Why the Zollikon Seminars Had to Happen – Brief Introduction to Daseinanalysis
Rafał Miętkiewicz
Good evening, Everyone,
First of all, I would like to thank Alfred for inviting me to open this seminar series. It is a pleasure and an honor to participate in what I hope will be the beginning of a fruitful collaboration and an opportunity for many of us to return to one of the most important texts in the history of daseinanalysis.
Before I begin, let me briefly introduce myself. My name is Rafi Miętkiewicz. I am a clinical psychologist, daseinanalyst, and existential therapist from Poland. For more than twenty-five years I have worked with people in the therapeutic setting. Recently, I have founded the Daseinanalysis Beyond Institutions Forum.
When Alfred asked me to say a few words of introduction today, I found myself asking a simple question: what have I truly gained from daseinanalysis?
My path to daseinanalysis did not begin with Heidegger. Before arriving here, I had already spent many years within Gestalt therapy, humanistic psychology, and psychoanalysis. Through these traditions, I had already encountered several elements that later became important within daseinanalysis: the phenomenological attitude, the use of the couch in psychotherapeutic work, the fundamental rule of free association, and the importance of dreams, albeit understood very differently in psychoanalysis.
These elements are precious to me, but they could still be inherited from other therapeutic traditions. What I would like to share briefly is what daseinanalysis brought me that was fundamentally new.
First, daseinanalysis offered me the existential structures — the existentials — as a uniquely powerful way of understanding the basic features of human existence. They are the fundamental structures through which Dasein is always already disclosed as being-in-the-world: temporality, spatiality, embodiment, attunement, being-with, care, understanding, freedom, guilt, finitude, and openness to possibility, just to name a few.
What I found especially useful is that the existentials allowed me to describe human being and suffering at the level where it actually takes place: not inside an isolated psyche, but in the relation between a person and their world. Anxiety, depression, psychosis, or despair can then be understood not merely as symptoms located in an individual, but as transformations in the way the world is disclosed, inhabited, endured, or closed off.
In this sense, the existential structures gave me a language for clinical work that is at once more precise and more humane. They allowed me to ask: how is this person’s world opening or closing? How is time lived? How is the body experienced? How are others encountered? What possibilities remain available, and which have disappeared?
Second, I encountered Medard Boss’s and Gion Condrau’s radical statement that, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as the psyche. At first, this sounded almost impossible, especially for someone trained in psychology, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis. Our entire professional language seems to depend on words such as psyche, mind, inner life, mental disorder, unconscious conflict, and psychological mechanism.
Yet gradually I came to understand the liberating force of this claim. Boss and Condrau were not denying suffering, inwardness, conflict, or depth. They were questioning the inherited assumption that these phenomena take place inside a hidden inner domain called “the psyche.” The contemporary concept of psyche already presupposes an inner region within the human being, a kind of invisible container in which mental contents, drives, representations, and mechanisms are supposed to occur. It silently divides human existence into an inner psychic realm and an outer world.
Daseinanalysis did not accept this division. Dasein is not a being that first exists inside itself and then somehow reaches out toward the world. Dasein is always already being-in-the-world. Moods, understanding, suffering, despair, joy, anxiety, and love do not occur “inside” a psyche; they are ways in which the world is disclosed as meaningful, threatening, inviting, empty, or unbearable.
This was one of the most important shifts for me. It allowed me to stop looking for a hidden psychic object behind the patient’s experience and instead to attend more carefully to the person’s world.
In this sense, the rejection of “the psyche” does not make therapy less deep. On the contrary, it returns depth to where it truly belongs – to existence itself, to the open clearing which a human being is. Daseinanalysis does not look “into” the psyche, because there is no “inside” to look into.
Third, Daseinanalysis transformed my understanding of dreams. Dreams ceased to be hidden messages requiring translation and became another fully legitimate mode of being-in-the-world. Dreaming reveals possibilities, concerns, relations, and attunements that belong no less to our existence than our waking life.
Fourth – the work of Alberto Seguin and his notion of therapeutic Eros. Although this idea does not originate in Heidegger, I have found it to be a profound and necessary complement to the Heideggerian perspective. Seguin reminds us that therapy is not merely an intellectual clarification of existence. It is also a deeply human encounter sustained by care, concern, affection, and the willingness to accompany another person in their suffering. Therapeutic Eros points to the unique bond that allows healing possibilities to emerge within the encounter itself.
