Heidegger, Daseinanalysis and Psychotherapy

Rafi: Good evening, Alfred. It’s such a pleasure to be with you today. You’ve spent decades working closely with Heidegger’s thought, editing and translating, but also bringing it into dialogue with contemporary questions. Let me start with something very simple but also very large: why Heidegger? Out of the countless philosophers one could dedicate a life to — from Plato and Aristotle, to Kant, to Nietzsche — why did you find yourself drawn so decisively to Heidegger? And why, in your view, should psychology and psychotherapy, which already have their own rich traditions, care so deeply about him today?

Why Heidegger?

Alfred: I got interested in Heidegger when I was in high school. We had a German language teacher who was also working on her dissertation on Heidegger at the same time. She gave two hours of philosophy class every week, and that was the first time I came across the name Heidegger. Later, during my studies, I considered going for Schelling over Heidegger at some point. I think it is important if you want to be a philosopher to study one philosopher very precisely and spend time on it. In the end, I decided to go for Heidegger because his life and thinking are basically my own heritage. Heidegger was born in the German Empire at the end of the 19th century, lived through the First and Second World Wars, the Weimar Republic, and the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany, as well as all this technological development. When he was born, there were hardly any cars; by the time he died, we had landed on the moon and had satellite TVs. Understanding the background of my own life is one of the things that got me into Heidegger, which ultimately led me to the idea of writing a biography of him. By doing so, it is easier to understand how his life influenced his thinking.

I think the importance of Heidegger is that modern metaphysics is determined by the subject-object relation, which goes back to Descartes and his notion of the Res Cogitans and the Res Extensa—the two finite substances. And there is, of course, the third one, which is God, the infinite substance. As soon as you start talking about the subject and object, you are making a distinction and end up with two separate realms. The problem is: how can you bring them together? If we have consciousness, how can it interact with the world around us? Heidegger became very aware of this problem and looked for another solution with his notion of Dasein, which is basically determined by being-in-the-world. We are always already out there in the world. You do not have impressions somehow transported by the senses to your brain, where your brain puts together all these elements to make the picture of the world outside of you. You are there already! If you hear a car passing in the street, you hear it passing in the street.

Being-with—there is the same problem. There is no problem of intersubjectivity; it is possible because, in the moment we are Dasein, we are being-with. The last one is existence, the notion of the way of being of human beings, which is different from the entities we encounter in the world. It opens new vistas, new worlds, and I think that makes it interesting for psychotherapy and psychiatry. One of the problems there is the link between the psyche and the body. It is usually overlooked, but the problem is: how is the interaction possible? That’s where Heidegger became so interesting for someone like Binswanger and later Medard Boss, and for Daseinanalysis in general.

Rafi: Many readers first encounter Heidegger as someone who challenges the Cartesian split between mind and world, subject and object. Would it be fair to say that Heidegger offers an alternative starting point — one in which the human being is always already involved in the world rather than separated from it? And why does this matter so deeply for psychotherapy?

Alfred: He would not call it a mistake because, in his later opinions or interpretation of the history of metaphysics, the succession of fundamental metaphysical positions, these thinkers are responding to an “address” of being, as being itself shows itself in such a way that there are good theories like Res Cogitans and Res Extensa and the place of God within the whole. So, this really is not a mistake, but it is a limitation. The same goes with Heidegger later developing his notion of “meditative thinking.” There are, harkening back to the Greeks, five ways in which we discover entities in their being, and one of them is through theoretical knowledge. Other ones are, for example, practical knowledge, which is such a dominant part in the first part of “Being and Time.” This is the ordinary way in which we discover the world basically. This is through the use of equipment and discovering which things are useful for us, and the theoretical consideration is taking a step back from the involvement in human life. If calculative thinking is the only way of thinking and everything that is real must be calculable, that would mean losing a large part of what it means to be human. This is the problem that happens in modern psychology and psychiatry. Everything is being quantified; this is the medical analysis of the problem. They say—you have borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, etc., and we should treat it with medication. The idea that you can heal people, help them become whole again, would be a better way of treating an illness. It can happen through talking, opening different possibilities. Dasein in itself is always being. There is a basic freedom people sometimes forget they have. They need someone to point it out to them, to disclose it, so they can understand themselves.

