our way by not interacting with us at all. But Binswanger regards the Other as a helpmate, and without such partners no one is able to realize his most profound human truth. It is because we can love and be loved that we are human beings at all, according to Binswanger. This is because loving and being loved lead us to the freedom to structure the world her­ meneutically, a freedom of which no other entity is capable. This freedom allows us release from the categories of the ob­ jective world and enables us to move within the world that lies

35

beyond the world. Wherever the beloved dwells, there springs forth a locality. As Rilke puts it, "Where you are, there arises a place.” Time measures only the mutual dwelling with the beloved; it ignores the mutuality of two beings who dwell to­ gether. Time is not relevant to mutuality, nor is care. Bin­ swanger denies death the central role which Heidegger ascribes to it in Being and Time. For Binswanger, Being-with serves a purpose in that it fun­ damentally changes life and death: genuine mutuality is not classified as either authentic or inauthentic by Binswanger; rather, it falls into a third category known as "encounter.” Binswanger vociferously agrees with Heidegger that in the everyday world we are least ourselves. In this inauthentic, fallen, everyday world, we live according to prefabricated roles, attempt to take power over nature, and manipulate other hu­ man beings as though they were objects. This is the world of care, dominated by Care and the own-most possibility of death. Biswanger’s third alternative of "encounter” does not signify inauthentic fallenness, nor does it imply authentic isolation from others: it entails respect for the Other, which involves not manipulating or using him in any way. "Encounter” is love. It is at this point that Binswanger breaks with Heidegger and chooses to adopt Buber’s terminology. The grammar of the third person is given up in favor of the second person, so that en­ counter takes place between I and Thou. In addressing the Other as Thou, I am immediately involved in a way I would not be if I used the terms "it,” "he,” "she,” and so forth. The very usage of the word "Thou” demands a personal speaker who is encountering the person he is addressing. This corre­ sponds with Buber’s explanation: "When Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing for his object. For where there is a thing, there is another thing. Every It is bounded by others. But when Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing; he has indeed noth­ ing. But he takes his stand in relation.. . . What, then, do *re experience of Thou? Just nothing. For we do not experience it. What, then, do we know of Thou? Just everything. For we know

36

nothing isolated about it any more.”27 In the work of Binswan­ ger, encounter is a total meeting, in which neither domination nor submission are relevant, but only participation. Encounter is a state of being and an attitude. Encounter entails being open towards an experience without attempting to grasp at it, utilize it, or influence it. In letting the experience approach oneself, it comes as it is, without being changed in any essential respect. Love as encounter is not a psychological mood, but a basic feature of Dasein. Love is radically distinct from care, so it is not subject to the spatial or temporal laws of Care. Bin­ swanger will go so far as to accept being-in-the-world as ex­ istence in which human existence is concerned about myself, but this self is not the I-myself of human existence as mine or yours or his only, but also the we-ourselves a priori to that Imyself as ontological possibility, as "our” human existence, as primal meeting. Binswanger in his writings repeatedly con­ cedes the overwhelming impression that Being and Time made upon him, but he soon notices that "the loving existence-to­ gether, love, stands in the cold outside of the doors of this project of Being.”28 In further examining the contrast between care and love, we find that on the ground of Care is the nothing; eerie, overwhelming, and overpowering, but on the ground of love there is homey security and the protection of home. Love is the ontological opposite of care. Love conquers space, time, and history, for it is not "worlding,” but eteming. Binswanger tells us, "I can die only as an individual, but not as the Thou o f an I. Even if I die as an individual, I am, in dying, thine, a part of our we-ness.”29 So care does not have the aspect of eternity that love has. Care and love belong equally to the full phenomenon of human existence. If either care:or love is sep­ arated and split off from the whole, the other gets altered, so that human existence becomes alien to itself, and we speak of alienation, estrangement, and insanity. Human existence for Binswanger is always human existence in general, or mankind. Man is not man because of his power of language, nor his consciousness, nor his ability to ask the question of why there

37

is something rather than nothing. Man is man because of Being-with, and it is only on the basis of Being-with that lan­ guage and consciousness become possible. When Binswanger uses the word "eternity,” he does not mean to imply the connotation of everlasting time, but rather the complete absence of time consciousness. The temporality of "encounter” is eternal duration, while the spatiality is called a "haven,” and also not finite. Encounter occurs in a present that is self-renewing; it happens now. Objects, on the other hand, can be experienced only in the dead past. It is only by living in the present that we can ever touch Being. The dead past to Binswanger is represented also by Heidegger’s notions of disposition, or Befindlichkeit, and facticity. Neither anxiety nor falling are even relevant to love, since it represents an entirely new world that is completely different from Heideg­ ger’s conceptions. Besides denying that love is either facticity or fallenness, Binswanger also says that from the point of view of love we cannot say that the essence of Dasein lies in its existence, as does Heidegger. Besides this controversy, Binswanger also re­ futes Heidegger’s statement that the being with which I am concerned is always my own being. Dasein to Binswanger is for the sake of our existence, not my existence. I sacrifice my own existence for the sake of mutuality. In loving encounter, there is no question of living towards something which stands out, such as death, for in the eternal moment of love there is nothing lacking, so that as long as there is mutuality, we do not have to reckon with the possi­ bility. Binswanger writes that the eternal moment of love is one in which Dasein "has already arrived in the sense of never having left the moment.”30 Binswanger’s "haven” of love, with its supra-spatiality, supra-temporality, and supra-worldliness is none other than the abode of Dasein rising above care and transcending resolution (Entschluss). One of Binswanger’s fundamental disagreements with Heidegger concerns the reason for the sake of which Das-

38

ein is in the world. The primary mode of being of Dasein is the dual mode of being. For our sakes, the haven of love must transcend the world of care. Binswanger believes that love is objective in that it is a man­ ner of being rather than a mere mood. Dasein has the structure of love built into itself. He explains, "The 'mystery of love’ can be understood only if one sees that encounter of the lovers as lovers would not be possible if Dasein were not already by essence loving encounter. In this encounter, I and Thou are born as the we-two, and the world opens itself up to our love as we stand transfigured as though by a new law ”31 The struc­ tural moment o f being loving encounter cannot be understood from Dasein’s proximity to others as beings who are bound by care and solicitude. It is an original, ontological, essential fea­ ture of Dasein and a feature which cannot be derived from any of the other features of Dasein. Heidegger’s resolute Dasein always confronts the situation with some form of action, since it is afraid to "lose its time.” But love experiences the lack of resolve and the loss of time, for there is nothing to resolve: all love wants is to dwell in eternity, far away from care, its ontological opposite. In conclusion, Binswanger’s fruitful misunderstanding of Heidegger takes its start from the world-design that results from being in the world and the three realms of one’s relation to oneself, one’s relation to others, and one’s natural environ­ ment. In Binswanger’s first existential studies, Binswanger organized his descriptions around the distinctions of the Mitwelt, Umwelt, and Eigenwelt. Later, he employed what are termed existential modes. The existential mode is the demension of Dasein in regard to the Mitwelt. There are four Existential modes designated by Binswanger: the dual existential mode, the plural mode, the singular mode, and the anonymous mode. There are several varieties of dual mode, which is an extension of Buber’s views of the I-Thou relationship. In one book, Bin­ swanger gave an extensive analysis of the dual modes of love and friendship. As we said before, in the dual mode of love,

39

space presents us with the paradox of being simultaneously infinite and all-near. Distance and proximity are transcended by a spatial mode which is related to space in the same way that eternity is related to time. The haven of love transcends space; a fusion of the present moment with eternity, forming the core of normal existential experience. The plural mode is related to formal relationships, competition with the Other, and struggle, where the intimacy of the I-Thou yields to the co-existence of one and the other, or two beings grappling with one another. The singular mode includes the relationships of man with his own self. Inner conflict is viewed as a variety of singular mode patterned on the conflicting, grappling model of the plural mode. And last, the anonymous mode is the mode of individual living and acting in an anonymous collectivity, like the soldier who kills an unknown enemy. Some people seek refuge in this mode as a means of escaping or fighting their fellow men. According to Binswanger, Heidegger’s concept of being-inthe-world has eliminated successfully the subject-object di­ chotomy which Binswanger detests as much as Heidegger. Bin­ swanger says that the next chore is to discover the individual’s world-design and thus establish empathic communication, a concept refuted by Heidegger’s Being and Time. Binswanger thus cannot be understood on the basis of Heidegger alone, or Binswanger’s particular expansion of Heideggerian terminol­ ogy. There is also concern with temporality and spatiality, as well as Buber’s I-Thou relation. Binswanger describes meeting, or loving encounter, as a dual mode of love and friendship in contrast to Heidegger’s authentic existence for oneself. The singular mode is the autonomous individual, related essen­ tially only to himself; while the plural mode corresponds to formal, impersonal relationships, such as competition and struggle. Binswanger had acknowledged an equal indebtedness to Buber along with Heidegger, and in passage after passage in his theoretical works, we note Buber’s intense influence. The I-Thou reflection is an ontological reality, and cannot be

40

reduced to what we see taking place within each of the members of the relationship separately. The self comes-to-be in the IThou relationship, and it is out of the undivided fullness of being of the each-other that I and Thou first emerge to attain their self-hood in each other. When people take the other at his word, this is a fall from being-together to being-with. Existen­ tial knowledge has its authentic ground and basis in the loving being-together of I and Thou. A genuine we comprises a type of gestalt that is more than the sum of two separate entities. This dual selfhood of love is opposed to the disclosure of the world as mine, as Heidegger says. Binswanger tells us: "The There of love and the selfhood of the Dasein as love does not mean a disclosedness of the There for myself, but for our-selves. The selfhood of love does not amount to a selfhood of the I, but of the We. The There of Dasein as love is not disclosedness by which Dasein as mine is there for itself, but rather, disclosed­ ness by which Dasein as We is there for Our-self, for you and me, for each—and this again, not as the sense of the beingthere of the world of care, but as the being-there of the world o f Each-Other.”*2 Binswanger places himself with the existentialists of dia­ logue who see the meeting between man and man as the fun­ damental ontological reality, as opposed to existential thinkers who see the inter-human as a dimension of the existence of the self, as does Heidegger. Love does not claim the Dasein phil­ osophically as existence of selfhood, but completely naively as We. The I and Thou make themselves and each other present by making room for the other and the unique belonging to each other, the homeland of I and Thou the dual We. Dasein is already in its ground a loving meeting, and it is this which makes possible the meeting of lovers as lovers in which I and Thou are bom as We-both. Only if Dasein already has the character of meeting, and only when I and Thou are part of its ontological structure, is love between Me and You at all pos­ sible. Loving meeting not only exists in the specific meeting with the surrounding world as the particular Thou, but it al­

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ready is a going forward toward the awaited and as yet un­ specified Thou which draws it and for which it seeks. This ontological significance of loving meeting makes it possible to permeate the world of Care, or ready-to-hand world, with the Thou of love. Self-hood issues only from the We, in that par­ ticipation does not precipitate the I-Thou relationship; rather, it is that relationship which is the ground of taking part. Mu­ tual participation is not a one-sided act of empathy, or putting oneself inside the other’s shoes, or of fellow-feeling, but as a two-sided receiving and giving based upon the mutual readi­ ness for what the future holds in store. To summarize, Binswanger has made a fundamental critique of Heidegger which other existential analysts such as Boss have let slip by; namely, failing to distinguish between that Being-with and the real Being-together in dialogue, or meet­ ing. Despite his critique of Heidegger, Binswanger’s attempt to synthesize Heidegger and Buber under one label leaves him straddled across the basic division between these two styles of existential philosophical thought. We may question whether Binswanger has succeeded in his "synthesis” of Heidegger and Buber, since it is doubtful that two so contradictory philoso­ phers in the social realm can ever be reconciled. Perhaps it is most accurate to look upon Binswanger’s fruitful misunder­ standing of Heidegger as a separate, independent, construct of man which rescues psychoanalysis from the one-sided, natu­ ralist distortion of the image of man, which leaves out the concept of becoming and the notion of individual freedom. Binswanger’s views are discredited by Heidegger as oriented towards philosophical anthropology, while the ontological ex­ plication is for Heidegger the more urgent and primary con­ cern, upon which anthropology depends. Perhaps the question is not so much a reconciliation of Heidegger with Buber as seeing the phenomenon of human Being-in-the-world in a con­ crete way. Heidegger’s criteria for concreteness left out the dimension of human dialogue. But Binswanger’s philosophical and psychiatric undertaking must be judged from the viewpoint

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of his professed goal. If his intention was to interpret Heidegger correctly, then putting into Heidegger’s mouth what Buber has said is a misunderstanding. But if we look upon Binswanger as focusing on the insufficient manner of Heidegger’s Beingwith, and then complementing this with Buber’s I-Thou dia­ logue, then there is no fault with Binswanger’s endeavor.

