https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5945-7513
ABSTRACT
My comment on the interdisciplinary study of Heidegger and Freud by Shoshani et al. is focused on the semantic and conceptual differences between these thinkers concerning the meaning of truth and the role of anxiety. Heidegger emphasizes truth as a philosophical goal, whereas for Freud truth is a challenge to study the dynamic functions of the human mind by avoiding predetermined answers. The authors describe convincingly how Heidegger and Freud tread on the same phenomenological terrain. Their approaches differ, however, in their respective goals. For Heidegger, the goal is a new philosophical understanding of the sense of being defined by him as Dasein. For Freud, the goal is to understand the dynamics of the human mind in a two-person clinical relationship. This difference in their goals also implies a difference in their ontological approach. On the other hand, Shoshani et al. highlight the value of Heidegger’s view of anxiety as a trigger that calls for a search for increased understanding. According to the authors, this point is important, as it opens a shared humane way to treat people with severely disturbed mental conditions. In this respect, the understanding of the meaning of anxiety by Heidegger can also inspire clinical work and thereby open perspectives common with psychoanalysis.
The paper by Shoshani et al. is a welcome contribution to the study of the relationship between Heidegger’s philosophy and Freud’s psychoanalysis. The article is not strictly philosophical nor psychoanalytical, but rather an attempt to bring the two together in a meaningful dialogue. The thoughtful comparison of Heidegger and Freud gives fresh substance to understand how philosophical analysis and psychoanalytic work can illuminate each other. The authors’ expertise and ability to construe a meaningful comparison is a source of pleasure to the reader.
An interdisciplinary effort such as presented in the article is, however, bound to confront semantic and conceptual problems. Their unresolved nature needs to be acknowledged to maintain to conceptual clarity. My remarks should be read as an invitation to exchange views how to increase transparency and clarity when bringing two different approaches together by transcending traditional disciplinary boundaries.
The paper opens with a short introduction to Heidegger’s philosophy, and first and foremost to his concept of Dasein and its temporal dimension, the ‘Sein und Zeit’. Here the authors pinpoint the historical struggle between hermeneutic and scientific understanding of the nature of psychoanalysis. They approach Heidegger’s thinking from two angles: the existential truth of the subject (likened to authenticity) and the motivating force of anxiety that drives the subject to strive for coherence and unity of the self.
The authors point out that continental philosophy addresses several similar issues that are relevant to psychoanalysis such as consciousness, thinking, freedom, anxiety, death, meaning, language and self-other differentiation. Their differences still abound, however, as the authors admit. Philosophy centers on epistemology, conscious aspects of reason and logic while psychoanalysis explores individual experience, human nature and unconscious motivation. Philosophy interprets its problems in theoretical and general terms, whereas psychoanalysis has a practical and individualistic perspective.
Theory and reality – the relationship between internal and external
Heidegger’s philosophy is presented as an attempt to bridge the gap that prevails between theory and reality. The authors pay much attention to highlight Heidegger’s aim to move from an experience-distant approach typical of philosophy towards an experience-near, phenomenological and ontological conceptualization. Being is interpreted as Dasein, being that is realized in a context and not as a self-containing entity. The true nature of being can only be uncovered in a reciprocal encounter between the individual and the world. Heidegger radically suggests that they belong to one and the same entity and are not separated by a boundary. This is in contrast to theories that differentiate between consciousness and things in themselves.
The spirit of this discussion also resembles the work of the other existentialists, too, such as Sartre (Citation1934) and his view of the transcendent nature of the ego, already published in the 1934 as a prelude to his later works. Sartre underlined our responsibility to choose our own idiosyncratic way of life, although in different words, but in a similar spirit to creating the individual Dasein. Existential anxiety was clearly a driving force for Sartre. However, the authors quote Heidegger’s critique of Sartre for his adherence to humanism, which to Heidegger represented commitment to the ‘other’ and thereby inauthenticity of the self.
While the authors emphasize the value of the opening towards reality by the Dasein, something that is easy to join, a caveat is called for. The problems involved in the abandoning of the line between the individual mind and the external reality need to be acknowledged.
Supposing, as Heidegger does, that the individual mind and the world are part of one and the same entity (this is apparently so only from the outside), a question arises about the role of the psychological reality testing in this discourse. The aim of reality testing is to differentiate between external and internal reality in a clinical setting where the maintenance of this boundary is of obvious importance (Kernberg, Citation1980). Reality testing does not involve any given, predetermined content or conceptual interpretation of what is real and true and what is not. Reality testing is purely a practical tool to inquire into what is experienced by the subject as internal, belonging to one’s own mind, and what is experienced as external and foreign to the subject. Testing of this function is called for especially when working with people in regressed borderline and psychotic states, but is also valuable, for example, in phobias as well as in dealing with transference illusions.