Dasein and Being-in-the-World

Rafi: You’ve already brought in some of Heidegger’s key words, which can sound difficult at first hearing. Terms like Dasein or being-in-the-world don’t easily translate into ordinary language. But for therapists, I think, they’re crucial, because they give us a different way of approaching a patient’s experience. Could you take a moment to unpack those two terms in a way that listeners can really take hold of? What does Heidegger mean by Dasein? And what does it mean to say that the human being is not an object but a being-in-the-world?

Alfred: Dasein appears in “Being and Time.” Heidegger had the opinion that it would be best to coin new terminology; that is why we find there a lot of neologisms. If you use traditional concepts like the soul or psyche, there is so much meaning already attached to them that it would be hard work to give them the meaning you would like them to have. If you start with a new term, Dasein, there will be no people who would claim they know what it is. If you use just a simple formal indication—and formal indication is an attempt to avoid conceptualizing and definitions. It tries to bring out the actualization of your Dasein that you can find in your own actualization of your Dasein, so this is not something that you can objectify. In “Being and Time,” most of the terms Heidegger uses are just formal indications. An example is an analysis of anxiety—if you want to know what anxiety is, you can only know it if you’ve come through it. It is similar to being in love. If you have never been in love, you may understand the word “being in love,” but you do not really know what it is until you experience it. This is the old notion of the experience that Heidegger starts from. This is why parents cannot protect their children from the mistakes they have made themselves. The child needs to experience them on his own. Before you put your hands on the stove, you can never tell how hot it is. But when you do experience it, you will never do this again. In a sense, it is so simple.

The next term: being-in-the-world. Human beings are not objects that are walking in the world. The world here is purely formal; it is the horizon within which everything happens. For Heidegger, this is a horizon of Dasein within which it actualizes all of its existential structures. An existential structure, or an existential, as Heidegger understands it, is a fundamental element in being human. That is not like a category we use to describe non-human entities and then apply to ourselves in traditional metaphysics, like Aristotle’s famous definition of the human being as the animal with ‘logos.’ Heidegger would say: if you want to understand the being of the animal in contrast to human being, you’d better start with being human because you have immediate access to this, which you do not have as far as the animal is concerned. In “Being and Time,” Heidegger uses the analysis of Dasein that shows its existential structure as a whole, but he does not cover the entire structure of Dasein. It is not necessary for that project, to develop his own fundamental ontology, but it certainly opens different possibilities for therapists and Daseinanalysts to develop some of his ideas from “Being and Time” further in different directions. A good example is corporality—Leiblichkeit, of which Heidegger does not speak much in “Being and Time,” but it is of course fundamental to being human. You can find this in his notions of things that we use as being ready-to-hand. You can’t use them without a hand, like if you want to use a hammer, you need to have a hand He talks about it more in the Zollikon Seminars much later. So there would be a possibility for, I mean, he is interested in developing the fundamentals of Daseinanalysis further. You could find new ways to go beyond Heidegger, which is always interesting, I think. You don’t have to stick with Heidegger. You develop your own understanding and your own thinking.

Rafi: “Being and Time” is so famous. Is it Heidegger’s opus magnum?

Alfred: I’m always careful with that notion of opus magnum. I think people forget that it was written in an extremely short time. He started writing it in March 1926 and finished it in the fall of 1926, almost six months. He used a lot of material that he developed earlier. One of the difficulties is that Heidegger is always working on at least four or five different projects at the same time. And he is like Aristotle; he follows things that he finds interesting and investigates them, and he is not thinking about systemizing everything into one whole. It is the obsession of, let’s say, German idealism. He used this material that he had gathered over the previous 10 years and had to put it in one form, so he had to put a framework over it, or fit everything into this framework. And that leads to a lot of tentions in “Being and Time.” You will notice this when you read the book. So in that sense, I like to compare it to a train station. Different tracks of Heidegger’s early thinking come to the train station of “Being and Time.” And after the train station, they go on in different directions. You can often find in Heidegger things that he said 10-15 years ago or even longer, that he picks up and then starts developing in another way or anew.

