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The prevailing trend in present day psychotherapy is to expand the psychodynamic and socio-dynamic perspectives into a broader existential viewpoint, based on the contributions of the schools of phenomenological anthropology and particularly ontology. These schools of thought illuminate the human being and his existence in an all encompassing and deeply meaningful way and lead us to reconsider the objectives of psychotherapy in terms of broadening its scope beyond personality integration toward ontic integration.
In the psychotherapeutic situation as in all human encounters, patients appear not only as samples of various psychic mechanisms or disease entities, but above and beyond that, as people with specific ways of experiencing life, specific ways of responding to stimuli coming from the environment, and specific ways of responding to deep stirrings of inner potentialities which demand realization within a limited and unknown time span. According to Heidegger's ontological thesis, human beings have specific ways of “being-in-this-world.”
These ontic characteristics apply to the total being of man as rated and described by Binswanger 1 as being-able-to-be, Being-allowed-to-be and having-to-be-in-this-world.
Being-able-to-be relates to man's capacity to know that he exists. This consciousness implies certain ontic freedom and responsibility in relation to one's own existence.
Being-allowed-to-be refers to the phenomenon of love as being-beyond-the-world, which is one of the dual modes of existence. This is an extension of Buber's 2 depiction of the “I—Thou” relationship. Being-beyond-the-world refers to the experimental transcendence of space, time, object and subject in the act of love, or better, in the “happening” of love.
Having-to-be refers to the fact that man is “thrown” (geworfen)