Ludwig Binswanger—1881-1966

Ludwig Binswanger died on February 7, 1966, at the age of eighty-five. He was born in Switzerland in 1881, a scion of a family which had given his country and Germany a number of distinguished physicians and psychiatrists. After working with Bleuler and Jung in Burghölzli and with Otto Binswanger, his childhood and soon became, following his father, the director of the Sanatorium Bellevue in Kreuzlingen, which acquired under his guidance a unique reputation.

Binswanger was a prolific author, and his voluminous writings include a great number of clinical papers and theoretical works. Early case histories appeared in the Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische and psychopathologische Forschungen, which Freud and Bleuler edited 1909-1913. During this period of Binswanger's life, Freud was the paramount influence. As a young man of twenty-six Binswanger, together with C. G. Jung, visited Freud in Vienna. Out of this encounter developed a deep affection and friendship between the two men which survived all vicissitudes of life and work, although Binswanger moved more and more away from psychoanalysis. He ultimately became the main creator of a new and widely spreading movement which he termed Daseinsanalyse (existential analysis).

Dissatisfied with Freud's sober scientific Weltanschauung, which Binswanger called his "naturalism," Binswanger devoted himself to the study of Heidegger and tried to develop a synthesis of Husserl's phenomenology, Heidegger's ontology, and Freud's psychoanalysis. He claimed that he did not abandon Freud's basic concepts and remained to his end a member of the psychoanalytic societies.

In his case histories, some of which have become famous, he proved to be an unusually perceptive observer; in his theoretical works it is not easy to follow his thinking. But his work has gained wide influence in Europe and, more recently, also in the United States. It has obviously given expression and guidance to the inner needs of many psychiatrists who had been