References ‘Heidegger, M. Being and Time. New York: Harper & Row, 1962, p. 157. 2Needleman, J. Being-In-The-World. New York: Harper & Row, 1963, pp. 124-25. 3Heidegger, op. cit. p. 154. «Gelven, M. A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time. New York: Harper & Row, 1970, p. 68. 5Poggeler, O. Per Denkweg Martin Heideggers. Pfullingen: Neske Verlag, 1963, p. 307. 6Boss, M. Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis. New York: Basic Books, 1963, p. 55. 7Ibid., p. 233. 8Ibid., p. 233. 9Boss, M. in Worlds of Existentialism. New York: Random House, 1964, p. 427. l0Ibid., p. 429. “ Freidman, M. "Phenomenology and Existential Analysis,” Journal of Existential Psychiatry, 1970,10, 156. l2Heidegger, p. 121. l3Ibid., p. 113. l4Ibid., p. 120. l5Ibid., p. 157. l6Ibid., pp. 200-201. I7Ibid., pp. 161-62. I8Ibid., p. 204. l9Ibid., p. 205. 20Sartre, J.P. Being and Nothingness. New York: Washington Square Press, 1966, 334-36. 2lNeedleman, pp. 26-27. 22Boss, p. 93. 23Needleman, p. 127.

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“ Buber, M. "Distance and Relation,” Psychiatry, 1957,20, 111. ^Binswanger, L. "Existential Analysis and Psychotherapy,” Progress in Psychotherapy, 1956,1, 196. “ Heidegger, M. "On the Origin of the Work of Art,” in Philosophies of Art and Beauty. New York: Random House, 1964, p. 662. 27Buber, M. I and Thou. New York: Scribners, 1957, p. 4 28Binswanger, L. Grundforemen und Erkenntnis menschlichen Daseins. Zurich: Niehans, 1953, p. 83. "Binswanger, p. 95. “ Ibid., p. 88. 31Ibid., p. 83. 32Binswanger, L. in Worlds of Existentialism. New York: Random House, 1964, p. 417.

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THE CASE OF ELLEN WEST This is the first of two chapters devoted to Binswanger’s most famous case history, that of Ellen West. The case history tre­ mendously furthered the popularity and prestige of existential psychiatry throughout the world, and is internationally hailed as a masterpiece. It has also had an effect on other fields as well. In the next chapter, we provide a critical commentary on the case using Binswanger’s point of view throughout. This chap­ ter, however, will be more eclectic in its analysis, and readers will find elements of the thought of Kelly, Rogers, Mowrer, and Szasz laced throughout. We shall try to see the case of Ellen West chronologically in terms of the material that Binswanger provides, as well as the chronological events in her life. We shall also attempt to see how the thought of Kelly, Mowrer, and Rogers can be applied to the case, and try to hypothesize or extrapolate how they would have treated her if she were a patient of theirs, based on what we know of their theories, and their approach to the client. Kelly, who originated what has come to be known as a "psy­ chology of personal constructs,” has no psychology of content. Kelly never stops to consider anywhere in his writings what the kinds of things are that man enjoys doing, with the excep­ tion of his notion of "man the scientist,” who enjoys predicting and controlling. So Kelly would only view the suicide of Ellen West as "sick” if it is of no use in predicting and controlling. And according to Kelly, one may never call a scientific concept "sick.” Kelly, like Binswanger, rarely speaks of sickness and health. It is for this reason that many are of the opinion that Kelly’s personal construct psychology would cast a cold eye on the case of Ellen West. Binswanger, too, is not so much inter­ ested in "sickness” and "health” as far as psychiatric categories and diagnosis go. Whereas traditional psychiatry asks the question "what?” and looks to classify an individual according

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to such-and-such a syndrome, Binswagner asks the all-toooften neglected question "how?” In other words, how did the person come to be what he is? This places the focus squarely on the existence of the individual, or his being-in-the-world. At the beginning of his existential analysis of Ellen West, after he has just completed presenting factual material about her, Binswanger writes, "The foregoing account summarizes what we know, on the basis of credible autobiographical and bio­ graphical documents and testimonies, about the human indi­ viduality to whom we have given the name Ellen West. This knowledge is of a purely historical sort, for which reason we designate the entirety of the underlying facts or data as the inner and outer life-history of that individuality. On the basis of the life-history, her specific name loses its function as a mere verbal label for a human individuality—as that of this unique time-space-determined individual—and takes on the meaning of an eponym. The name Ellen West thus designates the totality of a historical figure or personage. However certain and definite the data of a life-history may be, the judgments regarding it remain uncertain, fluctuating, and incomplete. True, we say in ordinary life that on the basis of a report or a narrative, we form an approximate "conception” or construct a more or less vivid "picture” of human individuality; however, this concep­ tion or picture, as is well known, depends upon the varying standpoint or viewpoint of the person or group making it. It is the task of historical science to test and compare "personal” judgments, trace them back to their basic perspectives, and to place them in a scientific perspective. However, since even a scientific perspective takes its directives from the present mo­ ment, 'history is constantly rewritten,’ as Ranke put it” (p. 268). Just as Heidegger found in Being and Time that the question of Being, raised by the pre-Socratics, was ignored and neglected in favor of everything else but Being, such as ethics, epistemology, and so forth, Binswanger feels that traditional psy­ chiatry is so steeped in preconceptions, value-judgments, and

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labels that it had forgotten the existence of the individual. When we sweep away the moral, social, esthetic, and medical, so that we are not prejudiced by these preconceptions, we can direct our attention squarely to the forms of existence in which the particular individuality of the patient is in-the-world. Where traditional psychiatry concludes, Binswanger is first begin­ ning. This is because traditional psychiatry thinks it casts light on the individual and explains everything with its objective hospital case-histories and reports. But all the clinical labels can provide us with is a summary of the false self of the in­ dividual. His inner self, which is his real self, is completely ignored by the clinical case history, which is not attuned to the inner self, and shuts itself off to it. The vast bulk of the material that is written in the typical hospital case history is therefore useless to Binswanger, and does little to further our under­ standing of Being-in-the-world. At the beginning of the case historical material that Bin­ swanger provides us with, we are told that Ellen West is the only daughter of a father for whom her love and veneration know no bounds. If we look at such a statement eclectically with an open mind, and ask ourselves what therapists from other schools would say about such a sentence, immediately we see that Kelly, the father of personal construct psychology, would ask what it is that makes the father worthy of such love and veneration. Or better yet, are there any people at all who deserve veneration that knows no bounds? If indeed the father does not deserve such love and veneration, which Kelly would say he probably does not, then why does he get it? A crucial issue would be whether the alternative mitigates any inspi­ ration at all. In other words, Kelly is inquiring as to whether the father requires such love and veneration if he is going to be loved at all. Personal construct psychology at this point asks whether there is a middle ground where the father can be loved qualifiably, or whether the only alternative is for him to be hated with an equal intensity of passion. We are faced here with two polarities or antinomies for which there is no in-be­

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tween. Kelly might feel that perhaps through association with her father, Ellen West takes on an extraordinary quality her­ self, so that just by being his daughter, she too is highly val­ uable. But as we shall see, no matter what assets there may be to this state of affairs, the liabilities are much greater, for this proves to be the first in a long stretch of parasitic rela­ tionships towards men in general. There is also the danger which comes from the other-directedness of taking on value through association, rather than having feelings of self-worth, so that one may feel self-esteem even when one views oneself individually, rather than in the context of some parasitic dyadic relationship. Furthermore, if Ellen West’s father is far less than perfect, a great deal probably had to be glossed over, scotomitized, and repressed in order to avoid the conflict arising from her father being unworthy of boundless love and vener­ ation. It is quite possible that Ellen West has avoided conflict with every significant other in her life. Or perhaps she has never learned to cope with conflict. In reading the case history, we see a split between the inner self and outer self of the father. The outer self he presents to the world is that of a willful man of action. He lends himself to extraordinariness. But his inner self suffers from depression, fear, pressure, and so on. As is often the case with the schizoid, the internal picture of Mr. West belies what he presents ex­ ternally. Here Ellen West is faced with the paradox first la­ belled by Kierkegaard as "either/or.” Either he is a willful man of action, or he is terrified of waking up in the morning. If we want to look at this state of affairs in Mowrer’s terms, Ellen West is confronted with the possibility that her father is a fraud and a hypocrite. The mother of Ellen West is described as a "very soft, kindly, suggestible, nervous woman, who underwent a depression for three years during the time of her engagement” (p. 238). The mother externally presents herself as suggestible and gullible. There is a strong contrast between what each parent presents as his or her self to the world. Ellen West probably did see her

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father as having shortcomings according to Mowrer, but did not confront her father about it. Given what we now know about Ellen West so far, Mowrer and Kelly would predict that Ellen West will be dependent upon men as she was towards her father, that she will be outerdirected and look for signs of excellence to prove to herself her own worth, and that her life will be one of strong contrasts, given the black/white presentation projected by her parents. Next we learn that Ellen West had a normal birth, and that at nine months of age, she refused milk and was therefore fed meat-broth. She could never tolerate milk in later years. We see here that at nine months of age she already has a strong appetite and a strong aversion to food. Food is a very powerful reinforcer for her, and she both hates and loves certain things. Food is one of the easiest pleasures in the world to obtain, but overeating causes obesity. Fatness is unhealthy, takes years off one’s life, and is viewed as unattractive in the Western world. In trying to surmise why fatness is unattractive, perhaps one reason is that obese people phenomenologically commu­ nicate that they are uninspired, phlegmatic, and leading an uninspired life. Psychologically, there is a certain hesitation to identify with a fat person. Binswanger goes on to say that Ellen West was a "very lively but headstrong and violent child” (p. 238). Once as a child, she was shown a bird’s nest, but she insisted that it was not, and nothing could make her change her opinion. Given this ex­ ample of stubbornness, we can safely assume its ubiquity, so the chances are that Ellen West was insistent all the time, not just once in a while. Here with the bird’s nest, we see that she is trying to make a point, but in the process, she is denying the self-evident. In Mowrer’s terms, she is not learning to make a point according to the rules of social interaction. Rather, she is willing to break the rules in order to make a point. She has chosen to win recognition rather than to tell the truth. She prefers to lie in order to be recognized. The truth becomes subordinate to her need for recognition. If a bird’s nest is not

