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This volume, written by an eminent Swiss psychiatrist, an advocate
of existential analysis, contains five studies on the major psychosis. Psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically oriented psychiatrists will find it of unusual interest. Ludwig Binswanger is an experienced clinician who has at his disposal the clinical material from one of the foremost private hospitals on the Continent; furthermore, he has a thorough acquaintance both with psychoanalysis and with existential analysis. The reader will recall that Binswanger was active at the beginning of the psychoanalytic movement, publishing his first important contribution in the Bleuler-Freud Jahrbuch. Although his philosophical interests later led him toward Husserl and Heidegger,—a development which led him away from psychoanalysis—, Binswanger nevertheless maintained his friendship with Freud.
The genetic approach, a cornerstone of psychoanalysis, is alien to existential analysis. Since it is not concerned with the origins of the phenomena it examines, existential analysis centers its attention on the direct description and analysis of the individual's experience as well as the structure of the individual's world. While, according to Binswanger, psychoanalysis is concerned primarily with an 'ethereal world' (a world of dreams and fantasies), existential analysis undertakes to enter into all possible worlds of human existence. In this way, the latter discipline follows Hegel's principle that 'the individual is what his world (his total world), as his world, is'. Binswanger pays tribute to Freud's concept of the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of the mind. However, he goes on to state that Freud's work, like most other works of genius, is one-sided and must be recognized as such to be scientifically fruitful.
The phenomenological method of existential analysis does not consider the human being as one of many objects of nature, but studies the human phenomenon from the point of view of its being in