Foucault and BinswangerBeyond the Dream

Bryan Smyth

This essay deals with the role played in theearly development of Foucault’s thought by Lud-wig Binswanger’s project of Daseinsanalyse(“existential analysis”). It is well known thatthere is an important biographical connectionhere. But given its existential-phenomenologicalcharacter, Foucault’s interest in Daseinsanalyseis generally seen as what Alan Sheridan called a“false start,” a juvenile pre-history of the realFoucault, and thus as lacking any philosophicalimport with regard to his later work.1 However,notwithstanding that Foucault did rejectDaseinsanalyse, that view is incorrect. On thecontrary, I submit that what Foucault specificallyrejected was not phenomenology per se, butrather the methodological framework of geneticphenomenology—and that this rejection wasmotivated precisely by the inadequacy of thatframework for addressing normative concernswith subjectivity.

Recognition of this situation is important fortwo related reasons. First, it can help to clarify theoverall continuity of Foucault’s oeuvre, inas-much as it suggests that the apparent normativeconcerns of his final works stem from a longitu-dinal axis. Second, it reveals a potential philo-sophical complementarity between Foucauldianaccounts of the “historicity of forms of experi-ence” and phenomenology, inasmuch as the lat-ter acknowledges that even at the genetic level itremains transcendentally naïve if it fails to cometo terms with the external horizons of experience.In other words, it suggests that Foucault’s workcan be read as extending, rather than rejecting,phenomenology’s transcendental concern withsubjectivity.

My essay has four sections. I first (1) intro-duce Foucault’s relation to Binswanger, and then

(2) clarify what Foucault found philosophicallysignificant in Daseinsanalyse. I then (3) considerthe methodological limits of the latter and howthis relates to Foucault, and by way of conclusion(4) I discuss this with particular reference toBinswanger’s case of “Ellen West.”

1

Along with others such as Karl Jaspers andEugène Minkowski, Binswanger was a pioneer-ing figure in phenomenological-existential psy-chiatry, and his project of Daseinsanalyse—which he developed mainly in the 1930s and1940s in the context of his directorship of thefamily-based Bellevue clinic on Lake Konstanzin Kreuzlingen (Switzerland)—is a majorlandmark in this field.

It is well-known among Foucault scholars thatthere is at least an historical connection here, asFoucault’s first (at least non-pseudonymous)publication (1954) was a lengthy introduction toJacqueline Verdeaux’s French translation ofBinswanger’s 1930 article “Traum undExistenz”—a piece which, it should be noted,Binswanger himself, approached by Verdeaux,selected for translation.2 He made this choicepresumably because, in addition to being rela-tively non-technical (it was originally publishedin a literary review), it represented the first step inthe formulation of Daseinsanalyse, the singlemost important source for which—theDaseinsanalytik of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit—had appeared in 1927. Basically, already drawnto Husserlian phenomenology as essential toproper psychiatric insight, Binswanger saw inHeidegger’s work—especially the notion of be-ing-in-the-world [In-der-Welt-Sein]—a crucial

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new way to interpret holistically the immanentstructure of styles of existence that would other-wise be reduced to psychopathology. The fullestexpression of Daseinsanalyse appeared later inGrundformen und Erkenntnis menschlichenDaseins (1942), a work that Binswanger supple-mented with a detailed case study of a patientknown as “Ellen West” (1944/45).

Length aside, Foucault’s was no mere intro-duction. Rather, as he made clear, it was an at-tempt to use Binswanger’s article as an incisivepoint of entry into Daseinsanalyse as a whole—in effect, (although he did not say so explicitly), aradical effort to root out its “unthought.” And heconstrued this project precisely as Binswangerhimself had characterized it, namely, as anthro-pology qua (unified) science of “man”—or qua(what might be called) “science of subjectivity,”3

where subjectivity, approached under the aegis of“existentiality” [Existenzialität], is understoodexistentially as a certain mode of situated tran-scendence.4

In this way, what Foucault called the “basicsense” of Binswanger’s anthropological projectimplies that it defies traditional disciplinarylines.5 As he put it in the Introduction, his intentwas “to present a form of analysis which does notaim at being a philosophy, and whose end is notto be a psychology; a form of analysis which isfundamental in relation to all concrete, objective,and experimental knowledge; a form of analysis,finally, whose principle and method are deter-mined from the start solely by the absolute privi-lege of their object: man, or rather, the being ofman, Menschsein”6—this latter being a key termin Binswanger’s thought.

