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The growing popularity of phenonenological psychology in Europe, and of its application in psychotherapy, behooves us here to familiarize ourselves with it more than we have been doing. This book, the first presentation of its basic principles in English, is intended to fill that need. This psychotherapy (daseinsanalyse, existential analysis) derives from the philosophy of existence of Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre (although the latter is repudiated as a deviationist), and the psychopathology of Jaspers, Binswanger, Boss, Kuhn and their schools.
About one third of the book is devoted to an exposition of the variations in the concepts of these thinkers as they have developed historically. A second third is intended to disprove or point up the inadequacies of current psychologies: psychoanalysis (Freud, Adler, Jung, Fromm, Horney) and gestalt psychology. The final third is devoted to the application of phenomenological ideas to therapy. Most of the questions preoccupying every therapist are touched upon: dreams, patient-analyst relationship, goals of therapy, diagnosis, the nature of neurosis and psychosis, etc. There is a detailed discussion of one patient in therapy with the author, and of three published cases of Binswanger.
According to this theory, the fundamental error of all modern psychology is the objectification of the self, or the making of an artificial schism between the self as subject (the cognitive, observing analyzing self) and the self as object (the observed, the immediate, the directly experiencing self). This duality must be replaced by the individual's precognitive being, which is the basic, irreducible empiric datum of psychic existence.
Practically, being exists in three aspects: being-body (allosomatic), being-with (with one's own personality and with others), and being-in (relationship between the self and the world). Being is characterized firstly by pre-given phenomenological tendencies (psychic drives, needs, conflicts and other