Fifth – was another discovery that I found liberating: the gradual disappearance of the concepts of transference and countertransference as explanatory frameworks for every aspect of the therapeutic relationship. Rather than approaching the other person primarily as a screen for projections, daseinanalysis made it possible for me to take the other seriously as the person before me. The analysand is not first and foremost an object of interpretation, nor merely a manifestation of unconscious dynamics. He or she is another human being, another Dasein, whose world, suffering, hopes, and possibilities deserve to be encountered directly.
Sixth – unique approach to (psycho)pathology: in medicine, pathology usually means a deviation from organic structure or function — a malfunction measured against a biological norm. But when this concept is transferred too quickly to human existence, suffering itself begins to appear as an error requiring correction.
Daseinanalysis questions these moves. It does not deny suffering; on the contrary, it takes suffering with utmost seriousness. But suffering is not primarily a malfunction of a psyche. It is a disturbance in one’s way of being-in-the-world — in time, body, relations, meaning, freedom, guilt, and possibility.
The task is therefore not simply to correct what is “pathological,” but to understand how a person’s world has become closed, threatening, empty, or uninhabitable; which possibilities have become narrowed or blocked; and toward what possibilities a person may be open too much.
Seventh, finally, through the Zollikon Seminars I encountered perhaps the most profound challenge of all: the invitation to rethink the foundations of medicine, psychiatry, and psychotherapy from the question of Dasein itself.
The seminars began on 8 September 1959 with Heidegger’s lecture at the Burghölzli Clinic of the University of Zurich and continued, under the organization of Medard Boss, in a series of meetings between 1959 and 1969, most often at Boss’s house in Zollikon. What makes them so remarkable is that Heidegger was not speaking primarily to philosophers, but to students and practitioners of medicine, psychiatry, and psychotherapy.
Heidegger did not offer them a new therapeutic method, a new technique, or a new psychological theory. He attempted to show what is already presupposed whenever medicine or psychotherapy speaks about the human being, illness, suffering, psyche, body, affect, memory, dreams, schizophrenia, stress, or psychosomatic medicine. The Zollikon Seminars are therefore not just a philosophical supplement to psychotherapy. They are a sustained attempt to clarify the ontological ground upon which every medical and psychotherapeutic understanding of the human being already stands.
This is why the seminars are so important for daseinanalysis. They return again and again to the difference between an ontic understanding of the human being — for example, as an organism, subject, psyche, or object of causal explanation — and an ontological understanding of Dasein as openness, disclosedness, being-in-the-world, being-with, temporality, spatiality, and embodied existence. One of their most important contributions is Heidegger’s attention to the body, not only as a physical object, but as the bodying-forth of human existence, the way in which Dasein inhabits and has a world.
For me, this is the importance of the Zollikon Seminars: they ask psychotherapy to examine its own foundations before it begins to interpret the patient. They ask whether our clinical concepts truly allow the suffering human being to show himself or herself from itself — or whether these concepts conceal the person behind theories of psyche, mechanism, diagnosis, or dysfunction.
What I can offer today, then, is not a systematic philosophical commentary on the Zollikon Seminars, but a brief map of the intellectual and historical path that made them possible — and, in a certain sense, necessary. To understand why these seminars came into existence, we need to step back and consider a larger historical story.
Crisis within modern science
The history of daseinanalysis begins with a crisis—a crisis created by the extraordinary success of modern science.
Beginning with Descartes in the seventeenth century, European thought increasingly came to understand the world through reason, measurement, and explanation. Human beings were gradually understood as objects that could be analyzed, predicted, and repaired. The body became a biological mechanism. Nature became a system of measurable laws. Suffering increasingly became a problem to be explained and treated.
This development brought enormous benefits. Modern medicine, science, and technology have transformed human life. Yet something was also lost. Questions of meaning, freedom, guilt, love, death, and the deeper significance of suffering slowly moved to the margins.
The first major reaction to this reduction of human existence came through Romanticism. Romantic thinkers and poets insisted that human beings could not be understood merely as biological organisms or rational machines. They rediscovered the depth of feeling, longing, imagination, tragedy, and mystery. Human suffering was no longer seen simply as a defect to be removed, but as an expression of our openness to meaning and our struggle with existence itself.