Foucault’s view was reflected in the epigraphfrom Kierkegaard’s Postscript that Binswangerplaced at the start of “Dream and Existence” (andelsewhere besides): “Above all, we must keepfirmly in mind what it means to be a human be-ing.” But it was more the case for Binswangerthat the imperative here is to keep asking “what itmeans to be a human being”—theMenschseinsfrage, as it were. As he claimed inthe article itself, “the question [as to] who ‘wehuman beings’ actually are, and what we are, hasnever been given less of an answer than in our

own time, and today we stand again at the verybeginning of a new questioning regarding thiswe.”7 In the studies of mania (“flight of ideas”)and manic-depression that Binswanger pub-lished shortly after “Dream and Existence”—thefirst application, so to speak, of Daseins-analyse—this anthropological orientation—andits contempt for traditional boundaries betweennormal and pathological—was explicit. “It is ouropinion,” he wrote, “that ‘manic-depressive in-sanity’ does not teach us anything anthropologi-cally new about ‘humans,’ but rather that it givesus, in a clearer and more conspicuous form, ananswer to the question [as to] ‘what a human be-ing is’ [‘was der Mensch ist’].”8 Binswanger’swork thus directly addresses Kant’s “fourth”—and, according to the Jäsche Logic—fundamen-tal question for philosophy—at least, as Kant putit— “in [the] cosmopolitan sense,” namely, Wasist der Mensch?9 And concerning this path of an-thropological interrogation, Foucault—who wasalready lecturing on Kant’s Anthropology (a textwhich he would later translate with an introduc-tion)10—expressed the view that Binswanger’swork represented “the royal road.”11

Foucault thus had a profound interest inBinswanger. The notes from the Introduction to“Dream and Existence” make reference to sev-eral other of Binswanger’s works, and DanielDefert reported that Foucault owned “carefullymarked copies of all of Binswanger’s major arti-cles and books.”12 Apparently, Foucault had eventranslated some of these,13 including a case his-tory of schizophrenia published in 1945 (the caseof “Ilse”), the title of which carried a contrast thatcould easily be seen as significant for Foucault:“Wahnsinn als lebensgeschichtliches Phänomenund als Geisteskrankheit” (“Madness as Life-Historical Phenomenon and as Mental Disease”).Foucault visited Binswanger at his clinic atKreuzlingen,14 possibly multiple times, as well asat his summer residence,15 and he also enteredinto a correspondence with him. It was in a letterto Foucault that Binswanger commented quite fa-vourably on Foucault’s text: “Your essay is forme a life-historical event [ein lebensgeschicht-liches Ereignis]”16—although Foucault’s radi-calization of his position was not lost on him.17

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Conversely, in later reflecting on his reading ofBinswanger, Foucault noted that in looking forsome “counterbalance” to “the traditional gridsimposed by the medical gaze,” “these superb de-scriptions of madness as fundamental, unique,incomparable experiences were, most certainly,decisive for me.”18

Foucault’s first book, Maladie mentale etpersonnalité (1954),19 a short text for studentsthat was written at the behest of Althusser for aseries edited by Jean Lacroix, also included anumber of significant references to Binswanger,all of which remained in the drastically revised(and re-titled) edition of 1962—although as weknow, Foucault had and always retained an ex-tremely negative—even hostile—attitude towardthat work.

2

It is, no doubt, largely for this and corollaryreasons that this earliest period is usually givenvery short shrift in the literature on Foucault—ifit is even mentioned at all. It is typically seenalong the lines of what Alan Sheridan called a“false start,”20 a sort of juvenile pre-history of thereal Foucault. Standard periodizations ofFoucault’s work begin in 1961 with History ofMadness, and proceed thence to define periods of“archaeology” and “genealogy,” followed by a fi-nal period, centring on the subsequent volumesof The History of Sexuality which, dealing with“practices of the self” or “ethics,” could be la-belled “the return of the subject” (or something tothat effect).

But as is well known, there are difficult ques-tions concerning, not necessarily the overall“unity” of Foucault’s work, for that may be a mis-placed idea, but rather the consistency of archae-ology and/or genealogy with that work of the fi-nal period. For what Amy Allen called the “anti-subjective hypothesis”—consisting in the beliefthat “the point of Foucault’s archaeological anal-yses of discourse and his genealogical analysesof power/knowledge is to attack, undermine, andeventually eradicate the concept of the humansubject”21—in other words, to participate in the(structuralist) “death of the subject”—is a widelysubscribed reading (whether positively or nega-

tively) of Foucault. Yet on the surface, at least,this seems scarcely compatible with Foucault’slater turn to the self and issues of ethical subjec-tivity. Connected to this interpretive problem arethe larger questions of the practical and norma-tive consequences of the “anti-subjective hypoth-esis” with respect to the viability—or even thevery possibility—of moral and transformativeagency. For if subjectivity is nothing but an effectof anonymous regimes of power/knowledge,then it would seem that Foucault’s project pre-cludes any possible grounding for evenminimally autonomous forms of ethical andpolitical resistance to those regimes.

