Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss and the Modern World

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Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss and the Modern World

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Title: Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss and the Modern World

1
Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss and the Modern
World

Founders of existential psychotherapy

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Dasein definition

past and future as implicit in present dasein
the unity of the experiential field
the study of being (ontology)
experience as reality we are our experience
the construction of the subject/object duality
mind (unreal) reduced to matter (real)
subject (unreal) reduced to object (real)
without a subject, nothing at all would exist to
confront objects, and to imagine them as such.
True, this implies that every object, everything
objective -- in being merely objectivized by
the subject -- is the most subjective thing
possible.
Boss, M. (1958). The Analysis of Dreams. New
York Philosophical Library

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Meaning as a primary phenomenon

what we perceive are first and foremost not
impressions of taste, tone, smell or touch, not
even things or objects, but meanings.
Binswanger, L. (1963). Being in the World. New
York Basic Books, p. 114.
Endowment of meaning Binswanger Marduks net
the revelation of exploration
the a-priori ontological structure
the world design, or matrix of meaning
History or the great father
Determinant of meaning endowment
Disclosure of meaning Boss Tiamats
re-emergence
the revelation of the object
the emergence of the phenomena the numinous
the very word phenomena is derived from
phainesthai, i.e., to shine forth, to appear,
unveil itself, come out of concealment or
darkness.

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Problem the phenomena determines the world view
determines the phenomena

When an object is explored, its motivational
significance is constrained (generally, as a
consequence of the specific goal-directed nature
of the exploratory process, inevitably predicated
upon a specific hypothesis -- is this thing good
for (a particular function? -- but not any number
of other potential functions).
The question in mind, implicit or explicitly
formulated, determines in part the answer given
by the object. The object is always capable of
superseding the constraint, in some unpredictable
fashion.

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This infinite potential finds its symbolic
expression in the self-devouring serpent, the
mercurial spirit of transformation.

While considering these ideas, I dreamed that a
small object was travelling above the surface of
the Atlantic Ocean, in the center of a procession
of four hurricanes configured as a square divided
into quadrants, one quadrant per hurricane
tracked by satellites, monitored carefully and
apprehensively by scientists manning the latest
in equipment, in stations all over the world.
The dream scene shifted. The object, a sphere of
about eight inches in diameter, was now contained
and exhibited in a small glass display case, like
that found in a museum.
The case itself was in a small room, with no
visible exit or entry points. The American
President -- symbol of social order -- and the
crippled physicist Steven Hawkins --
representative of scientific knowledge (and of
disembodied rationality) -- were in the room with
the object.

One of them described the features of the room.
Its walls were seven feet thick, and made of some
impervious substance (titanium dioxide (?)) --
which sounded impressive, in the context of the
dream. These walls were designed to permanently
contain the object. I wasnt in the room,
although I was there as an observer, like the
audience in a movie.
The object in the display case appeared alive. It
was moving, and distorting its shape, like a
chrysalis or a cocoon in its later stages of
development. At one point, it transformed itself
into something resembling a meerschaum pipe.

Then it reformed itself into a sphere, and shot
out through one wall of the case, and the room,
leaving two perfectly round, smooth, holes -- one
in the case, and the other in the wall. It left
with no effort whatsoever, as if the barriers
designed to restrain its movement were of no
consequence, once the decision had been made.
The object was an image of God, the uroboric
serpent, embodied in matter (powerful enough to
require the accompaniment of four hurricanes, as
attendants).

At least two years after experiencing this dream
(and a year or so after writing it down) I was
reading Dantes Inferno (Ciardi, J. (1954/1982).
The Inferno Dantes Immortal Drama of a Journey
Through Hell. New York Mentor Books). In the
ninth Canto, a messenger from God appears in hell
to open the Gate of Dis, which is barring the
divinely ordained way of Virgil and Dante. The
approach of this messenger is preceded by a great
storm, described in the following manner
Suddenly there broke on the dirty swell
of the dark marsh a squall of terrible sound
that sent a tremor through both shores of Hell
a sound as if two continents of air,
one frigid and one scorching, clashed head on
in a war of winds that stripped the forests bare,
ripped off whole boughs and blew them helter
skelter
along the range of dust it raised before it
making the beasts and shepherds run for shelter.