During the nineteenth century this concern deepened further in the work of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky. They recognized that many forms of human suffering arise not from biological malfunction but from the very conditions of human existence: freedom, responsibility, isolation, despair, guilt, and the search for meaning.
At the same time, new philosophical movements emerged that would become crucial for daseinanalysis. Phenomenology, founded by Edmund Husserl, called for a return to lived experience itself rather than abstract theories about it. Hermeneutics emphasized that human life is always a life of meanings that must be understood rather than merely explained.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, a new possibility had emerged: perhaps human beings are not objects to be explained like things in nature, but beings whose experience must first be understood.
At this historical moment Sigmund Freud appears.
Freud: Reopening the Question of Meaning in Human Suffering
In 1856, in the small Moravian town of Freiberg, the future founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, was born. He did not come into the world during the age of Romantic poets or grand metaphysical systems, but into a world of railways, factories, laboratories, and developing clinical medicine. He grew up at a time when the human being was increasingly becoming an object of investigation: a nervous system, a biological organism, a clinical case. At the same time, however, it became increasingly clear that this “modern human being” suffered in ways that neither anatomy nor physiology could adequately explain. Hysteria, anxiety, paralysis, and melancholy escaped purely biological understanding.
Freud thought like a nineteenth-century physician and scientist. He sought causes, mechanisms, and laws governing psychic life. At the same time, however, his imagination and intellectual influences placed him much closer to the Romantic tradition than might initially appear. He was deeply familiar with the work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, for whom nature was a living, dynamic whole rather than a dead mechanism. He was also fascinated by the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, with its conception of blind will as a deep, unconscious force governing life.
In one of his letters to his devoted friend Wilhelm Fliess, Freud wrote about himself:
“I am actually nothing but a conquistador by temperament—an adventurer, if you want it translated—with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort.”
These themes—depth, unconsciousness, and the tension between reason and instinct—would later reappear in psychoanalysis, though dressed in a new, “scientific” language.
Freud was the first to systematically listen to those dimensions of human existence that do not submit to measurement: dreams, symptoms, desires, fantasies, fears, and personal histories. He discovered the inner drama of existence, its ambiguity and contradictions. Although he employed the language of psychic energy and mechanisms, he was in fact touching the same dark depths of life that the Romantics had intuited through poetry and philosophy.
In Freud, therefore, two powerful forces of his age meet: the Enlightenment’s faith in causality and the Romantic intuition of the mystery of human experience. In this sense, psychoanalysis was born as an attempt to preserve the meaning of human suffering within the modern world.
It was this implicit and largely unspoken wisdom in Freud that later attracted the founders of phenomenological psychiatry and daseinanalysis—Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss. Although they criticized his naturalistic and energetic models of the psyche, they were deeply impressed by his intuitive grasp of the dramatic structure of human existence, which they subsequently reinterpreted within a phenomenological and existential framework.
Following Erik Craig, we can summarize Freud’s existential significance in three categories:
1. The Meaningfulness of Human Life
Although Sigmund Freud constructed his theories in the language of the natural sciences, in practice he was the first to insist, with remarkable consistency, that all psychic phenomena are meaningful. Dreams, neurotic symptoms, jokes, and slips of the tongue—nothing is accidental. Everything has significance and calls for interpretation. As Medard Boss emphasized, Freud was the first to demonstrate the “ubiquitous meaningfulness of all psychic phenomena.” The human being ceased to be merely a collection of biological reactions and became a being of meanings.
2. The Hiddenness of Human Existence
In his search for meaning, Freud quickly discovered that a vast portion of human life is inaccessible to direct consciousness. Human experience is largely concealed, opaque, and only partially available to awareness. Hence his concept of the unconscious—a domain about which, as Freud himself admitted, “we know nothing,” yet which “we must assume.”
Boss argued, however, that Freud had touched upon something even deeper: the fundamental hiddenness of human existence itself. Human beings are never fully transparent to themselves. Their lives always contain dimensions that remain undisclosed.
According to Boss, Freud nevertheless took a decisive step that shaped the character of psychoanalysis. Rather than leaving this hiddenness as a feature of existence itself, he transformed it into a collection of psychological objects and mechanisms explained through causality.
