Rafał Miętkiewicz
1. Introduction: From Language to Integrity
I would like to begin with an observation.
The way we speak about our work is not a secondary matter. Language does not merely describe what we do after the fact; it already defines the horizon within which our practice becomes intelligible at all. Long before we adopt methods, formulate theories, or position ourselves institutionally, our words quietly decide what kind of being we take ourselves to be encountering—and, consequently, what kind of encounter becomes possible.
This is because language is never a neutral instrument that we can simply apply at will. It is the medium within which understanding itself takes place. Before there is explanation or technique, there is already disclosure. Our words do not merely point to phenomena; they open—or close—the space in which phenomena can appear as what they are. In this sense, language is not an accessory to practice but one of its most decisive conditions.
Martin Heidegger wrote that “language is the house of Being.” What he meant was not that language passively labels a pre-given reality, but that it provides the clearing in which beings can show themselves in the first place. To speak in a certain way is already to dwell within a particular understanding of existence. Every vocabulary carries with it an ontology.
If this is so, then the language we use in our work does far more than communicate our intentions or professional identity. It silently shapes the field of what can be seen, heard, and taken seriously in the encounter with another human being. It decides, often in advance, whether the other appears as a fellow being-in-the-world, as a bearer of symptoms, as a case, or as an object of intervention.
For this reason, questions of language are not peripheral for Daseinanalysis. They are foundational. If we are careless here, we become limited in advance. We risk missing precisely what is most essential—both in the other and in the encounter itself. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s remark is therefore not merely linguistic but existentially relevant:
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
The world that becomes accessible in daseinanalytic work is inseparable from the language in which it is articulated.
Furthermore, if our understanding of the human being is phenomenological, then our language cannot be treated as neutral or interchangeable with that of psychology, psychiatry, or medicine. Words carry with them entire ontological frameworks. When we adopt terms inherited from these disciplines, we often also adopt—without noticing—their underlying assumptions about what a human being is: assumptions about inner domains, mechanisms, dysfunctions, and norms of correction.
This concern brings my thoughts to the work of Medard Boss. He was not an outsider to psychology or psychiatry. He was trained within these traditions, practiced within them, and collaborated closely with figures such as Freud and Jung. Precisely because of this proximity, he was able to recognize their limits. He took these traditions seriously enough to question their foundations.
Boss gradually came to doubt whether the dominant language of psyche, mental apparatus, and inner mechanisms was capable of doing justice to human existence as it is actually lived. His sustained engagement with Martin Heidegger was very important. Heidegger did not offer Boss new psychological concepts or refined therapeutic techniques. He offered something far more radical: a different understanding of what it means to be human in the first place.
Boss did not seek to improve psychoanalysis by correcting its concepts, nor did he attempt to modernize psychiatry or soften it into a more humane form. His work represents a far more decisive move. Following Heidegger, Boss came to question whether the very notion of a “psyche,” and the entire framework built around it, rested on an adequate understanding of the human being at all.
What Boss was searching for was not a better theory of the mind, but a different way of understanding the human being—one no longer grounded in an inner psychic apparatus, but in existence as being-in-the-world. This shift marks not an internal reform of psychology and psychoanalysis, but a departure from them at the level of ontology.
This questioning was not merely theoretical. Boss’s extended journeys to India in the late 1950s played a crucial role in deepening it. There, outside the conceptual habits of Western psychology and psychiatry, he encountered forms of understanding human existence that did not begin with a psyche, an ego, or a mental apparatus at all. What struck him was not a new doctrine, but the immediacy of encounter, the primacy of lived situation, and an understanding of the human being as already embedded in a meaningful world rather than enclosed within an inner domain. These experiences reinforced his conviction that Western psychological language was not merely limited, but fundamentally misleading when it came to grasping what it means to be human.
For this reason, Daseinanalysis did not arise as a modality within psychotherapy. It arose from a radical questioning of what it means to be human. The decisive issue, therefore, is not whether certain terms are familiar, established, or institutionally convenient, but whether they are adequate to the phenomena as they show themselves.