Rafi: It would be difficult to follow that notion and read 4 or 5 of his works simultaneously. What is the best way to study him in order to understand his basic notions well?

Alfred: It depends a lot on where you’re coming from. If you are a student of philosophy, it’s different from someone who is studying psychology. For a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, or psychologist with a few years of practical experience, I think the best way is through a seminar, where you can exchange thoughts with other people and have someone who knows a bit more about it than you do who can help you understand. But you could, of course, start reading some of Heidegger’s easier texts, especially his later work where he was writing for an audience that was not made up of philosophers or philosophy students. So he had to go in a gentle way and couldn’t presuppose some knowledge that students would have after being at university. So “Gelassenheit” is still, I think, a good introduction to his thinking.

“Being and Time” is, of course, a very complex work. So, getting through it on your own without prior philosophical knowledge or any knowledge of Heidegger at all is very difficult. This is an experience a lot of people still share. When they started reading “Being and Time,” they knew it was important but had no clue what it was about or how to make sense of it. And that’s basically a key element in philosophy: you have to be able to make sense of it yourself. This applies not only to Heidegger but also to Kant or Aristotle. If you can’t make sense of what the philosopher is saying, then you’re wasting your time.

Of course, you can get into it via secondary texts, which would be easier. Start with texts on, let’s say, Daseinanalysis, and it makes Heidegger more accessible. Then you can say, “I want to know more; I want to go deeper.” It also depends on what you want to do with it. If you just want to have some knowledge of what Heidegger was saying and see why it was so interesting and important, so you can apply it in your own practice, then you end up with a steady understanding of “Being and Time,” I think. If you want to develop a new Daseinanalysis from Heidegger’s thinking, then it’s a different story.

That’s probably the reason why there was so little further development of Dasein analysis on Heidegger’s foundations. I think if you work out the foundations of Daseinanalysis anew, you could take it in different directions and expand on it, in the way that Boss and Condrau presented. I’ve written a few articles about that kind of broadening of your mind to show what is possible, which most people don’t recognize anymore because they are so caught up in this metaphysical thinking. They are always trying to play with the subject-object relation, they objectify everything. If you think about it, objectifying means putting a concept over it. In German, it’s the word ‘griff,’ ‘begriffen,’ but it’s really grasping. Grasping can be both the mental act of understanding something and taking something into your hand. And once you do that, you take it out of its context. The variety is the world, and you can manipulate it once you have it in your hand. You can turn it into an object you can use in any way. A simple example is what we do with animals. You have chickens, but you are not interested in the chicken as a living being. You just want to use the chicken to produce eggs and meat. And that’s the only way you look at the chicken: it’s a product. You want to be as functional and as cheap in producing the product as you can be.

Heidegger and Therapy

Rafi: So, we don’t want to look at human beings like we look at chickens. In psychotherapy, we try (hopefully) not to do that. It’s the similar story with the labeling.

Alfred: There is a danger of putting a label on someone: you have ADHD, you have borderline personality disorder, you have schizophrenia. It’s essentially determining the people, determining the Dasein from something which is only a small part of it. If you break a leg, you don’t want to be defined by the fact that you broke your leg. It doesn’t make much sense.

Rafi: That’s so helpful. And it resonates immediately with the danger we face in psychotherapy: the danger of reducing a human being to a label, or a set of symptoms, or a tidy category in the DSM. When we fall into that, it’s almost like treating the person as a specimen, something to be measured and sorted, rather than as a being who is struggling, searching, and opening possibilities. Patients sometimes even come to us already carrying a label — “I’m borderline,” or “I’m depressed.” And my instinct is to push back gently, to say: no, you’re not reducible to a single word in a manual. You are far more, and your life is far more complex and rich than that.

