A conversation with Miles Groth
Rafi: Miles, let us begin with the question of what first sparked your interest in Daseinanalysis.
Miles: It was psychoanalysis. When I was very young, in my early undergraduate years — I was maybe nineteen — I changed my major in college from medicine to philosophy. That was where I came to know Sartre, Husserl, and then Heidegger, pretty much in that order. At the same time, I began to read Freud.
Freud was very popular then, in the 1960s, and as the poet W. H. Auden said, he had established “a whole climate of opinion.” I like Auden’s phrase. Psychoanalysis was everywhere. It was in the movies — Hitchcock, for example.
My interest in psychoanalysis came from the section of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness that had been independently published as Existential Psychoanalysis. It had nothing to do with psychotherapy, as you know. It was a philosophical text, but it drew me toward psychoanalysis in a more serious way. I later learned that Sartre actually claimed to have practiced his existential psychoanalysis with “patients” he visited in their homes. They were mostly his girlfriends.
I decided that Freud’s psychoanalysis was something that I thought I would perhaps pursue. When I was in graduate school in philosophy at Duquesne University I decided I definitely wanted to begin training as a psychoanalyst. I was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, then, however, and there one could not find lay psychoanalytic institutes.
The only institutes there in Pittsburgh were those that required an M.D. for admission to the program for the study of psychoanalysis. After about seven or eight years of thinking about this and some sort of long distance interactions with a psychoanalyst I had met in Philadelphia, who turned out to be a Daseinsanalyst, I moved to New York in 1981 because here there were lay psychoanalytic institutes.
For five years I did a standard orthodox psychoanalytic preparation. I don’t like the word ‘training’, as it sounds like what you do with horses and dogs and children when they are learning to use the toilet. As I came out of that program and began to practice, I found that Freud’s metapsychology was not a theoretical model that I could support. I was also reading Heidegger a great deal, having begun that in 1965, as I mentioned. In 1987, six years after I came to New York the Zollikon Seminars by Medard Boss were published in Germany. I became aware of Daseinanalysis by reading this book. I discovered that there had been a book published by Boss much, much earlier, Psychoanalysis and Daseinanalysis, so I read that and also then discovered the translation of the Grundriß, the Existential Foundations of Medicine and Psychology, by Boss. So I threw overboard Freudian psychology and began to try to understand psychoanalysis as modified in the form that had come to be known as Daseinanalysis. I traced its history back to the early 1940s, learning that no substantial institute setting situation had been set up in Europe until about 1970. So, it was that route, from philosophy to psychoanalysis, via Heidegger that brought me to Daseinanalysis. I had gone back to where Freud and Heidegger met intellectually, namely, in Boss himself, who had known both Freud and Heidegger.
Rafi: Thank you, Miles. What strikes me in your story is that your path to Daseinsanalysis seems to have emerged not only from dissatisfaction with Freud’s metapsychology, but also from a deeper philosophical search shaped by Heidegger. So let me ask more simply: what did you find in Daseinsanalysis that felt missing in psychoanalysis? What changed for you in the actual encounter with another human being?
Miles: In Daseinanalysis, there is no psyche. There is no ego. There’s no self. There’s no person. None of these objects that Freud had hypothesized can be defined or found.
I realized that in meeting people in a situation that could be effective therapeutically it was essential to think in terms of the Dasein of the other and not of his or her self, ego, or person with features that could be approached and explained as an objective subject. Now, this was a revelation, because if I sit across from what I believe to be another human being, I do not begin with an object with certain features. That is not what is first there in human Begegnung or meeting (encounter). We come across each other ontologically first as Dasein and Dasein.
What I learned was that the incipient relationship, say, between Rafał and Miles, presupposes a Dasein-Dasein relation. I think of the relationship as between two named Daseins. So my approach when working with others is to try to become attuned to the present of the Dasein of the other in relation to my Dasein, not the person who is in relationship with me. So there are two things going on, one ontological (Dasein-Dasein) and the other ontic (Rafał-Miles).
I found that when there were difficulties that another expressed, there was some stricture, a tightening, a stricture of the other’s Dasein which can be understood as a limiting of the possibilities that Dasein, defined as pure possibility, ontologically speaking, has suffered. Now all the while, don’t forget, the relationship is going on. And one can’t have just one or the other. Both going on and they are going on for analyst and analysand, respectively. The Daseinanalyst is attentive to this and especially to the ontological relation. That’s just what the word ‘therapeut’ denotes, the one who is attentive to or attends to what Heiddeger calls the Dasein of the other. This is the Daseinsanalyst’s caring (Fürsorge) for the Dasein of the other
So my practice was changed entirely and I had to unlearn all of my habits of thinking about the other that I had been trained in for many, many years and read so much about when I was first fascinated by the Freudian myth. It’s a fabulous myth. It’s an extremely interesting and subtle account, but it is a myth. My way of thinking about the difference between psychotherapist and Daseinsanalyst also had to change in another way, so that I no longer saw a hierarchy between analyst and analysand in their therapeutic relationship. I had more experience than the person sitting there, yes. I was more attentive than she or he was, yes, and so there was a difference, but at a primordial level there was no difference. We are first in a relation of Dasein to Dasein. And since then, I’ve been able to put all this in plain terms. I’ve talked about it before in various forums, webinars and classes. A striking fact to keep in mind: Dasein is without sex, without gender, without age, without ethnicity. All this is—what I like to term the named Dasein—is secondary to the primary ontological relation between Dasein and Dasein in the therapeutic setting.