Gion Condrau articulated this orientation with great clarity when he wrote:
“In each of its activities and objectives the Daseinsanalytic Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics is committed to reevaluating traditional psychological values and cannot therefore be described as merely another school of psychology and psychotherapy. By virtue of its fundamentally different, phenomenologic-hermeneutic approach to medical and psychological research and practice it penetrates and redefines the very core concerns of these disciplines. Daseinsanalysis does not intend, therefore, merely to open up a new horizon for understanding psychological illness and health but rather to provide a new basis for medical and psychological science.”
In the current revival of interest in Daseinsanalysis—a revival that is in many respects welcome—there is a tangible risk that this foundational insight into language is being obscured. In the effort to appear relevant, accessible, or institutionally viable, Daseinsanalysis is increasingly presented in borrowed vocabularies drawn from psychology, psychiatry, and the psychotherapy industry. These vocabularies do not merely translate Daseinanalysis for external audiences; they quietly reintroduce assumptions about the human being that are foreign to its own ground.
What is at stake here is therefore not a question of stylistic preference, rhetorical sharpness, or terminological hygiene. It is a question of ontological integrity. When Daseinanalysis adopts alien conceptual frameworks in order to secure recognition, it risks losing clarity about what it is—and, more decisively, about the kind of encounter it makes possible.
What follows in this paper is not a critique of other disciplines, nor a denial of human suffering. The task is both more modest and more demanding: to make this risk visible, to listen carefully to what we are saying when we describe our work, and to ask whether the language we use remains faithful to the existential-ontological ground of Daseinanalysis—or whether it quietly leads us back onto terrain that this approach originally sought to leave behind.
2. The Importation of Alien Categories
Despite its origin in a radical ontological departure, contemporary Daseinanalysis often continues—sometimes unreflectively—to rely on concepts inherited from psychology, psychiatry, and medicine. Terms such as psyche, pathology, psychopathology, symptom, psychotherapy, patient, client, or case frequently appear in our descriptions of practice as if they were merely convenient labels. Yet none of these terms is innocent. Each carries with it an entire conceptual framework that silently reshapes the daseinanalytic encounter.
These vocabularies do not merely name phenomena; they interpret them in advance. They presuppose inner domains, normative standards, causal mechanisms, and asymmetrical relations of expertise. When such terms are adopted without scrutiny, they do not simply coexist with Daseinanalysis. They quietly reintroduce precisely those ontological assumptions that Daseinanalysis originally set out to suspend.
This leads us to the important question of the present inquiry:
Are certain terms inherited from psychology, psychiatry, and medicine still suitable for Daseinanalysis—or do they quietly undermine it?
In order to make this question concrete, the following sections examine a series of key terms that continue to structure contemporary discourse:
- Psyche
- Pathology
- Psychopathology (DSM, ICD)
- Symptom
- Psychotropic
- Psychotherapy
- Doctor and Patient
- Counsellor and Client
- Case history / analysis
Each of these terms will be approached by asking what understanding of the human being they presuppose, what kind of encounter they make possible, and what they conceal as much as what they reveal.
a. Psyche
The contemporary term psyche presupposes an inner domain, a region “inside” the human being in which mental processes, contents, or mechanisms are said to occur. It thus already implies a division between an inner psychic realm and an outer world.
Daseinanalysis cannot adopt this term without contradiction. Dasein is not a being that has an inner psychic domain in addition to an external environment. Dasein is its being-in-the-world. Moods, understanding, suffering, despair, joy, or anxiety do not occur “inside” a psyche; they are ways in which the world is disclosed as meaningful, threatening, inviting, empty, or unbearable. To speak of a psyche is therefore already to have stepped outside the phenomenological field. The term reinstates a subject–object structure that Daseinanalysis explicitly leaves behind.
For this reason, Daseinanalysis does not merely revise the concept of psyche—it abandons it entirely. The notion of psyche belongs to a metapsychology grounded in natural-scientific causality, one that treats experience as an inner domain governed by forces, mechanisms, and regulatory processes. Daseinanalysis begins elsewhere: not with a psychic interior, but with existence as already exposed, already world-involved, already meaningful. What psychology calls “inner life” is, phenomenologically, always a way in which the world shows itself.
As Gion Condrau makes explicit, the concept of psyche never referred to a whole human being. It functioned instead as a hypothetical internal agent—a kind of mental homunculus imagined to govern existence from within. In therapy, this abstraction quietly replaces the person themselves, so that the relationship is no longer between two human beings but between a technician and a theoretical construct. As Condrau writes:
“The ‘psyche,’ a hypothetical agent supposedly contained somewhere inside the person, took the place of one of the partners in the relationship, namely the patient or client, while the other partner, the therapist, was hidden behind his or her technical role as the one who treats the psyche.”