Heidegger removes the principal boundary between internal and external reality, as the authors describe, by introducing the concept of Dasein, which according to him enables understanding of the pure sense of being in a context that is real. Interpreting being as a Dasein, being there, being in a context, opens a way for Heidegger out from a dualism between being and reality.
In a clinical context, the line between internal and external is, however, also quite significant during the early developmental years of a child. Heidegger’s position on the boundary between external and internal appears to be first and foremost a top-down philosophical construction of Dasein vis á vis the world, also described as unconcealment and disclosure. Such a theoretical principle can hardly function, however, as a window that would open a feasible perspective to clinical reality where the question of who am I and who are the others forms the main playground of psychological work.
The authors quote Heidegger’s view that being-in-the-world and being-with-others confines a person, alienates and distances them from themselves, and conceals the truth from them to the extent that they become inauthentic. This is denoted as a ‘fall’. A clinical reader may think of this differently, namely from the point of view of self-other differentiation, and ask whether such differentiation should be seen as alienation. The transition from self-centered existence towards recognition of the other as a reality is a developmental step that does not imply abandoning of the self or alienation from self-experience. The pain of differentiation between me and not-me arises precisely from keeping both alive, the self and the object, and does not mean alienation, but an important developmental step that facilitates new genuine interaction between the self and the other. It seems that Heidegger’s philosophical analysis and clinical understanding of alienation do, indeed, have a different semantic context.
A reminder of the distinction Freud made between things and thing representations may also be relevant here. By thing representations Freud did not mean things in themselves, but rather the non-verbal, nameless thing-like experiences analogous to external objects, not out there but inside the mind, that are typically prevailing in the regressed minds of depressive, borderline or psychotic subjects.
Thing representations do not have verbal links or names. However, they are not separate from consciousness. They dwell in the internal reality of the subject without a clear line between these experiences and the rest of consciousness. The undifferentiated bad feelings involved are often connected with bodily symptoms, such as a heavy feeling in the chest or stomach. The absence of the boundary between the internal and external in such experiences does not pertain to the line between consciousness and the external reality, but to the joined representation of the external and the internal within the subject, like an introjection that is often also a hallmark of depression. Heidegger’s removal of the internal-external boundary appears as a brave visionary opening, which in a clinical light, however, is more a philosophical construction than a psychological observation, as it by-passes the different meanings of things, their representations in the mind and things in themselves.
Truth, Heidegger and Freud
The concept of truth has a central position in the paper. Following Heidegger, the authors stress the origo-position of the self-experience for understanding of the meaning of truth in the Heideggerian analysis, while in classical psychoanalysis the self-experience is argued to have remained in the shadow. Heidegger not only describes the new viewpoint that the Dasein concept can allow for understanding of the nature of the self-experience, but he raises the Dasein to a primordial truth and to a similar position that he criticizes the classical psychoanalytical formulations for holding.
The question remains is in what way is the truth of the Dasein, Truth with a capital 'T‘ (Being, Sein), different from other truths that exist in the reality that we know, be it physical, biological, medical, psychological, historical or truth in literature? This may simply be a matter of opinion, or not, but it appears that Heidegger makes a claim of having achieved a superordinary truth when he changed the perspective of philosophy to the perspective of the open, process-like Dasein. There is no doubt that Heidegger’s revelation of the meaning of Dasein merits the position of a novel philosophical discovery, but it deserves being questioned whether it indeed represents an ultimate psychological truth of the mind?
Heidegger is quite demanding in his opinion that true authenticity means an existence of full openness devoid of any disguise. The reader wonders whether this is possible in reality and whether it does not represent a claim of something absolute, as someone would have endless possibilities and possess a virtue to be totally open. While Freud may be criticized for having a truth ideal that is too demanding, Heidegger is not free of such a tendency, either. In a friendly comparative journey the contributions and ambitions of these two thinkers would do well if they were recognized on an equal footing.
The critique of Freud by Heidegger in relation to the truth concept reaches its peak in his accusation that psychoanalysis can be inhuman. While wrongly practiced psychoanalysis can be at worst inhuman, not all psychoanalysis by far can be described as such. Well-functioning psychoanalyses can be most human in the original spirit of Freud. Such statements by Heidegger are uncritical, and have a black and white character that requires counterbalancing.
Freud as many others after him, and also authors outside the confines of psychoanalysis (e.g., Craig Citation2003, Damasio, Citation2003) have seen the relationship between self-experience and truth differently. The core of the self-experience (the Dasein) does not necessarily represent an ultimate truth. It can be seen as a perception, an internally perceived experience, analogous to perceptions mediated by our external senses.