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a bird’s nest, then what is it? Ellen West is complicit in de­ stroying meaning, so that the truth becomes arbitrary and subject to her whims. We must ask whether this prognosticates a problem in value when at the age of nine she barters the truth in order to win a point. Indeed, as an adolescent, she later writes in her diary, "All things soon lost their intrinsic mean­ ing” (p. 256). Mowrer would say here that what Ellen West is really bartering is intrinsic meaning. As a result, she is faced with the problem of "what is reality?” We must remember that even as a child she suffered under a pressure that she did not understand, and that everything seemed empty to her. With regard to her education, we are informed that she was a good student and very ambitious. She would cry if she were not first in rank. From the research of Riesman and his col­ leagues, we know that when an individual’s rank is important to him, he is outer-directed. Ellen West requires publicity for her success, and lacking such publicity, she weeps. We must note that she does not cry if she does not understand the lessons, which would be evidence of sorrow that is intrinsic, and con­ cerns only the pursuit of knowledge itself. Binswanger, how­ ever, is of the opinion that she does not care about the judgment of the external world. In her diary, Ellen West writes a sentence that is to become a theme throughout her life: "Man in small things make your world.” She desires recognition and "undying fame,” but she wants to understand that the heroism is in everyday life, and convince herself that the drama is not on the stage, but in the mundane, everyday world. Ellen West writes at a very early age, "Either Caesar or nothing!” Ac­ cording to Kelly, her core construct is that she is destined to become an extraordinary person. Many readers are so im­ pressed by her diary upon reading it that they wonder about the source of her despair, since she is not as poorly off as she paints herself. None of the therapists whom she consulted dur­ ing her lifetime knew that she failed, because they were all unaware of how high her aspirations were. Although we can see by her diary that she was precocious, that wasn’t enough

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for her: she wanted to be an Emma Goldman or the equivalent. And if she fails at this goal, she wants to commit suicide and does. She becomes a victim of her own self-contempt. If the world does not recognize her as famous, she is lost, because it is of no help to her to recognize herself as worthy. Ellen West is highly other-directed and dependent upon the opinion of the world, because the external world can validate what she cannot validate for herself. She had great expectations that gave her euphoria, but she collapsed when she was unable to meet her own expectations. Whenever an individual consciously realizes his shortcomings, it is a sobering moment. Whenever Ellen West could not make good on her aspirations, or deliver what she had promised herself, it was a very painful experience for her. Her poem "Kiss Me Dead” shows that she was already contemplating death just at the point when things were at the height of ecstacy: I’d like to die just as the birdling does That splits his throat in highest jubilation; And not to live as the worm on Earth lives on, Becoming old and ugly, dull and dumb! No, feel for once how forces in me kindle, And wildly be consumed in my own fire, (p.246)

Ellen West is at a loss when faced with undramatic, mundane situations. She does not know what to do with tomorrow. Since she cannot handle her own finitude and the realization that she has to die, she desires immortality through "undying fame.” In her poem "The Grim Sea-King” she asks the question, "Is there no rescue any more?” She looks toward males to rescue her and sweep her off her feet, just as she looked toward her father as a child to rescue her. In her poem, "I Hate You,” she writes of a boyfriend whom she formerly loved, but whom she now hates. To find oneself in love is to be vulnerable. Even in love, Ellen West is obsessed with competition, an outer-directed activity. Through competition, one tries to defeat the other person, so that one person’s success is acquired at the expense

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of the other person’s failure. This is very different from intrinsic satisfaction, which is pursued for its own subjective, personal reward. Since Ellen West brings the factor of "victory” into love, she turns intimacy into competition. She is absorbed with the concepts of "winning” and "losing,” so that even love, which Binswanger cites as an example of the dual mode, involving sharing and the equitable distribution of pleasure, is reduced to the plural mode of struggle and competition. During the time she writes of rescue, at the age of 17, Ellen West is already beginning to be pessimistic about her ability to deal with life is she fails to be a victor. She involved herself with the notion of fame from the moment in childhood when she proclaimed that a bird’s nest was not a bird’s nest. The poems that she wrote at the age of 18 continue to exhibit the contradictoriness of her mood. When she is optimistic, she resonates with euphoric "core constructs,” but when she is de­ pressed and pessimistic, she sobers to the fact that she is pre­ cocious, but in actuality "a nobody.” When she embarks on a journey with her parents, this proves to be the happiest time of her life. On an ocean voyage, she is able to eiyoy herself and forget all about competition. She is able to place a moratorium on winning and losing. At the age of 20, she is still filled with hope. In her diary, she writes, "I long for a storm that is shrill” (p. 241). In other words, she wants to be shaken free of her own stodginess, and hopes that nature will rescue her. She is looking for someone to substitute for her father, so that she will be able to offer him her un­ qualified veneration and love. At the request of her father, she breaks off an engagement to a "romantic foreigner.” At the age of twenty, Binswanger estimates that she is existentially thirty-five, since she looks down upon all of her plans, and wishes they were deeds which have been actualized instead of "useless words.” From the moment she begins to realize the distinction between words and deeds, there appears an outerdirectedness that makes her fear being found out. Her outerdirectedness is now fatness, and the dread of getting fat. Ellen

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West now equates fatness with failure, so that every time she contemplates where she has failed, she thinks about her weight. Just as the case with grades while she was a child in school, she does not want any publicity for her failure. The dread of fat is the dread of being found out. She fears that by becoming fat, she will displease her fianc£. She equates thin­ ness with the ethereal, and fatness with intellectualism, eli­ tism, and Jewishness. If we look at the verbal comments of Ellen West only, and ignore her actions, she presents the picture of a highly com­ mitted idealist. When she writes, "I cannot breathe this hy­ pocrisy and cowardice,” she shows us that courage is an important core construct at the heart of her being. She fights off her own inclination for feeling valuable by having a sym­ pathy for the masses, or das Man, and wanting revolution. Verbally, she is highly concerned with truth, strength, courage, autonomy, and independence. But when it comes to taking action, she allows her father to break up two engagements and marries her cousin. Although she was in love for two years with a student, she is tom between the student and her cousin. This represents a conflict between passion and affection. When she marries her cousin, whom she does not love, she has sunk low in her own terms. She writes of how low she has sunk, not only from her previous idealized image of herself, but from that which formerly she really was. Binswanger notes, "Formerly the world lay 'open before her’ and she wished to 'conquer it,’ her feelings and sensations were 'strong and vigorous,’ she loved and hated 'with her whole soul.’ Now she makes conces­ sions; she would have ridiculed anyone who had prophesied this to her; with every year she has lost 'a little of her old strength (p. 245). Much of Ellen West’s downfall can be made intelligible when we note how she resolved the mechanics of the two relationships between the student and her cousin. She proved that she was no better than anyone else. When she married her cousin, she proved that she was incapable of marrying someone she loved.

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She proved incapable of attaching herself to an experience. Phenomenologically, she lost something of inestimable value. In order to love, one must be prepared to lose what is dearest. She writes "Woe is me” because she does not have the courage to love the man that she really loves: to love is to risk the potentiality of loss. She takes the coward’s way out, but because of her outer-directed attitude, wonders why life dealt her such a poor hand of cards when she brought the tragedy on herself. By marrying her cousin, she sealed her future, so that there was to be no exit for her except suicide. She writes that she wants no children, and dreads them. Binswanger says that having children requires that one not perceive the world as dreadful. However, Ellen West does not perceive the world as dreadful. She only sees her own life that way. If it was the world, she would not be suffering. She holds herself responsible for the dreadful life she is living. Ellen West writes a letter to her husband in which she expresses her true feelings for the student. Here she breaks clear of a major deception. But ac­ cording to the principles of Mowrer’s "integrity therapy,” tell­ ing the truth when you cannot do anything about it is different from telling the truth and being ostracized. To Mowrer, her letter has no power because it changes nothing. Eating and longing are connected in Ellen West’s life because her only pleasure comes from eating. Her only fear is being caught as an unsuccessful person. One of her analysts feels that she is motivated to have this dread, because he views the consequences of her life as her goals. So he assumed that she wants the dread. But Ellen West writes in her diary that it is useless to have analysis tell her that she wants dread when this does nothing to help her breaking heart. She wants some­ one to tell her that her life is a disaster, but what her analysts tell her is that she has possibilities and potentialities. In small things, she has failed. Meaning was eroded so early in her life that things have lost all their intrinsic meaning. Ellen West sees herself only in terms of a thin/fat dichotomy. Rogers, the founder of client-centered therapy, is of the opin­

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ion that the suicide of Ellen West could have been averted if she could have gotten her own feelings reflected back to her over an extended period of time. Rogers says that he would be able to sense both what she is, and what her potentialities are, and through unconditional positive regard, he would be ac­ cepting of her and willing to allow her to become both, or either. Slowly, gradually, she would discover that she could experience both love and resentment towards her father, both fear of and eagerness for independence, and the desire to be both a sub­ missive wife as well as a competitive achiever of social reform. Ultimately, says Rogers, she would discover that there was no need to struggle against nature and against her feelings. Rather, she would find in client-centered therapy that she could be open to all of her experiencing. This would provide a con­ structive guide for her behavior, and for her life.

References Binswanger, Ludwig. ’The Case of Ellen West: An AnthropologicalClinical Study,” in R. May (Ed.), Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958. Kelly, George. The Psychology of Personal Constructs. New York: Macmillan, 1953. Mowrer, O. Hobart. The New Group Therapy. New York: Van Nos­ trand Reinhold, 1964. Rogers, Carl. "The Loneliness of Modern Man as Seen in the Case of Ellen West,” Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, 1961,2,94-101.