Alfred: One of the problems for psychotherapists now is that people, through the internet and the availability of all this information, are diagnosing themselves. If most people feel something, they will look on the internet and discover that they have a very aggressive kind of cancer, which, of course, is nonsense. They’ll be totally scared for a couple of weeks until they finally get the courage to go to the doctor, who’ll say, “Well, you are fine, you do not have cancer.” Because the doctor has studied medicine for 10 years, he knows a little bit more about it than you do. And it’s the same with therapy. It helps in a sense. You can’t help getting diabetes, so that has an influence on your life, and if you take your medication and all that stuff, then you can live with it. It’s not the same as saying, “Well, my son has ADHD, so that’s why it’s so difficult at school.” The school is happy because then they get more money. But if a child has a problem, we start medicating children who are maybe 10 years old instead of saying, “Maybe there is something wrong with the school system.” I think that’s where Heidegger can have a liberating effect on the thinking of people.

Rafi: Hearing you talk, I’m reminded of Jaspers. In one of his books he reflected on the thinkers who were most formative for him — Socrates, Buddha, and others. Let me turn the question to Heidegger: who were the philosophers that he most deeply drew from? You’ve already mentioned the Greeks and Christian thought. Are there others — perhaps Augustine, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche — who we should understand as essential conversation partners for Heidegger? And do you think psychotherapists today could benefit from reading them, not just for historical knowledge but as living sources of insight?

Alfred: For Heidegger, you have to make a distinction between early Greek thinkers and other philosophers. In his concept of the history of metaphysics, there is a period of preparation of metaphysics where the thinking of people like Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclitus is not yet metaphysics. It’s an expression of an awareness of being. Plato`s and Aristotle’s thinking turned it into what becomes metaphysics. There’s a shift happening there. For Heidegger, it’s a sequence of fundamental metaphysical positions. Each fundamental metaphysical position is important in itself. There aren’t that many: Plato, Aristotle, and if you want, you can include Neoplatonism.

The Christian influence on thinking, on philosophy, is significant. The dogmatism of Christianity is unthinkable without Greek philosophy. Then you get to the Middle Ages with Scholasticism, which Heidegger worked a lot on when he was a student and a private teacher. Then you come to the figures of modern metaphysics, like Descartes, who changed the direction of metaphysics. For Heidegger, you would have Leibniz, and Kant, and to a lesser extent, other key figures leading to German idealism: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, as the culmination of Western metaphysics.

I think it’s worth reading these philosophers if you want to understand this development. Aristotle, in some ways, offers more foundational philosophy than Plato. Although Whitehead said that all of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, I think Aristotle’s “On the Soul” helps you understand what later becomes the Christian understanding of being. Descartes is important as well. In Kant, you find texts that are interesting for a therapist. You could make a reading list from the history of philosophy that might be interesting to a therapist.

There is this shift towards certainty: everything can be doubted, but there is something that cannot be doubted. Descartes posited that even if an evil, all-powerful spirit deceives him in everything he thinks and does, it cannot deceive him that he is thinking. Even if deceived, he still has to be. Hence, “Cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am). This is all fascinating.

Time, Temporality, and Human Existence

Rafi: I have the impression that philosophy has more to offer for psychotherapists than classical psychology nowadays. Kierkegaard is personally important for me. Also, Nietzsche, who himself wrote a lot about psychology and had some interesting insights that were developed further by people like Jaspers, also influenced by Jung. I have one more question for today. The notion of time. What is time, in your understanding and in Heidegger’s understanding?

Alfred: Basically, Heidegger starts with what he calls facticity, which is something you cannot explain further. The ecstasy means, basically, that you find yourself in the world at a certain point. When we are born, or right now when we think about it, it’s the moment you become aware of it.

You are already Dasein; but we don’t actualize the whole structure of Dasein yet. It’s something that… I don’t know how to explain it. The key element in Heidegger is that Dasein has an existential structure. It is formal, it is universal. It’s universal.

And in that sense, it’s even timeless. And that explains, one step in between, it’s only actualized in the Dasein in this concrete, individuated world; this formal world gets filled up with a concrete world. Because you’re not born into the world as a horizon, you’re born into a concrete historical world. What Heidegger says is that you have to start from the notion of not being yourself, being the “they.” You’re doing everything as you are being taught.