Perception in any domain, external or internal, acquires a meaning and becomes understood in the context of memories of previous perceptions. Memories of old perceptions allow the new perception to find its place and be conceived within a network of what happened before. The integration of old memories with new experiences is often also emphasized today in cognitive neuroscience. It corresponds well to Heidegger’s notion of the process of the transcendence of the Dasein, the revelation from actual existence to open, connected existence, from the ‘here’ towards ‘there’.
However, a difference remains as to the place of truth in this process. Self-experience as an internal perception remains open to interpretation regarding its sources, nature and conditions. The truth of perception is thus an open question that calls for inquiry. It is not a truth in itself, as Heidegger suggests.
Moreover, as truth about oneself is a ‘sine qua non’ condition for the searching of self-understanding, it is a particular and not a universal phenomenon. Truth of reconstruction, on the other hand, is specifically a psychoanalytical point of view. The recognition of a developmental truth, such as the meaning of the parents’ or siblings’ behavior in the subject’s history, may revive memories that have influenced how the life of the subject has unfolded over a long period of time. The authors refer to this meaning of reconstruction in their citation of Freud. All this calls for inquiry, not for giving ready-made answers.
Heidegger criticizes Freud’s use of concepts such as ‘truth’ and ‘subject’ as they were grounded in untenable metaphysical assumption and construed, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, as objective, absolute and universal. This is, however, not so in Freud’s own writings. Freud avoided taking a position on the ultimate truth, and here he followed the view generally held in the sciences. Heidegger’s claim rather appears to represent his subjective image of Freud’s way of dealing with the subject matter of psychoanalysis. Freud (Citation1940, p. 158) expressly wrote that the ultimate truth of the internal as well as the external reality is unknown. Moreover, it is well known that Freud changed his views during the development of his ideas, from the topographical to the structural model and later to understanding of the unending nature of analysis. Both signify a humble attitude. Freud did not claim to have found finished and even less so absolute truths.
While Heidegger criticized Freud for metaphysical assumptions, he also adduced that Freud relied on a vague and ambiguous concept of truth, as the authors note. One is prompted to ask whether this is only a weakness, or rather a virtue, holding doors open to inquiry, as Freud consequently refused to make claims about absolute truths. Implicit in this and other similar statements by Heidegger appears to be competition regarding who possesses the real truth instead of a vague one. Competition regarding authority belongs, of course, to the process of scientific study and is almost part of the spirit of the game. However, a contest of ultimate truth is a vanity, as it is difficult to consider that any individual would have a sole right to possess the truth.
Freud was a pioneer in changing psychiatric practice towards a more humane attitude and towards the appreciation of individuals and their feelings, compared to the then prevailing objectifying position. Thus, whatever criticism of psychoanalysis may be justified, and many points of criticism can, of course, be raised, Freud was not a positivist in the traditional sense. His important merit was to be the first to take the internal world of the patient seriously and to participate in it together with the patient, instead of categorizing it. Truth to Freud meant a correspondence between reality and its representation, not a final answer.
In conclusion, the impact of the difference between Heidegger’s and Freud’s methods for increasing personal openness vis á vis the reality needs to be remembered. Heidegger works as a philosopher in the solitude of philosophical analysis,Footnote1 whereas the clinical work initiated by Freud’s discoveries is conducted in a clinical relationship that involves two real people. This is a fundamental difference in the respective methods of these thinkers. It influences how they approach their subject of study, and it also offers a key to understanding why their opinions differ so much, despite the fact that they were treading on the same terrain of the human internal reality.
Anxiety
The authors discuss at length the role of anxiety in triggering the process that creates the Dasein experience. Several parallels are drawn between Heidegger and Freud that are well described and make it clear that Heidegger and Freud were searching for new understanding in the same subject area. Examples include the principles of concealment, falling prey to repression, disclosure, the call for openness, the triggering effect of anxiety, the search for meaning in what is inaccessible and the immanent conflict in that endeavor. All these appear similar in their views. The discussion of the similar nature of ‘being’ and ‘the unconscious’ also is thought-provoking and interestingly widens the psychoanalytical scope.
The reality of deep anxiety is not, however, primarily a philosophical challenge. More than anything, it is a part of clinical work with patients suffering from severe psychopathology. The authors refer to the works of Laing, Bion and other writers. Detailed descriptions of the nature of psychotic anxiety have also been presented by several clinical writers, such as Pao (Citation1977), Volkan (Citation1995) and Volkan and Akhtar (Citation2016).
The authors emphasize the clinical scope in analyzing the meaning of ontological anxieties. This part of the paper is closer to the reality of a clinician. Anxiety at the root of subjective experience is a clinical reality, whereas in philosophy anxiety has an existential color that accompanies great human dilemmas of life (Angst als Stimmung; as a mood). Clinical anxiety is of a different kind and has many faces varying from the catastrophic feeling of the collapse of the world in acute psychosis to the defensive aggression and persecutory anxiety prevailing in paranoia and in a less intensive mode in borderline states. In the less severe conditions anxiety manifests itself in more indirect ways as avoidance, inhibitions and withdrawal (Freud, Citation1924).