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FOOD, AIR, AND GROUND IN THE SHORT STORIES OF FRANZ KAFKA AND LUDWIG BINSWANGER’S THE CASE OF ELLEN WEST We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end. When we think to attach ourselves to any point and fasten to it, it wavers and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes forever. Nothing stays for us. This is our natural condition, and yet most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses. —Pascal1

In calling man Dasein, or being-in-the-world, Heidegger is saying that humans can be themselves only in and through their world. "My” world will die with me when I perish, but "the” world will go on without me. The starting point for the study of man is his existence, or Being-there. Daseinanalysis begins with the concept of man in relation to other men and from the outset "in” a world, so that man does not exist without "his” world, nor does "his” world exist without him. Biological birth must be differentiated from existential birth. Biological birth is the act which casts one into the world. When I am born, for example, I am looked upon by the others as a separate entity, real and alive, with my own ways. It is taken for granted by most people that the new baby is also existeniially alive, and indeed, in the majority of cases, in a short period of time, the infant feels real and alive and has a sense of being an entity, and therefore having temporality and a bodily location in space. Biological birth in most cases is fol­ lowed by existential birth, and because this is the most common state of affairs, existential birth is generally overlooked. Ex­

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istential birth, however, is crucial, for without it, one can go through one’s entire life being biologically alive, with a beating heart, moving limbs, flowing blood, and so forth, but all the time feel dead, and have to constantly search for the self-val­ idating criteria that definitively prove that one is actually alive. But since existential birth is the presupposition for all further certainties, without it, it is doubtful if one can ever find the feeling of aliveness for which one is searching. If I am existentially alive, every act I perform is felt to be "me,” and I become "me” through each and every action. I "keep myself alive” by my acts, so that each act is a new beginning, a new birth, a re-creation of myself, a ful-filling of my self. If I am existentially alive, I cast myself forward with every proceeding action, but if the opposite is true, I feel myself spiraling, or going backwards, or going round in circles, or getting nowhere. I f I am existentially dead, I may have to fill myself with others who are alive in order to exist. Or I may have to live through the lives of others, so that "my” life stops while I "go” every­ where, like a parasite on the back of another, but "get” nowhere myself. I go round in a whirl, "going” everywhere, but "getting” nowhere. No matter how hectically I may move about in space, i f I am existentially dead, for all intents and purposes, I am getting nowhere. No matter how fast I run or how much I speed up my pace, I am on an exercise wheel: I never move from the same point. One man dreamed, "I was at the seashore. There were sands and barren rocks. I was alone. I ran into the sea and swam and swam until, almost exhausted, I came to another shore, where there were again sands and barren rocks. Once more I found that I was alone. It was the same place.”2 Indeed, in entering the world of Kafka, one finds men not in search of wealth or fame or utopia, but rather, their very ex­ istence. For if one is not existentially alive, no further problems can be said to be solved until this obstacle is removed. Kafka’s protagonists are face to face with biological but not existential birth: life, without feeling alive. Biologically, Kafka’s main characters have some sense of identity, but they have only

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come as far as an animal rather than a human being. Existentially, their identities are that of necessity: they lack and need a sense of aliveness that is necessary for any subsequent unfolding of human potentialities. Their present failure and their pro-ject of quest are symbolized in Kafka’s fiction, as they often appear in reality in existential case histories, as a hunger that cannot be satisfied, a lack of firm ground to stand upon, or a lack of breatheable air. In Kafka, identity as necessity is presented as a central reason for man’s inability to create fa­ vorable conditions for authenticity .3Just in Being-in-the-world, Kafka’s characters have a biological identity, but the claims of necessity, the need for existential identity (often represented as everydayness4), keep man from the unhampered unfolding of his potential in all areas of human ex-istence. Two general possibilities are open to every individual: he may experience his own being as real, alive, and whole, with an identity that is never in question, or he may feel more unreal than real, with his identity always in question. If the individual’s identity is a lack or necessity, he cannot take his own aliveness and au­ tonomy for granted. His every effort is incessantly and per­ petually directed toward preserving his identity, keeping himself alive, trying to be real, and preventing any loss of his self. What others can brush aside without a second thought is dwelt upon, lingered over, and significant to the individual who has a low threshhold to threats of non-being. Trilling says, "If we compare Shakespeare and Kafka, considering both only as expositors of man’s suffering and cosmic alienation, it is Kafka who makes the more intense and complete exposition. And, indeed, the judgment may be correct, exactly because for Kafka the sense of evil is not contradicted by the sense of personal identity. Shakespeare’s world, quite as much as Kafka’s, is that prison cell which Pascal says the world is, from which daily the inmates are led forth to die; Shakespeare no less than Kafka forces upon us the cruel irrationality of the conditions of human life, the tale told by an idiot, the puerile gods who torture us not for punishment but for sport; and no

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less than Kafka, Shakespeare is revolted by the fetor of the prison of this world, nothing is more characteristic of him than his imagery of disgust. But in Shakespeare’s cell, the company is so much better than in Kafka’s; the captains and kings and lovers and clowns of Shakespeare are alive and complete before they die. In Kafka, long before the sentence is executed, even long before the malign legal process is even instituted, some­ thing terrible has been done to the accused. We all know what that is—he has been stripped of all that is becoming to a man except his abstract humanity, which, like his skeleton, never is quite becoming to a man. He is without parents, home, wife, child commitment, or appetite; he has no connection with power, beauty, love, wit, courage, loyalty, or fame, and the pride that may be taken in these. So that we may say that Kafka’s knowledge of evil exists without the contradictory knowledge of the self in its health and validity, that Shake­ speare’s knowledge of evil exists with that contradiction in its fullest possible force.”6 We see that Shakespeare depicts char­ acters who feel themselves to be real and alive, even though they may be doubtful or tom with conflict. But with Kafka this is not the case. Kafka’s protagonists live in the absence of such assurances. There is no contradictory6 sense of the self in its "health and validity” to lessen the intensity of the despair7and terror in existence, so that one is condemned to live. In their quest for existential birth and the feeling of being alive, Kafka’s fictional characters start from a position8 of on­ tological insecurity. The word '"security” applies not only to material security, but more importantly to bodily self-preservation. Lower organisms supposedly have this aim only, but man initiates into the scene the concept of ontological security as an additional dimension: the security of the personality, the quest for reality as a person in one’s own right, having personal significance and entitled to the space9 that one occupies.10This is what ontologically insecure individuals are found to lack. The deeper one probes into their psychic makeup, the more evidence one finds that they experience themselves as empty,

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meaningless, futile, isolated, lonely, and aimless. But they have an existential craving11for close contact for security’s sake. That is, they are dependent but this is something that they so fear that they can do nothing effective to realize it or accept it. If the individual contrasts his own inner emptiness, worth­ lessness, coldness, desolation, and dryness with the warmth, abundance and worth that he sees elsewhere, there is evoked within him a cloud of conflicting and ambivalent emotions, from a desperate longing and yearning for what others have that he lacks to a frantic existential craving and hatred of all that is theirs and not his. These feelings may be counterbal­ anced with attitudes of disdain, contempt, disgust, or indiffer­ ence. Tausk wrote of how, in childhood, adults at first were able to look right through us and into us, and how great an accom­ plishment it was when we, in fear and trembling,12 could tell our first lie, and thus make the dis-covery that there are certain respects in which we are irredeemably alone, where no one else can penetrate. But some people are never able to real-ize them­ selves in this "position.” Tausk said, "We are familiar with this infantile stage of thinking, in which a strong belief exists that others know the child’s thoughts. Until a child has been suc­ cessful in its first lie, the parents are supposed to know every­ thing, even its most secret thoughts. The striving for the right to have secrets from which the parents are excluded is one of the most powerful factors in establishing and carrying out one’s own will. The developmental stage observed in the above men­ tioned period is one in which the child does not yet sense this right to privacy and does not yet doubt that the parents know everything.”13 This genuine privacy is the basis of genuine relationship. But the ontologically insecure person feels more exposed, more vulnerable, and more isolated. He is made of glass: every Other is a potential Medusa who can stare right through him and turn him to stone.14 It is possible to tell a lie and not feel guilt at doing so. It is also possible to lie and feel guilt, without suffering under the belief that the lie will show

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in one’s face. Being able to tell one’s first lie is a major achieve­ ment, for one gains confidence in the fact that adults have no way of knowing what he does unless they see him. If one does not tell the Other, all he is able to do is guess. My thoughts are inaccessible to the Other unless I "give the show away” myself. The child who cannot keep a secret or cannot tell a lie because o f persisting magical fears that should have been discarded long ago has not established full autonomy or identity. As Laing says, "No doubt in most circumstances good reasons can be found against telling lies, but the inability to do so is not one of the best reasons.”16 The existential prototype occurs in the life of the young child and forms a dynamic mode around which is gathered an in­ articulated configuration of experiences leading him "to be,” or threatening him in his attempts "to be.” The prototype can become the nucleus for the individual’s progressive or regres­ sive16existential attitude. Wolff used the term "primary scene” to designate the existential prototype.17 The existential pro­ totype can create the plot for the individual’s life, but does not necessarily have to be a causal factor in what his life becomes. The basic existential "position” originally arrived at does not determine the subsequent course of life, but it does constitute the Anlage18for what will be the setting up of the adult’s hopes, disappointments, anxiety, love, hate; in short, the setting in which his joy and suffering will be encountered, and the terms in which they will be lived. But in addition to having this progressive significance for the individual’s life, the existential prototype has the further character of drawing about it all similar experiences and of continually producing counterreac­ tions as protective mechanisms. It also seems to set the stage for regressive behavior, or a return to the existential totali­ zation19that prevailed before the shock occurred. The existen­ tial prototype need not be negative in its influence, but it is a nodal point in the child’s life. Existential analysis seeks an awareness in the patient of the existential prototype and the elements involved in the shock of this prototype. They cannot

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be erased, but the individual’s attitude to this shock may change, and its impact may be reduced. In existential shock, there is the sudden awareness of my predicament and my finitude, as well as my "place” in the world and my death.20The polarities of existence cannot be adequately understood or ap­ preciated without a concern for this awareness or shock, and hence, it has been explicated here as background material to understanding the polarities of Kafka’s protagonists. Almost all of Kafka’s works deal with the existential prob­ lems of man’s life. Displeasure with the individual’s meaning­ less existence is usually the result of inner or outer pressures. The awareness in the individual of this displeasure leads to the attempt of the protagonist to establish an existence in which consciousness harmoniously complements life, intellect, and intuitive Being, so that they become one. The individual lacks a firm hold on reality, and is unable to establish a life with a center from which he can live and act. He desires an existence in which a harmony between knowledge (intellect) and intuitive Being can be achieved. Very seldom does the individual ever reach such a harmony, but the desire is so great that the protagonists keep trying time and time again, so that the hope of an authentic existence is always reaffirmed. Food, air, and ground symbolize the existential situations in which Kafka’s characters find themselves. In the fictional tales I shall investigate, man searches for himself, but never manages to find his way out of the maze and the endless traps he sets for himself that drown out the voice of authentic Being. The individual thus does not fulfill his true self, but rather obliterates his true self and metamorphoses into an ex-istence diametrically opposed to the protagonist’s previous consciousness. It is the dichotomy that causes the in­ dividual suffering without redemption. The dichotomy is only resolved by death. If the individual lives on, he is left dangling on a rope between two possibilities, unable to return to life that he has left, but unfortunately incapable of living up to the challenge of the voice of his self.