The room was a classification system, something
designed (by the most powerful representatives of
the social and scientific worlds), to constrain
the mysterious phenomenon.
The object transformed itself into a pipe in
reference to the famous painting (by Magritte) of
a pipe, entitled (in translation) This is not a
pipe -- the map is not the territory, the
representation not the phenomenon. The capacity
of the object to escape, at will referred to
the eternal transcendence of the phenomenal
world, of its infinite capacity to unexpectedly
supersede its representation, scientific and
mythic.

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A ModernVideo Analog

Folding Hat
by John Baldessari
1971, 2948 min, bw, sound.
http//www.eai.org/eai/titleOrderingFees.htm?id20
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Folding Hat is a deadpan conceptual exercise that
represents a dashed attempt to rescue an object
from the meaning assigned to it.
Whistling an aria from The Barber of Seville,
Baldessari bends and folds a simple hat into
numerous configurations.
However, for the duration of the exercise, which
unfolds in real time, the object never loses its
"hatness.
In the end it is untransmutable -- no escape can
be made from its meaning.
Although Baldessari tries to drive a wedge
between the signifier and signified, the viewer
never misrecognizes the hat.

I dreamed, much later (perhaps after a year) of a
man suspended in a cubic room, equidistant from
the floor, roof and walls, about arms length
from each. The surfaces of the cube curved
inwards, towards the man (as if the room was
constructed of the intersection of six spheres).
All surfaces of the cube remained at the same
distance from the man, regardless of his pattern
of movement. If he walked forward, the cube moved
forward with him. If he walked backward, the cube
moved backwards, at precisely the same rate, with
no discontinuity whatsoever.

The surfaces themselves were covered with
circular patterns, about four inches in diameter,
inscribed within squares of about the same size.
Out of the center of each circle dangled the tip
of a reptiles tail. The man could reach in any
direction, grasp a tail, and pull it out of the
surface, into the room.
This dream referred to the capacity of man to
(voluntarily) pull the future into the present,
so to speak. The serpent was the uroboros,
contained in the phenomenal world. The tail was a
three dimensional cross-section of a
four-dimensional totality (and, as such, was a
symbol of the phenomenal world itself).
The potential for the emergence of something new
was present in every direction the man could
look, inside the cube. He could determine what
aspect of being would reveal itself, as a
consequence of his voluntary action.

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Mans option to respond to this claim or to
choose not to do so seems to be the very core of
human freedom.
Boss, M. (1963). Psychoanalysis and
Daseinanalysis. New York Basic Books, p. 271.

22
The thrownness of Dasein

Specific historicity
A priori rules and limitations (the rules of the
game)
Its absurd nature
Inauthenticity as subjugation to thrownness
thrownness as functionally equivalent to
unconsciousness
victim of a priori circumstances

23
Motivational constructs

emotion as an aspect of dasein
attraction of (embedded, revealed) possibility
(the unknown) as prime motivational construct
authenticity as the transformation of revealed
possibility
freedom predicated upon acceptance of thrownness
adaptation as the use of possibility against
actuality

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Pathology Fear and Guilt (existential and
neurotic)

Existential guilt and fear as debt to
possibility the revelation of responsibility
(conscience)
Failure to shoulder existential burden results in
neurotic guilt and fear
Uncanniness as origin of anxiety the revelation
of the unknown
Apprehension of the uncanny as dread
Fear of loss of world as root of existential
anxiety
Failure to follow revelation Boss
Failure to adjust epistemological structure
Binswanger

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Pathology

Neurotic Guilt
unpaid debt to existence
clean up your room
Neurotic Anxiety
constriction of world-design
defense as
unrecognized world-view
unmet revealed meanings

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The dreadful consequences of inauthenticity the
social psychopathology of the mass man

The concentration camp
England, Germany, Russia, China, Cambodia,
Yugoslavia
66 million dead through internal repression in
the Soviet Union (1918-1959)

Jung stated at some point that any internal
state of contradiction, unrecognized, will be
played out in the world as fate. This statement,
of course, carries with it the stamp of
mysticism.
How could the world play out a psychological
condition (or the refusal to recognize a
psychological condition)?
Well, the purpose of abstraction is to represent
experience, and to manipulate the
representations, to further successful
adaptation. If we both want the same toy, we can
argue about our respective rights to it if the
argument fails -- or if we refuse to engage in it
-- we can fight.

