An Epistemology of The Clinic Ludwig Binswanger's Phenomenology of The Other
An Epistemology of The Clinic Ludwig Binswanger's Phenomenology of The Other
An Epistemology of The Clinic Ludwig Binswanger's Phenomenology of The Other
In 1913, the German phenomenologist Max Scheler pointed out that psy-
chological knowledge was intersubjective by denition because its converse,
the oft-proposed denition of the mental as that which is accessible to one
person only, would put an end to all empirical psychology whatsoever.1
Although the problem of understanding the other was not new to the twen-
tieth century, in this period in Germany the topic of intersubjectivity arose
with new vigor in the overlapping discourses of phenomenology, psychol-
ogy, and philosophy.2 Scheler and other phenomenologists in the Husser-
lian tradition sought to understand mental experience in everyday contexts
The writing of this paper was made possible by the support of an NSF postdoctoral fellowship
in Science and Technology Studies based at Boston Universitys Center for Philosophy and History
of Science. I am indebted to Dr. Dieter Binswanger for giving me access to Bellevues patient
records and the University Archive in Tubingen, especially Irmela Bauer-Kloden, for help locating
source material. I am also grateful for critical commentary from Arnold Davidson, the members
of the editorial board at Critical Inquiry, and to Anne Harrington, Peter Galison, Alfred Tauber,
Bettina Bergo, Debbie Weinstein, and Bruce Fischl. All translations, unless otherwise cited, are my
own.
1. The passage continues, For the mental datum present to the individual must not only be
identiable throughout a multiplicity of acts on his own part, but by many other people as well
(Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath [New Haven, Conn., 1954], p. 221). See
also Scheler, Die Idole der Selbsterkenntnis, Abhandlungen und Aufsatze, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1915),
2: 3168.
2. Wilhelm Dilthey and those in the hermeneutic tradition made a concerted eort to
formulate a methodological basis for the human sciences based in great part on a psychology of
understanding (Verstehen). Diltheys classic work on a descriptive psychology that employed the
method of Verstehen in distinction to an analytic psychology utilizing explanation was originally
published in 1894; see Wilhelm Dilthey, Ideen uber eine beschreibende und zergliedernde
Psychologie, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Karlfried Grunder and Frithjof Rodi, 23 vols. to date
(Stuttgart, 1961), 5:139240. See also Michael Ermarth, Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical
Reason (Chicago, 1978), pp. 17176.
160
3. See Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, trans. Antos C. Rancurello,
D. B. Terrell, and Linda McAlister, ed. Oskar Kraus (1874; London, 1995); Edmund Husserl,
Logische Untersuchungen, 2 vols. (The Hague, 19001901). For a description of the ways in which
Brentanos notion of inner perception was adopted by Wilhelm Wundt for experimental ends, see
William Lyons, The Disappearance of Introspection (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), pp. 36.
4. Husserl argued that empathic viewing of the other was an act of intuition, but was not
originary; see Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological
Philosophy, trans. F. Kersten (1913; Dordrecht, 1982), 1, p. 6. Edith Stein, an assistant to Husserl,
elaborated on Husserls view of empathy in On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein (1917;
The Hague, 1964). Stein argued that empathy was the way in which we perceived an alien
consciousness and was an act of perceiving sui generis. She disputed Lippss claims that one could
achieve a seamless unity with the experience of another person and argued that we possess our
own and the others standpoint simultaneously. In 1913, Scheler published Zur Phanomenologie
und Theorie der Sympathiegefuhle und von Liebe und Ha, in which he contested Lippss theory of
projection, arguing that there could be a direct inner perception of anothers psychological reality,
not derived from the understanding of ones self. Schelers addendum, Anhang uber den Grund zur
Annahme des fremden Ich, was the focus of Ludwig Binswangers discussion of the other in his
Einfuhrung in die Probleme der allgemeinen Psychologie (Berlin, 1922); hereafter abbreviated E.
Moritz Geiger published a critical review on the problem of Einfuhlung in 1911; see Moritz Geiger,
Uber das Wesen und die Bedeutung der Einfuhlung, Bericht uber den Kongre der Deutschen
Gesselschaft fur Psychologie 4 (1911): 2973.