Now, I don’t think that this is the case. Rather,I think that Foucault’s characterization of his pro-ject as “a history of the different modes by which,in our culture, human beings are made sub-jects”22 is accurate—that his abiding concern waswith “the relations between the subject, truth, andthe constitution of experience”23—which is tosay, as Foucault did indeed say, that “the subject”was all along “the general theme of [his] re-search.”24 It is just that his is a project of transcen-dental critique. As such, it is focused on condi-tions of possibility. But in contradistinction to theuniversalism of Kantian transcendental critique,Foucault’s aims to come to terms with the social,cultural, and especially historical conditions ofpossibility—in a word, the historical a priori—ofmodern subjectivity.25 As he wrote at the end of“What is an Author?” this sort of critique asks:“under what conditions and through what formscan an entity like the subject appear in the orderof discourse? What position can it occupy, whatfunctions does it exhibit, and what rules does itfollow in each type of discourse?”26 It is, as Allenargued, a matter of treating subjectivity asexplanandum and consequently bracketing it outmethodologically (Allen herself doesn’t put itthat way) from any explanatory (that is, constitu-tive) role.27 “Foucault’s archaeological and gene-alogical works should not be understood as at-tempts to eradicate the concept of subjectivity;on the contrary, they are attempts to specify thediscursive and non-discursive practices thatmake a particular . . . conception of subjectivitypossible,”28 and this in a way, Allen claims, that

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allows for coherent sense to be made of the laterconcern with (constitutive) “practices of theself.”

This is generally correct, I think. I would,however, take issue with Allen concerning howshe frames her conclusion: “this way of readingFoucault holds out the possibility of a new under-standing of Foucault’s philosophical project, onewhich emphasizes the continuity between thethree periods . . . of his work,”29 that is, in a waythat stretches back “almost [to] the very begin-ning of his philosophical project.”30 For I wouldcontend that Foucault’s earliest, pre-archaeologi-cal period also fits into this continuity, and,what’s more, that it may be necessary to include ittherein. For it is by no means immediately clearjust how the interpretive shift that Allen suggestswill result in “a conception of a subject that hintsat the possibility of new and potentially liberat-ing modes of subjectivity.”31 With this in mind, Iwould rather take literally Foucault’s statementthat the later return to the subject was a matter, ashe said, of “reintroducing the problem of the sub-ject that [he] had more or less left aside in [his]first studies.”32

Béatrice Han called that a “curious under-statement.”33 This is because it seems to contra-dict Foucault’s unambiguous rejection of any ap-proach—paradigmatically, phenomenology—that remains committed to a constitutive notionof the subject. But this view is inattentive (oroblivious) to what it was that Foucault had foundso interesting in Binswanger’s Daseinsanalyse.Most generally, this has to do with Kant, and therelative priority between the Critiques and theAnthropology—of universality and finitudewithin the transcendental theme. Is it the case, asKant is standardly read, that the latter is to begrasped in terms of the former? Or is it rather thecase that the Critiques themselves need to befounded in a critical anthropology that disclosesthe ontological finitude of Menschsein? This lat-ter view is along the lines of Heidegger’s claimthat the essence of Kant’s philosophical projectlay in the attempt to ground metaphysics througha disclosure of its “inner possibility” in “the sub-jectivity of the human subject,” and that “thegrounding of metaphysics is [thus] a questioning

with regard to the human being, i.e., Anthropol-ogy.”34

Now, despite Foucault’s late claim that, forhim, Heidegger was “the essential philosopher,”and that his “entire philosophical developmentwas determined by [his] reading of Heidegger,”35

this view of Kant is not quite the line he follows.He did not, that is, take up anthropology as an an-alytic of finitude lying on this side of the empiri-cal-transcendental divide. It is thus not just thesense of the transcendental that gets reworked inFoucault, but the sense of the empirical as well.And he was drawn to consider the point of theirconnection—the point where, as Merleau-Pontyechoed Husserl, the empirical and the transcen-dental sich einströmen, where they flow into oneanother. Such is exactly what the young Foucaultperceived in Binswanger’s Daseinsanalyse. Ashe wrote in the Introduction to “Dream and Exis-tence,” Binswanger, rejecting any a priori dis-tinction between them, “outflanks the problem ofontology and anthropology by going straight toconcrete existence, to its historical content anddevelopment. From there, by way of an analysisof the structures of existence . . . he moves contin-ually back and forth between the anthropologicalforms and the ontological conditions of exis-tence. He continually crosses a dividing line thatseems so difficult to draw, or rather, he sees itceaselessly crossed by a concrete existence inwhich the real limit of Menschsein and Dasein ismanifested. . . . It is a matter, for [Binswanger], ofbringing to light, by returning to the concrete in-dividual, the point at which the forms and condi-tions of existence mutually articulate.”36 It is be-cause Binswangerian “existentiality”—that is,the existential a priori—is in this way orthogonalto the Heideggerian distinction between the exis-tential and the existentiell that Daseinsanalysecan maintain a coherent, non-aporetic commit-ment to a concrete sense of constitutive subjec-tivity.

