Existential Psychiatry: Ludwig Binswanger: Being-in-the-World. Selected Papers, translated and with a Critical Introduction to His Existential Psychoanalysis by Jacob Needleman.  Basic Books, Inc., New York, London 1963,  364 pp.

The value of this book is two-fold. It offers the first English translation of some of Binswanger's major contributions to existential psychiatry: three longer essays on “Freud's Conception of Man in the Light of Anthropology,” “Freud and the Magna Charta of Clinical Psychiatry,” “Dream and Existence,” and a detailed account of the Case of Lola Voss (translated by Ernest Angel). There are also shorter pieces on Heidegger's Analytic of Existence, “Introduction to ‘Schizophrenie’,” and on “Extravagance (Verstiegenheit).”

From these selections, there emerges a philosophic equipment (rare among psychoanalysts) with which Binswanger relates psychoanalysis to philosophic categories, as found in Hegel, Kant, Husserl and Heidegger. In the foreground and background stands the figure of Freud whose views Binswanger would modify or supplement, not clinically, but philosophically. This is done in a gracious style, and with what Freud called “tact in disagreement.”—The other value of the book is the long introduction (145 pages) by Professor Needleman. This deals with Binswanger's work as a whole which he subsumes under a concept called “the existential a priori,” and relating it primarily to the philosophy of Kant. There is a penetrating chapter comparing the symbol as used in psychoanalysis and in Daseinslehre. Altogether, this volume is at once a source book on and a valuable exposition of existential psychoanalysis.