Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss and the Modern World

1. Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss and the Modern World • Founders of existential psychotherapy

2. 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

4. 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: Marduk’s 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: Tiamat’s 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.

5. 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.

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

10. 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.

11. 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 wasn’t 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.

12. 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).

13. At least two years after experiencing this dream (and a year or so after writing it down) I was reading Dante’s Inferno (Ciardi, J. (1954/1982). The Inferno: Dante’s 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.

14. 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.

18. A ModernVideo Analog • Folding Hat • by John Baldessari • 1971, 29:48 min, b&w, sound. • http://www.eai.org/eai/titleOrderingFees.htm?id=2081 • 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.

19. I dreamed, much later (perhaps after a year) of a man suspended in a cubic room, equidistant from the floor, roof and walls, about arm’s 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.

20. 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 reptile’s 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.

22. “Man’s 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.

23. 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

24. 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

25. 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

27. 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

29. 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)

30. 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.

31. 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.

32. “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.

33. 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.

34. “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.

35. “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 wouldn’t 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.

36. “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.

37. “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 won’t do it again.”

38. 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.

39. 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.

40. 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 wasn’t 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!”

41. 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 won’t do it any more!”

42. 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.

43. “- 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.

44. 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 one’s 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:

45. “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.”

46. 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.

47. 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, couldn’t wait to tell the story to every chance newcomer we met, and to the whole cell -- as if it were an anecdote.

48. Here’s the sort of people they were. Olga Sliozberg’s 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!”

49. Here’s 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 weren’t guilty, because then I won’t join the Komsomol, and I won’t forgive them because of you. • But if you are guilty -- I won’t 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!”

50. 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. • Here’s the sort of people they were: Y.T. gave sincere testimony against her husband -- anything to aid the Party!