So, as a child, you learn and you discover the world under the guidance of your parents, for example, and you will learn a language. And this language that you speak helps you understand the world, helps you understand other people and through social interaction you learn, the different ways of being-with that are considered to be appropriate and fair in certain different cultures. But this universal structure means that we can understand people, all the people on the planet, even people who wrote things about 2, 3, 4 thousand years ago. We can still read Plato and it’s still speaking to us. We can still read the tragedies of Sophocles and Aeschylus. Even biblical texts, some of them are even older, and Hindu texts that are much older, still speak to us. Because they talk about the same subject. Although the people talking about it before didn’t know that it was the structure of Dasein. But it’s there already. It shows up also in the history of philosophy.

To be able to understand anything, Heidegger would say, you need an understanding of being.

When we use the word “is”—the table is, he is a nice guy, the sun is shining, one plus one is two—we understand what this “is” means in the context. We don’t understand what this “is” means just as “is.” Although we have an understanding of it, which is not explicit, we cannot formulate it. It’s part of “Being and Time,” which is a quote from the Sophistes, “I thought I understood what being means, but when they asked me to explain it, I don’t know how to explain it.” Which is similar to what Albert Einstein said about time.

If you ask me about time, I don’t understand it, and if you don’t ask me, I understand what time is, but I cannot find the words. So, the starting point is this understanding of being. But you cannot say anything more. And that’s also the starting point of phenomenology. Phenomenology needs something that is given.

If there is nothing given, you can only construct something. So you make it up yourself. So for Heidegger, he is basically doing two different things at the same time, but he doesn’t make it explicit. He is trying to do a phenomenological analysis of this given, this understanding of being, and at the same time asking the question, how is it possible? It is a Kantian notion of transcendental philosophy. How is it possible that there is an understanding of being? Or that it is given? If there is something that gives, there is something that receives the given, we can start developing it from there. And, of course, being… I would say that the Greeks experienced this being as this openness, as the open realm into which everything comes and disappears. And this, when Aristotle started asking the question, “what is a being as a being, an entity as an entity, what is the sense of being?”

Then, basically, they thought about being as a kind of attribute, like beauty is the attribute that everything that is beautiful has. It makes everything beautiful. So the attribute of being makes everything existing or “is-ing.” This attribute of quality, they then call beingness. It’s the beingness of a being that gives its being.

And then the question is, how can you ground this beingness? Where does it come from? And then the answer is it comes from the most being of all beings, which is a being that needs nothing besides itself to be, which then becomes something like the Platonic ideas, which are eternal and unchanging. Of course, in Christianity, it becomes God, who is the creator of everything, and who, of course, makes the interaction betweenthe thinking and extended substance or the interaction between the two possible.

Naturally, Heidegger is saying, well, if you think about the human being, you have to take time into consideration because the Rafi that is sitting here was maybe 40 years ago a boy, who is very different from the Rafi now here, but at the same time, they are identical. So being is a process that happens over time. And if you want to understand being, you have to understand it in its development.

Then the next question is, how do we understand time? If you think of time as a sequence of “now” moments, you have a now that is already gone, now there is a now that is not yet, and there is a now that is now, but as soon as you say it, this now is gone. And you can never understand how we can have an understanding of something like becoming.

Because even in language, if you say a sentence, you have to remember what it said at the beginning of the sentence if you want to understand the whole sentence. This would mean that we are always in a space of between.

We are temporality. It’s the solution that Heidegger finds. We are temporalizing.

It’s not sufficient for understanding the possibility of memory, of seeing how things develop over time. It’s only possible if you’re temporalizing yourself. And it’s something you do in your memory, meaning I am time. You are temporality. I produce, I create time in that way. It’s part of Dasein.

In its actualization, it’s also opening up reality, which is the condition of possibility of things being in space. You usually think of things as beings in space, like something is contained like the water is in the glass. But Dasein, human beings, are not like a glass. We are opening it up. And within this openness, you can have the different directions like before, behind, above, below (?) that we live in basically and use without spending any time on it. We do it automatically.

Rafi: Do you mean that our perception opens the world?

Alfred: Our being. We are this openness, both spatial and temporal. Because we are this openness, some things can happen in time and space. And we can describe what’s happening in time and space.