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In Kafka’s short story, The Metamorphosis, food, air, and ground are integrated in the form of the story so that these factors graphically emphasize the main themes of the tale. The protagonist, Gregor Samsa, is faced with two possibilities which exist simultaneously and under whose burden Samsa must perish. The main character’s metamorphosis into a dung beetle is not an emergence of an existence that never was be­ fore, but a radical transformation towards an existence which was always latently present, but never before made manifest. Gregor’s initial surprise at the metamorphosis shows how little he knows about himself. " 'What has happened to me?’ he thought. It was no dream.”21Samsa realizes the inauthenticity o f his life as a traveling salesman, and in reflecting upon his work, he does not deceive himself: "Oh God, what an exhausting job I’ve picked on! Travelling about day in, day out. It’s much more irritating work than doing the actual business in the office, and on top of that there’s the trouble of constant trav­ eling, of worrying about train connections, the bed and irreg­ ular meals, casual acquaintances that are always new and never become intimate friends. The devil take it all!”22 But when Samsa is confronted with himself as vermin, he tries to laugh it off as such, or deny his existence. He is at a loss to authentically confront this new aspect of his self, although he was able to adequately diagnose his inauthenticity as a trav­ elling salesman. "He tried it at least a hundred times, shutting his eyes to keep from seeing his struggling legs, and only de­ sisted when he began to feel in his side a faint, dull ache that he had never experienced before.”23 We see that before the metamorphosis, Samsa complained of his estrangement from the they-world of society and family. His relationships with the others in his world are not genuine. "If I didn’t have to hold my hand because of my parents I’d have given notice long ago, I’d have gone to the chief and told him exactly what I think of him. That would knock him endways from his desk!. . . Well, there’s still hope; once I’ve saved enough money to pay back my parents’ debts to him—that should take another five or six

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years—I’ll do it without fail. I’ll cut myself completely loose then. For the moment, though, I’d better get up, since my train goes at five.”24 Gregor here admits to himself that the only reason he didn’t walk out on the world of they was because of his family and his obligation to it. Everydayness takes a heavy toll on Samsa. He blames his immersion in das Man on the chief clerk of the firm who comes to fetch Gregor on the morning of the metamorphosis. "What a fate, to be condemned to work for a firm where the smallest omission gave rise to the gravest suspicion! Were all employees in a body nothing but scoundrels, was there not among them one single loyal devoted man, who, had he wasted only an hour or so of the firm’s time in the morning, was so tormented by conscience as to be driven out of his mind and actually incapable of leaving his bed?”28 But Gregor’s defiant protests against the they-world and the pres­ sure that it places upon him never becomes a matter of con­ scious assessment, since Samsa is unfortunately incapable of reaching and assessing certain layers of his existence. Only the most trivial and inconsequential aspects of das Man come to Samsa’s mind, so that the metamorphosis is simply some inexplicable occurrence or happening whose significance cannot be assessed or accepted, and which he feels should not intefere with his "normal” life.26 At first, although the metamorphosis seems to have affected him physically, Gregor’s appetite does not initially seem to have changed: "Gregor really felt quite well, apart from a drowsiness that was utterly superfluous after such a long sleep, and he was even unusually hungry.”27 Samsa’s bug-hood is an allusion to the vegetative, non-thinking side of himself which existed prior to the metamorphosis as Samsa lived-for-others inauthentically, rather than separating himself from the "they” and becoming authentic. The meta­ morphosis re-veals many previously hidden phenomena, the emergence of which are fatal to Samsa. The metamorphosis affects Samsa’s family as well. Gregor dimly realizes the need of his family’s help, and thinks in anguish, "Ought he really to call for help? In spite of his misery, he could not suppress

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a smile at the very idea of it.”28 The estrangement of Gregor from his family becomes worse and worse, so that communi­ cation is impossible. Gregor wishes for his family to metamor­ phose along with him, but this does not occur. The initial phase o f Samsa's metamorphosis is brought out by the first meal which takes place after the first attempt at escape. "He dipped his head almost over the eyes straight into the milk. But soon in disappointment he withdrew it again; not only did he find it difficult to feed because of his tender left side; he did not like the milk either, although milk had been his favourite drink. . . indeed it was with repulsion that he turned away from the basin and crawled back to the middle of the room.”29 The favorite food of his former existence is now repulsive to his taste. Gregor does not know the reason for this, for there is no realization of the significance of the metamorphosis. The change must be willed,30 not passively experienced, or one will not be enhanced at a higher level of existence. Gregor’s met­ amorphosis explodes the petrified mode of his existence. But Gregor and the three members of his family close their eyes to the challenge of the change, and cannot meet the new re­ sponsibility which results. In comparison with Gregor’s pre­ vious existential form, he now possesses repulsiveness and Otherness. The metamorphosis also points out the displeasure Samsa had with his past existence. If there is a growing per­ ception of Gregor’s new condition, it is not expressed explicitly. Hunger now introduces a second meaning: Gregor’s hunger wakes him out of his sleep, but there is still a lack of clear realization of the nature of this hunger. It is no longer a bodily, physical hunger, but is now fused with the added components o f hope, worry, and other emotional states. Gregor hopes to obtain the right type of food from his family, but his alienation and estrangement have progressed to the point that even Gre­ gor’s sister, from whom he hopes will come empathy and kind­ ness, sees her brother as a monster. The next time she brings him food, it is with the understanding of the significance of the change. Since dung beetles are able to eat only food that has

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already rotted, the sister acknowledges Gregor’s animality by bringing him this type of food. She ironically makes Gregor’s alienation more complete even though she is the only one who retains serious consistent contact with Samsa. Her "goodness” and "kindness” belong to the type that one extends to lower animals and not to human beings. There is no element of love in the sister’s kindness, for Gregor repulses her. Gregor is ac­ cepting of his sister’s humiliating "kindness,” but doubts arise in his mind. In delighting in rotten food that previously would have repulsed him, Gregor is suspicious of his "acceptance” for this new role. But his satiation simultaneously prevents him from breathing normally and brings on an asthmatic attack. Gregor finds himself crawling on the ceiling, where the air is thinner and he is more comfortable. The new world of meta­ morphosis slowly closes in on Samsa. What was previously firm ground is now inadequate. The ceiling is a place where Gregor is satisfied and at ease. The new adventure of crawling on the ceiling matches the displeasure with food that Gregor previ­ ously devoured with great joy. But the freedom of the ceiling also has its dangers: it may lead to false exuberance that might impair Gregor’s existence. Samsa’s difficulty in breathing is referential31 in that it refers back to Gregor’s fundamental weakness of the lungs. "Slight attacks of breathlessness af­ flicted him and his eyes were starting a little out of his head as he watched his unsuspecting sister sweeping together with a broom not only the remains of what he had not eaten but even the things he had not touched.”32 This existential weak­ ness of the lung bursts into the foreground under the stress o f such an extreme situation or Grenzsituation.33 Breathing dif­ ficulties are identified with difficulties of an existential nature, whereas ease of breathing can be equated with freedom and well being. The lack of freedom and the lack of ability to act effectively are associated with the activity of breathing. There is an existenial incompatability between the family and the Gregor of the metamorphosis, yet Gregor does not at­ tempt to bring about harmony between himself and his sister.

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His hiding from others and his refusal to eat certain foods testify to his emerging new self. If Gregor were "loved”34by the family, this would have done much to aid the situation, but the challenge of the metamorphosis is not to the family alone. Since Gregor’s new selfhood appears to himself as a vermin, as a dung beetle, overcoming this has to be Gregor’s task alone. Gregor soon stops eating altogether, and mocks himself by watching his family and the boarders at dinner. "The family itself took its meals in the kitchen . . . [The lodgers] ate their food in almost complete silence. It seemed remarkable to Gre­ gor that among the various noises coming from the table, he could always distinguish the sound of their masticating teeth, as if this were a sign to Gregor that one needed teeth in order to eat, and that with toothless jaws even of the finest make one could do nothing. 'I’m hungry enough,’ said Gregor sadly to himself, 'but not for that kind of food. How these lodgers are stuffing themselves, and here I am dying of starvation!’ ”35 Gregor is now becoming increasingly aware of the animal-like existence of the they-world, whose existence seems to Samsa to be centered around food and physiological processes. Yet the boarders and Gregor’s family are ambivalently still envied by the protagonist. Gregor’s plan to send his sister to a conservatory of music is one of the few things in Gregor’s life which is not connected with either his family’s welfare or his own welfare. Gregor’s sacrificing unselfishness in order to do this for his sister is diametrically opposed to the harsh materialism that is usually evident in the Samsa household. Music is not "useful” in the same mode as the earthly, and it is for this reason that Gregor is not an animal, for his primary concern is not with the phys­ iological upkeep of an animal, but a new, longed-for food. Music symbolizes everything that Gregor’s premetamorphotic exist­ ence was not. The world of material values, of which the board­ ers, the father, and the clerk are representatives’ is transcended36 by the narrowness of the Arbeitswelt37and becomes the promise o f a life in which something more than the animal-like is cen­

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tral. The advent of a new life is identified as a new food. The process of voluntary starvation shows Samsa’s awareness of a new existential possibility. The rhetorical question asked by Gregor, "Was he an animal, that music had such an effect on him?” seems to leave no doubt that Gregor is not an animal. This shows that an animal who is better than man suffers because man is too blind to recognize the humanity under his disguised new form. In a reverie, Gregor wishes to lure his sister into his room, "for no one here appreciated her violin playing as he would appreciate it.” It is at this point that Gregor gains the fullest insight as to the nature of his existence, and we note a full exposition of the dualism that was previously latent. When Gregor’s very existence is at stake, he protects the picture on the wall with his whole being. "Just let her try it! He clung to the picture and would not give it up. He would rather fly in Grete’s face.” The metamorphosis of Gregor is a rebellion of an individual in whom an entire layer of existence was not permitted to be made manifest. When it did, it took on the look of a monster, a vermin, representing both Gregor’s and the family’s view of that existential aspect. The family’s reaction develops from puzzlement to anger to disgust, and finally culminates with the sister’s cruel proclamation: "We must try to get rid of it.” This shows the utter futility of the challenge of the metamorphosis. Gregor becomes a mere "it,” not a Being-in-the-world, having lost for the others all the attributes characteristic of humanity. But the disappointing attitude of Gregor’s family—the father’s dishonesty, the sister’s ambivalent love/cruelty, and the mother’s ineffectualness—has not destroyed love in Gregor, but rather caused him to look upon his family with love for the first time. This marks the first time that his relationship with his family is expressed in such terms. This confession of love coincides with the protag­ onist’s death and the symbolic "broadening of light in the world outside his window” that transfigures his end. Gregor’s death is accompanied by signs of general reconciliation: the pains of

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his existence have lessened, his thoughts are without urgency and anxiety, and he peacefully breathes his last breath. Gregor’s metamorphosis brings him to a higher level of hu­ manity and awareness than he had before, but he is unable to muster enough power to meet the onslaught of the powers of life. He fights back passively rather than actively, refusing to eat not by choice, but by losing his appetite. Yet the family regenerates and triumphs, making plans for the future and hoping to marry off their daughter. Gregor is not a hero who fails in the struggle to assert his will,38 but is a passive victim who is suspended between powers which are unknown and unrealized by him. The existential antinomies39disappear only in death. Our empathy goes out to Gregor, yet Kafka’s judg­ ment is not only passed on the clerk, the family, and das Man alone, but on the protagonist as well. The failure of authentic existence if one remains in society’s world is as much the fault o f the society as the individual. In the story, Gregor undergoes a painful process of individuation by learning about foods: he refuses to eat foods which he previously liked and finds a pre­ dilection for foods that formerly used to nauseate him. It is in music that he might find a promise of "nourishment” that could possibly satisfy him. Music is the symbolic mediator between the two existential spheres: the impersonal realm of the Samsa family and the realm of freedom that transcends the drabness o f their vegetableness. Music is posited as a possible way to a new life. The all-pervasive intellect recognizes the attraction o f freedom, but also its dangers, so that inauthentic modes of Being are receptacles for mockery and satire, but this judgment is suspended so that one becomes sadly aware of the complexity o f the human condition. Gregor first loses the appetite for food which previously was the only source of life that he knew. He rejects this food and experiences a transfiguration in which his life is seen in a completely different perspective. But this ex­ perience is in the immediate proximity of death. The moment o f insight coincides with the moment of death. The attitude of openness-to-death40 is only a remote possibility. Is the judg­