Here some brief comments concerningBinswanger’s relation to Heidegger are neces-sary—comments which, as far as I know, goagainst virtually every reference to Binswangerin the Foucault literature. For these tend to glossDaseinsanalyse as in effect simply the applica-

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tion of Heidegger’s thought to the psycho-pathological domain. Whereas in fact, notwith-standing an enormous intellectual debt,37

Binswanger’s work—under the contrary influ-ence of Martin Buber, for example, as well asKarl Löwith’s important early critique ofHeidegger—differed in certain fundamentalways from what Heidegger was doing. AsBinswanger himself once put it, Daseinsanalyseis based on “a productive misunderstanding”[eine produktive Mißverständis] of Heidegger’sDaseinsanalytik.38 Basically, whereas Heideggerapproached Dasein in strictly ontological terms,Binswanger’s approach was, as we have seen, an-thropological—something which, as made ex-plicit in the Zollikon seminars, was wholly anath-ema to what Heidegger was doing. Rather thanjust on the general structures of “being-in-the-world” interpreted in terms of “care” [Sorge],Binswanger focused on what he termed particu-lar “world-designs” [Weltentwürfe], the articula-tion of Eigen-, Mit-, and Umwelten, that are asmuch a function of “love” [Liebe], understood asan irreducible dimension of intersubjective co-existence that is, in an existential sense, “be-yond” the world [über-die-Welt-hinaus]. Indeed,criticizing the narrowness and inadequacy ofHeidegger’s account of existence as simply In-der-Welt-Sein, and extending it into an account ofIn-der-Welt-Über-die-Welt-hinaus-Sein (“being-in-and-beyond-the-world”), is in effect the prin-cipal task undertaken by Binswanger inGrundformen und Erkenntnis menschlichenDaseins, and it lies at the very heart of hisDaseinsanalyse. This “misunderstanding” ofHeidegger—which, in addition to Buber andLöwith, also reflects the earlier influence onBinswanger of Husserl39—centers Binswanger’swork on a notion of “encounter” [Begegnung]and gives i t a robust dialogical andintersubjective orientation that differs radicallyfrom Heideggerian phenomenology. It is thisview of existentiality as “being-in-and-beyond-the-world” that enables Binswanger to maintaina coherent commitment to a concrete sense ofconstitutive subjectivity.

3

Even this coherence, however, has its limits.Binswanger’s is, after all, a phenomenologicalproject. Above I used the term “bracketing out”deliberately to indicate the family relation be-tween phenomenology and Foucauldian archae-ology and genealogy as radical reprises of tran-scendental critique. The key point of contactconcerns a profound methodological problem af-flicting phenomenology at its very core, namely,that its definitive reliance upon the self-evidentness of intuitional givenness renders itcongenitally incapable of undertaking a criticalinterrogation of the socio-historical horizonswithin which (that is, against the background ofwhich) this self-evidentness is experienced.Without such an interrogation phenomenologywould be left (in Husserl’s terms) “transcenden-tally naïve”—yet it is a task that phenomenol-ogy’s methodological commitment to givennessrenders it incapable of discharging. It cannot getbeyond the level of “genetic phenomenology,”and thus necessarily remains limited within theframework of egological self-temporalization(Lebensgeschichte).40

We can see this in Foucault’s first book—which is accordingly divided into two parts. (Itwas primarily the second part that Foucault re-wrote.) The first part deals with “the psychologi-cal dimensions of mental illness,” and it is herethat we find the references to Binswanger.Foucault presented phenomenological psychol-ogy as the proper culmination of psychology. Forsince “the way in which a subject accepts or re-jects his illness . . . constitutes one of the essentialdimensions of the illness,”41 it is necessary to un-derstand pathological experience “from the in-side.”42 Fundamentally, as he put it in an histori-cal survey of psychology published in 1957, thecoherence of the discipline necessitates that it befounded upon an “existential analysis of the wayin which human reality is temporalized, [how itis] spatialized, and how it projects a world.”43

This prioritizes precisely the sort of phenomeno-logical psychopathology pract iced byBinswanger, which is at root “a matter of restor-ing . . . both the experience that the patient has of

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his illness . . . and the morbid world on which thisconsciousness of illness opens, the world atwhich this consciousness is directed, and whichit constitutes.”44