He continues :
“What can be established firmly is that ‘psyche’ did not refer to a whole fellow human being. On the contrary, it implied some kind of mental ‘homunculus,’ an anthropomorphically conceived internal force.”
Dasein does not have a psyche. Dasein is being-in-the-world.
This critique is already anticipated by Medard Boss himself. Reflecting on the conceptual language of psychology, he writes in one of his greatest books „A Psychiatrist discovers India”:
“Our psychology is always speaking, for instance, of drives, a psychic apparatus, a mind …Nevertheless, even Freud was forced to admit that his theory of drives was the mythology of psychoanalysis.”
Concepts such as psyche, drives, ego, or unconscious proliferate explanatory entities, but they do not clarify how meaning, freedom, or world-disclosure are possible in the first place. For Daseinanalysis, this is crucial. It therefore does not look into the psyche—because there is no “into” to look into.
At this point, however, it seems relevant to ask whether this abandonment of the concept represents a loss of an originally richer meaning of the term psyche.
Etymologically, the Greek ψυχή (psychē) derives from ψύχειν (psychein), meaning to breathe, to blow, or to cool. In early Greek usage, psyche named the breath of life, the vital animation that lets a human being be alive and responsive. It did not designate an inner mental apparatus or a separate domain of representations. Rather, it referred to the living presence of a human being in the openness of the world.
This original meaning, however, was gradually displaced. Through centuries of metaphysical reinterpretation and, decisively, through the rise of modern natural science, psyche – as said before – was transformed into an inner entity opposed to the external world, something enclosed, localized, and eventually objectified.
For this reason, a return to the Greek meaning of psyche is no longer possible. The historical distance is too great, and the semantic burden carried by the term in modern discourse is too heavy.
Any attempt to rehabilitate psyche today would inevitably reintroduce the very subject–object framework that Daseinanalysis seeks to leave behind. Abandonment, in this case, is therefore more faithful than retrieval. Daseinanalysis leaves the term psyche behind not out of neglect for its history, but out of fidelity to the phenomenon the word once sought to name.
b. Pathology
The contemporary concept of pathology originates in medicine, where it designates deviations in organic structure or function. In this context, pathology names a disorder or malfunction relative to a biological norm. When this concept is transferred to human existence, it silently imports a standard of correctness against which life itself is measured.
Etymologically, however, the term has a very different origin. Pathology derives from the Greek πάθος (pathos), meaning that which is suffered, that which befalls, affection, or being- affected. In classical Greek usage, pathos did not refer to disease or defect, but to the fundamental capacity of a human being to be affected by the world — to undergo, endure, and suffer what happens. In this original sense, pathos belongs to the structure of human existence itself, not to an abnormal condition.
This original meaning, however, has been transformed. In the medical and scientific tradition, pathos was narrowed into pathology: suffering reinterpreted as dysfunction, deviation, or error. What was once understood as an essential dimension of human life became the name for a defect requiring correction. As a result, suffering itself came to be treated as something that ought not to be.
From the perspective articulated by Medard Boss, this shift already misses the phenomenon. In A Psychiatrist Discovers India, Boss writes about human distress that cannot be grasped as biological malfunction at all. Modern patients, he observes, increasingly suffer not from discrete symptoms, but from meaninglessness, emptiness, and despair — from the question of how their lives are to be justified at all. Such suffering does not appear as a deviation from a natural standard, but as a disturbance in how the world is disclosed and inhabited.
To call this suffering pathological is therefore already to interpret it through a medicalized concept of error. It frames what is lived as malfunction rather than asking how existence has become constricted, frozen, or unbearable. In doing so, the concept of pathology replaces understanding with correction.
Daseinanalysis does not deny suffering. On the contrary, it takes suffering with utmost seriousness. Daseinanalysis refuses to interpret suffering through categories borrowed from the treatment of organs. Human existence is not an organism that occasionally malfunctions. Suffering, in the existential sense, is not something that happens to existence; it is a way in which existence itself comes to stand in question.