One last comment on this for now: following from Heidegger’s fundamental ontology of Dasein, Dasein is as much determined by talk (Rede) and therefore our being “had” by language as it were as by being-with (Mitsein), both of which he calls existentials of Dasein. We need to think very, very carefully about this “linguistic” perspective since after all psychoanalysis and Daseinanalysis alike, unlike say physical therapy of some kind, takes place entirely in language. Then interesting questions also come up about the language dimension, the “talk” dimension, that belongs to Dasein which is equally important as its givenness or thrownness (Geworfenheit), another of the existentials of Dasein, all of which “work” together and can only artificially, abstractly be considered separately as we are doing now.
Our givenness is the source of the “wherein” everything is happening, our provenance, where we were born and when, and so on. Along with this comes another existential: namely, society’s claims on us and distracts us as Dasein. It is inevitable and yet harmful. This Verfallenheit (distraction) includes such matters as what will “people” (das Man, “one”) think of me? All of this is very pressing. So, too, is the fact covered by another existential, that if I do something, I don’t do other things. And so I’m in a state of what Heidegger calls guilt (Schuld), not in a moral sense, but in the sense that I have failed to do many things when I do something. something. If you’re doing something, you fail to do other things, right? So that’s just the way it is. So on for all of the other existentials, including, understanding (Verstehen), being in the world (In-der-Welt-sein, which is another expression for Dasein), uneasiness about existing (Angst), and so on. Bear in mind that Heidegger’s full account of the existentials is missing in Being and Time, a book that was only one-third completed when published.
Of course, for us therapists, speech (Rede) or talk is of crucial importance. Talking is what human beings do from the start, and it’s such an essential part of our being here (one way of translating Dasein) and, so, the existential that comes into sight first of all of them. Recall that infant (infans) means without speech, but also recall that from the outset we talk to our newborns, even though they haven’t got a clue about what we are trying to communicate. Talk is also perhaps the most puzzling existential. It’s what we’re doing right now and yet what we understand least well about our existential-ontological relation. Apply this to the therapeutic situation and all sorts of questions arise. In Daseinanalysis the two don’t wrestle around or play on the floor. There is no physical manipulation. It’s language oriented. It’s about talk, talk oriented by a mood or attunement.
It stood out to me and continues to be a really essential question for me about how best to understand this talking as a phenomenon in the therapeutic setting.
And just to emphasize again: if Dasein in relation is fundamental, language, this exchange of talk cannot be separated from any consideration of it. There is something about talk that we haven’t yet articulated very well but need to appreciate Daseinanalysis. Note that language can hide just as language can reveal; words can hide, just as words can reveal. Much of this has to do with the tone, the inflection, the pronunciation of words, complemented by facial expressions, posture and gestures.
Rafi: So, if I understand you correctly, the shift was radical: from seeing the other as a psychological object — a self, ego, or personality structure — toward encountering the other first as Dasein.
And what also seems essential in what you are saying is that therapy becomes less a matter of interpreting a psyche and more a matter of attentiveness to the way another human being exists, speaks, relates, and becomes narrowed or restricted in their possibilities of being.
So, taking all this into account — what, then, is the role of the Daseinanalyst while encountering a suffering person?
Miles: What is the role of the Daseinanalyst? I take the two words that makeup Daseinanalysis. One of them is analysis (which means a freeing up—not a breaking into components as in chemistry), the other Dasein. The role of the Daseinsanalyst is to the greatest extent possible to see to the freeing up (analysis > analuein) of the existential possibilities (Dasein) of another human being. I do not see the Daseinsanalytic setting as a psychotherapy office. As for sufferings? I don’t see them first. I hear complaints and may even observe signs of disturbed functioning (someone talks at a rapid rate, the foots taps, they eyes are wide open as in fear). But I don’t see suffering. I see existing, albeit unusual or extreme “by normal standards.” The Eastern philosophers pointed out thousands of years ago that to be alive is to suffer. All life is suffering, and so the suffering you speak of is not unique to, say, the psychoneurotic or psychotic or sociopathic person. I see that “suffering” is more at the edge of the Dasein of the other who has sought me out as therapist. Which raises the question about why I have been sought out and how the other identifies himself or herself—“I have OCD,” says one; “I cannot sleep at night,” says another; “I’m afraid Ill hurt myself or someone else.” This “having” a disorder is in our time a barrier to Daseinanalysis.
Rafi: I understand the philosophical distinction you are making, and yet, in practice, most people do not come into the office because existence feels open, meaningful, or joyful. Usually they come because something has collapsed, narrowed, become unbearable, frightening, or painfully repetitive.
Rarely does someone arrive saying: “Life is beautiful, my relationships are good, and I simply wanted to talk.” More often, suffering is precisely what brings them to the encounter — even if, as you say, what we meet first is not a diagnosis or a “disorder,” but a human being existing in a particular way.
Miles: No, that would be a friend coming to visit. [slight laughter] But, of course, sometimes friends come that way. Sometimes friends come with, “Oh my God, what has happened? I have to tell you about this,” and you exchange words. So why call the complaints negative in the therapeutic setting? This is the point. With a friend you are sympathetic—synpathos—you feel what the friend feels or try to do that. The Daseinsanalyst does not evaluate the “content” a happy or sad with the aim of making someone less sad and happier, again, as one would do with a friend. For the Daseinsanalyst in the therapeutic setting, we accept what the other expresses. We hear about simply enduring life, about events that have been hurtful, even harmful or upsetting. I understand this as a deficiency of the freedom of the individual to experience more fully their lives. I avoid concluding that this is the worst, perhaps even the worst possible sort of experience that you can imagine. And you have mentioned some pretty powerful cases in our other conversations. I would say that from a “practical” point of view—that is, with respect to the Daseinanalysis, I keep this in mind: This is the world, the Dasein of this other and there are other possibilities to be dis-covered, uncovered, brought into the open—into the open there between us.