Qua world, the “morbid” world of mental ill-ness serves as the background condition of possi-bility for the inner history of the illness itself.45

But at the same time, “it is never an absolute thatabolishes all reference to the normal.” Rather,“the sick consciousness always opens out with adouble reference, either to the normal and thepathological, the familiar and the strange, theparticular and the universal, or wakefulness anddreaming [l’onirisme].”46 How, then, Foucaultasks, does such a world relate to the ‘normal’world? Fundamentally, it is as a matter of aban-donment or detachment—or more generally, ofalienation. Whereas—and here Foucault cites animportant invocation of Heraclitus thatBinswanger makes in “Dream and Existence”47

—the “normal” world is the single world of com-mon wakeful life, Heraclitus’ koinos cosmos, the“morbid” world is a “private world”—Heraclitus’ idios cosmos—that results from aprocess of Verweltlichung. Foucault leaves thisterm untranslated, but we could call it “mundani-zation”—by which is meant a disintegrative col-lapse that “abandons the subject to the world as toan external fate.”48 It is the loss of the dimensionof existence “beyond” the world. “The nucleus of[mental] illness lies in this contradictory unity ofa private world and an abandonment to theinauthenticity of the world.”49

But Foucault did not stop there. Even if in1954 he positioned Binswanger’s phenomeno-logical anthropology at the apex of psychology,he did not think that psychology was the wholestory. Even then he recognized the need to carrythe analysis further. As he wrote at the beginningof the Introduction to “Dream and Existence,” itis necessary “to situate existential analysis withinthe development of contemporary reflection onman,” and, by following—i.e., taking further—“the inflection of phenomenology toward an-thropology,” to show “what foundations havebeen proposed for concrete reflection on man.”50

It is a matter of accounting for the enigmatic

Verweltlichung of mental illness in terms of theworld itself.

This is addressed in the second part of thebook, and herein lies the rupture between the twoeditions. One the one hand, in the first editionFoucault looked toward the “external and objec-tive conditions” of the world, in effect laying outa Marxist materialist account of mental illness interms of the alienating structural contradictionsof modern society.51 This left the book hangingon a disconnect between a phenomenological an-thropology and a materialist social history.52 It iswith respect to this that Foucault later recol-lected: “I wondered whether, rather than playingon this alternative, it would not be possible toconsider the very historicity of forms of experi-ence.”53 As he had written in 1957, the possibilityof psychology does depend on an existential-an-alytical basis, but also a return to “what is mosthuman in man, namely, his history.”5 4

(Geschichte, not just Lebensgeschichte.)Thus, on the other hand, the revised second

part offers what amounts to a summary of His-tory of Madness. Here the concern is withpsychopathology as “a fact of civilization”—notthe socio-economic conditions that would causemental illness in some (in principle) universallytrue and ahistorical sense, but rather the histori-cally specific cultural and discursive conditionsin vir tue of which madness has beenpathologized as such, and the subsequent institu-tion of normalizing disciplinary practices. Thework thus no longer seeks “the root of mental ill-ness” through “a reflection on man himself,”55

but rather in “a certain historically situated rela-tion of man to the madman and to the true man.”56

The overall task changes accordingly from an at-tempt to situate personal existence socially, toone of situating (phenomenological) psychologyand its attendant concepts (e.g., mental pathol-ogy) in its historical context. As the revised firstpart concludes: “Is there not in mental illness awhole nucleus of significations that belongs tothe domain in which it appeared—and, to beginwith, the simple fact that it is in that domain that itis circumscribed as an illness?”

It was this additional level of self-critique thatBinswanger’s phenomenology lacked. For

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Foucault, then, the problem with Daseinsanalyseis that it operated uncritically within the parame-ters of normalcy of the modern world. But thisworld is not the world. It is, rather, a historicallyspecific and contingent world, and this must betaken into account, if one’s perspective is not tosuffer an insupportable transcendental naïveté.

No less important than identifying this line ofcriticism is recognizing Foucault’s work as a cor-rective generalization of Daseinsanalyse—thehistorical generalization of existential apriority.Archaeology and genealogy respond to the meth-odological impasse of phenomenology by articu-lating the historical horizons of its experienceand thus providing a critical perspective on theforms of subjectivity that are operative within it.This need not replace phenomenology, but rathercan be seen as situating it in a way that allows fora more complete and critical fulfillment of thecommon radical transcendental thematic—andthis in a way that can maintain a non-aporeticcommitment to a concrete sense of constitutivesubjectivity.57

