Book Review: Zollikon Seminars. Protocols–Conversations–Letters

This long-anticipated first complete English version of Heidegger's seminars for Swiss residents in psychiatry who were being supervised by Medard Boss consists of Boss's verbatim records of Heidegger's remarks during twenty-one meetings held between 1959 and 1969. The first seminar was given in the auditorium at the Burghölzli Clinic, where Eugen Bleuler and Carl Gustav Jung had practiced, but on Heidegger's recommendation, the remaining meetings–usually two a week at irregular intervals over the years – were held in a more intimate setting, Boss's home in the Zollikon district of Zurich. The last seminars were given when Heidegger was 80 years old. Boss's handwritten notes were read into a tape recorder just following the seminars, then typewritten transcripts of these "protocol drafts" were sent on to Heidegger, who "corrected them very carefully, made some minor additions here and there, and occasionally added major additions" (p. xiii). The protocols, which occupy about one-half of the volume, are supplemented by records of conversations based on "short notes" Boss took in private moments with Heidegger during his visits to Zurich between 1961 and 1972, as well as when the two men were on vacation or traveling together. One session was recorded on a plane between Rome and Zurich; another took place in Sicily. The "conversations" are arranged in 27 sections. "Understandably, I was able to record only a fraction of what was said during the discussions" (p. xix). Interspersed among the protocols and conversations are a few short texts Heidegger prepared for the seminars and private meetings. Finally, there are (alas, only brief) excerpts from 111 of the 256 letters Heidegger wrote to Boss between 1947 and 1971. The book also includes Boss's original "Preface" and "Afterword" – an open "Letter of a Friend" to Heidegger published, in 1969, in a Swiss newspaper – for the first German version (1987), his detailed table of contents, and the uncompleted preface for the American edition (1990), which, at the discretion of Boss's wife, was supplemented by a few paragraphs from the "Preface" for the second German edition (1994). Rounding out the book are essays by the translators ("Heidegger's Philosophy and Its Implications for Psychology, Freud, and Existential Analysis" [Askay] and "The Question of Being, Language, and Translation" [Mayr]), both professors of philosophy at the University of Portland, and a glossary of German terms with translations keyed to passages in the text. At relevant places in the text, the translators have provided discussions of their translation decisions and cited references to Heidegger's published texts and selected secondary literature. The translation was reviewed by, among others, William J. Richardson (p. vii).

Foreshadowing their work together in the seminars many years later, Heidegger had written to Boss in 1948: "It is especially the case in psychiatry that the continuous encounter between the thinking of the natural scientist and that of the philosopher is very productive and exciting" (p. 238). What was the nature of these meetings between Heidegger and the psychiatrists who had been trained as natural scientists? At one point, Heidegger tells his listeners: "I do not want to make philosophers out of you, but I would like to enable you to be attentive to what concerns the human being [Menschen] unavoidably and yet is not so easily accessible to him" (p. 112). To that end, he teaches the doctors some Aristotle and Kant, and comments on medieval philosophy, Descartes, Nietzsche, Bergson and Husserl. He also recalls, however, that "[a]t the beginning of the seminar, Professor Boss likened these seminar evenings to a kind of group therapy, which should make possible a freer view, a more adequate letting-be-seen of the constitution of human beings" (p. 132-33). It is clear that Boss hoped his psychiatric residents would experience the galvanizing effect he himself had had listening to Heidegger. He anticipated nothing less than a transformation of their way of working with patients, based on a radically different way of seeing what the translators call the "unfolding essence" [Wesen] of the human being as such.

As we read through the seminar protocols, we see Heidegger quoting Goethe and referring to Cézanne, but also citing current psychiatric literature, with which the seminar participants would have been acquainted as specialists. The materials cited are consistently criticized for the limited view of the human being underlying the clinical practice represented in them. Heidegger provides a reading list for physicians beginning their study of the thinker (p. 290): Was heißt Denken? [What Is Called Thinking?] (which he once termed his "favorite book"), followed by Der Satz vom Grund [The Principle of Reason]; then the essays "Gelassenheit. Bodenständigkeit im Atomzeitalter [Releasement. Stability in the Atomic Age]" and "Zur Erörterung der Gelassenheit. Aus einem Feldweggespräch über das Denken [On the Discussion of Releasement. From a Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking]" (both of which appear in Discourse on Thinking) and the texts collected in Nietzsche ("Important as an introduction into the modern awareness of Da-sein"); and, "later on," the essays collected in Wegmarken [Pathmarks]. Offering sage advice, he adds: "I would dissuade [abraten] you from the [secondary] literature on Heidegger."

Heidegger is very critical of science as method, most notably as it is represented by physics, in both its Newtonian and quantum incarnations: "I have reservations about science–not science as science–but only about the absolute claims of natural science" (p. 123). For Heidegger, absolute claims are by definition cut off from human experience. He wants to replace the method of natural science with phenomenology, which, for Heidegger, "is more of a science than natural science is" (p. 211). As might be expected, then, the most important contents of the seminars and conversations are phenomenological evocations of space and time ("Space and time belong together, but one does not know how" [p. 144; cf. pp. 33 ff., 181]), language ("Language is identical with the understanding of being" [p. 220]), bodying forth [Leiben] (pp. 200-201), memory and forgetting (pp. 167-171, 202), schizophrenia and hallucinations (pp. 73, 151-152), stress (pp. 137-138, 141), affects (pp. 166-167), pain (p. 221), parapraxes (p. 187), transference (p. 165), introjection and projection (p. 163-164), repression (p. 287), the Freudian structural theory of id, ego and superego (pp. 174-175)–and dreams: "Dreams are not symptoms and consequences of something lying hidden behind [them], but they themselves are in what they show and only this" (p. 245; cf. pp. 228-229). Heidegger even refers in passing to one of his own recurring dreams.