The suffering that Buddha is talking about is not from, you know, catching your finger in the door or hitting it with a hammer. It is of the fact that existing is suffering. Heidegger’s word here is leiden. It means to be uncomfortable but in a very broad sense, from physical pain to generalized distress. Its essential sense is to go through. But it is about going through (en-during) life. We go through life as a river goes through the countryside. And so all movement works against gravity, meets oncoming wind, stones in the pathway, and so on. Human life is not effortlessly floating through the air. But you mean experiences of serious injury and physical pain. We hear about a woman being hit with a hammer by an angry man; we hear about the penetration of a tiny girl’s vulva by the grown man’s penis; we hear about the penetration of little boy’s anus by a man who weighs 125 pounds more than the child; we hear about awful beatings; we hear about awful deaths. We also hear a lot about forms of verbal sadism. We hear boys tell us about having been shamed, about violence (physical and emotional), having been called vicious names, having been yelled at unendingly for hours, days and weeks, and years, right? Until either one says, “I have to get out of here” and runs away or commits suicide or tries to commit suicide because he has to get away from a ceaselessly violent situation, but can’t afford to, since he’s too small or too young, or can’t support himself to do that. Some—both girls and boys—in their teens have fled into the world of online pornography where they are exploited to earn money of which they get only a small share.
Rafi: Right. And I think this is an important distinction you are making — between friendship and the therapeutic encounter. A friend usually wants to comfort, reassure, reduce pain, make things better. But the Daseinanalyst, as you describe it, does not approach the other primarily through categories like “positive” or “negative,” nor through the goal of simply removing suffering.
At the same time, what people bring into the room can be extraordinarily painful: humiliation, violence, abuse, terror, despair, loneliness, even forms of cruelty that profoundly wound one’s way of being in the world. And yet you seem to suggest that the task is neither to moralize nor to pathologize these experiences, but to remain with them carefully enough that other possibilities of existence may begin to appear.
So how does this actually happen? How does the Daseinanalyst help another person move toward greater openness or freedom in their existence?
Miles: I do it by—I like to use the image of—deflecting, warding of seductions on the part of the analysand to talk about the past. They will certainly continue to talk about the past, but I will try to, as it were deflect this as well as talk about the future. Here the talk about planning for this or that, worrying about what’s going to happen and trying to control it. This we commonly refer to as anxiety; the former is generally spoken of in terms of depression. I do this in the interest of bringing us to the present and, so, to our basic relation as Dasein to Dasein. I describe what I do—what I attempt to be really—as being nothing as much as possible to the other, of being nobody in particular to the other. He or she will want to make me out as a teacher, healer, solver of problems, savior—to save him from a bad situation, teach him to forget or teach him to remember, teach him to keep in mind certain practices. But when I do that—when I deflect his talk about “the past”—I nevertheless follow him then but without acknowledging it. He is saying, “Follow me into the past.” But what I attempt to do is not be some part of that past, which he believes is fixed like a recording or video, in which he wants me to play a part in a revival of the show, so to speak. But memory does not work like that and for this reason I am confident in working as I do.
Rafi: What happens when you are not going forward, and you are not moving into the past?
Miles: The present then opens up. In very practical terms, I’ll ask, “What’s going on between us right now? “ That, for most therapists, is proscribed because according to their training it means becoming too personally involved. It becomes a matter of too great intimacy on the part of the analyst. But this is precisely what we want. The present opens up as a situation of great intimacy, what the Peruvian therapist Alberto Seguín calls “the therapeutic eros,” a notion which I love very much. But it is necessary to understand this eros in a very particular way, namely in the original sense of the word as a gift, a favor bestowed without expectation of anything in return. To do this in the therapeutic situation, to offer as it were one’s own Dasein without expecting anything in return, is what I have constantly, in my practice, attempted to do. I would speak of this also in terms of loving the Dasein of the other.
Again, she’ll want me to play a certain role in her drama of the past or her vision of the future, but I resist playing the roles that are being assigned to me. This is why Medard Boss says the whole idea of transference is nonsense. The other is not seeing me as a father substitute. He’s not seeing me as a mother, a mothering figure. He’s seeing me as Dasein even though he is not able to put in such terms, distinguishing the named Dasein I actualize as and my Dasein as such which makes any actualization as, say, Miles Groth, possible. I think that our common background in psychoanalytic studies must be thrown overboard.
And Boss was very clear about, and I found it to be very enlightening. So maybe the easy answer, Rafał, is that there are these lingering ideas of psychotherapy, these lingering ideas about transference and carrying something over from the past into the present that must be abandoned. As Boss says, therapy is what happens when there is a meeting between two human beings who are first of all there, simply there. Yes, our identity as therapist is there, but this must give way to our being there (which is the literal meaning of Da-sein). By the way, here is another notion that I think has to be stripped from therapeutic practice, this notion of identity. It’s necessary, of course, in everyday social life. For example, you identify as a father, the father of your wife, Magda, and you identified as the father of her two children as well, when you made Hector’s gesture: “I’m your father.” You lifted them up, and you showed that identity to the world. And it is no different with Jasmine, your newborn.
