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In sending us his article, Dr. Boss wrote: “Perhaps it would be possible to add editorially that during the years 1932-3} I was in training at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute and there I did supervised analytic work with Karen Horney. From her I received my first impulses which led me to overcome mechanistic thinking and to replace it with a holistic view which since has developed into my daseins-analytic concept.”
Dr. Medard Boss is professor of psychotherapy at Zurich University and Chairman of the International Congress for Psychotherapy, Zurich, 1954. He is the author of several books, among them the following: Sinn und Gehalt der sexuellen Perversionen (American edition published under the title: Meaning and Content of Sexual Perversions, Grune & Stratton, Inc., New York, ); Körperliches Kranksein als Folge seelischer Gleichgewichtsstörungen, and Der Traum und seine Auslegung all published in German by Hans Huber Verlag, Berne, Switzerland.
There is still a widely held belief that the chaos enfolding us in the beginning was truly dispelled only by science, which alone will ultimately let us see the real order of the world. Actually, a fundamental understanding of world is inherent in the nature of man. Even the child at play has at the very outset access to a world which yields nothing in wealth and fullness to that of the adult. Indeed, the child's fairy world often outstrips in intricacy even the most fanciful cosmologies of modern physicists.
The whole history of mankind testifies to a pre-scientific understanding of the world that long antedates science as such, a germinal view of the nature of things, no matter how vague. Later scientific insight and achievement always turn out to be no more than refinements and differentiations of whatever world view prevailed before the coming of science. Conversely, no Weltanschauung is the objective result, so-called, only of scientific research.
The nature of man precludes understanding without prejudice or premise. H