If we are suffering from moral uncertainty, at
the philosophical level -- and cannot settle the
internal war -- then our behavior reflects our
inner disquiet, and we act out our contradictions
in behavior, much to our general discredit.
Thus the means of settling a dispute cascade,
with each failure, down the chain of abstraction
from the word, to the image, to the deed -- and
those who will not let their outdated identities
and beliefs die, when they must, kill themselves
instead.

A. B------v has told how executions were carried
out at Adak - a camp on the Pechora River. They
would take the opposition members with their
things out of the camp compound on a prisoner
transport at night. And outside the compound
stood the small house of the Third Section.
The condemned men were taken into a room one at a
time, and there the camp guards sprang on them.
Their mouths were stuffed with something soft and
their arms were bound with cords behind their
backs.
Then they were led out into the courtyard, where
harnessed carts were waiting. The bound prisoners
were piled on the carts, from five to seven at a
time, and driven off to the Gorka - the camp
cemetery. On arrival they were tipped into big
pits that had already been prepared and buried
alive.

Not out of brutality, no. It had been ascertained
that when dragging and lifting them, it was much
easier to cope with living people than with
corpses.
The work went on for many nights at Adak. And
that is how the moral-political unity of our
Party was achieved.
Solzhenitsyn, A.I. (1975). The Gulag Archipelago
(Vol. 2). New York Harper and Row, p. 390.

The most ghastly moment of the twenty-four hours
of camp life was the awakening, when, at a still
nocturnal hour, the three shrill blows of a
whistle tore us pitilessly from our exhausted
sleep and from the longings in our dreams. We
then began the tussle with our wet shoes, into
which we could scarcely force our feet, which
were sore and swollen with edema. And there were
the usual moans and groans about petty troubles,
such as the snapping of wires which replaced
shoelaces.
One morning I heard someone, whom I knew to be
brave and dignified, cry like a child because he
finally had to go to the snowy marching grounds
in his bare feet, as his shoes were too shrunken
for him to wear. In those ghastly moments, I
found a little bit of comfort a small piece of
bread which I drew out of my pocket and munched
with absorbed delight.
Frankl, V. (1984). Man's Search for Meaning. New
York Washington Square Press, pp. 51-52.

In cold lower than 60 degrees below zero,
workdays were written off in other words, on
such days the records showed that the workers had
not gone out to work but they chased them out
anyway, and whatever they squeezed out of them on
those days was added to the other days, thereby
raising the percentages.
(And the servile Medical Section wrote off those
who froze to death on such cold days on some
other basis. And the ones who were left who could
no longer walk and were straining every sinew to
crawl along on all fours on the way back to camp,
the convoy simply shot, so that they wouldnt
escape before they could come back to get them).
Solzhenitsyn, A.I. (1975). The Gulag Archipelago
(Vol. 2). New York Harper and Row, p. 201.

O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm,
Hath found out thy bed
Of crimson joy
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
Keynes, G. (Ed.). (1966). The Complete Works of
William Blake, with variant readings. London
Oxford University Press, p. 213.

Fire, fire! The branches crackle and the night
wind of late autumn blows the flame of the
bonfire back and forth. The compound is dark I
am alone at the bonfire, and I can bring it still
some more carpenters shavings. The compound here
is a privileged one, so privileged that is almost
as if I were out in freedom -- this is an Island
of Paradise this is the Marfino sharashka -- a
scientific institute staffed with prisoners -- in
its most privileged period. No one is overseeing
me, calling me to a cell, chasing me away from
the bonfire, and even then it is chilly in the
penetrating wind.
But she -- who has already been standing in the
wind for hours, her arms straight down, her head
drooping, weeping, then growing numb and still.
And then again she begs piteously Citizen
Chief! Please forgive me! I wont do it again.