5. Other philosophers who wrote on intersubjectivity in this period, but whom I do not discuss
because they did not inuence Binswangers early psychiatric epistemology are Martin Buber, Karl
Lowith, and Husserl in his later work, particularly the fth meditation of his Cartesian
Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (1929; Dordrecht, 1995).
6. Also included in this group are the psychiatrists Franz Fischer and Emil Freiherr von
Gebsattel and the neurologist Erwin Straus, to name a few. As to Binswangers role, the
phenomenologist and historian Herbert Spiegelberg wrote, Binswanger was chiey a trail-blazer
for a new approach in phenomenological psychopathology, and there is little doubt that thus far
he is the major one. Certainly, for better or worse, none of his potential rivals in this enterprise has
made so much use of philosophical phenomenology (Herbert Spiegelberg, Phenomenology in
Psychology and Psychiatry: A Historical Introduction [Evanston, Ill., 1972], p. 232).
7. In 1942, Binswanger published an extensive phenomenology of intersubjectivity, a
celebration of we-hood (Wirheit) and love: Grundformen und Erkenntnis menschlichen Daseins
(1942), vol. 2 of Ausgewahlte Werke, ed. Max Herzog and Hans-Jurg Braun, 4 vols. to date
(Heidelberg, 1992). As this work appears twenty years after the scope of this paper, it will not be
discussed here, but certainly Binswangers early attempts at understanding intersubjectivity
formed the foundation for this later project. For more on this part of Binswangers oeuvre, see
Roger Frie, Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity in Modern Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: A Study of
Sartre, Binswanger, Lacan, and Habermas (Lanham, Md., 1997), and Michael Theunissen, Der
Andere: Studien zur Sozialontologie der Gegenwart (Berlin, 1977), pp. 43976. Jan Holthues does
discuss Binswangers early work, but does not pair his insights with a discussion of psychiatric
practice; see Jan Holthues, Kritik der Psychologie: Anthropologie und Wissenschaftstheorie bei
Ludwig Binswanger (Heidelberg, 1999). Recent work on Binswanger includes William Alan Sadler,
Existence and Love: A New Approach in Existential Phenomenology (New York, 1969); Torsten
Passie, Phanomenologisch-Anthropologische Psychiatrie und Psychologie: Eine Studie uber den
Wengener Kreis: Binswanger, Minkowski, von Gebsattel, Straus (Hurtgenwald, 1995); Heinz-Peter
Krienen, Ludwig Binswangers Versuch einer existentialontologischen Grundlegung des
psychopathologischen Daseins: Geschichte und aktuelle Situation (Frankfurt, 1982); Alice Holzhey-
Kunz, Leiden am Dasein: Die Daseinsanalyse und die Aufgabe einer Hermeneutik
psychopathologischer Phanomene (Vienna, 1994); and Klaus Homan, Ludwig Binswanger
Begegnung von Psychoanalyse und Philosophie, Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse 37 (1996): 24864.
See also the recent issue of Luzifer-Amor 29 (2002), with essays on Daseinsanalyse by Klaus
Homann, Albrecht Hirschmuller, Alice Holzhey-Kunz, Gion Fidel Condrau, Roger Frie, and
Gerlinde Angelika Schopf.
11. See Karl Jaspers, Allgemeine Psychopathologie: Fur Studierende Arzte und Psychologen (1913;
Berlin, 1923). In a letter to Jaspers, Binswanger said that despite his criticism of Jasperss methods,
they were united in the attempt to turn psychology in the direction of subjectivity; see Binswanger,
letter to Jaspers, 1 Nov. 1922, Binswanger Archive 443/17, Tubingen University Archive, Tubingen,
Germany; hereafter abbreviated UAT.
