The Concept of the Individual “World‐project” as a Hermeneutic Tool
Daseinsanalytic research is therefore the investigation of the individual world‐project of someone labelled with a psychiatric diagnosis. Two major advantages of exploring the underlying world‐project in mental illness should be indicated. First, this allows for a view of the neurotic or psychotic individual in its wholeness. Second, it enables the Daseinsanalyst to look for a hidden meaning in the manifestly meaningless symptoms from which the patient is suffering. If it is true that everything any person feels, thinks, or does has its meaning as part of his own individual world‐project, then the same holds true for the feelings, thoughts, and doings of a mentally ill person. Therefore, their hidden meaning can be discovered as soon as light is shed on the underlying world‐project of someone suffering from a mental illness (Binswanger 2004, p. 202).
Placing a
hermeneutic tool in the hand of the Daseinsanalytic psychiatrist is a big advantage compared with traditional psychiatric descriptions, which usually do nothing other than look for the patient’s mental deficiencies in comparison with mentally healthy people. It is noticeable that the interpretation of symptoms based on this concept is totally different from the psychoanalytic one. Whereas Freud and his followers look for an infantile or psychogenetic meaning by relating the symptoms to repressed childhood experiences, Binswanger looks for their “ontological” meaning by relating them to the specific world‐project, which is, according to Binswanger, an ultimate given that even underlies the psychoanalytic “unconscious.”
Critical Perspectives
When Binswanger calls the world‐project a “transcendental form,” he reveals how he has read and adopted the ontology of Dasein given in Being and Time, namely not as an existential ontology, but as a transcendental one in the tradition of Kant and Husserl (see Binswanger 2004, p. 194). In other words: he has
missed the existential turn that makes this work a masterpiece.
I will explain the difference later when describing my own Daseinsanalytic approach to psychic suffering. Here I will just mention two highly problematic consequences of this misinterpretation: first, mental illness is given a deterministic aspect that gives psychotherapeutic treatment few prospects of success, although Binswanger himself seemed unaware of this consequence. Second, the world‐project itself – as a transcendental a priori – is no longer hermeneutically explicable. The predominant question now concerns the specific structure of the world‐project underlying mental illness. This means that the Daseinsanalytic investigation of the world‐project starts as a hermeneutic one, but then returns to the traditional psychiatric discourse, looking for “deviations from the norm” and judging the mentally ill person’s world‐projects as “restricted,” “impoverished,” “simplified,” and “depleted” Binswanger 2004, pp. 205, 209).
van Deurzen, Emmy. The Wiley World Handbook of Existential Therapy (pp. 57-58). Wiley. 2019, Kindle edition.
所以詮釋學的循環得以成立的前提是無法歸約
在雙方的互動中兩個人都沒有預設回得了家
事實上雙方都回不到家
但他們對家卻第一次可以有一種喜劇的理解