Nothing is transferred. Everything is happening just now, fresh and new and unexpected, unpredictable, full of surprises. It’s like this conversation we are having. We didn’t know where it would lead when we started, and here we are at it, at a certain point, and then at a certain point, it will end.
Yesterday in webinar lectures on this I was considering the problem of the so-called “therapeutic hour,” you know, 45 minutes. It starts at 1:00 and it ends at 1:45 or 1:50, for example. It seems to me that this makes genuine therapy impossible. Sometimes 10 minutes is more than enough lived time for therapeutic effect. Sometimes you need to be with the person for three hours or four hours. Now, how can you meet this reality and at the same time schedule one, two, three, four people between 8 a.m. and noon and another four between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m., as busy therapists sometimes do. Well, it seems to me you could do this by giving yourself a lot of time in setting up, say, only two appointments a day, one at 8 a.m. and one at 1 p.m. You may need only one hour, and it is over. It is then all open-ended and subject to the analysand’s schedule. These days, of course, an analysand sets aside an hour for therapy between taking a child to school and going to work. That is another matter. But the “open hour” as I might call it leaves it up to the analyst and analysand to agree when to end, based on the analysand’s decision. Now you have analysands and analysts harnessed to their watches. If they were told “Here we are. Let’s get started” the would decide when they were finished. clock then to say, I’ve had enough. It’s time for me to go—and that might be 10 minutes. You’ve had patients who sit there fiddling, waiting, looking at their watch, wondering “When will this be over?” and others at the end of 45 minutes saying “Please, you know, by the way . . ..” They say something dramatic and in a sense only want to stay longer. Or they say, “Look, you know my father jumped on me and raped me when I was a little girl!” And, what are you supposed to do when you have another client coming in 10 minutes. The hour is up but the session is far from being over.
Rafi: The idea of finishing exactly at 50 is something very, very meaningful. This can be seen as an obsession. The idea of having the freedom to sit with someone for an indeterminate time as opening some space for freedom is very relaxing and mind-opening from what I see.
Miles: By the way this doesn’t mean that the person might not say in the middle of a session, “I have to go to the restroom for a minute and come back.” It doesn’t mean that you can’t stop for a moment and take a break. It doesn’t mean that you can’t feel thirsty, drink something. If the person is coughing, it doesn’t mean that you can’t say, do you want some water? If someone is crying, would I withhold a tissue from them because it would be an offering for which they then would felt guilty? I mean, that’s the psychoanalytic explanation, right?
Rafi: At least sometimes.
Miles: The human thing is to give a tissue if you’re covered with tears.
Rafi: Yes, last month I gave soup to the patient.
Soup, it was very cold and his mother died. He just came back from Germany by car from the funeral. And he was in a really shitty condition, and he said he was hungry, lonely. And this was the [……] I live with the family, so it’s always lively here. Children are running up and down the stairs, there are some noises, and when he said he’s hungry, I thought, oh, and my wife has just cooked soup. I told him, wait a second, And I brought him soup, and that’s quite normal behavior. I believe.
Miles: This is being human. It doesn’t mean you’re running a food service, right? It means that at that moment that’s the human thing to do. Yes! And why in the world not? Some things in Daseinanalysis have been taken over from orthodox psychoanalysis that I think are important. For example, the use of a couch. For some that’s frightening and they need to see your eyes and they need to have that the assurance. But for Daseinsanalytic work, I would say that use of the couch is essential. The world becomes circumambient in an aural atmosphere. The vis-à-vis of most psychotherapy today is limiting. The absence of visual cues, the reactions of the analyst, for example, enhances talk and allows for comfortable silences. Sitting, staring at someone makes it very difficult not to talk. This pressure is relieved when the analysand is on the couch. He may also close his eyes, which might be socially offensive in a traditional interpersonal setting. But we are talking about the relation of Dasein and Dasein which as Heidegger pointed out is determined in one of its existentials by talk. Some interesting recent discussions about virtual sessions comes up at this point, too. But we can leave that for another time.
Rafi: So, you see that some concepts of psychoanalysis are useful, like soup and not be acting out in a negative form or with its source in the anaylst’s and personal impulse.
Miles: Yes. Freud sometimes gave his patients money when they didn’t have any. Boss was seen for much less that Freud usually asked. He needed money to get back and forth for Freud’s home office. You know a psychoanalyst trained in New York would never do that. I mean, it would be considered to be a major counter-transference error. But I think that’s bullshit. On the other hand, that doesn’t mean you’re an ATM or that you start subsidizing the analysand’s life.
But each case, each situation it seems to me, is what determines these choices. To withhold doing the human thing it seems to me is the inheritance of later psychoanalysis, however, and that’s very, very unfortunate. You know that we must keep the transference pure, they say. Freud never thought in those terms. He wrote about this and destroyed some of the papers on “technique.” But the analysts picked up on what he wrote and published and followed it to the letter. They asked, “What would Freud do?” We must ask, “What is the human thing to do. What would Freud do in the case of the Rat Man or the Wolf Man? Well, we know what it was, but it could have been something else. What would do in the case of the man who is hungry, coming from his mother’s funeral? I would have to see.