The authors clearly state that Dasein, as the source of authentic self-experience, is not a finished, universal phenomenon, but an incomplete one. In severe mental conditions anxiety is, however, far from problems of authenticity and closer to the primal struggle of keeping mental life alive, and sometimes even the body. In this scenario, anxiety does not function as a call to open windows towards authenticity, while in less severe clinical conditions anxiety comes closer to the perspective of the Dasein.
The ethos of the authors is to avoid formalism and righteousness especially when working with people with psychosis and other severe pathology. This message is important. The spirit of treating people with severe pathology in a personal, humane and non-authoritative way is crucial. The authors make a plea for an accepting and not a distancing role towards deep psychopathology and anxiety, and invite to be psychologically ready to meet people with severe pathological conditions. This is most welcome and makes a contrast to a categorizing and closing attitude towards these conditions and leaving them out of humane relationships.
The final comment concerns the effect of birth on the experience of anxiety. It is worth remembering that it was Otto Rank who proposed that birth is the primal source of human anxiety. Freud did not concur with Rank (Freud, Citation1924, pp. 135–6, 150–151), neither did Winnicott (1949/1987) agree with him.
The reason for this is physiological. The infant cannot have experiences of life together with others before birth, so the birth cannot traumatize the infant psychologically. There are no valuable memories of real interaction with the caretaker before the birth, and there are consequently no object-related memory traces that could be traumatized. The birth trauma cannot be conceived as a trauma in a genuine psychological meaning that would destroy prevailing psychological structures.
In contrast, birth is a fundamental developmental psychobiological reorganization that changes all of the infant’s physiological functions into a new mode so that they are capable of meeting the demands and vital interactions to come in the life outside the womb. Thus, birth is not a trauma, but a most radical and profound developmental step that starts a new type of life of the infant in the external world and with its players outside the womb after the nine months of intrauterine symbiotic existence with the physiological mother (Lehtonen, Citation2022; Lehtonen et al., Citation2020).
Alienation in modern times
The paper closes with a note on Heidegger’s view of modern life. Together with him, the authors emphasize the ontological unity of being human and creating technology in contrast to dividing them into separate domains. Man is responsible for his own creations, a credo that has also been characteristic of other existentialists. The current tendency to replace human experience with digital technology is powerful and is followed by alienation and malaise.
These thoughts are as topical today as they were in Heidegger’s time. The power of suppressing and staying silent is great. There is strong resistance raising a voice against the dominance of the technological ideals that replace a humanistic look at life.
A joint philosophical and psychoanalytic study of alienation due to the all-encompassing, ecological effect of digital technology is surely called for. The need for this is aptly worded by the authors. Further elaboration and expansion of these highly topical themes both in professional and public discussion would be most welcome. The reader can hardly feel differently from the authors about these notions.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Johannes Lehtonen
Johannes Lehtonen is a professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of Eastern Finland and a member of the Finnish Psychoanalytical Society. He started his research in the 1970s by comparing psychoanalytical dream theory with the neurophysiology of dreaming. The parallels discovered in them opened an opportunity to integrate psychoanalysis with neurophysiology in a new way. Later, he widened the integration by suggesting that the screen for dream images (the dream screen as described by Lewin) is not a separate concept, but is related to the body ego, here following Freud’s definition of the body ego as a projection of the body surface. Together with a research team at the University of Eastern Finland, he has further tested the validity of this conception in empirical studies on the infant’s neurophysiological responses to infant−mother interaction as well as to breast-feeding. These studies revealed specific responses to the interaction with the mother in infants already in the neonatal age. Signs of an emerging connection between hunger satisfaction and sleep induction were also found. The phenomenological side of these studies has also led him to recognize the value of philosophical understanding of early mental development, of which the analysis of the Dasein concept can be seen as one example. He has published his research in articles in international journals and in chapters in books such as in The Power of Understanding by Aira Laine (ed.), Karnac 2004, Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience by Mauro Mancia (ed.), Springer 2006, The Seed of Madness by Vamik Volkan and Salman Akhtar (eds.), Karnac 2016, Art Therapy for Psychosis by Katherine Killick (ed.), Routledge 2017. He has also published two books in Finnish (Tietoisuuden ruumiillisuus 2011, Olemassaolon tunne 2022).
Notes
1. To describe the place of solitude in Heidegger’s work, the authors quote Julia Kristeva (2020): Humanity is rediscovering existential solitude, the meaning of limits and mortality.... we find it in philosophers, in Hegel and Heidegger.
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