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ment of the self feasible without accepting death as a compan­ ion and guide? Being-to-death41 is an admirable existential ideal, but can man meet the challenge? Kafka does not commit herself one way or the other. Kafka does not apologize for his protagonist; he simply pleads for consideration of man as Das­ ein, caught between the claims of absolute standards and the nature of his own inadequacy and fear. Jules Henry calls that short story an example of what he terms pathogenic metamorphosis. This is the process whereby an individual is converted into something else, whether it be a monster or nonentity. Pathogenic metamorphosis when ex­ amined is often found to have two transformations: a primary transformation where the individual is magically degraded into a monster or nonentity who has the power to devour others, and a secondary transformation whereby once the individual is magically degraded, further detachment from the person is excusable, for who could love the very monster or nonentity that has been mentally created? Henry says, "All pathological environments must metamorphose the creatures in it. Franz Kafka, transformed by his humiliating father, saw himself as cockroach, various animals, and ’hunger artist.’ Pathogenic families change their children into bugs, horses, dogs, garbage pails, and so on.. . . Pathogenic institutions simply cannot han­ dle a human being, for humanness is a threat. For a cruel institution to function within its cruelties, it has to redefine its inmates—hence the pathogenic, lethal metamorphosis. In a pathogenic society, Negroes become animals; Jews become monsters and murderers; Chinese become evil, yellow, little men, and so on. This redefinition of a human being into a persecutable category I have called pathogenic metamorphosis. Of course, the transformation cannot be perfect unless the sub­ ject acquiesces.”42 This is the same category of which Cooper writes when he explains the two-step conversion of a political enemy into the "inhuman” and then "non-human,” where the inhuman enemy becomes the ultimate projected version of our­ selves, those bits of ourselves that we wish most finally to

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destroy in order to become Pure Being. If we cannot destroy these bits in ourselves, we have to destroy them in this outside version. The sub*human or non-human are totally destructible, so there can be no possibility of guilt. They have to be wiped out almost before they exist as the non-human in our meta­ physical imaginations. For Sartre, all evil is projection. People hate in others that part of themselves that they have denied and projected into them. A critical situation faces the ontologically insecure individ­ ual: he has become unreal and dead, but the possibility of life is not lost. He sees realness and life elsewhere. But the self hates and envies the richness that it always sees there, never here. The self that has become empty and dry might be termed an oral self by Freudians or Neo-Freudians insofar as it is empty and ambivalently both longs and dreads to be filled up. But its "orality” differs from the formulation of Freud and from the later psychosocial model of Erikson in that this orality can never be satiated by any amount of eating, drinking, feeding, masticating, or swallowing. This type of self is characterized by the inability to incorporate anything, and as such remains a bottomless pit, a chasm that can never be filled. The guilt which might arise were it possible to ingest and thus destroy the world as food cannot arise, for the self in its hatred reduces the object to nothing without digesting it. So although the self has a desperate existential craving for the goodness and real­ ness it perceives elsewhere, it must destroy it rather than in­ gest it. Realness must be obtained in some way so that the self is not destroyed in the process. In examining the history of ontologically insecure individ­ uals from infancy forward, one often finds that oral hunger and greed have never found expression in infancy. Instead of en­ ergetic feeding followed by satiated sleep, the infant’s basic oral instinctual drives have failed to find expression and ful­ fillment, and as such, is a sign that the child is notexistentially becoming alive. Later on in adulthood, this ontological inse­ curity may be characterized by extreme preoccupation with or

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desire to become what one perceives, to fully ingest it and make it so a part of oneself that one is no longer oneself, but the object of one’s perception. Sartre in Being and Nothingness provides us with a brilliant phenomenological description of man as a lack, incessantly trying and failing to become the fullness of Being, and thus provide a foundation for one’s ex­ istence, become hard and solid, and equal oneself in terms of a perfect equation. Man is a failed God, for he futilely tries to fuse his consciousness with pure Being and thus become God, or Pour-Soi-En-Soi, For-Itself-In-Itself. However, the category only applies to accessory reflection, and Sartre looks toward the pure reflection of existential analysis as liberation from this hopeless goal. The realization that one’s plans are futile may send one into despair and anguish, but this honesty and dread is a better solution than comfortable deception, or bad faith. This desire to become God exists in everyone to some degree ontologically. In other words, one possesses this char­ acteristic just in being human. But in most "normal” people, one does not find such extreme obsessions with this hopeless goal as one finds in an individual whose very existence is al­ ways a question that must be answered, who always needs assurances that one’s self is alive and real, and will desperately look anywhere in craving aliveness and wholeness. To someone who is desperately searching for the feeling of reality instead of non-being, ontological boundaries are frantically cast to the wind, and much time is spent in the exercise of trying to become a secure en-soi and thus exist: "That’s the rain. I could be the rain. The rain on my cheek is my tears. That wall. I could be that wall.” All perception of objects potentially posits mergence with the object, so that me-ness as pour-soi is not distinguished from the objects of perception. "Normal” people soon realize the futility of such endeavours and give them up, and thus can fashion a world of sorts. But to an ontologically insecure person, every act of perception may involve the wish to fuse self with not-self. In Kafka’s short story The Hunger Artist, the circus per-

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former cannot resolve the existential antinomy43 between his outlandish appetite, or the ful-fillment of individual being, and the desire for the admiration of the Other, his audience. His strange "hunger” symbolizes these unresolved polarities. He is a hunger artist, showing his relationship to his audience and to the circus manager. The predicament of the hunger artist is not necessarily that of the artist alone. The protagonist may be exemplary of modem man’s general predicament, but man must also be put into his surrounding context; in this case being the triangle of hunger artist, art, and audience. In being given the position of the hunger artist and the history of his art, we find that his art has declined in popularity. Sympathy and participation played an important part in this art, and performances were attended by huge crowds who did not doubt or ridicule. But now, only children naively admire the hunger artist; in their original innocence, they can view his strange­ ness without being undermined by doubt and irony. But even the children betray scrutinizing looks at times that suggest the hunger artist’s alienation and estrangement. Guards are se­ lected from the audience to watch over the performance of the artist, and by the nature of their occupation, they belong to a sphere of existence which is diametrically opposed to that of the artist. Yet there still appears to be some unexpressed sym­ pathy and understanding. The hunger artist is pleased to see the guards devour a free breakfast after an all-night vigil, but he dislikes the guards who are lax in their duties, and thus give him the opportunity to take some food, for this "benevo­ lence” is ambivalent in that it is simultaneously a mockery of the very basis of the hunger artist’s art and existence. There is a grave misunderstanding at the root of the relationship between the artist and the audience. Only the artist knows the value of his production, and no one, no matter how well in­ formed, could judge a process which is beyond the realm of customary knowledge, a process which defies the very cate­ gories44 of the everyday. The artist must know his own value

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and should not be dependent upon the Other for approval and subsequent knowledge that he is a good artist. The nature of the hunger artist’s performance is out of the ordinary: it involves a denial of the very basis for everyday existence, the denial of food or nourishment. Therefore, the tax upon the audience is great, although this was not so in the past. Men were once capable of deep appreciation of the hunger artist’s art, but now they need factual proof of anything that transcends everydayness. The artist tells his audience that starvation is easy, and that he would not be able to eat anything even if it were given to him because he would become nauseous, but the audience does not believe this, and does not trust the artist unless it watches him perpetually, lest he be able to sneak some "wanted” food. But the actual fact that the artist does not "want” any food falls on the deaf ear of men who cannot imagine anything which is different from the everyday, and the vulgar experience of the five senses. The hunger artist’s unhappiness therefore does not result from the exhaustion of starvation, but because he is not per­ mitted to go on starving, and thus make his sacrifice complete. Even his most sincere desires are meaningless in the face o f the spectators. Fasting for the hunger artist is easy, and he has fits of anger when a member of the audience feels that his sadness and depression stems from prolonged hunger. His in­ sistence upon fasting beyond the agreed time seems inexplic­ able to them, but soon the situation changes, and the audience senses this change, although no one is able to understand why or at what point the change occurred. The hunger artist, as a victim of new change in attitudes, cannot acknowledge defeat: he is frantically dedicated to his art and does not change his own existence. He proceeds with his act even though he is not a proud performer who draws huge crowds, but another freakshow oddity in the circus of life. The hunger artist is allowed to continue starving because no one cares whether he does or not. The people do not find the existence of the hunger artist to be different from their mode of Being-in-the-world, or con­

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trary to nature, or a challenge to authenticity. They rather view the hunger artist with indifference, apathy, and misun­ derstanding. They are so hopelessly immersed in inauthentic­ ity that even the thought of there being other possibilities does not occur to them. They make the existence of the hunger artist almost nonsensical, but he learns to accept their attitude, thus making his estrangement from das Man complete, for he does not even have a negative contact with the outside world. From an objective standpoint, the hunger artist’s art reaches a peak during his association with the circus, when he can starve to his heart’s content. His achievements surprise him, but without the recognition of the Other, his achievement is separated from reality. His magnificent accomplishment becomes a receptacle for ridicule and comedy because it falls out of the accepted pattern of human conduct. The art of the hunger artist longs to be embodied in the reality of the world that could make it feasible. But the hunger artist cannot make the necessary com­ promise with the world and must perish. The hunger artist does not deceive himself; he is aware that he cannot find food to his liking and that his attitude is negative. Yet the hunger artist is heroic in that he relentlessly searches for perfection even though there is little or no hope for it. Is there a food which would be to the artist’s taste? Is there a possibility of an existence based upon the premises of the short story? Gregor Samsa possibly found music as fulfillment or nourishment, but what can the hunger artist find? For the hunger artist, the sympathy, admiration, and understanding o f the people as an existential pole is his concern, for without the people, the hunger artist cannot exist. "Great star! What would your happiness be, if you had not those for whom you shine!”46 So the new food might be an attunement46 between the existential polarities in which the conflict can be resolved for the sake of a complementary existence whereby the new food would be acceptable to the hunger artist and would also quench the needs of the people. The hunger artist in his pursuit o f a different kind of food makes himself guilty by making a

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spectacle of his search which inflates the value of his pursuits and ultimately brings on his failure. The hunger artist cannot achieve a balance of antinomies inherent in all existence. The hunger artist’s quest for authenticity prevents him from par­ taking in the food of life. His existence is thus imperfect and incomplete. A commitment to starvation assures him of per­ fection, but this perfection is sterile and vacuous without the Other who can lend it reality. The panther exists totally on the physical plane, not aware of the reality beyond himself, so that physical necessity coin­ cides with the totality of life, and the panther can thus be said to be free. Living like a panther may look good to man, but we must remember that the panther is in a cage. It is possible to reconcile these extreme forms of existence? This question Kafka leaves for the reader to answer. Kafka in exploring an archetypal existential situation such as the relation of man to society offers us no solutions. Kafka’s anthropology47 is dualistic in that man is tom between two existential antinomies: the searching intellect vs the naive acceptance of life in its totality. Man as Dasein is frequently unable to maintain the struggle and withdraws into death. The realization of the in­ adequacy of a particular existential mode manifests itself as hunger, a lack of breatheable air, or the absence of firm ground, the hunger of man for authenticity raises him above the misery of the human condition. Gregor Samsa’s sister and the panther in The Hunger Artist are somewhat positive elements that serve to show the totality of life proceeding unhampered and untouched by the sight of human suffering. The hunger artist dies because he cannot reconcile the ex­ istential antinomy between himself and the world. The abun­ dance there is longed for, in contrast to the emptiness here; but reconciliation without loss of being is felt to be futile, and also is not enough, so the individual must cling to his isolation, his separateness, because in doing so, he is clinging to his identity. The hunger artist longs for union with the others, but he si­ multaneously fears the longing, for it means the end of his self.