12. Binswangers understanding of the doctor-patient relationship places him alongside other
early critics of psychoanalysis such as Sandor Ferenczi in promoting a therapeutic relationship
modeled on a more intimate connection than that of psychoanalytic transference; see Sandor
Ferenczi, The Clinical Diary of Sandor Ferenczi, ed. Judith Dupont (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), and
chapters on Ferenczi in Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago, 2000). In the 1950s,
psychoanalysts such as D. W. Winnicott and Michael Balint began to look favorably on a more
direct relationship between patient and doctor. See also Andre Haynal, The Technique at Issue:
Controversies in Psychoanalysis (London, 1988), and Ralph Greeson and M. Wexler, The Non-
Transference Relationship in the Psychoanalytic Situation, International Journal of Psychoanalysis
50 (1969): 2739. Homan points out that Binswanger saw his later existential analysis as a
foundation for psychoanalysis and not as an independent, therapeutic method; see Homan,
Ludwig Binswangers Einu auf die deutsche Psychoanalyse nach 1945, Jahrbuch der
Psychoanalyse 41 (1999): 191208. On the relationship of Binswangers approach to psychoanalysis,
see also Gerald Izenberg, The Existentialist Critique of Freud: The Crisis of Autonomy (Princeton,
N.J., 1976), and Leston Havens, Approaches to the Mind: Movement of the Psychiatric Schools from
Sects to Science (Boston, 1973).
13. See Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 18731893, ed. Harry Francis
Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica, Calif., 1994). For Vischer, empathy was the
projection of ones ego onto the object. Other aesthetic theorists of Einfuhlung included Johannes
Volkelt, Der Symbol-Begri in der neuesten Aesthetik (Jena, 1876); Paul Stern, Einfuhlung und Association
in der neuren Asthetik (Hamburg, 1898); Theodor Lipps; and Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and
Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. Michael Bullock (New York, 1953).
14. See Theodor Lipps, Asthetik: Psychologie des Schonen und der Kunst, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 19036)
and Leitfaden der Psychologie (Leipzig, 1903).
15. Binswanger focused on the expressionist collective of the Blaue Reiter, particularly the work
of Franz Marc; see Der Blaue Reiter, ed. Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc (1912; Munich, 1984).
16. Binswanger found himself in accord with Marcs declaration that he was searching for a
feeling [Empnden] of the organic rhythm of all things, a pantheistic feeling-into
[Sichhineinfuhlen] the tremble and ow of the blood of nature, in the trees, the animals, in the air
(Marc, letter to Reinhard Piper [the publisher of Der Blaue Reiter], 20 Apr. 1910, quoted in Claus
Pese, Franz Marc: Leben und Werk [Stuttgart, 1989], p. 61).
17. The larger cultural debates of this period reected this elevation of the purely intellectual
over that of the technical, especially as evidenced in the struggle over epistemological issues in the
new discipline of psychology. See Ash, Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, pp. 4250, and Fritz
Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 18901933
(Hanover, N.H., 1990), pp. 10213. In this vein, G. E. Berrios asserts that Jasperss adoption of
Husserlian phenomenology amounted to a strategic labeling of the older descriptive method as
phenomenological, which was merely a way to shore up the decaying authority of classic
nineteenth-century descriptivism; see G. E. Berrios, Phenomenology, Pychopathology, and
Jaspers: A Conceptual History, History of Psychiatry 3 (1992): 30327 and Phenomenology and
Psychopathology: Was There Ever a Relationship? Comprehensive Psychiatry 34 (Jul.Aug. 1993):
21320.
21. See Binswanger, Versuch einer Hysterieanalyse, Jahrbuch fur psychoanalytische und
psychopathologische Forschungen 12 (190910): 174356 and Analyse einer hysterischen Phobie,
Jahrbuch fur psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen 3 (1911): 228308. Binswanger
also served as president of the Zurich Psychoanalytic Society from 1910 to 1914 and became an
important player in the political machinations between the Vienna psychoanalytic school and the
independently minded Zurich school; see Binswanger, letter to Eugen Bleuler, 12 Nov. 1914, UAT
443/1.
22. See Binswanger, Psychologische Tagesfragen innerhalb der klinischen Psychiatrie,
Zeitschrift fur die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie 26 (1914): 57499; hereafter abbreviated PT.
This Swiss Society for Psychiatrists was founded in 1895 and composed mainly of asylum
psychiatrists. It was dedicated to both promoting the science of psychiatry and contending with
the practical matters of the asylum care of patients.