For this reason, Daseinanalysis cannot return to the Greek meaning of pathos by simply rehabilitating the term pathology. The historical transformation of the concept is too deep, and its contemporary usage too firmly embedded in a medical ontology. What once named the fundamental capacity to suffer has become the name for defect. Under these conditions, abandonment is more faithful than retrieval. Daseinanalysis leaves the term pathology behind in order to remain faithful not to a word, but to the phenomenon of human suffering itself.
c. Psychopathology (DSM, ICD)
Modern systems of psychopathology, such as the DSM and ICD, present themselves as instruments of scientific reliability, standardization, and administrative clarity. Their explicit aim is classification. Their implicit claim is that human suffering can be exhaustively captured in the form of discrete diagnostic entities.
From a phenomenological and daseinanalytic perspective, this claim is deeply misguided. These systems do not begin from the phenomenon of suffering as it is lived, but from the prior assumption that suffering must be an expression of an underlying disorder. In doing so, they commit a fundamental category error: they treat pathos—the human capacity to suffer—as if it were pathology—a defect, malfunction, or disease.
This is not merely a theoretical mistake. It leads directly to the invention of illnesses where none exist. As Thomas Szasz argued forcefully, so-called “mental illnesses” are not discovered in the way bodily diseases are discovered, but constructed through social, moral, and political judgments that are then given medical authority. What is classified is not a disease entity, but a form of life deemed deviant, disturbing, or inconvenient.
The historical instability of psychopathological classifications makes this unmistakably clear. Entries in the DSM and ICD change with cultural fashion, political pressure, and shifting moral sensibilities. Diagnoses appear, disappear, and are redefined without any corresponding discovery of new biological entities. Perhaps the most infamous example is homosexuality, which for decades was officially classified as a mental disorder and treated with extraordinary brutality—through institutionalization, forced medication, aversive “therapies,” and social exclusion. What was pathologized here was not an illness, but a way of being. The consequences of such pathologization were devastating.
Medard Boss exposes the deeper logic underlying such systems. He describes modern psychopathology as an intellectual short-circuit: lived temporal sequences of experience are transformed into causal mechanisms in order to render them calculable, predictable, and technically manageable. In this process, the phenomenon itself is replaced by an explanatory fiction. Anxiety, guilt, despair, or meaninglessness are no longer heard as existential disclosures, but reinterpreted as effects of hidden mechanisms that must be corrected or controlled.
The result is that suffering is not understood, but neutralized. Classification replaces encounter. Diagnosis replaces understanding. The human being disappears behind a grid of categories, codes, and labels that claim scientific authority while obscuring the very phenomenon they purport to explain.
From a daseinanalytic perspective, human existence does not appear as a collection of discrete disorders. It appears as a historically situated way of being-in-the-world that can become constricted, conflicted, or unbearable. Psychopathological taxonomies fragment this unity and hereby intensify suffering rather than alleviate it—by turning lived distress into a problem to be managed rather than a condition to be understood.
For this reason, Daseinanalysis cannot adopt systems such as the DSM or ICD without abandoning its own ground. At most, such classifications may be acknowledged as administrative necessities imposed by institutions. They can never serve as guides to understanding human existence. To treat them as such is philosophically confused and ethically dangerous.
d. Symptom
The concept of the symptom deserves particular attention, because it quietly structures how suffering is understood long before any explicit theory is applied. In medicine, a symptom is something that points beyond itself. It is a sign of an underlying illness.
A rash points to infection; pain points to tissue damage. Even when a symptom is subjective, it is understood as secondary to a hidden cause. What truly matters, medically speaking, is not the symptom itself, but what lies behind it.
This logic is carried over uncritically into psychiatry and psychology. The person’s experience is treated as an indicator of something else—an underlying disorder, mechanism, or dysfunction that must be discovered and corrected.
If Daseinanalysis does not deal with illness in the medical sense, then nothing points beyond the phenomenon. What shows itself is not a sign of something else. It is the phenomenon itself. Etymologically, this is already revealing. The Greek σύμπτωμα (symptōma) derives from συμπίπτειν (sympiptein), meaning to fall together, to happen, or to befall. Originally, a symptōma named an occurrence—something that happens to someone—not a sign pointing to a hidden causal structure. Only later, within medical and scientific frameworks, did the term acquire its diagnostic meaning as an indicator of underlying pathology.