The wind carries her moan to me, just as if she
were moaning next to my ear. The citizen chief at
the gatehouse fires up his stove and does not
answer.
This was the gatehouse of the camp next door to
us, from which workers came into our compound to
lay water pipes and to repair the old ramshackle
seminary building.
Across from me, beyond the artfully intertwined,
many-stranded barbed-wire barricade and two steps
away from the gatehouse, beneath a bright
lantern, stood the punished girl, head hanging,
the wind tugging at her gray work skirt, her feet
growing numb from the cold, a thin scarf over her
head.

It had been warm during the day, when they had
been digging a ditch on our territory. And
another girl, slipping down into a ravine, had
crawled her way to the Vladykino Highway and
escaped.
The guard had bungled. And Moscow city buses ran
right along the highway. When they caught on, it
was too late to catch her. They raised the alarm.
A mean, dark major arrived and shouted that if
they failed to catch the girl, the entire camp
would be deprived of visits and parcels for a
whole month, because of her escape.

And the women brigadiers went into a rage, and
they were all shouting, one of them in
particular, who kept viciously rolling her eyes
Oh, I hope they catch her, the bitch! I hope
they take scissors and -- clip, clip, clip --
take off all her hair in front of the line-up!
(This wasnt something she had thought up
herself.
This was the way they punished women in the
Gulag.) But the girl who was now standing outside
the gatehouse in the cold had sighed and said
instead At least she can have a good time out
in freedom for all of us!

The jailer overheard what she said, and now she
was being punished everyone else had been taken
off to the camp, but she had been set outside
there to stand at attention in front of the
gatehouse. This had been at 6 PM, and it was now
11 PM.
She tried to shift from one foot to another, but
the guard stuck out his head and shouted Stand
at attention, whore, or else it will be worse for
you! And now she was not moving, only weeping
Forgive me, Citizen Chief! Let me into the camp,
I wont do it any more!

But even in the camp no one was about to say to
her All right, idiot! Come on in!
The reason they were keeping her out there so
long was that the next day was Sunday, and she
would not be needed for work.
Such a straw-blond, naive, uneducated slip of a
girl! She had been imprisoned for some spool of
thread. What a dangerous thought you expressed
there, little sister! They want to teach you a
lesson for the rest of your life!
Fire, fire! We fought the war -- and we looked
into the bonfires to see what kind of victory it
would be. The wind wafted a glowing husk from the
bonfire.
To that flame and you, girl, I promise the whole
wide world will read about you.
Solzhenitsyn, A.I. (1975). The Gulag Archipelago
(Vol. 2). New York Harper and Row, pp. 147-149.

- for whence
But from the author of all ill could spring
So deep a malice, to confound the race
Of mankind in one root, and Earth with Hell
To mingle and involve, done all to spite
The great Creator?
Milton, J. (1667/1961). Paradise Lost (and other
poems), annotated by E. LeComte. New York New
American Library, p. 71, Part II 380-385.

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Human beings are emotionally attached to those
whom with they identify sympathy for the victim
of injustice means inability to perpetrate such
injustice. Identification with tyranny, on the
other hand, means temporary effortless surcease
from painful (intra and extrapsychic) moral
conflict. Such identification merely requires
denial of the injustice committed to ones own
person, and the subsequent falsification of
individual experience. This falsification cuts
the empathic bonds, connecting prisoner to
prisoner -- connecting man to man -- connecting
man to himself
44

I shall despair. There is no creature loves me
And if I die, no soul will pity me
Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to myself.

45
The victim who finds personal security in
identity with his persecutor has become that
persecutor has eliminated the possibility of
further adaptation, integration and growth has
voluntarily forfeited possibility of redemption.
46
Solzhenitsyn describes the reactions and actions
of staunch Communist Party members, imprisoned
and devoured by the system they supported and
produced

To say that things were painful for them is to
say almost nothing. They were incapable of
assimilating such a blow, such a downfall, and
from their own people, too, from their own dear
Party, and, from all apearances, for nothing at
all. After all, they had been guilty of nothing
as far as the Pary was concerned -- nothing at
all.
It was painful for them to such a degree that it
was considered taboo among them, uncomradely, to
ask What were you imprisoned for? The only
squeamish generation of prisoners! The rest of
us, with tongues hanging out, couldnt wait to
tell the story to every chance newcomer we met,
and to the whole cell -- as if it were an
anecdote.