By the way, this is another thing that comes to mind: Freud’s consulting room. If you think about this analyst’s offices here are very simple and quiet, but Freud had an open door leading into his study and at the end of the couch was one of those old Victorian stoves. He was smoking cigars, so the room was filled with smoke and there beside him a spittoon into which he would expectorate as needed to. And there was a little dog, his chow, running back and forth. Elsewhere in the house Mrs. Freud was cooking, so there’d be the smell of, you know, soup or bread or a roast or whatever. So, it was a place full of life. It was not a sterile atmosphere, but a place full of life right? This was my experience with both my analysts, who had their offices in their homes. I think the sterility now, the attempt to make a therapist’s space a surgical operating theater has been a very unfortunate way to move. Laing sometimes would sit on the floor with patients, his legs crossed. I don’t know of any analyst except a child analyst, who might get down on the floor with children to play on the floor, who now positions himself in other than a formal, stilted position. By the way, I’m not quite sure that Daseinanalysis can be done with children. Another topic for another time. I think that child psychoanalysis was an area carved out for Anna, Freud’s daughter, who was a school teaching by formal training. The point is that spontaneity is really essential.
Rafi: I’m very grateful for this conversation that we are having. I really enjoy that it’s personal and intimate, not a technical debate.
Miles: Yeah. I hope so. That is way Daseinanalysis works, too!
Rafi: Right. There’s an interesting thing about Daseinanalysis and Martin Heidegger. There were a lot of rumors about the ethics and values of Heidegger’s philosophy because Heidegger is quite difficult to understand, at least for me. Is he concerned with values, the good life, the not so good life? Or is he not concerned about this? And as Daseinanalysis is, as I understand, strictly connected to Heidegger, what place in Daseinanalysis does good, bad, evil, have a place? Because we are trying—correct me if I’m wrong—to reveal the truth of existence, right? To let it show itself, to let it shine. Do we have any presuppositions about the nature of the true existence? Like there were some naïve concepts about the human nature, that the true human nature as Rogers was writing is pure and only good. This is what Rollo May asked Carl Rogers in a letter, indicating that the human is not only good, but also evil, and that we should be very careful and also take this into consideration. I guess, from what I know, Carl Roger didn’t respond to this letter, but this is what he was writing about. How is it in Daseinanalysis?
Miles: There are five questions at least here! It seems to me the central issue is whether or not Daseinanalysis is value-free, and not subject to presuppositions about the presence of good or evil in human beings. And my understanding of Heidegger, who’s at the heart of Daseinanalysis after all, is that Dasein’s existing is in its essence value-free. So, the question Rogers and May are debating doesn’t arise for Heidegger. Dasein is just as much neither good nor evil just as it’s not sexed or gendered or of a particular ethnicity, all these classic ways of dividing up people. That these notions have been imported from religion, mostly, and the Judeo-Christian tradition of course its primary source in Genesis. It’s of course about Eve eating of the tree of good and evil. You recall the very opening chapter. By the way, you know Rogers was a minister, a Protestant minister and Rollo May studied at Union Theological Seminary in New York, with Paul Tillich, as I recall. They were both immersed in pastoral counseling early on in their careers. This tells us something about the source of questions of good and evil in their view of psychotherapy.
So, the short answer is that Dasein is value-free and the freeing up of Dasein is a freeing up of the possibility for good or evil or both. And what one does is, of course, determined by the things that were done to the person, bad things, unhappy, unpleasant, sometimes violent and aggressive things, things that have been done to the person that some would find unspeakable. But that is true for good things they do, of their becoming good people rather than bad or evil people. Of course, socialization means that restraints of some kind are imposed on everyone’s behavior, and infants don’t like that, children don’t like that. But in the interest of socialization parents reluctantly say, “No, you must not do this,” and the child screams and yells and eventually gives in. This causes frustration, which in turn can turn into aggression, all in the interest of the big game that we call social living in which everyone has a part to play unless he or she wants to live alone and apart from other. But even if they decide to live alone and apart, they will have had, unless they were feral children, the experience of being told “No” and therefore subject to influences that later lead to a degree of aggressiveness. At the same time, we are, if lucky, treated lovingly and our comportment toward others is congenial and we are called good people. But I think, as with Schelling, that the two are compossible—there is not good without evil. There is no good without its contrast—evil—which defines being good.
In Daseinanalysis, our interest is purely in the freeing up of possibilities, subject, of course, to the givens of the organism (in Kurt Goldstein’s sense). This brings us back to the existential givenness. I didn’t choose my parents, nor do I choose my children. They appear and as we know, from large, large families, parents, sometimes don’t like some of their children as well as others. Some children are singled out as special and others are more or less forgotten or treated indifferently. All of this is terribly important and leads to the sorts of things that you and I see in the consulting room down the road, but the fact is, it’s simply part of the givenness and not the Dasein there before us. Which, by the way, makes something like friendships perhaps even more important than any other kind of relationship because one does choose one’s friends. So also, for us sex partners and parent partners. There we make a choice, one makes of choice unless there’s been rape, in which case, we’re in a horrible situation for the woman especially, but also for the child and the man. So, all that to say, when we take into consideration that these givens are there, these givens are unavoidable and circumscribe the possibilities of the other in certain ways. The actualizations nevertheless are independent of the pure possibility that Heidegger identifies with Dasein. To respond to your question in summary, Daseinanalysis is neutral regarding good and evil. It’s beyond (jenseits) good and evil, beyond and behind evil, as Nietzsche said.