Daseinanalysis remains closer to this original sense. Anxiety, despair, withdrawal or compulsion are not surface indicators of deeper causes. They are the very way existence currently shows itself. What psychiatry calls a “symptom” is, phenomenologically, a mode of being-in-the-world under conditions of constriction, conflict, or collapse.
Medard Boss insists that the attempt to move behind the phenomenon—to search for hidden mechanisms—is precisely what prevents understanding. The phenomenon does not conceal meaning; it is meaning as it appears, here and now.
For this reason, to speak of “symptoms” in Daseinanalysis is misleading. It suggests that what the person experiences is not what truly matters, that the real issue lies elsewhere. This undermines the fundamental phenomenological commitment to take what appears seriously, as it appears.
e. Psychotropic
The term psychotropic once again presupposes the existence of a psyche that can be chemically influenced. Medication is thereby framed as something that acts upon an inner mental apparatus, modifying internal states in order to correct dysfunction.
From a daseinanalytic perspective, this language is not doing justice. Psychotropic substances do not act on a psyche, because there is no such inner object to be acted upon. What medication alters are attunement, vitality, responsiveness, and the overall openness in which the world is encountered.
It changes how the world shows up, not by understanding it, but by chemically modulating the conditions of disclosure. Daseinanalysis does not deny the historical role of medication in reducing overt coercion in psychiatry, nor does it deny that medication may dampen suffering. What it questions is whether the chemical regulation of attunement can ever address existential suffering itself. Medication may quiet anxiety, mute despair, or smooth agitation, but it does not engage the question of meaning, freedom, or possibility. It does not respond to suffering; it masks it.
Medard Boss describes this masking function with particular clarity in his monograph from 1962 Anxiety, Guilt and Psychotherapeutic Liberation, in his analysis of boredom and modern ennui. He
writes:
“Within every boredom, however, there is hidden an intense ennui. This is already revealed by the German word Langeweile, that is, a ‘long while.’ To have a long while means to long very much for something or somebody. In the vast, yawning boredom of the modern vacuity neurosis there is concealed a longing which, if it were not warded off with the utmost force, would cause the eruption of an insight into homelessness and the loss of all sheltered security whatsoever. Panic anxiety and an abysmal consciousness of guilt would necessarily be the consequence of recognizing that one has lost oneself utterly upon falling into such a bottomless chasm.
For this reason, the ennui which rules the existence of modern neurotics so often has recourse either to the deafening twenty-four-hour uproar of our hectic modern life or to the stupor induced by all kinds of medicaments and tranquilizers, in order to mask its true meaning.”
Tranquilization does not resolve suffering; it prevents insight. What is reduced is not a disorder, but disclosure itself. The very attunement through which existential truth might become visible is dulled.
f. Psychotherapy
The word psychotherapy literally means the treatment of the psyche. Even when the term is broadened or softened in contemporary usage, it retains a technical orientation: a method applied to something presumed to be in need of correction. The word itself already implies an object of intervention and a goal of therapeutic effect.
However, Daseinanalysis is not a technique. It is not a method applied to an inner object. It does not operate on a psyche, because no such entity is phenomenologically given. Rather, it is a way of encountering another human being, grounded in the understanding that existence is always already relational, meaningful, and open.
When Daseinanalysis is placed among “psychotherapeutic modalities,” its categorical distinctiveness disappears. It becomes one option among others, differentiated by methods or style, instead of being recognized as a fundamentally different stance toward what it means to be human. This is the danger: Daseinanalysis is forced back into the very framework it originally sought to leave behind.
Gion Condrau’s critique of the term psychotherapy is well-known. He shows that the word does not describe an encounter between two human beings at all, but a service rendered to a hypothetical entity. As he writes:
“The term psychotherapy did not portray the engagement of two persons in an interpersonal relationship, but merely the performance of a service to a hypothetical entity called ‘psyche.’”
He adds:
“Speaking arises neither from a so-called psyche nor is it addressed to a psyche. Speaking is the action of a whole human being and is directed toward the totality of another.”
What is lost in psychotherapy, as Condrau shows, is precisely the phenomenon of encounter. The therapist disappears behind a professional role, the other becomes a recipient of intervention, and the existential relation between two human beings is replaced by a procedure. Psychotherapy does not name an encounter; it names a service. Even when practiced dialogically, it remains bound to the medical model. It remains an intervention, a service applied to an assumed inner domain.
