Die Psychotherapie in daseinsanalytischer Sicht
Authors: Gion Condrau
Journal: Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics (1974)

Modern scientists, the psychiatrists, psychologists and doctors have mostly lost sight of the real importance of the obvious. They often overlook the richness of what can be immediately experienced, and concentrate on coming as soon as possible to an indirect, background-based, theoretical explanation of all they meet, thereby making their object of investigation calculable and thereby also reproduceable. In contrast to this is the phenomenological or existential analytical approach, which emphazises a simple experience of the perceived phenomena. It dwells on just the matter to be explored, always tries to grasp its meaning more explicitly. Thereby it is in an excellent way 'objective' or real. The right to a special position in the field of psychiatry, psychotherapy and psychosomatics, derives from the fact that all these sciences principally have to do with the human being. Man, less than anything else, can be dissolved into calculable quantities. The priority of the existential analytical scientific method in these areas has its further basis in the nature of the neurotic, psychosomatic and psychotic way of being ill. This, in its real nature, is primarily not founded on countable quantities, as would be the way the natural sciences could deal with them. It can only be understood through insight in the incalculable qualities of the always different disturbed, of key and unfree relationship of the individual patient, to the eventualities of his world. This, of course, does not exclude, but includes the fact that by methods of natural science, data can be found in the existence of human beings both healthy and sick, which can be useful and somatically important. But, by this method, one never finds the specifically human cause of being healthy and sick. From a historical point of view, the psychological-medical existential analysis has developed from Freud's psychoanalysis and Heidegger's (1957) philosophical existential analysis. One can say that the mechanistic philosophy that Freud superimposed on his empirically founded psychoanalytical discoveries, has been replaced by the existential analytical way of viewing the human being. In this way, one has achieved further development of the theory as well as the practice of Freud's psychoanalysis. It is obviously not correct – as occasionally is done – to put existential analysis as 'philosophy' in contrast to psychoanalysis as 'science'. They both are sciences of man, both so to say 'anthropologies'. As medical treatment they both belong to psychiatry and psychotherapy. This still is so in a time when the more narrow meanings of the medical terms 'disease', and 'health' have been expanded by the sociological point of view. Today, psychiatry and psychotherapy are not contented with formulating pathologies, and discovering laws that enable them to predict about course, therapy and prognosis of psychotic and neurotic illnesses. With increasing pertinence the doctor asks himself about the essence of that which is sick and has to be healed. To clear the relationship between body and soul, and to try to escape the blind alley of the dualistic way of looking upon life, doctors and psychologists are forced to consult those philosophers, who are occupied with questions of the 'last things', with the essence and existence of man. Every human explaining and acting, including the psychological and medical science, relies on presuppositions which are philosophical and pre-scientific. By considering these philosphical presumptions the quality of the practical work of the psychiatrist and the psychotherapist is established, because their work is certainly influenced by their way of understanding the world.