And I think Heidegger’s discovery is important because until this insight, we had assumed, for example in the Christian tradition, that people are born sinful and there is original sin. Even if that is true, we do our best to compensate for that social, religious actualization. Heidegger, you know, was born Catholic and he knew about this very, very well and for about six weeks was going to be a priest but then he decided against it. Perhaps he could not accept that we are evil (sinful) by nature, just as Carl Rogers, who came out of the Protestant Christian tradition, somehow believed the contrary to everything he knew from Genesis and from his training as a pastor, and believed we are basically good and we all turn towards the good and towards the best that we can be. I think this is probably the biggest mistake of humanistic psychology. The assumption that people want the best for themselves and are basically good at heart is not the true. This is what made Rogers so popular, of course, but I think he’s wrong. Rollo May reminds him that there may be good in there but there’s also evil. He’s recalling the Genesis story better than Rogers is. Heidegger is rejecting it and sees it very much as a tradition with elements that are Greek and elements that are Judaic, that are very, very ancient and quite different. Is there a sense or knowledge of good and evil? That’s different. The apple Eve bit into was the tree of knowledge of good and evil. All this is interesting, but it also is quite far from our topic, no?
Rafi: Thank you very much. Miles. Did it often happen to you in your practice that when the possibilities were open, they were revealed they were doing harmful things, harmful occurrences?
Miles: Of course, of course. Some individuals are very close to being violent. Others have a long patience for having been badly treated and have developed powerful forces to keep it in check. They have also sometimes sublimated it, as Freud said, they find ways to express it. Perhaps surgeons and butchers are examples. But I guess your question is what do you do about the appearance of this violence in words, in name-calling, shouting and such like?
Rafi: Yes. What is the therapist’s role when it happens? What is the psychotherapist role when the harmful possibilities show up?
Miles: What is his role? Yes, at that point—his role. Well, for one thing it—and this is most important—when it’s the threat or acting out of physical violence, it’s no longer an issue for Daseinanalysis. It’s then an issue for the police or the psychiatrist who can implement the use of behavior-subduing drugs. It’s later an issue for re-education, re-socialization. Everything depends upon the age of the person and the setting in which these things occur. As for “just” words (threats, name-calling), here I am divided. I believe that if somebody, for example, says they wish to do harm to you, an acquaintance or their wife or their child, I think we have to very plainly say: “You realize that if you do this, you’ll be breaking laws of various kinds, divine, natural, and human, and you’ll be punished for them.” And that’s the most I can do because after all, here again, we are looking at what Daseinanalysis is supposed to do, and that is to bring the engagement into the present. These threats are about the future, which is not our concern. We also have the option of simply stopping analysis for the day or permanently. Where there are laws about reporting threats to officials, Daseinanalysis is in a sense precluded.
It’s relevant, but not to Daseinanalysis. If the person says he wishes to do harm to himself, my response is going to depend upon age. Again if it’s a 12-year-old or it’s a 42-year-old, it’s going to make a lot of difference. If it’s a very young person, I think I would respond: “Do you know what that means? Do you know what dying means?” If it’s an older person, I would perhaps say, “How are you planning to do it?” But the point is that I don’t discard the seriousness of these threats and intentions but try as much as I can to bring his awareness of his Dasein in the immediate situation right now into view. This discourse is about the future. Now what if the person says, “I’m going to kill you, right now? I have in my pocket a gun, and I’m so outraged, I’m going to kill you.” Well, at that point, I’m going to get up and say, “Get the hell out of here!” And I’m going to try to defend myself, even if I’m pretty sure that it’s only a bluff. But I take the person seriously in the moment with me and to react in the moment with me as I should. Happily, this has never happened in my experience. I hear many reports of threats physical violence in institutional settings. But remember that individuals are inmates in such places. They are prisoners who cannot escape. That changes the scenario entirely.
I’ll give you just one example from practice that is relevant here. A young man came into my office when I was a young practitioner in a large clinic. We were in one of those tiny little cubicles—itself an entirely undesirable location for therapy! It was our first meeting and after 10 or 15 minutes, he became very agitated and clearly was trying to make the situation as tense as possible. There’s no problem with that; that’s what the person was experiencing at the moment and I attended to it. But what happened then is that the person said generally bad things had happened to him, bad things have been done to him. “I’m no good,” he said, and he started banging his face with his fist. Being of a psychoanalytic orientation, I thought “borderline personality”; I thought self-harm for the sake of feeling something, a desire to show that he was serious and that I should take him seriously. I knew that some people cut themselves for this same reason. They do such self-harming acts or play-act them (a very interesting topic). But I also knew that even though this banging was making a little red mark on his face, that would probably not go that much further. Right? And he, in fact, paused. He wanted me to see what my reaction was and here, again, keeping it to the present as much as I could, I said, “If you continue to do that we stop and I’m going to ask you to leave.”Not, “We will stop”, but “We stop.” I don’t know that it was the best thing to do. He stopped, we talked a little bit more, and that’s the only time I saw him. He didn’t come back. Maybe he was cured. Maybe he went to see somebody else and did the same performance. Maybe he went home and whipped himself or pretended to, enacting a fantasy.
So trying to answer your question in terms of practical responses, and I think that’s what you’re really mostly interested in, I can only say that I’ve been surprised over and over and over again by the unexpected. Once I was sitting with a young man who was very intelligent, very sedate and still sat very still, not flat of affect, but with a very serious expression. I saw that he more or less was mirroring my posture and attitude. So if I smiled, he would smile. And at one point, he surprised me, he was talking about something, and he got up to illustrate a dancing move. This was completely out of character for the time that had preceded it. Right?. And I watched the performance, and he sat down, and we continued to talk, and we talked until our time was over. I think I smiled at the dance performance and appreciated it for what it was. I realized that it was a way of speaking, but not with words, just as dancers who are performance artists speak just that way. They don’t use words. They use their bodies to say things. So, I tried to understand what he was telling me, what he was saying, and my conclusion was that, at the moment, he was telling me: “Look at me. I can feel free to be moved and move in your presence. You won’t think it strange that I improvise this little dance.” I considered that to be a bit of progress, in fact. I considered that to be a good thing. Two examples, then, very different: one produced a stern a warning, the other a smile.