And you can follow the development of things. You can think of music. If you want to hear a melody, in a sense, you’re already projecting what’s coming next. So it’s a totally different kind of experience than just experiencing one moment after the other. It’s now one o’clock, now it’s one past one, and now it’s two past one, and at some point it’s two o’clock and then go on, it’s the next day, it’s the next year, it’s the next century. It can go on forever, you never get to the end of it. But to see, I think that’s a different way of looking, or understanding basically. If you understand yourself as an openness, you’re standing open, that’s the notion also of existence, standing out into the openness, this openness of being human. So in that sense, we are the world. I think I call it being in the world. Basically, if you think it through, it’s being the world.

Being the world… The world. We are being the world. We live in it. We are familiar with the world, because it has always been opened and disclosed by people who lived before us. So you’re born into a tradition. And, of course, as long as you are within the tradition, everything makes sense, and there is nothing that can disturb you. As soon as you get the awareness that this tradition is only one of many possible traditions, that there are other possibilities, then you can start questioning your own tradition. Think of simple examples: until 100 years ago, women didn’t have the right to vote because they were perceived as being not capable of making any rational decision, what was totally acceptable to people like Kant because it was the world they lived in. Nowadays, you would say, well, this is a bit strange. Although there are still people who want to go back to that stage of human development.

Temporality is basically about that we bring back the past, and at the same time, we project into the future. So an example is when you finish your high school and you decide to go to university. You have to decide what subject you are going to study; you have to choose your major.

Of course, you can take a period of saying, I’ll listen to different, it used to be that way anyway, we could visit different faculties and listen to the lecture courses of different professors and then say, well, I feel most at home with this subject, or this is the most interesting subject. But that’s really one of those moments where you have to make a decision. And the decision, in the end, is only the decision you take, this notion of resoluteness.

I’m going to give you a short summary. We go through life as a sequence of situations. And most of these situations resolve themselves. Simply.

You don’t have to think about it. If you want to have a cup of coffee, you just make coffee. Before you learn it, you have to learn, you have to take the pot, and then you have to put the coffee in the pot, and you have to boil the water, and then once you can think of it, you can do it without thinking. But in the really important decisions in your life, like what subject am I going to study, there is never a complete rational foundation for the decision. Kant seems to imply, if you think about it, you can come to a rational conclusion. This is not true. We are not rational animals. It is the same when you decide to start a partnership with another person. A man and a woman, or a man and a man, or a woman and a woman decide they want to spend their lives together. You can never figure it out beforehand. But you make the decision. And with making the decision, it makes you responsible for the decision you take. That’s where the foundation is. And then you can see what happens, sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t. People will separate and say, well, we can’t live together after all, we both go our separate ways. Sometimes they stay friends, and sometimes they hate each other for the rest of their lives.

Same story with having children. You can decide to have a child. You never know what you’re getting yourself into until the child is born. And it’s the one thing in your life that you can never undo. You can get married, you can divorce, but once you bring a child into the world, you can never undo it.

From then on, you’re a father or a mother. Colorful magazines like Cosmopolitan, where you can do a test if your boyfriend is still suited for you, etc. pretends to take the existential responsibility for your choices of you. But this is illusion. You can ask the magazine tests about love – they would say, for example – if you are above 56 stick with what you have, if you are between 40 and 56, you have to seriously work on your relationship, and below 40, you should leave the house immediately. As such simplyfing would ever be possible. This is speculative kind of thinking, which tries to take away your responsibility, in a sense, because the test tells you what to do.

Rafi: I’m struck by the way you connect Heidegger’s thought with responsibility and decision-making. For us as therapists, this is so vital: helping patients recognize that their existence is not something already fixed, but something they must take up, moment by moment. It reminds me that therapy is not about providing answers or solutions from outside, but about opening a space where responsibility can be lived into. That’s a profound challenge for us as practitioners — and perhaps also the deepest gift we can offer.

Alfred, I want to thank you warmly for guiding us today through these dense but living ideas — from Dasein and being-in-the-world, to Heidegger’s relation to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, to the question of responsibility in existence. You’ve shown us that philosophy is not an abstract exercise but something that can transform how we see the person sitting across from us in therapy. For that, and for your generosity in sharing your insights, I’m deeply grateful. It has been a real pleasure speaking with you.