Heres the sort of people they were. Olga
Sliozbergs husband had already been arrested,
and they had come to carry out a search and
arrest her too.
The search lasted four hours -- and she spent
those four hours sorting out the minutes of the
congress of Stakhanovites of the bristle and
brush industry, of which she had been the
secretary until the previous day.
The incomplete state of the minutes troubled her
more than her children, who she was now leaving
forever! Even the interrogator conducting the
search could not resist telling her Come on
now, say farewell to your children!

Heres the sort of people they were. A letter
from her fifteen-year old daughter came to
Yelizaveta Tsetkova in the Kazan Prison for
long-term prisoners Mama! Tell me, write to me
-- are you guilty or not? I hope you werent
guilty, because then I wont join the Komsomol,
and I wont forgive them because of you.
But if you are guilty -- I wont write you any
more and will hate you. And the mother was
stricken by remorse in her damp gravelike cell
with its dim little lamp How could her daughter
live without the Komsomol? How could she be
permitted to hate Soviet power? Better that she
should hate me. And she wrote I am guilty....
Enter the Komsomol!

How could it be anything but hard! It was more
than the human heart could bear to fall beneath
the beloved axe -- then to have to justify its
wisdom. But that is the price a man pays for
entrusting his God-given soul to human dogma.
Even today any orthodox Communist will affirm
that Tsetkova acted correctly. Even today they
cannot be convinced that this is precisely the
perversion of small forces, that the mother
perverted her daughter and harmed her soul.
Heres the sort of people they were Y.T. gave
sincere testimony against her husband -- anything
to aid the Party!

Oh, how one could pity them if at least now they
had come to comprehend their former wretchedness!
This whole chapter could have been written quite
differently if today at least they had forsaken
their earlier views!
But it happened the way Mariya Danielyan had
dreamed it would If I leave here someday, I am
going to live as if nothing had taken place.

Loyalty? And in our view it is just plain
pigheadedness. These devotees to the theory of
development construed loyalty to that development
to mean renunciation of any personal development
whatsoever!
As Nikolai Adamovich Vilenchuk said, after
serving seventeen years We believed in the
Party -- and we were not mistaken! Is this
loyalty or pigheadedness?
No, it was not for show and not out of hypocrisy
that they argued in the cells in defense of all
the governments actions. They needed ideological
arguments in order to hold on to a sense of their
own rightness -- otherwise, insanity was not far
off.

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The task of life

Independence from thrownness
realization of meaning

53
The evidence is intolerable -- so much the worse
for the evidence!

Ideology confines human potential to a narrow and
defined realm adaptation undertaken within that
realm necessarily remains insufficient, is
destined to produce misery, as it is only
relationship with the transcendent that allows
life to retain its savour.
Ideology says it must be thus, but human
behavior constantly exceeds its realm of
representation the capacity for exception must
therefore be denied, lest faith in ideology
vanish, and chaos, intolerable chaos, reappear.

... for now the thought
Both of lost happiness and lasting pain
Torments him round he throws his baleful eyes,
That witnessed huge affliction and dismay,
Mixed with obdurate pride and steadfast hate
At once, as far as angels ken, he views
The dismal situation waste and wild
A dungeon horrible, on all sides round,
As one great furnace flamed, yet from these flames

No light, but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all, but torture without end
Still urges, and a fiery deluge, fed
With ever-burning sulphur unconsumed.

Such place Eternal Justice had prepared
For those rebellious, here their prison ordained
In utter darkness, and their portion set,
As far removed from God and light of Heaven
As from the centre thrice to the utmost pole.

Every act of repression -- every lie -- creates
an intrapsychic reservoir, so to speak, of
disregarded experience -- of truth, unsettling
and disturbing. In this reservoir lives the
re-animated dragon of chaos, ready to devour, in
an unguarded moment, the quaking and deceitful
soul.
Every act of suppression limits potential for
action and representation weakens the total
personality constantly increases likelihood for
continued and expanded suppression of experience

For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and
he shall have more abundantly but whosoever hath
not, from him shall be taken away even that he
hath. (Matthew 13 12).

Repression of the truth ensures the deterioration
of personality assures transformation of
subjective experience into endless meaningless
sterility and misery.
Acceptance, by contrast -- in the spirit of
ignorant humility, courage disguised -- provides
the necessary precondition for change.

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