I mentioned the first one to say that these threats are about the future and Daseinanalysis is entirely about the present (Gegenwart). I could give you a hundred examples of people telling me about their past and about what someone did to them, and what they did to someone and what they thought, about what they thought someone thought about their thought about them. And so on. Laing provides many examples of this in his books, such as Knots. In both cases, the fleeing into the past or let’s say taking refuge in the past, or trying to get out of the present by considering what’s to happen, the other is fleeing the present that freeing it. In Daseinanalysis we see unfolding events in terms of the immediate meeting between the two of us, first at the level of our respective Dasein. I might think about their stories about the past during a pause, and that’s all very interesting, and I may remember all of these details about the past later on, but my concern is with only one thing, which is the freeing up of pure possibility in the present.
Rafi: Thank you. I have one more question for today about finances in the role of the Daseinsanalyst. Boss wrote about his trip to India. You mentioned this nicely in your book. He said that in India in the ashrams where he sat with his gurus or masters, they didn’t take money for sitting and accompanying him or from anyone. They were doing this with their heart and as a service (but service is maybe a bad word).
Miles: Yes. But often someone would give the guru something, a gift—food, a trinket, a memorabilium.
RafI: Yes, yes, exactly.
Miles: But notice it was a gift, not a payment.
For which you don’t expect a gift in return. It is the same for what the Daseinsanalyst gives as therapist. This, too, is a gift—again, think of “the therapeutic eros.”
Rafi: What do you think about Daseinanalysis as a way of earning money for living?
It’s a big question, and a big problem because it’s implicated, and as it was for Boss in the psychoanalytic and the psychiatric tradition on the medical model, and now what is known as the healthcare business. I think we have to finally admit that what’s unique about Daseinanalysis is that it’s not a service. It’s not a commodity. It’s not service provided. It’s not a helping profession. It’s not one of the other impossible professions Freud spoke about (teaching and leading). It is a calling and very much I’d say more like the sort of life that you find in musicians, writers and clergymen who are very happy to have money for what they do (especially in the case of painters and musicians) but would paint even if they were not given money for their compositions or canvases. Think van Gogh. There are endless examples of people who continue to paint and write music even though are not getting anything monetary in return. Many we know were impoverished and at the same time writing one of the very small number of masterpieces we have in the arts. One masterpiece after another, and some died too early because they starved to death. But I wouldn’t think of this calling—Daseinanalysis—as being too much related to pastoral work, because there in the background is an institution that’s paying for the pastor or the priest’s life. So, in turn, in exchange for being celibate and service to the church, the priest in a sense does everything for free, but of course the Church takes care of his expenses, right? She sends him to school, has a place for him to live, to eat. He gets food and clothing, spending money for books, and all this is carefully controlled by the institution. There’s no such institution for Daseinanalysis, however. It’s was connected with psychiatry at the beginning, as we know, and more recently with psychoanalysis and then the clinical psychology profession. But it’s going to have to be disengaged from these, it seems to me. It must declare a complete declaration of independence from these institutions.
How that’s going to play out in future? It seems to me there are a couple of directions. One is that it can be again be affiliated with Academe. In my own experience, as you know, that was what I relied on for most of my income—from teaching, which I enjoyed it very much, loved it, in fact. Other colleagues have written books that sold lots and lots of copies when they were young went on speaking engagements you know (Laing, May). But I’m not famous and never will be. Boss charged people for the time spent in his office—as psychiatrist. This is an option: the Daseinsanalyst disguised as a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist! The other possibility that I see is being supported by a philanthropist. This may be the most feasible and likely outcome, given our times. There have been no schools of Daseinanalysis in universities in the States, although there are some in other countries, I’ve learned. In Europe, in the past, institutes of psychoanalysis have been few, but that remains a good prospect. I doubt that it is a realistic one to hope for, however, anywhere—especially in the States. Departments of psychoanalysis have existed only in medical schools and the little independent places (lay institutes) have not been able to support the people they prepared as psychoanalysts. I think that there’s a good reason to go with the option of earning a living, doing something else and then also practicing Daseinanalysis. No contracts, no government oversight or insurance programs (third-party payers”). This has meant the death of psychotherapy. Socialized healthcare is going to be a very, very difficult entanglement to cut free from because it’s seductive.