Ludwig Binswanger accepted the idea of the unconscious but interpreted it phenomenologically—as different modes of being-in-the-world. Boss, by contrast, rejected it altogether as an unnecessary theoretical construction. Despite these differences, both agreed on one fundamental point: Freud had grasped the essential opacity of human existence.
3. The Situatedness of Human Beings in World and Time
Freud never viewed the human being as an isolated mind. His theories of development, drives, neurosis, and transference always situated the individual within a world of relationships and within a life history. Human beings are shaped by their past and, at the same time, oriented toward their future.
Their desires are always directed toward worldly “objects”: another person, a relationship, a possibility, a meaning. Even within his dualistic conception of the psyche, Freud intuitively understood that there is no human being without a world.
For this reason, Boss could speak of Freud’s “profound understanding of the human being”—not at the level of his speculative biological theories, but at the level of his silent intuition concerning the human condition.
Freud—though entangled in the language of mechanics and causality—was the first figure in modern science to reopen the space of meaning, hiddenness, and existential drama within human life. He touched what is fundamental in human existence, yet attempted to explain it through the language of energy, processes, and mechanisms. Although he ultimately remained faithful to the modern scientific ideal in which everything must be reduced to causality, without Freud there would have been neither existential psychology nor daseinanalysis.
Martin Heidegger: The Ontological Turn
The philosophical breakthrough occurs with the publication of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time in 1927. Heidegger shows that the world is not merely a collection of objects standing opposite an autonomous subject, the Cartesian ego that modern science had made the starting point of knowledge. The world is not something neutrally “given,” but is always already lived and understood through human involvement.
The human being is not an observer of reality but a being-in-the-world: a being from the very beginning engaged in relationships, meanings, temporality, and embodied presence. Human beings do not “have” a world; they exist within one. They are always situated, embodied, related to other people and to things. Without this primordial relationality, neither experience nor meaning is possible.
This ontological revolution challenges both the mechanistic image of the human being found in modern science and the Freudian language of forces and mechanisms. In doing so, it opens the way toward a new understanding of human suffering as a mode of being-in-the-world. Before long, it would begin to influence psychiatry and psychotherapy directly.
The Phenomenological Turn within Psychiatry
Parallel to the development of psychoanalysis and existential philosophy, a clear revolt emerged within psychiatry itself during the early decades of the twentieth century against reducing the human being to the brain, biology, and the mechanics of psychic processes.
One of the key figures in this transformation was Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), who in his General Psychopathology (1913) criticized both biological “mythologies of the brain” and the speculative constructions of psychoanalysis. He insisted on distinguishing between causal explanation (Erklären) and understanding of meaning (Verstehen). In his view, mental disorders are not defects of a mechanism but ways of experiencing the world, time, relationships, and meaning.
Other European psychiatrists and investigators of experience soon joined this movement. Eugène Minkowski (1885–1972), author of Le Temps vécu (Lived Time, 1933), analyzed disturbances of temporality in schizophrenia. Erwin Straus (1891–1975) investigated embodiment and perception during the 1920s and 1930s. Viktor von Gebsattel (1883–1976) developed phenomenological analyses of neuroses and existential disturbances during the 1930s.
Together they created what we now call phenomenological psychopathology: an attempt to describe depression, psychosis, anxiety, and existential disturbances as particular ways of being-in-the-world.
This early revolt against positivistic psychiatry prepared the ground for the later emergence of daseinanalysis. Even before Binswanger encountered Heidegger in the 1920s, psychiatry was already arriving at the conviction that human suffering cannot be understood without reference to meaning, experience, and existence as a whole.
Binswanger: Psychiatric Daseinanalysis (A Phenomenological Anthropology of Psychopathology)
The first thinker to bring Heidegger’s thought directly into the clinical realm was Ludwig Binswanger.
He was born into a family in which psychiatry was almost a hereditary tradition. His grandfather, Ludwig Binswanger Sr., founded the famous private psychiatric sanatorium Bellevue in Kreuzlingen. His uncle, Otto Binswanger, directed the psychiatric clinic at the University of Jena, where Friedrich Nietzsche was treated following his psychological collapse in 1889. Later, management of the Bellevue sanatorium passed to Ludwig’s father, Robert Binswanger.
Binswanger studied medicine between 1900 and 1906 and subsequently began work at the famous Burghölzli Clinic in Zürich under the direction of Carl Gustav Jung. There he participated, among other things, in Jung’s well-known word-association experiments. It was Jung who introduced Binswanger to Sigmund Freud in 1907.