By way of analogy with Daseinsanalyse astherapy, then, “one can think of later Foucault aspracticing genealogical therapy on the madnessof modernity. He is trying to historicize . . . theclosed, normalized view we have of ourselves as... subjects in order to ready us for the possibilityof a new interpretation of the human self thatcould take up currently marginalized practices,thus opening up our world rather than shutting itdown.”58 In short, the hints and gestures towardliberation and disalienation that are sensed inFoucault’s later work especially point back to thenormative spark that animated the Daseins-ana-lytical account of existentiality with which heoriginally engaged. As Foucault once wrote in aNietzschean vein: “Historical sense has more incommon with medicine than philosophy. . . . Itstask is to become a curative science.”59

4

The issues that I have been discussing are inmany ways crystallized in Binswanger’s case of“Ellen West.” This is a well-known but contro-versial case study published by Binswanger in1945 of an intelligent, creative, idealistic,

revolutionarily-minded Jewish woman sufferingfrom anorexia, who, after two failed analyses andseveral suicide at tempts , ended up inBinswanger’s care. By means of a “hermeneuticexegesis [of her life] on the ontic-anthropologi-cal level,” he ultimately diagnosed her as suffer-ing an incurable sort of schizophrenia: basically,he thought that there were existentially irrecon-cilable rifts between her Eigenwelt and her Mit-and Umwelten. Her mortification of her body wasan expression of this. Her dreams and desireswere could not be rooted concretely. “Ellen’s be-ing-beyond does not begin and end in being-in-the-world [but] in a return to Nothingness.”60

“Nowhere does her existence find a loving shel-ter, nor can it anywhere lay hold of its ground.This means that her existence is threatened by itsown nothingness.”61 Her authentic self-realiza-tion thus required her corporeal de-realization.Binswanger thus consented to her leaving thesanatorium, fully confident—correctly, as itturned out—that her suicide was inevitable. And,indeed, she poisoned herself just days later.Binswanger infamously argued that this was an“authentic suicide,” that it was “the fulfillment ofthe life-meaning of this existence,”62 and he con-sequently regarded this case as methodologicallyimportant for understanding Daseinsanalyse.

Historically, though, this case has been the fo-cus of a variety of criticisms, (albeit without ac-cess to original documentation), including mal-practice,63 “psychic homicide,”64 misdiagnosis(concerning eating disorders),65 misogyny, andanti-Semitism.66 Such criticism has led some tosuggest that Daseinsanalyse represents a kind of“therapeutic nihilism.”67 Recently available ar-chival material has given rise to renewed scrutinyand criticism of the case.68 This exceeds thescope of the present essay. But what is germane isthat in the 1950s Foucault endorsed Binswan-ger’s diagnosis, in both the Introduction to“Dream and Existence”—where, indeed, deathand suicide form a leitmotiv—as well as in botheditions of Maladie mentale. What are we tomake of this?

We can relate this to the question of “the deathof the subject.” While there is something like “thedeath of the subject” in Foucault’s archaeological

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and genealogical works, that is just a mistakenview of the “bracketing out” of the subject. Andthis sort of “de-subjectivation” is geared towardthe goal of a less “alienated” realization of sub-jectivity. There is something truly like “the deathof the subject” in Foucault—but unexpectedly, itis in the earliest period, and it is manifested in thecase of Ellen West. This shows simultaneouslythe radical nature but also the pitfalls ofBinswanger’s project as phenomenological. Thesubject’s death—her suicide —is accepted as“authentic” and inevitable solely and preciselybecause of the inherent methodological limita-tions of the genetic phenomenological frame-work. Ellen West was aspiring to constitutivesubjectivity—in an important sense she is “thesubject”—but the structural obstacles of themodern world that underlay her alienation and

oppression were beyond the ken of Binswanger’sperspective. The inauthenticity and impossibilityof her existence are real enough, but a more radi-cally “curative” view is possible through a moreradically historical analysis. Taken naïvely, hercase shows that subjectivity is a dream, and that“death is the absolute meaning of the dream.”69

But a more complete transcendental analysiswould show that we can wake up, surpass the pri-macy of the dream, and find real happiness in theorder of expression by engaging subjectivity as“an ethical task and an historical necessity.”70

Unexpectedly, then, it is precisely through the ar-chaeological and genealogical work that manyhave indicted in “the death of the subject” thatFoucault may actually contribute somethingquite valuable to saving it.71

NOTES

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1. Alan Sheridan, Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth(London: Tavistock, 1980), 195.

2. Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, trans. B. Wing(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991),44; David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault: ABiography (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 59.

3. Susan Lanzoni, Bridging Phenomenology and theClinic: Ludwig Binswanger’s “Science of Subjectiv-ity” (Dissertation, Department of the History of Sci-ence, Harvard University, 2001). Cf. Mitchell G.Ash, Gestalt Psychology in German Culture,1890–1967: Holism and the Quest for Objectivity(Cambridge University Press, 1998), 11; Louis Sass,Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light ofModern Art, Literature, and Thought (Harvard Uni-versity Press, 1994), 329.