Daseinanalysis, by contrast, is a way-making encounter oriented first and last toward the freedom of the other. It is not a method applied to a psyche, but a partnership grounded in being-with. For this reason, it should be clear that Daseinanalysis is not a form of psychotherapy as this endeavor is generally understood. The psyche presupposed by psychotherapy was never discovered; it was invented.
To sum up, Daseinanalysis does not seek to improve psychotherapy or to offer a more refined technique. It offers something categorically different: a form of care that is not technical, not corrective, and not objectifying, but phenomenological and freeing. It seeks not to treat a psyche, but to encounter a human being.
Daseinanalysis is not better psychotherapy — it is something else entirely.
g. Doctor and Patient
I often hear that we speak—myself included—about the people we work with as patients. Let us therefore pause for a moment and reflect on this pair of words: doctor and patient. The doctor–patient relationship originates in medicine and is structured by a clear asymmetry. One party possesses expert knowledge; the other suffers from an illness. One diagnoses; the other is diagnosed. This asymmetry is not accidental. It belongs to the medical model itself, where responsibility for understanding and intervention rests primarily with the doctor. Daseinanalysis does not rest on this structure. Its foundation is being-with. The person who comes is not a patient suffering from a disorder, but a human being whose way of being-in-the-world has become constricted, conflicted, or untenable. The analyst does not stand over against the other as a diagnostician, but alongside them as a fellow being-in-the-world.
When we adopt medical titles, we quietly reinstate a model of authority that contradicts the very basis of daseinanalytic work. The encounter becomes hierarchical rather than dialogical, and care risks turning into management. Where responsibility is taken for the other, freedom recedes. The doctor-patient relation belongs to a professional service framework. Daseinanalysis does not. It is not a profession in the usual technical sense, but a calling grounded in a prior Dasein-to-Dasein encounter. The relation is neither hierarchical nor contractual, but grounded in being-with.
Where there is a service, there is asymmetry. Where there is encounter, there is not.
h. Counsellor and Client
At first glance, the pairing counsellor and client appears more benign than doctor and patient. Yet it introduces a different, and equally problematic, set of assumptions. The relationship becomes contractual and goal-oriented: one party offers guidance, expertise, or strategies; the other receives a service.
In this model, human existence is subtly instrumentalized. The person who comes is understood as someone seeking solutions, optimization, or improved coping. The encounter is framed in terms of effectiveness and outcomes rather than understanding. Daseinanalysis does not operate within this framework. It does not offer advice, solutions, or strategies. It does not aim at adjustment, optimization, or coping. Its concern is not effectiveness, but truthfulness—truthfulness to existence as it is lived. What is at stake is not solving a problem, but allowing existence to show itself more freely.
For this reason, the counsellor–client model misrepresents the daseinanalytic encounter just as much as the doctor–patient model, albeit in a different direction. Where the medical model risks taking responsibility for the other, the service model risks reducing the encounter to a means toward predefined goals.
i. Case History/Analysis
Finally, the notion of a case, which transforms a life into an object of study. It abstracts existence into something recordable, comparable, and administratively manageable. What is singular and ongoing is reduced to a narrative that can be stored, analyzed, and set alongside others. Daseinanalysis resists this reduction. While biographical histories are unavoidable in practice, they are not gathered in order to reconstruct causal sequences or to explain the present by reference to the past. Existence is not a mechanism whose current state can be derived from earlier events. As Gion Condrau emphasizes, biography in Daseinanalysis is not explanation. The past is not a cause producing symptoms, but a dimension of existence that still is. Life history is listened to not in order to explain away what appears, but to understand how freedom has been forfeited and how it may be reclaimed. To turn a life into a case history is already to have stepped outside the encounter and into third-person abstraction—and, in doing so, to evade responsibility for the present.
Existence is never a completed object available for analysis. A human life is always underway. To treat a person as a case is therefore not a neutral methodological step, but an ontological shift: the encounter is replaced by observation, and understanding by classification. This shift is philosophically problematic and it is potentially harmful. Once a life is turned into a case, what is remembered, recorded, and emphasized depends inevitably on the analyst: on what they happen to notice, what they consider relevant, what fits their expectations, theoretical preferences, mood, or even the contingencies of memory itself. What is left out disappears silently.