Although the young Swiss psychiatrist was initially deeply impressed by Freud’s “brilliant biological-psychological scientific system,” he gradually began to distance himself from it theoretically. Despite these differences, however, an extraordinary friendship developed between the two men—a friendship lasting more than thirty years and sustained through regular correspondence and several personal meetings. During one of his later visits to Freud’s home in London, Binswanger recorded in his diary words that capture the character of their relationship:
“My encounter with Freud remains the most significant human experience of my life—the experience of the greatest man I have ever had the privilege to meet.”
Despite his admiration for Freud, Binswanger came to believe that psychoanalysis—despite its enormous power of discovery, lacked a sufficiently rigorous philosophical foundation. As early as 1911, while preparing a paper on Freud’s influence on psychiatry, he realized that a scientific evaluation of psychoanalysis required a deeper philosophical grounding. He therefore began an intensive study of philosophy, particularly the work of Henri Bergson and the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl.
During the 1920s his interests expanded to include hermeneutics and the philosophy of dialogue, especially the thought of Martin Buber, whom he met personally in 1933. The most important intellectual event of his life, however, was his encounter with Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (Being and Time). Binswanger regarded it as a work that was “fundamental in the fullest sense of the word.”
His personal meeting with Heidegger in 1929 opened a new chapter in his thinking – a chapter in which the central concept of psychiatry became being-in-the-world.
Binswanger came to the conclusion that mental disorders are neither biological defects nor psychic mechanisms but particular ways of being-in-the-world. Depression, mania, and schizophrenia became forms of existential constriction, distortions in one’s relationship to the world, to time, and to other people. He arrived at a radical conclusion: madness does not exist as a separate entity or disease in itself.
He argued that psychiatry must abandon the attempt to objectify the human being according to the model of the natural sciences. Its proper subject matter is no longer a “sick psyche” or “disturbed psychic functions,” but the human being as an existence of being-in-the-world.
In this way, psychiatric daseinanalysis was born: a phenomenological description of human suffering as a mode of existence, most clearly visible in Binswanger’s famous case studies. The best known of these are the cases of Ellen West, Ilse, and Lola Voss.
Binswanger, however, was above all a hospital psychiatrist working under very particular and highly privileged conditions. His patients lived in something that resembled a therapeutic sanatorium campus more than a nineteenth-century asylum.
His primary aim was not psychotherapy in the sense of a one-to-one therapeutic conversation. Rather, he sought to construct a phenomenological anthropology of psychopathology: descriptions of depression, mania, and schizophrenia as ways of being-in-the-world.
Although Heidegger later came to believe that Binswanger had not fully understood his philosophy in several important respects, describing this nevertheless as a “fruitful misunderstanding”—their intellectual relationship and mutual respect endured until the end of their lives.
Binswanger’s contribution thus became the first historical stage in the development of daseinanalysis. It is worth noting that the term Daseinsanalyse itself was not originally introduced by Binswanger. It first appeared in 1942 during a discussion following one of his lectures, when the Swiss psychiatrist Jakob Wyrsch used the term to describe Binswanger’s phenomenological approach to psychiatry.
Prior to this, Binswanger had employed expressions such as “phenomenological anthropology” and “existential analysis,” but he regarded Wyrsch’s proposal as apt and subsequently adopted it.
Binswanger opened the path toward a phenomenological understanding of mental illness as a way of being-in-the-world. Yet it would be Medard Boss who transformed daseinanalysis into a fully developed therapeutic practice.
Medard Boss: From Psychoanalysis to Therapeutic Daseinanalysis
Medard Boss (1903–1990) began as a classically trained physician and psychiatrist, fully immersed in the world of psychoanalysis. As a young medical student in Vienna in 1925, he had personal sessions with Freud, who—despite serious illness—received him warmly and in a very human way. Boss later recalled Freud’s “fiery eyes” and his extraordinary sensitivity to the person before him rather than to his scientific theories.
When the young trainee’s stomach growled during sessions, Freud would sometimes give him money for a meal afterward and significantly reduced his fee. When their meetings came to an end, Boss returned to Switzerland, completed his psychoanalytic training, and worked within psychiatric institutions, combining clinical practice with analysis.