4. See Ludwig Binswanger, Ausgewählte Werke,4 vols, eds. M. Herzog, H.-J. Braun, and A. Holzhey-Kunz (Heidelberg: Roland Asanger, 1992–94),1.214.

5. Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits I: 1954–1975 (Paris:Gallimard, 2001), 94.

6. Ibid.7. Binswanger, “Traum und Existenz” [1930]. In

Ausgewählte Werke, 3:98.8. Binswanger, Ausgewählte Werke, 1:141.9. In the Jäsche Logic (1800) Kant summarizes “the

field of philosophy in [the] cosmopolitan sense” in

four questions: What can I know? [Was kann ichwissen?] What should I do? [Was soll ich tun?] Whatmay I hope for? [Was darf ich hoffen?] What is a hu-man being? [Was ist der Mensch?] Kant says that thefirst question is answered in metaphysics, the secondin morals, the third in religion and the fourth in an-thropology. But crucially, he adds that all of this canbe included under anthropology because all of thequestions “relate to anthropology.” Lectures onLogic, trans. and ed. J. M. Young (New York: Cam-bridge University Press, 1992), 538.

10. See Foucault, Dits et écrits I, 22.11. Ibid., 95.12. James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New

York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 73.13. See Foucault, Dits et écrits I, 21.14. Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, 60.15. Eribon, Michel Foucault, 45–46.16. Binswanger to Foucault, 10.5.1954. Cited in Max

Herzog, Weltentwürfe: Ludwig Binswangersphänomenologische Psychologie (Berlin: Walter deGruyter, 1994), 118.

17. As Binswanger put it: “your essay is for me a life-his-torical-event, for I have lived through the time whenthe dream had the greatest difficulty securing its rightto scientific investigation, wehreas now it is virutallytruiumphant and existence in the sense of wakefulexperience is already nearly disparaged.”

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18. Duccio Trombadori, Colloqui con Foucault (Coop-erative editrice, 1981). Cited in Eribon, MichelFoucault, 47.

19. The chronological order in which Foucault respec-tively composed this work and the Introduction toBinswanger’s article is not clear.

20. Sheridan, Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth, 195.21. Amy Allen, “The Anti-Subjective Hypothesis:

Michel Foucault and the Death of the Subject,” ThePhilosophical Forum 31 (2000): 114.

22. Michel Foucault, “Afterword: The Subject andPower,” in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow,Michel Foucault: Between Structuralism and Her-meneutics, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1983), 208.

23. Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: In-terviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, ed. L. D.Kritzman, trans. A. Sheridan et al. (New York:Routledge, 1990), 48.

24. Foucault, “Afterword: The Subject and Power,” 209.25. See Kant, “What is Enlightenment?”26. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory,

Practice, ed. D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell Univer-sity Press, 1977), 137–38.

27. “There is nothing particularly disturbing about thedeath of man. It is just a particular case—or if youlike, one of the visible forms—of a muchmore gen-eral death. I do not mean by it the death of God, butthat of the subject, of the Suject with a capital S, ofthe the subject understood as the origin andfoundationof knowledge, Freedom, Language, andHistory” (“La naissance d'un monde,” in Dits etécrits i, 816).

28. Allen “The Anti-Subjective Hypothesis,” 125.29. Ibid., 126–27, my emphasis.30. Ibid., 125, my emphasis.31. Ibid.32. Foucault Live: Interviews, 1966–84, ed. S. Lotringer,

trans. J. Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989),329.

33. Béatrice Han, Foucault’s Critical Project: Betweenthe Transcendental and the Historical, trans. E. Pile(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 10.

34. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Meta-physics, 5th, enlarged edition, trans. R. Taft (IndianaUniversity Press, 1997), 144.

35. Michel Foucault, “Final Interview,”Raritan5 (1985): 8.

36. Foucault, Dits et écrits I, 95.

37. See in particular Ludwig Binswanger, “DieBedeutung der Daseinsanalytik Martin Heideggersfür das Selbstverständnis der Psychiatrie” [1949], inAusgewählte Aufsätze und Vorträge, vol. 2 (Bern:Francke, 1955), 264.

38. Binswanger, Grundformen und Erkenntnis mensch-lichen Daseins [1942], Ausgewählte Werke, 2:4.

39. On Husserl and love, see R. Philip Buckley,“Husserl’s Rational ‘Liebesgemeinschaft’,” in Re-search in Phenomenology 26 (1996): 116–26, andUllrich Melle, “Edmund Husserl: From Reason toLove,” in Phenomenological Approaches to MoralPhilosophy: A Handbook, ed. John J. Drummondand Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002):229–48.