And you aren’t going to find many who are going to risk this lifestyle. I would also say that what one does outside of analysis in Academe doesn’t necessarily have nnything to do with psychology, social sciences or the natural sciences or the human sciences, as these various “fields” are called. Recall that Heidegger was a strong advocate of returning to the Humboldt University model even as early as the first decade of the 20th century when he saw Academe turning into “fields” and “programs.” Philosophers, perhaps historians, perhaps people in the arts—all of these individuals may well come from “backgrounds” that have best prepared them for doing Daseinanalysis. And yes there are a few doctors, too, who will be fine Daseinsanalysts! One example of a non-science oriented therapist here in the States comes to mind from the 1950s. Paul Goodman was an American poet, writer, essayist but a Gestalt therapist as well. He, Fitz Perls, and Ralph Hefferline wrote a book on the topic which was the classic, basic text on the topic. Goodman was able to earn a living as a writer and as a teacher and speaker, but was a Gestalt therapist. Another example—this from the clergy—would be the Jesuit, Father William J. Richardson, whom I know knew. he was a Heidegger scholar and Lacanian psychoanalyst. As a Jesuit, he couldn’t take money from anybody. And yet he saw analysands. So, there’s another possibility. Take Holy Orders! But not everybody’s going to be a guru or a priest or a great writer who wants to practice Daseinanalysis. But I think one can be a pretty good teacher of philosophy or whatever in the world, you know, you want to teach. Recall Freud’s advice for the preparation psychoanalysts: wide reading in history and literature and an analysis of one’s own. This holds for Daseinanalysis. And this is the time to recall that the personal teaching analysis is the centerpiece of preparation for Daseinanalysis. This requires a long discussion. And so just to summarize: I think you just can’t make a Schubert or a Mozart or a Wagner or a Horowitz—or a Daseinsanalyst. There’s a gift there that may or may not be cultivated. It presses forward. It can’t be subdued. It can’t be held back. This is the essence of a calling. Yes, one can learn Daseinanalysis, but it cannot be taught. One can learn to play the piano with an instructor, but one cannot be taught how to make music. The difference, of course, is in the mentor-relationship of transmission of Daseinanalysis from one therapist to the one in preparation—and that is in the teaching analysis (Lehranalysis). There is nothing comparable here in the arts. Perhaps the only comparison is with following the reading of a great thinker and in this way learning to think—thinking along with is a kind of transmission experience.
Rafi: Miles do you divide people that you see in the office, such as, all right, so this person is good to go with Daseinanalysis and this person is only fine for….. sorry for the language, I know people are not objects……. and this person is good for psychoeducation in terms of the possibility to benefit from the meeting, of what is possible in the realm of the office. Do you do these things, do you distinguish between persons?
I think everybody who comes for therapy comes for Daseinanalysis. They don’t know it. They wouldn’t be able to put it in those terms, but anyone who comes to a therapist, understanding therapy in this way comes for Daseinanalysis. Now we are also living in a culture where people are told something different about what therapists are and what they do. You’ll go there to be fixed, you’ll go there to be become a better person, you’ll go there to enjoy your work more, have better sex, be a better mother—they’re told this in the media. These are improvements, right? It’s like a house and you’re going to have it painted and decorated differently. Or it’s like a mechanism that needs repairing, or like a body that needs a surgical procedure. But I think anybody who comes not on his own—and there are more and more of them—here we have a big problem. This abuse of what therapy really is. A long period of clarification is going to be required to acquaint the public with what therapy is about. And that’s not going to happen in a year or five years. And the mental healthcare (really, illness-care) is going to resist this because it’s a very lucrative business for insurance companies.
And should I get into this discussion with the person at the beginning? Yes, I think that’s going to depend upon how the person starts the session. I don’t start the session; the person starts the session. I would not ask a person “How did you come to be here today?” Well, you know, the best answer to that question is “Well, I took a taxi.” That is not a joke. I never ask someone “What brings you’re here today?” I might say, “what do you want to do here?”
Rafi: I don’t speak much during the sessions. I also don’t start unless it gets uncomfortable for the patients.
Miles: Yes, and this is, also, I think, a very big issue that psychotherapy in general and Daseinanalysis in particular is going to have to come to grips with. The other says to you, “I want to have hugs from you.” Or she hugs you spontaneously. I see no problem whatsoever, assuming that you’re not sitting twenty feet away, to accept such a hug. And, in Daseinanalysis, when the other gets up off the couch, I see no problem grasping him with both hands and smiling. Again, a lot depends upon the age of the person. Is this a 59-year-old woman, or is this a 16 year old girl? You know? What does a hug mean to a 12-year-old girl? What does a hug mean to a postmenopausal woman? Where is she in her menstrual cycle?
I think that forbid any of this spontaneous behavior, as the psychoanalysts do, which is to absolutely forbid any kind of physical contact with the other person, is misguided. It’s not a human way to be with someone. Priests reach out and put their hands on the head of the person who is consecrated. No one thinks of this as a sexual gesture. We’re a culture, however, that sexualizes the sensual, as in the examples I gave of analyst and analysand. The assumption is that the hug or grasping of hands is sexual in intention. It’s more of the legacy of Freud, all of the Oedipus stuff. I think he was mistaken. Of course, sometimes it is sexualized, but for the most part it’s not. It cannot be, however, for the Daseinsanalyst. We’re going to have to grow up as a culture, particularly in America where physical touch is very, very much forbidden. I think I’ve seen more of it in Italy and France, more openness than here. And among my Jewish friends there’s much more physical warmth, demonstrative affection shown than most other Americans. They are open and warm physically with each other and there’s no sexual agenda. This is especially important between sons and fathers, men and boys and young men. Here women are more liberated in being more open physically with one another.
I try not to read into the suggestion or the gesture, something about which I don’t have any understanding because in that case I’m presuming to understand what it means to that person. In our COVID days, I think it makes perfectly reasonable sense to say that’s probably not such a good thing to being close physically, but that will change. The touching must be spontaneous, not meeting the analyst’s needs and responsive to the moment for the analysand.
Rafi: Miles, thank you very much, I’m very grateful for your time and for sharing your experiences and wisdom gather through the years.