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He does not wish for a relationship of mutual enrichment and give-and-take between two friendly beings, and cannot con­ ceive of a dialectical relationship that would serve to synthesize the two existential polarities. In the Lysis, Plato postulates that friendship can exist only between congenial beings. But Plato gets stuck at the paradox of two people not ’’wanting” anything, yet "wanting” something from each other. It is on this issue that the ontologically insecure person also gets stuck: can he exist alone, or does he "want” something from the Other? For the hunger artist, the awareness that other people appre­ ciate him for what he is, assures the artist that he exists. The hunger artist, never convinced from within himself that he is alive, needs to gain a conviction of his realness and worth by being an object in the world of others, and thereby mitigate his state of depersonalization and inner deadness. The hunger art­ ist needs other people to experience him as a person of worth because he has never been convinced from within himself that he is valuable and alive. But the hunger artist does not receive this apprehension from the others, and must perish, for ac­ cording to the hunger artist, to be perceived is to be. The hunger artist is a suppliant: he humbly petitions others by means of his bizarre art to supply him with being by recognizing him and appreciating him. The hunger artist needs to have his presence endorsed or confirmed by the Other; he needs his total existence to be recognized; he needs, in fact, to be loved. In examining Binswanger’s The Case of Ellen West, the topics of food, air, and ground again arise, although they are mani­ fested differently. In The Case of Ellen West, we see the role Binswanger ascribes to the elements of "air,” "food,” and "ground” in the contrasting worlds of the patient’s subjective experience. Binswanger’s existential analysis of the case of Ellen West moves between the poles of authenticity and in­ authenticity, of floundered and accomplished forms of exist­ ence, but not between "normal” and "abnormal,” "healthy” and "sick.” Binswanger places an analysis of temporality close to the center of his discussion of Ellen West. Her existence is

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ruled by the past, encircled in a bare, empty present, and cut off from the future. Robbed of the authentic meaning of her life that only the future can provide, Ellen West must fill in time, must fill up the existential emptiness, through an insatiable animal greed that represents a desperate and always unsuc­ cessful flight before the dread of nothingness, of non-being. Binswanger also analyzes Ellen West from a vertical axis of spatiality that includes the ethereal world, the terrestrial world, and the world of the tomb or swamp. Binswanger elu­ cidates how the loss of ground on which to stand and to work left Ellen West with two conflicting worlds the inevitable out­ come of which was a dissipation of the ethereal world into empty possibility and complete triumph of the tomb world. In the usage of the everyday, one metaphorically speaks of the air as being "thick with tension,” of "standing on thin ice,” or of fear or despair that "eats away at a person.” This everyday usage reveals more of the true nature of the concepts of food, air, and ground than Freud with his notion or orality and Erikson with his psychosocial inclusion of air intake or respira­ tion in the incorporative stage of trust vs mistrust, and his formulation of standing firmly and actively, or intruding into space by vigorous locomotion which is a manifestation of ini­ tiative vs guilt. In speaking of Being, Heidegger says that we must know something of the truth of Being, for we use the word "is” in our everyday language. The truth of Being is not impossible to ascertain, nor is it manufactured by man. It is there all the time, but merely waiting to be re-vealed, and man is the agent who lifts the veil. Take away our concepts and what do we have left? Feelings, moods, sentiments, emotions, and intuitions, providing a starting point from which to pursue the truth of Being. Heidegger says that a poetic elite including Rilke and Holderlin are closer to the truth than philosophers who have a gluttony for words and write long-winded discourses. Bin­ swanger uses literature in his case histories just as Heidegger finds it advantageous to his revolutionary work in ontology.

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Binswanger is extremely well versed in German and French literature, and alludes frequently to Goethe, Valery, Bachelard, and other great men of literature where the need for description arises, since metaphorical allusions to such uni­ versally understood models are clearer than most psychoan­ alytic or mechanistic descriptions. As such, existential psychology and philosophy are unique in their utilization of poetic lan­ guage, the House of Being. For Binswanger, "schizophrenia” is a unique style of living which is a radical alteration of the whole world of the person. It is for this reason that temporality is so close to the center of Binswanger’s discussion of Ellen West. "World” is etymologically derived from the Germanic "werald,” where "wer” is man and "aid” is age. Therefore, man’s age is the world, which implies a temporal conception of the world, rather than a geo­ graphical or geological orientation that sometimes comes to mind. According to Binswanger, in "schizophrenia,” natural subjective experience loses its spontaneity, and the basic mode of Being-in-the-world splits into inflexible, rigid alternatives. The rigid alternatives are high-flown ideals and their anti­ nomic correlatives. The unbearable aspects of the alternative are masked and concealed to sustain the dominion of the highflown ideals. The result is a wearing away of existence, which is a narrowing and impoverishment of the whole world of the person. One can no longer be with others in intimacy, and instead becomes an object. But psychology must not match this objectification with its very terminology. Such is the case with Freudian psychopathology, and this is what Binswanger’s ex­ istential analysis seeks to depass.48 Binswanger is not the ob­ jective diagnostician who stands outside the patient’s world, but an active participant who attempts to capture every subtle nuance of change and relationship. Any psychology which at­ tempts to objectify the patient in an attempt to gain "empirical knowledge” or "be scientific” has a vocabulary and orientation whose split matches that of the very individual it is attempting to analyze. If psychology is not a science of persons and ignores

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contradiction rather than totalizir.g** it. it cannot be said to adequately be performing iis task, for its own characteristics become a part of the syndrome. Binswanger is just as indebted to Buber as he is to Heidegger. Binswanger sees that the I-thou relation is an ontological real­ ity. that cannot be reduced to what takes place within each of the members of the relationship. It is in the I-Thou relationship that the self comes to be. In this manner, psychology moves out o f the notion of the absolutely individualized and isolated ego to the concept o f existential knowledge having its authentic ground in the being-together of I and Thou. Mind, body psyche, id. superego, organism, as well as their processes, functions, events, activities, tendencies and acts are all abstracta. How can we speak of the relationship between me and you when our language allows only for the interaction of one isolated mental apparatus with another? In the last century. Feuerbach dis­ covered that philosophy had been exclusively oriented around the ~I.~ No one had yet thought that “you" is just as important as "I.” "1“ is meaningless without its complementary category o f "you.” The presence of the Other has a profound reactive effect upon me. Only a solipsist believes that he is the only perceiver and agent in his world. The world is peopled by oth­ ers, and these others are not merely objects, but centers or re­ orientation to the objective universe. And these others are not simply other 'T s,’" but "you,” "him.” "her." "them,” and so forth. Binswanger is associated with philosophers such as Feuerbach and Buber who see the meeting between man and man as the basic ontological reality. The I and Thou make themselves and each other present by making room for the other and for the unique belonging to each other, the homeland o f I and Thou. Binswanger uses the I-Thou phenomenon in the service o f a phenomenological analysis of the "world-design” o f Ellen West. In this study, I propose to examine the factors o f food, air, and ground as they relate to her case. Ellen West’s defiance and stubbornness exclude her from the authentic I-Thou relation­ ship of the being-with-one-another and leave her to a world of

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interpersonal relations consisting of mere togetherness where each seizes on the weak point of the other and tries to dominate him. In the case of Ellen West, we note three world-designs: 1. Existence in the shape of a jubilant bird soaring into the sky, flying in a world of light and infinite space. 2. Existence as a standing and walking on the ground in the world of resolute action. 3. Existence in the form of a blind worm crawling in muddy, dead earth; the moldering grave, the narrow hole. This is char­ acterized by a shrinking, a dwindling, and a narrowing of ex­ istence along with its turning into swampy earth. In the case of Ellen West, the freedom to form an airy, ethe­ real world was replaced more and more by the freedom to sink into the narrow world of the grave and swamp. The transfor­ mation of the ethereal into a grave-world is represented by the change of existence as expressed by an exaltingly soaring bird to an existence in the form of a slowly crawling, blind earth­ worm. Perhaps the best place to start in the analysis of food, air, and ground in this case history is with the poem of Ellen West entitled, "The Evil Thoughts”: One time we were your thinking, Your hoping pure and proud! Where now are all your projects, The dreams that used to crowd? Now all of them lie buried Scattered in wind and storm, And you’ve become a nothing, A timid earthy worm. So then we had to leave you, To dark night we must flee; The curse which fell upon you

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Has made us black to see. If you seek peace and quiet, Then we’ll come creeping nigh, And we’ll take vengeance on you With our derisive cry. If you seek joy and gladness, We’ll hurry to your side; Accusing you andjeering We'll e’er with you abidel50

Consider the sequence in the above poem which I have ital­ icized: storm, worm, night, sickness unto death. Compare this with the sequence in Blake’s poem, "The Sick Rose” : O Rose, thou art sick! The invisible worm That flies in the night, In the howling storm, Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy, And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy.51

The parallel is nearly complete. In following the chronology of the poem, we find that Ellen West begins from a position in the ethereal or "airy” world of glowing radiance, bright blue skies, vast, open landcapes, and warm sunshine. But the high-flown ideas of the ethereal world—the ambitions, projects, and dreams—are scattered in a windy storm. This wind and storm brings to mind allusions from other poems she wrote during this period: of the sky grow­ ing dark with storm clouds, the winds blowing weirdly, causing the ship of her life to sail on unguided, not knowing where to direct itself, until a stormy rain drops over sea and beach, and in pain, she gives up hope of rescue, until the cold, grim king of the sea approaches her with the kiss of death, and encom-

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passes her in his black embrace. She becomes a nothing, an earthy worm belonging to the dead earth, having no ambition or self-confidence; rotting and being transformed to the very earth itself, painfully sinking and submerging to the blindly crawling, slithering worm of the earth, with her development atrophied and cut off from the future. The evil thoughts flee to the dark night, where they disappear in the blackness and foggy obscurity. Minkowski says, "Imagine a dark night, so obscure that you can see nothing; or achieve this absolute ob­ scurity by closing your eyes, and, as much as possible, shutting out everything that we know and can represent of light space. This obscurity is not all the simple absence of light, as we know it; it has something very positive about it. It seems much more material to me, much more ’filled’ than light space, which, as we have seen, fades away, so to speak, before the materiality of the objects which are in it.. . . Everything is light, precise, and clear in light space. In dark space, everything is obscure and mysterious. One feels as if in the presence of the unknown, in its positive value, and the ’phenomenon of mystery’ seems the best way to express this characteristic of lived obscurity. This trait is inherent in the night itself, but from there it extends to all that occurs in obscurity. For something can occur in it, and absolute obscurity never means absolute nothing­ ness . . . a murmur, a sound, a voice can be uttered .. .obscurity can be filled, be peopled, so to speak, with murmurs, and noises . . . as soon as we have identified these noises . . . we have introduced representations which come from light space into our dark space.”52 These representations are mocking, ac­ cusing, screaming voices that attack in the dark space of night and bring on the sickness unto death in the case of Ellen West. Binswanger described Kierkegaard’s concept of the sickness unto death as one of the most important contributions to the purely anthropological understanding of certain clinical forms of schizophrenia. He sees sickness unto death as central to Ellen West. As was the case in her earlier defiance of her role as a woman, so too in her conflict between an animal greed