40. This is precisely the primary issue in Trân DúcTháo’s work, Phénoménologie et matérialismedialectique (Paris: Minh-Tân, 1951).

41. Michel Foucault, Maladie mentale et personnalité(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954), 56.

42. Ibid., 53.43. Foucault, Dits et écrits I, 164.44. Foucault, Maladie mentale et personnalité, 55-6.45. Ibid., 68.46. Ibid., 60–61.47. Binswanger, Ausgewählte Werke, 3:112–15.48. Foucault, Maladie mentale et personnalité, 69.49. Ibid., 69. For Binswanger, the aim of therapy is thus

to establish new intersubjective bonds that overcomesuch “detachment from life” and thereby liberate theperson from captivation in/by his subjective realm.The therapist is a link between individual idiosyn-crasy and the shared intelligibility of the publicworld. Her task is to help free the patient “from out ofblind isolation, out of the idios cosmos . . . thus frommere life in his body, his dreams, his private inclina-tions, his pride and his exuberance, and to illuminateand liberate him for the ability to share in the koinoscosmos, the life of genuine fellowship (Koinoinia)orcommunity” (“Über Psychotherapie” [1935],Ausgewählte Werke, 3:215f.).

50. Foucault, Dits et écrits I, 93.51. A project that Joseph Gabel had already commenced

and would later express in terms of a “socio-patho-logical parallelism”—a global theory of psychic andsocial alienation. See Joseph Gabel, “La Réification:Essai d’une psychopathologie de la penséedialectique,” Esprit (October 1951): 459–82; Laconscience fausse: Essai sur la réification (Paris:Éditions de Minuit, 1962).

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52. A situation that mirrors the structure of Trân’s Phe-nomenology and Dialectical Materialism.

53. Cited in Eribon, Michel Foucault, 47–48.54. Foucault, Dits et écrits I, 165.55. Foucault, Maladie mentale et personnalité,

2 [l’homme lui-même].56. Ibid. [l’homme fou … l’homme vrai].57. Cf. Han, Foucault’s Critical Project, 11.58. Hubert Dreyfus, Introduction to Michel Foucault,

Mental Illness and Psychology, trans. A. Sheridan(New York: Harper and Row, 1976), xxxix.

59. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, and His-tory,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 156.

60. Ludwig Binswanger, “Der Fall Ellen West: Eineanthropologisch-klinische Studie” [1944/45],Ausgewählte Werke, 4:278.

61. Ibid., 280.62. Ibid., 295.63. Carl R. Rogers“Ellen West and Loneliness,” Review

of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 1 (1961):94–101; R. D. Laing, The Voice of Experience (Lon-don: Allen Lane, 1982), 53–62; John Maltsberger etal., “The Case of Ellen West Revisited: A PermittedSuicide,” in Suicide & Life-threatening Behavior26 (1996): 86–97.

64. David Lester, “Ellen West’s Suicide as a Case of Psy-chic Homicide,” Psychoanalyt ic Review58:2 (1971): 259–60.

65. Kim Chernin, Obsession: Reflections on the Tyrannyof Slenderness (New York: Harper Collins, 1981),

162–77; Liliane Studer, “Ellen West (ca. 1890–ca.1924): ‘Das Leben lastet wie eine Wolke auf mir’,” inWahnsinnsFrauen, ed. S. Duda and L. F. Pusch(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992): 226–54.

66. Abigail Bray “The Silence Surrounding ‘EllenWest’: Binswanger and Foucault,” Journal of theBritish Society for Phenomenology 32 (2001):125–46. Cf. Roger Frie and Klaus Hoffmann,“Binswanger, Heidegger, and Antisemitism: Replyto Abigail Bray,” ibid., 33 (2002): 221–28, and Bray“A Question of Indifference?—Reply to Frie andHoffmann,” ibid., 228–32.

67. Lanzoni, Bridging Phenomenology and the Clinic,267; cf. 271.

68. See Albrecht Hirschmüller, “Ludwig BinswangersFall ‘Ellen West’: Zum Verhältnis von Diagnostikund Übertragung,” Luzifer-Amor 29 (2002): 18–76;Hirschmüller, ed., Ellen West: Eine Patientin LudwigBinswangers zwischen Kreativität und destruktivemLeiden (Heidelberg: Roland Asanger, 2003); andNaanah Akavia, and Albrecht Hirschmüller, eds., El-len West: Gedichte, Prosatexte, Tagebücher,Krankengeschichte (Heidelberg: Roland Asanger,2007).

69. Foucault, Dits et écrits I, 123.70. Ibid., 147.71. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the

2009 meeting of the Society for Existential andPhenomenological Theory and Culture, on a panelorganized by Chloë Taylor and Bettina Bergo.

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