Over the following years he immersed himself even more deeply in psychoanalysis, studying with its leading representatives and working in psychiatric hospitals. Yet what especially attracted him was the spiritual and symbolic dimension of human experience developed by Carl Gustav Jung.
For nearly ten years he participated in Jung’s private seminars in Zürich. There he encountered archetypes, Eastern religions, mythology, spirituality, and deeper layers of human experience that Freud had either avoided or rejected. Jung even saw in him a potential successor.
Boss absorbed this perspective but ultimately did not find in it a sufficiently solid foundation for understanding human existence.
He was introduced to Sein und Zeit through Ludwig Binswanger, with whom he shared a mentor–student relationship. Already in the late 1930s, Binswanger had opened to the younger psychiatrist the world of phenomenology and of psychiatrists who were thinking beyond the framework of medicine alone. As a result, Boss gradually began to distance himself from Freudian orthodoxy.
In his early writings he frequently cited Binswanger and other phenomenological psychiatrists such as Erwin Straus and Viktor von Gebsattel. Until 1944 he openly referred to himself as Binswanger’s student, sent him his manuscripts, and developed his first book, Sinn und Gehalt der Sexuellen Perversionen, largely within a Binswangerian horizon. His habilitation was likewise written entirely under the influence of this mode of thought.
Only later did the paths of the two psychiatrists begin to diverge. From Binswanger’s perspective, daseinanalysis was to remain primarily a psychiatric and anthropological project. In his view, it was not something that could simply be translated into a one-to-one therapeutic technique.
For Boss, by contrast, the significance of daseinanalysis was fulfilled only when it became a therapeutic practice. The tension between these visions gradually intensified until it culminated in an open conflict at a conference in 1950. The final point of rupture came with the publication of Psychoanalyse und Daseinanalytikin 1957.
As witnesses of those years later suggested, the conflict was not merely scientific but also personal, and it strongly affected the circles of students surrounding both schools.
At the same time, Heidegger increasingly supported what came to be known as the Zürich school emerging from Boss’s work, maintaining that Binswanger had misunderstood his philosophy in several crucial respects.
Yet painful as the separation was, Boss never ceased emphasizing Binswanger’s role in his own path toward Heidegger. In a letter written for Binswanger’s eightieth birthday, he openly admitted that he knew he had “not brought him much joy,” because he had “drifted far away in thought.” At the same time, however, he insisted that he would never cease being grateful for the fact that it was Binswanger who had first introduced him to Heidegger.
To understand this divergence, we need to return to Boss’s encounter with Heidegger’s thought. The first shift occurred when Boss began studying Heidegger’s Being and Time intensively during the war years. At first he understood very little of it. Yet something in Heidegger’s thinking moved him deeply.
As his American daseinanalytic colleague Paul Stern later recalled, Boss’s first readings of Heidegger consisted of “catching small islands of meaning in a vast sea of incomprehension.”
In 1947 Boss wrote to Heidegger requesting a meeting. Heidegger replied and invited him to his mountain hut in Todtnauberg. Once the postwar border situation had stabilized, the two men met there in 1949. Over time a friendship and a long collaboration developed.
His relationship with Heidegger did not remain a private philosophical friendship. It gave rise to formative events for the entire daseinsanalytic movement. A particularly important period in the development of daseinanalysis was the series of seminars conducted by Martin Heidegger in Zollikon between 1959 and 1969 for physicians and psychiatrists invited by Medard Boss.
These meetings became a unique dialogue between philosophy and medicine. Heidegger sought to demonstrate that most modern psychological concepts rest upon hidden metaphysical assumptions concerning the nature of the human being. In this sense, the seminars played an enormous role in shaping daseinanalysis as a therapeutic approach grounded in the ontology of being-in-the-world.
The question with which I began — why the Zollikon Seminars had to happen — can now be answered more clearly. They had to happen because Freud had reopened the question of meaning, but remained caught in the language of mechanisms; because Binswanger had brought Heidegger into psychiatry, but had not yet created a fully therapeutic daseinanalysis; and because Boss needed a more adequate foundation for the suffering human being he encountered in practice.
Out of this path, daseinanalysis emerges as a new way of understanding the human being and therapeutic work: not by explaining the person through theory, but by allowing human existence to be encountered as being-in-the-world.