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which would make her fat and a wish to be thin and ethereal, Ellen West betrays the stubborn wish to be herself and not be herself—Kierkegaard’s definition of the sickness unto death. "Fate wanted to have me fat and strong,” says Ellen West in her fight with facticity,53 "but I want to be thin and delicate.” Binswanger says the wish to be thin is calamitous, because it fixates her in the conflict between the ethereal world and the gloomy, dull, wet world of the swamp. Ellen West’s dread of becoming fat is only the end of the encirclement process by which her existence becomes closed to new possibilities. Ellen West knows that she cannot survive if she does not "break the ban” and get out of her preoccupation with herself. As a result, her existence is consecrated to death. But Ellen West’s freely chosen death is a liberation from her "no exit”54 hell, and a real, although tragic, entrance into authentic existence with "marks the victory of this existence over the power of'hell.’ ” Ellen West reacts to a threatened existence. Her world is split apart into rigid alternatives. On the one hand, there are high-flown ideals which must be supported by the masking or concealment of the opposite: deep feelings of inferiority. There is a retreat of existence away from intimacy with others, away from reality, away from any threat to the ideals. The masked and rejected antinomies must remain unknown and not under­ stood in order to maintain the high-flown ideals. Schizophrenia, according to Binswanger, is the retreat of an existence which has failed at fulfillment. The schizophrenic throws away col­ orful human weakness for a soaring fiction that can only be maintained at the cost of human reality, human contact, and the shared world that gives existence its meaning. Ellen West tries to transcend herself and fails. Her existence is inauth­ entic, and she sinks into nothingness. Ellen West’s existence is driven by a single concept: to be beyond-the-world in the sense of being above the world. The vertical axis of spatiality includes the ethereal world, the terrestrial world, and the tomb or swamp-world. Whereas the terrestrial world at first held in check the conflict of the

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ethereal and tomb worlds, the loss of ground on which to stand and work left Ellen West with two worlds in conflict, in which the ethereal world dissolved into empty possibility and the tomb world ultimately triumphed. Ellen West’s world is one in which the brightness, the air, and the light and the deadness, the darkness, and the blackness of the grave or swamp world battle each other. The ethereal or "airy” world which Ellen West inhabits like a bird splitting its throat in jubilation, is the world of optimism, of hopes and of high spirits. The ter­ restrial world is the world of practical action, where one stands firmly with both feet on the ground. In this world, one knows where one stands, where one is going, how one is going to get there, and who one "is” in practical life. Yet in the case of Ellen West, there is a loss of ground on which to stand and work: the terrestrial world cannot help her; instead it succumbs and al­ lows the ethereal world to dissipate when it cannot actualize its hopes and dreams in practical action, and the threat of the tomb world to become a reality is the only route to authenticity after Ellen West cannot lose herself in her work and thus forget about death as an ever-more-feasible alternative. One of the desires in the ethereal world of Ellen West is to transcend time and have her name immortalized. She would like to gain great, undying fame, and have her name ring out on the lips of mankind hundreds of years after she is dead. As Laing says, "Who is not engaged in trying to impress, to leave a mark, to engrave his image on the others and the world—graven images held more dear than life itself? We wish to die leaving our imprints burned into the hearts of others. What would life be if there were no one to remember us, to think of us when we are absent, to keep us alive when we are dead? . . . Of such stuff is our hope and our despair.”55 But the world of practical action, the terrestrial world, cannot make real these high-flown ideals, and as such shatters the illusion and drags Ellen West down to the ground, the earth. She writes in her diary, "I cannot breathe in this atmosphere of hypocrisy and cowardice, and I mean to do something great and must get a little closer to my

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ideal, my proud ideal.” She hates the contradiction between the injustice of the social order and her privileged position, and wishes a revolution or overthrow of the status quo. Over the winter she continues to air in her diary the hatred of the luxury and good living which surround her, and wishes to "rise above the conditions.” She complains of the "stuffy air of the every­ day.” She writes, "How musty is the smell of this cellar hole,” the hole of the tomb or swamp world which threatens to triumph whenever the world of resolute action cannot actualize her ideals. "The scent of the flowers cannot drown the stench of decay. No wonder you have got such ugly yellow souls, you who have grown up in this atmosphere. Already you have no­ ticed how hard it is to breathe here. Your souls have grown dwarf lungs.” But when in the same passage she complains o f being made flabby by the ugliness of the everyday, we see the beginnings of the association of thinness with the ethereal world. We note the emergence of the dread of getting fat, and the conflicting desire to fill in time, to fill up the existential emptiness and existential vacuum by means of an insatiable animal greed that represents a desperate and always unsuc­ cessful flight before the dread of nothingness. Ruled by the past ideals she has rigidly set for herself, and engulfed by a bare, empty present that only a revolution can cure, Ellen West is robbed of the authentic meaning of her life that only the future can provide. Some religions are more high flown than Ellen West’s. Whereas Ellen West merely wishes to be slim and ethe­ real, some traditions have as their goal having no body at all, but rather, escape from the corporeal part of man’s destiny and not being seen or heard from at all. Many traditions indicate that transcendence is not compatible with human being-in-theworld. In Buddhism, for example, the holy men reach such a degree of unification of experience and being that they finally become freed of their bodies and from the material world. They become one with the utter void of pure transcendence. The Buddha was the compassionate one who could have achieved this final liberation, but who refrained from a final

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act of unifying transcendence so that he could remain on Earth to teach.56Again we see the terrestrial world of practical action, namely teaching, pulling the individual down from transcend­ ence. This tradition of enlightened men, who, after a final pe­ riod of trial and temptation, descend from the holy mountain to teach,57refers to similar acts of refraining, the holy mountain symbolizing the peak of the dialectical enterprise of possible unifying transcendence in the world. For no matter how high the mountain, it is still solidly a part of the earth. The German word "verstiegen” refers to losing one’s way in the mountains, at the point where one cannot go either forward or backward (progress or regress). At this point one is dialectically stuck: "verstiegen” thus means extravagant, high flown, eccentric, or odd. This extravagance or high flownness can be explained temporally or spatially. To speak of extravagance as a disproportion between breadth and height is to explain ex­ travagance spatially. Height refers to the vertical dimension, which has to do with the desire to rise above the everyday and gain a higher perspective so that one might shape and master things. Breadth refers to the horizontal dimension, which has to do with the broadening of insight and perspective. Bin­ swanger is of the opinion that outside help is usually necessary to save the individual from his extravagance. Ellen West’s own writings attest to the fact that she is stuck in the mountains: she writes of standing "lonely as on icy peaks,” with only the winds understanding her longing and her fear. With the air becoming more and more stifling as time goes by, and the tomb still narrower, it is no surprise that in keeping with this process o f existential encirclement, the material conditions of restric­ tion become more and more massive; they are now walls against which Ellen West beats with her hands, as she later does against her own fat body, until her hands drop powerless. Ellen West is no longer flying alone in airy heights, but standing with a frozen heart on icy peaks. Binswanger writes, "This existence builds for itself a sky-castle in the ethereal world, but we can trace percisely how this airy structure is more and

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more pulled down into the earth and, indeed, by greed—transformed into a tomb or grave. The spacious rooms of the sky-castle become a narrow dungeon, the thin, movable walls become impenetrable, thick masonry. The most impen­ etrable wall, however, is the fat body which has greedily gorged itself to the full, indeed, in the final analysis, corporeality in general. (Consult her own equating of being thin with bodi­ lessness). Hence the most passionate hatred is directed at the body; only in relation to the body does dread turn into panic.”68 Ellen West’s life is filled with dread: dread of eating, dread of hunger, and dread of the dread (metadread). Only death can save her from this dread. As Kafka wrote, "You can hold your­ self back from the sufferings of this world; this is something you are free to do and is in accord with your nature, but perhaps precisely this holding back is the only suffering that you might be able to avoid.” For Ellen West, every day is like walking on a dizzying ridge, an eternal balancing on cliffs. Ellen West wishes to consume herself in her own fire, with the longing for death flashing up out of the ethereal world itself. Death is longed for as the highest completion of festive existence. It is with the suicide of Ellen West that many critics of ex­ istential analysis become horrified. To them, the life of the human being must be preserved at all costs. Binswanger, how­ ever, explains that Ellen West’s release from the hospital was related to the concept of existential aging, that an individual can be existentially old before he is physiologically old. ("D o not despair. The soul dies even before the body.”69) Binswanger contends that Ellen West’s suicide is beyond good and evil. A n existential analyst must respect the free decision of the patient. In writing of existential aging, Binswanger expresses a belief in "psychological time” as opposed to "clock time.” Ellen West has aged beyond her years, as is proven by the deep thoughts expressed in poetry and in diaries which stand in contrast to the shallowness and frivolity which is usually associated with adolescence. Many individuals chronologically older than Ellen West could not have expressed the realization of certain

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thoughts as well as she did. In applying the concept of exis­ tential aging to the case of Ellen West, Binswanger is saying that she has lived, experienced, and is. All else is of secondary importance. Binswanger sees Ellen West’s suicide as an "arbitrary act” and "necessary event.” "Who will say where in this case guilt begins and "fate” ends?” Binswanger feels that the emptying or impoverishment of Ellen West’s existence was metamor­ phosis of "freedom into compulsion,” but the suicide itself was the final breakthrough of the free personality. He writes, "That this existence can once again break through its congealing, that once more it is able to burst the prison of pastness, to exchange it for the world of an authentic present, and so once more to become authentically and wholly itself—this testifies to the power of freedom in general which, to some degree, makes itself felt even in the insidious form of schizophrenia.”60 Binswanger is confident in the positive nature of Ellen West’s suicide, and remarks, "Love knows no answer to the question of whether Ellen West’s suicide had to take the place of fateful necessity or whether she had the possibility of escaping it.” Binswanger could have chosen a more "successful” case if he wished to elucidate a methodology rather than attempting to broaden our conception of man through the application of ex­ istentialist thought. Binswanger delves into a case with the purpose of understanding some problem about human beings and the human condition in general rather than with the goal of explaining how a case should or should not be handled ther­ apeutically. If Binswanger’s intention was an explanation or illustration of techniques of therapy, he would not have chosen a case that was over fifty years old. Binswanger rather seeks to answer the question of whether there are times when an existence, in order to fulfill itself, must destroy itself. Does the human being have needs and values that transcend its own survival, and are there not situations in which existence, in order to fulfill itself, must put an end to itself? To ask this question is to radically question adaptation, length of life, and

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survival as ultimate goals. We have overemphasized the hu­ man being’s concern with scarcity and survival satisfactions because they so neatly fit our cause-efTect way of thinking. But Nietzsche described man as the organism who makes certain values, such as prestige, power, and love, more important than existence itself. And this is the point that Binswanger is mak­ ing in "The Case of Ellen West.”

Reference Notes ‘Pascal, B. Pensees. II, 72, Dutton’s Edition, pp. 19-20. 2Laing, R.D. Self and Others. London: Penguin, 1961, p. 132. 3Man as project is unfinished, continually becoming what he makes of himself through choice. Most important is the choice between authenticity and inauthenticity. Inauthentic existence is a mode of existence whereby one lives under the tyranny of das Man, the anonymous "they.” In authentic existence, however, the individ­ ual assumes the responsibility of his own existence. In the tran­ sition form inauthenticity to authenticity, one suffers anguish, despair, anxiety, and dread of nothingness, but it is better to be in despair than to live in the comfortable deceit of accessory re­ flection. See Heidegger, M. Being and Time. New York: Harper and Row, 1962, Section 53; and Sartre, J-P. Being and Nothing­ ness. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956, Part Four, Chapter Two.