There is also strong criticism of the interpretations of several psychiatrists who, like Boss, took an interest in Heidegger's work: Ludwig Binswanger (pp. 115-116, 191-192, 205, 227-228; cf. p. 249), Erwin Straus ("[Straus's] book [On the Sense of the Senses] . . . is such an obvious imitation of Being and Time" [p. 250]), and Wolfgang Blankenburg (p. 204-206). Heidegger gives evidence of his familiarity with the Écrits (an "obviously baroque text" [p. 279]) of the neo-Freudian French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. Referring to a letter from Lacan, Heidegger writes to Boss (April 24, 1967): "It seems to me that the psychiatrist needs a psychiatrist" (pp. 280-281).

Although the reader will find precious little in the way of practical recommendations about psychiatric practice, Heidegger does say that for the clinician the "decisive point is that the particular phenomena, arising in the relationship between the [existential] analysand and the [existential] analyst, and belonging to the respective, concrete patient, be broached in their own phenomenological content and not simply be classified globally under existentialia" (p. 124). Here he cautions clinicians against the mechanical application of the existential "categories" of existence (Da-sein) worked out in Being and Time, while emphasizing the utter uniqueness of each analysand and each analyst. But just as each patient is a unique, singular instance, so is each therapist. This observation would seem to suggest that Heidegger would have had little to do with training therapists in conformity with a prescribed model of practice. The notion of applying a technique in existential analysis would have been anathema to him. Observing that a medical psychotherapist is more like a family doctor than a specialist (psychiatrist), he offers that "[a]s a physician one must, as it were, stand back and let the other human being be" (p. 211; cf. 215). In a time when, increasingly, psychiatry is dominated by physiological explanations of behavior, Heidegger asserts that the very "justification of psychology consists only in its point of departure and in its taking the noncorporeal seriously" (p. 216).

As far as I know, this work includes some of the few places where Heidegger discusses children. In closing, I will point out three such places. The first contains the hint of a possible contribution to developmental psychology. (1) "When I tell a child, 'This is a table,' it awakens the child to the intuition of essence (Weseneinsicht)–to a glimpse of the essence (Wesenblick)'table'. The phenomenon is the essence of what shows itself. The phenomenon as what shows itself from itself always means the being of beings (Sein des Seiendes) and not a particular being" (p. 176). Here Heidegger claims that the child's fundamental stance is phenomenological and that it is evoked by language, specifically by the adult's invocation of the names of things. He suggests that there is an event in the life of the child in which be-[ing] (Sein) "shows itself" for the first time. A key question that arises, of course, is the meaning of such a Wesen–for example, the Wesen of a table. As noted earlier, the translators render Wesen with "unfolding essence," implying, correctly, I think, that what there is for the child (and for us) is never something fixed but is, in nature, ongoing in its revelation, in which existence (Da-sein) plays the crucial part.

It is difficult to know what Heidegger would have made of this rendering of Wesen, especially given the fact that he did not work well with English. On his own admission, Heidegger's facility with English was very limited. Replying to Boss's suggestion that Heidegger accompany him to Washington, DC, where Boss had been invited to speak, Heidegger says: "One major difficulty [with the prospect] is my very poor command [dürftige Beherrschung] of English. I cannot speak the language at all and understand even less [Sprechen kann ich gar nicht und hören kaum]." Immediately following, he adds the following important comment: "Through translation everything is transformed [verwandelt] and becomes drawn out [langwierig]. My way of thinking [Denkweise] and the phenomenological will probably still be strange [fremd] over there" (p. 255, translation modified). What was true in 1960 (two years before the first English translation of Sein und Zeit appeared) is still true in 2001.

(2) Heidegger also claimed that Freud did not understand "consciousness of children" (p. 182), because he failed to see the clearing (Lichtung) that makes the Weseneinsicht described earlier possible. Heidegger seems to say that this clearing originates in childhood (and presumably in most children), not in the phenomenologically trained observer. I wonder what Heidegger would have said if he had been asked what obscures the clearing for most human beings in the course of their lives and requires the effort of learning to see phenomenologically.

(3) Finally, Heidegger observes that "little children and old people live exclusively in the present (präsentisch leben)," but that these ways of human be-ing are not equivalent: "In contrast to the small child, there is for the old person a having-benness (ein Gewesenenseins da) [as well], but it conceals itself" (p. 183, translation modified).

There is much more of interest to the existential analyst in these pages. I recommend that the reader move between the three sections of the text, in order to see what Heidegger, in conversation and in his letters to Boss, had to say about the seminar sessions themselves. I also hope that Boss's wife and the Heidegger family will one day permit the publication of all of the Heidegger-Boss correspondence. In the meantime, we have an English version of Heidegger at his most accessible without any loss of philosophical depth.

Miles Groth