Background
Blnswanger, Ludwig was born in 1881 in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland.
Blnswanger, Ludwig was born in 1881 in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland.
Universities of d UsanneHeidelberg and Zurich. Qualified as a JunC or’ I^()' lnfls: Husserl, Heidegger, Freud and i„.
1910-1956, Director, Sanatorium BelUekreuzlingen.
j'Jain Publications:
p 'Einführung in ilie Probleme der allgemeinen Q'U u,h>gie [Introduction to the Problems of enerul Psychology], Amsterdam: E. J. Bouset.
A~) Grundformen und Erkenntnis menschlichen ase‘ns [Basic Forms and Cognition of Human
Existence!. Zurich: Niehaus; second revised edition, Zurich: Niehaus, 1953.
(1947-1955) Ausgewählte Vorträge und Aufsätze [Selected Letters and Essays], 2 vols. Bern: Francke. (1957) Schizophrenie, Pfullingen: Neske.
(1960) Melancholie und Manie.
Pfullingen: Neske. English translations of some of Binswanger’s work are to be found in:
May, Rollo. Angel. Ernest, and Ellenberger. Henri F. (1958) Existence, New York: Basic Books.
Needleman, J. (1963) Being-in-the-World, New York: Basic Books.
Pivnicki-Dimitrije (1979) ‘Paradoxes of psychotherapy: in honour and memory of Ludwig Binswanger’. Allan Memorial Institute, Montreal, Canada: Confmia-Psychiatrica 22 (4): 197-203. Sahakian, W. S. (1976) ‘Philosophical psychotherapy: an existential approach’. Journal of Individual Psychology 32 (1): 62-8. Van Den Berg, J. H. (1955) The Phenomenological Approach to Psychiatry, Springfield. 111., and Oxford: Thomas. Binswanger developed a form of psychotherapy, called Dasein analyse or ‘existential analysis’, based directly on the philosophical work of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. He was born into a family of distinguished physicians and psychiatrists, succeeding his father as Director of the Sanatorium Bellevue, founded by his grandfather. Binswanger sought to counter what he saw as the excessive reductionism both of natural science and of current psychoanalytic accounts of human experience and behaviour. All such accounts, he argued, imposed their own point of view on the patient. Phenomenology and existentialism, on the other hand, could help us to achieve an understanding of the world in terms of the patient’s own framework of meaning, without presupposition. without restructuring. Existential analysis thus seeks to draw out and make explicit the patient’s a priori ‘being in the world’, the phenomena being allowed to ‘speak for themselves’ rather than being viewed through the lens of this or that theory. This is not to say that natural science is unimportant. On the contrary, in so far as we seek to change or control the patient’s experience, science remains our most effective tool. But scientific explanation needs to be set alongside direct understanding of the patient’s worldview. Existential analysis, although for many years restricted to relatively small numbers of practitioners in continental Europe, has experienced something of a revival in recent years. This is partly because of a new meeting of minds between the continental and Anglo-American philosophical traditions. It also reflects a shift of emphasis in health care towards what has become known as patient-centredness, that is clinical decisions being based increasingly on the patient’s own values and experience rather than on the professional's opinion of their needs.