23. Binswanger cited Freud here (PT, p. 595); see Sigmund Freud, Ratschlage fur den Arzt
bei der psychoanalytischen Behandlung, Zentralblatt fur Psychoanalyse 2 (1912): 486. Some writers
on empathy discuss Freuds concept of identication as an unconscious form of empathy; see
Robert Katz, Empathy: Its Nature and Uses (New York, 1963), pp. 7176. The elements of
identication include introjection, imitation, and regression. This was not understood as a
therapeutic/scientic tool, however, as was the above description of the analytic encounter.
24. See Freud, Ratschlage fur den Arzt bei der psychoanalytischen Behandlung, p. 486.
25. See Binswanger, Bermerkungen zu der Arbeit Jaspers: Kausale und verstandliche
Zusammenhange zwischen Schicksal und Psychose bei der Dementia praecox (Schizophrenia),
Internationale Zeitschrift fur arztliche Psychoanalyse 1 (1913): 38390. Jasperss original article was
Kausale und verstandliche Zusammenhange zwischen Schicksal und Psychose bei der Dementia
Praecox (Schizophrenie), Zeitschrift fur Neurologie 14 (1912): 158263.
26. Jaspers argued that psychoanalysis could oer psychological explanations of the
unconscious or what he called unnoticed (unbemerkte) conscious events, but not causal
explanations. The latter were only possible within the bounds of a natural scientic approach.
27. Without causality, Binswanger wrote that scientic psychology would receive its
deathblow (Todessto) (PT, p. 592).
28. See Binswanger, Analyse einer hysterischen Phobie. See also Binswanger, letter to Paul
Haberlin, 5 Feb. 1913, in Paul Haberlin-Ludwig Binswanger Briefwechsel 19081960, ed. Jeannine
Luczak (Basel, 1997), p. 107.
29. See Binswanger, letter to Hermann Oppenheim, 9 Sept. 1913, UAT 443/34. See also
Binswanger, letter to Christian Muller, 26 Nov. 1918, UAT 443/34.
30. See Binswanger, letter to Bleuler, 18 Feb. 1916, UAT 443/1. Christian Muller describes
Duboiss method as one situated between hypnosis and psychoanalysis, which included the
Socratic method of questioning patients. Dubois employed the term psychoneurosis
(psychonevrose) to indicate a psychogenic origin of neurosis; see Muller, De lasile au centre
psychosocial: Equisse dune histoire de la psychiatrie suisse (Lausanne, 1996), pp. 15053.
his life that his enthusiasm for psychoanalysis had only abated after ap-
proximately ten years of disappointment, but its practical limitations had
become evident rather quickly.31
It was the nature of the Bellevue clinical milieua family-based asylum,
where the lives of sta and patients intermingledthat contributed to Bin-
swangers growing dissatisfaction with many aspects of the psychoanalytic
method. The Bellevue asylum was founded by Binswangers grandfather in
1857 and had operated according to a family model, where sta and patients
shared common living quarters and participated together in social activities
(g. 1). During his fathers tenure as director of the asylum from 1880 to
1910, the young Binswanger often encountered patients that his father was
treating at the nearby family home. As director, Ludwig Binswanger and his
family lived on asylum grounds in the villa Harmonie until 1917 and then
moved to the garden house, also on asylum grounds.32 Binswanger repeat-
edly commented to friends and colleagues about the intensive demands of
working at an asylum; it was more taxing than undertaking psychiatricwork
in a clinic, which had more circumscribed hours.33 Indeed, his involvement
often extended to evening hours, when he attended social functions for the
patients, including performing as the musical accompanist for a patient
who gave a vocal concert at the asylum.34 In 1957, Binswanger explicitly con-
trasted his practice with Freuds, who had a separate entry in his home for
his patients so that his family would be shielded from them.35 Rather than
31. Looking back in 1956, Binswanger wrote that in 1911 he thought almost every patient could
be analyzed; see Binswanger, Sigmund Freud: Reminiscences of a Friendship, trans. and ed. Norbert
Guterman (New York, 1957), p. 29.
32. See Binswanger, Zur Geschichte der Heilanstalt Bellevue in Kreuzlingen, in Ludwig
Binswanger und die Chronik der Klinik Bellevue in Kreuzlingen: Eine Psychiatrie in Lebensbildern,
ed. Herzog (Berlin, 1995), p. 65.