The person’s existence becomes filtered through another’s perspective and fixed into a narrative that can no longer answer back.
A life explained is a life no longer encountered. Existence is not a case — it is always underway.
3. The Temptation of Relevance: Why the Search for “Relevance” Leads to Conceptual Oblivion
There is a strong contemporary temptation to make Daseinanalysis appear relevant. This temptation is understandable. It does not arise from superficial ambition or theoretical confusion, but from very real pressures that shape contemporary academic and „clinical” life. Daseinanalysis exists not only in private practice, but also within institutions that demand visibility, comparability, and justification. It is therefore constantly exposed to expectations that it translate itself into recognizable terms.
This pressure is driven, among other things, by:
– the search for legitimacy within established scientific and clinical discourses,
– concerns about institutional survival and continuity,
– the ideal of interdisciplinarity,
– and the practical demands of funding, publication, and professional recognition.
Within this context, the continued use of familiar psychological and psychiatric concepts can appear pragmatic, even responsible. Shared terminology promises access to dialogue, protection from marginalization, and participation in broader professional conversations.
Yet this is precisely where the danger lies. The attempt to secure relevance by adopting established vocabularies risks obscuring what is most distinctive about Daseinanalysis. Translation into dominant conceptual languages does not merely make Daseinanalysis understandable to others; it subtly reshapes it according to assumptions that are foreign to its own ground.
The question, then, is not whether the desire for relevance is justified. There is nothing wrong with this desire as such. The more difficult question is whether relevance achieved at the price of conceptual integrity is worth the cost.
4. Integrity, Care, and the Temptation of Relevance
The temptation of relevance is powerful because it does not present itself as a betrayal, but as responsibility. A said, Daseinanalysis exists within institutions that demand justification, visibility, and comparability. Funding bodies, academic journals, licensing structures, and professional organizations all exert pressure to speak a shared language. Within this context, the continued use of familiar psychological and psychiatric concepts can appear reasonable, even necessary.
Yet, translation into established vocabularies does not merely make Daseinanalysis understandable to others; it subtly reshapes it according to assumptions embedded in those vocabularies. Concepts such as psyche, disorder, treatment, patient, or therapy are not neutral labels. They presuppose an ontology in which the human being appears as an object of intervention, governed by causal mechanisms and normative standards.
To adopt this language in the name of relevance is therefore to allow Daseinanalysis to be guided by an alien Entwurf. What is gained in recognizability is lost in integrity. Over time, this loss does not remain superficial. It affects training, supervision, research questions, publication standards, and ultimately the kind of encounters that become possible in practice.
Here Heidegger’s concept of Sorge—care—becomes important. Sorge does not mean concern in a psychological sense, nor responsibility understood as professional obligation. It names the fundamental way in which Dasein relates to its own being and to the being of others. To care for Daseinanalysis, in this sense, is to take responsibility for its ground, its language, and its future possibilities.
Such care requires resisting the pressure to justify Daseinanalysis by external standards. It requires patience and the courage to remain faithful to phenomenological rigor even when this fidelity is inconvenient. Integrity here does not mean isolation or hostility toward other disciplines. Dialogue remains possible and necessary. But dialogue presupposes that one knows from where one is speaking.
5. The Future of Daseinsanalysis: Integration Without Dilution
The future of Daseinanalysis does not depend on its acceptance by psychology, psychiatry, or the natural sciences. It depends on our capacity to recognize one another as participants in a shared project grounded in a distinctive understanding of human existence. This recognition is not automatic. It must be cultivated through rigorous scholarship, careful training, and sustained international dialogue.
Integration, in this sense, does not mean synthesis with other modalities. It means integration within the daseinanalytic community itself: integration of philosophical grounding with clinical practice, of historical sources with contemporary work, and of geographically dispersed traditions into a living conversation. Such integration strengthens Daseinanalysis from within rather than diluting it from without.
If Daseinanalysis has a future, it will be because it has remained faithful to its origin while courageously projecting itself forward. This projection cannot be outsourced to institutional demands or market pressures. It is a task that belongs to those who practice, teach, and think within the tradition.
Integrity, not relevance, is the path forward.