Institutionalization and Subsequent Generations (After 1970)
Following the conclusion of the Zollikon Seminars in 1969, Heidegger explicitly confirmed that Boss “understood” his thinking. Under pressure from colleagues and students, Boss founded an institute in 1970 for the training of future daseinanalysts. From that point onward, a clear generational transmission begins.
The second generation was concentrated primarily in Switzerland. One of its important figures was Gion Condrau—a psychiatrist (who completed his psychiatric training at the famous Burghölzli Clinic in Zürich under the direction of Manfred Bleuler), neurologist, and philosopher; a direct student of Medard Boss and a participant in the Zollikon Seminars between 1959 and 1969.
Beginning in 1971, he helped establish and subsequently directed the Daseinsanalytic Institute in Zürich, which later became known as the Zürich School. Condrau developed the clinical application of Martin Heidegger’s thought, formulating a phenomenological theory of neuroses and psychosomatic disorders.
Interestingly, Condrau consciously attempted to write about daseinanalysis in as simple a language as possible, avoiding excessive use of Heideggerian terminology. One of his more important books is Martin Heidegger’s Impact on Psychotherapy, in which he presents a systematic account of the daseinsanalytic understanding of psychopathology.
The culmination of this institutional phase was the founding in 1990 of the International Federation of Daseinsanalytic Psychotherapy (IFDA) by Condrau and the Zürich circle. The purpose of the Federation was to connect daseinsanalytic centers throughout the world, safeguard training standards, and preserve the continuity of the therapeutic tradition emerging from Boss and the seminars with Heidegger. IFDA became the first international structure formalizing the generational transmission of daseinanalysis.
At the same time, approaches more closely aligned with Binswanger also emerged, represented among others by Alice Holzhey-Kunz. Although she collaborated with Boss and co-authored scholarly works with him, she gradually moved toward a more anthropological and philosophical interpretation of suffering, one closer to the early Jaspers and Binswanger than to the later Boss. Her work demonstrates that already within the second generation, different paths of development within daseinanalysis had begun to appear.
Over time, the center of gravity shifted beyond Switzerland.
The movement weakened in the country of its birth but developed internationally: in Austria, the United States, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Greece, and especially strongly in Brazil.
There are also individual practitioners in France and Italy, while at the same time new institutes have emerged, such as the Polish Institute of Daseinanalysis and the British Institute of Daseinanalysis.
A clear therapeutic lineage emerged, transmitted from generation to generation.
One of its principal continuators is Miles Groth, who himself comes from a direct Boss lineage through students who worked with him in Switzerland.
This tradition did not develop as a collection of “theoretical factions” in the way psychoanalysis did. Its core remained one and the same: the couch, the fundamental rule, the dream as a mode of existence, phenomenological openness, and the rejection of metapsychology. Different emphases and interpretations appeared, but the orthodox therapeutic line—faithful to the later Boss—retained its coherence.
Daseinanalysis is a living tradition that has passed from Swiss clinics, through the seminars with Heidegger, to an international network of practitioners, while preserving its original aim: not to explain the human being through theory, but to encounter the human being in his or her existence.
On a more personal note, I am grateful to have become part of this lineage and to have encountered so many remarkable people along the way. Compared with other therapeutic traditions, daseinanalysis remains a small family — with all the difficulties and tensions that belong to any living tradition — but the people I have met on this path have often been generous, warm, and deeply committed. For me, it has become a good place to stand, to learn, and to continue the work.
Thank you.
This text is based on a short introductory lecture given at the invitation of Alfred Denker for the Zollikon Seminars series. It is not intended as a complete academic history, but as a personal and pedagogical map of the path that led me to daseinanalysis.
Bibliography
- Binswanger, L. (1963). Being-in-the-world: Selected papers of Ludwig Binswanger. New York: Basic Books.
- Boss, M. (1965). A psychiatrist discovers India. London: Oswald Wolff.
- Boss, M. (1963). Psychoanalysis and daseinsanalysis. New York, NY: Basic Books.
- Condrau, G. (1998). Martin Heidegger’s impact on psychotherapy. Vienna: Edition Mosaic.
- Groth, M. (2024). Why in the world not? An introduction to daseinanalysis. London: Free Association Books.
- Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). New York, NY: Harper & Row.
- van Deurzen, E., Craig, E., Längle, A., Schneider, K. J., Tantam, D., & du Plock, S. (Eds.). (2019). The Wiley world handbook of existential therapy. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