33. See Binswanger, letter to Fraulein von der Leyen, 21 May 1929, UAT 443/38.
34. See Binswanger, letter to Frau P., 1 Dec. 1934, UAT 441/2256.
35. See Binswanger, Zur Geschichte der Heilanstalt Bellevue in Kreuzlingen, p. 49.
36. See Binswanger, letter to Freud, 15 Feb. 1925, in Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Binswanger:
Briefwechsel 19081938, ed. Gerhard Fichtner (Frankfurt am Main, 1992), p. 199.
37. See ibid. In his reply, Freud emphasized that he had merely intended to stress the
importance of dispelling conscious expectations in the therapeutic process; see Freud, letter to
Binswanger, 22 Feb. 1925, in ibid., p. 202.
38. Jaspers, General Psychopathology, trans. J. Hoening and Marian W. Hamilton (Chicago,
1968), p. 22. Jaspers said that this process had to be an interplay of detachment and sympathy and
that such an endeavor entailed working on oneself as much as working on the facts.
39. As Freud explained:
I cannot advise my colleagues too urgently to model themselves during psycho-analytic
treatment on the surgeon, who puts aside all his feelings, even his human sympathy [menschliches
Mitleid], and concentrates his mental forces on the single aim of performing the operation as
skilfully as possible. . . . The justication for requiring this emotional coldness [Gefuhlskalte] in
the analyst is that it creates the most advantageous conditions for both parties: for the doctor a
desirable protection for his own emotional life and for the patient the largest amount of help that
42. Lipps also discussed general apperceptive Einfuhlung, mood empathy, and empathy in
nature; see Lipps, Leitfaden der Psychologie, pp. 18791.
46. For Schelers theory of inner perception, see Scheler, Zur Phanomenologie und Theorie der
Sympathiegefuhle und von Liebe und Hass: Mit einem Anhang uber den Grund zur Anahme der
Existenz des fremden Ich (Halle, 1913).
47. Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, p. 242. See also Scheler, Wesen und Formen der Sympathie,
6th ed. (Bern, 1973), p. 236.
48. Scheler questioned the circularity of Lippss theory; to grasp others bodily changes as
expressive movements was evidence that we intuited another expressive being originally and had
not secondarily connected the others bodily expressions with our own psychological experience.
49. See Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, p. 206; see also Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-
Formal Ethics of Values, trans. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk (1916; Evanston, Ill., 1973), p.
408.
50. See Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, pp. 26162.
51. Slightly changed text printed in Scheler, Wesen und Formen der Sympathie, p. 239.
52. Empathy theory said that deceptions or errors in understanding others were a failure to
make the right projection onto others, but Scheler pointed out that the more common error was
that we mistakenly take others experiences for our own. This fact revealed that the most
fundamental understanding of others was not a function of our self-projection, but our capacity
to take on the others experience; see E, p. 237.
53. This did not mean that one could not use representations and ones intellect to further
understand the other, according to Binswanger; see E, p. 275.
54. See Binswanger, Welche Aufgaben ergeben sich fur die Psychiatrie aus den Fortschritten
der neueren Psychologie? Zeitschrift fur die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie 91 (1924): 40236;
hereafter abbreviated WA.
56. Minkowski had spent two months living with this patient and described the patients daily
delusion that at the end of the day he would be destroyed by having to imbibe all the waste in the
world. Minkowski argued that it was the patients sense that there was no future stretching out
before him, or a disturbance of his time sense, that formed the basis for the development of his
delusions. This interpretation was at odds with the commonly accepted one: that the patients
delusions caused the disturbance of his time sense; see Minkowski, Etude psychologique et
analyse phenomenologique dun cas de melancolie schizophrenique, in Schweizerischer Verein
fur Psychiatrie Protokoll der 63. Versammlung, Samstag den 25. und Sonntag der 26. November
1922 in Zurich, Schweizer Archiv fur Neurologie und Psychiatrie 12 (1923): 33132.
57. See Bleuler, Korreferat Bleuler, in Schweizerischer Verein fur Psychiatrie Protokoll der
63. Versammlung, pp. 33031.
58. See Minkowski, Diskussion zur Phaenomenologie, in Schweizerischer Verein fur
Psychiatrie Protokoll der 63. Versammlung, pp. 33236.
59. Binswanger singled out biology as a eld suering from such exhaustion, which had
important repercussions for psychiatry, as it was its neighboring eld.
60. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, pt. 1, 2, 2:7.
61. See Binswanger, Sigmund Freud, p. 9.
62. Husserl had travelled to Reichenau for relaxation and to visit Alfred Schwenninger,
assistant at the Psychiatrische Landesanstalt near Reichenau, Konstanz. Schwenninger had also
been a student of Lipps and was among the Munich group that went to study with Husserl in
Gottingen in 1905; see Schuhmann, Husserl-Chronik, Denk- und Lebensweg Edmund Husserls (The
Hague, 1977), pp. 271, 89. In a letter to a colleague (27 Aug. 1923, UAT 443/26), Binswanger reported
that Husserl had visited the Bellevue asylum with Schwenninger, and Binswanger enjoyed a very
animated afternoon.
63. Binswanger also discussed the intuition of essences in geometry, for example in the
perception of a triangle, but this section was rather brief in comparison to his discussion of artistic
forms. Binswanger stated that he wanted to use geometic examples to remedy what he thought
could be the misperception of phenomenology as an artistic process; see UP, 3:51.
64. Binswanger warned against characterizing this essence as simply an ideal form in a Kantian
sense or as possessing real existence, as it could not be explained by the ideal-real epistemological
opposition; see UP, 3:40.
65. The source that Binswanger cites throughout his lecture is Marc, Briefe, Aufzeichnungen,
und Aphorismen (Berlin, 1920), p. 122.
76. Later in his lecture, Binswanger did venture a description of the phenomenological essence
or core of autism, which he identied as an altered attitude toward values. This essence stood as a
corrective to the generally accepted view of autism as a rejection of outer reality and a focus on the
inner world. Binswanger based these conclusions on evidence from a patient along with work
done by Gruhle and Jaspers; see UP, 3:63.
77. Husserl, Shorter Logical Investigations, p. 107. Kurt Danziger explains the origins of the
psychological concept of the Kundgabe in systematic experimental introspection with von Aster,
who used it as the expression of the overall quality of experience rather than the description of
parts of the experience; see E. von Aster, Die psychologische Beobachtung und experimentelle
Untersuchung von Denkvorgangen, Zeitschrift fur Psychologie 49 (1908): 56107. As Danziger
explains it, the study of the Kundgabe focused on personality and was picked up in the work of
Kurt Lewin on motivated behavior and clinical existential psychology; see Kurt Danziger,
Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research (Cambridge, 1990), p. 46.
Conclusion
Binswangers inquiry into phenomenological philosophy encompassed
a host of methods including empathy, inner perception, essential intuition,
and the analysis of expressive utterances (see E, p. 264). In the end, however,
his syncretistic bent emphasized the common root of these methods rather
than their dierences; they all relied on an intuition or direct perception of
the person and not on conceptual knowledge or forms of judgement. The
goal was the understanding of the person from the immediacy of the clinical
encounter, and this process
always presupposes intuition (presentative or representative); the
hearer apperceives the speaker intuitively as a person, who intimates
this and that, or he perceives (wahrnehmen) him as such, just as he
perceives the intimation itself. The understanding of the intimation
(Kundgabe) is simply not a conceptual knowledge of the intimation,
not a judgement of the manner of the statement. [E, p. 264]
A phenomenology of the mentally ill other was carried out through the
direct apprehension of the patients words and expressions as manifesta-
tions of his or her personhood.
Binswangers focus on the patient as a person was dependent on the role
of the psychiatrist as an empathic and perceptive beingin short, as a well-
honed epistemological instrument. Those with an intellectual/spiritual
(geistiges) grasp of the complexities of experience, mixed with a good dose
of artistic and ethical understanding, were equipped to practice this new
phenomenological psychiatry. This sort of psychiatrist embodied the qual-
78. Binswangers studies of the manic ight of ideas were published in Binswanger, Uber
Ideenucht (Zurich, 1933), and his case studies of schizophrenia are collected in Binswanger,
Schizophrenie (Pfullingen, 1957).
79. Foucault, Dream, Imagination, and Existence, p. 32.