Foucault and Binswanger Beyond the Dream

Bryan Smyth

This essay deals with the role played in the (2) clarify what Foucault found philosophically early development of Foucault’s thought by Lud- significant in Daseinsanalyse. I then (3) consider wig Binswanger’s project of Daseinsanalyse the methodological limits of the latter and how (“existential analysis”). It is well known that this relates to Foucault, and by way of conclusion there is an important biographical connection (4) I discuss this with particular reference to here. But given its existential-phenomenological Binswanger’s case of “Ellen West.” character, Foucault’s interest in Daseinsanalyse is generally seen as what Alan Sheridan called a 1 “false start,” a juvenile pre-history of the real Foucault, and thus as lacking any philosophical Along with others such as Karl Jaspers and import with regard to his later work.1 However, Eugène Minkowski, Binswanger was a pioneer- notwithstanding that Foucault did reject ing figure in phenomenological-existential psy- Daseinsanalyse, that view is incorrect. On the chiatry, and his project of Daseinsanalyse— contrary, I submit that what Foucault specifically which he developed mainly in the 1930s and rejected was not phenomenology per se, but 1940s in the context of his directorship of the rather the methodological framework of genetic family-based Bellevue clinic on Lake Konstanz phenomenology—and that this rejection was in Kreuzlingen (Switzerland)—is a major motivated precisely by the inadequacy of that landmark in this field. framework for addressing normative concerns It is well-known among Foucault scholars that with subjectivity. there is at least an historical connection here, as Recognition of this situation is important for Foucault’s first (at least non-pseudonymous) two related reasons. First, it can help to clarify the publication (1954) was a lengthy introduction to overall continuity of Foucault’s oeuvre,inas- Jacqueline Verdeaux’s French translation of much as it suggests that the apparent normative Binswanger’s 1930 article “Traum und concerns of his final works stem from a longitu- Existenz”—a piece which, it should be noted, dinal axis. Second, it reveals a potential philo- Binswanger himself, approached by Verdeaux, sophical complementarity between Foucauldian selected for translation.2 He made this choice accounts of the “historicity of forms of experi- presumably because, in addition to being rela- ence” and phenomenology, inasmuch as the lat- tively non-technical (it was originally published ter acknowledges that even at the genetic level it in a literary review), it represented the first step in remains transcendentally naïve if it fails to come the formulation of Daseinsanalyse, the single to terms with the external horizons of experience. most important source for which—the In other words, it suggests that Foucault’s work Daseinsanalytik of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit— can be read as extending, rather than rejecting, had appeared in 1927. Basically, already drawn phenomenology’s transcendental concern with to Husserlian phenomenology as essential to subjectivity. proper psychiatric insight, Binswanger saw in My essay has four sections. I first (1) intro- Heidegger’s work—especially the notion of be- duce Foucault’s relation to Binswanger, and then ing-in-the-world [In-der-Welt-Sein]—a crucial PHILOSOPHY TODAY SPEP SUPPLEMENT 2011 92 © Depaul University 2011 new way to interpret holistically the immanent own time, and today we stand again at the very structure of styles of existence that would other- beginning of a new questioning regarding this wise be reduced to psychopathology. The fullest we.”7 In the studies of mania (“flight of ideas”) expression of Daseinsanalyse appeared later in and manic-depression that Binswanger pub- Grundformen und Erkenntnis menschlichen lished shortly after “Dream and Existence”—the Daseins (1942), a work that Binswanger supple- first application, so to speak, of Daseins- mented with a detailed case study of a patient analyse—this anthropological orientation—and known as “Ellen West” (1944/45). its contempt for traditional boundaries between Length aside, Foucault’s was no mere intro- normal and pathological—was explicit. “It is our duction. Rather, as he made clear, it was an at- opinion,” he wrote, “that ‘manic-depressive in- tempt to use Binswanger’s article as an incisive sanity’ does not teach us anything anthropologi- point of entry into Daseinsanalyse as a whole— cally new about ‘humans,’ but rather that it gives in effect, (although he did not say so explicitly), a us, in a clearer and more conspicuous form, an radical effort to root out its “unthought.” And he answer to the question [as to] ‘what a human be- construed this project precisely as Binswanger ing is’ [‘was der Mensch ist’].”8 Binswanger’s himself had characterized it, namely, as anthro- work thus directly addresses Kant’s “fourth”— pology qua (unified) science of “man”—or qua and, according to the Jäsche Logic—fundamen- (what might be called) “science of subjectivity,”3 tal question for philosophy—at least, as Kant put where subjectivity, approached under the aegis of it— “in [the] cosmopolitan sense,” namely, Was “existentiality” [Existenzialität], is understood ist der Mensch?9 And concerning this path of an- existentially as a certain mode of situated tran- thropological interrogation, Foucault—who was scendence.4 already lecturing on Kant’s Anthropology (a text In this way, what Foucault called the “basic which he would later translate with an introduc- sense” of Binswanger’s anthropological project tion)10—expressed the view that Binswanger’s implies that it defies traditional disciplinary work represented “the royal road.”11 lines.5 As he put it in the Introduction, his intent Foucault thus had a profound interest in was “to present a form of analysis which does not Binswanger. The notes from the Introduction to aim at being a philosophy, and whose end is not “Dream and Existence” make reference to sev- to be a psychology; a form of analysis which is eral other of Binswanger’s works, and Daniel fundamental in relation to all concrete, objective, Defert reported that Foucault owned “carefully and experimental knowledge; a form of analysis, marked copies of all of Binswanger’s major arti- finally, whose principle and method are deter- cles and books.”12 Apparently, Foucault had even mined from the start solely by the absolute privi- translated some of these,13 including a case his- lege of their object: man, or rather, the being of tory of schizophrenia published in 1945 (the case man, Menschsein”6—this latter being a key term of “Ilse”), the title of which carried a contrast that in Binswanger’s thought. could easily be seen as significant for Foucault: Foucault’s view was reflected in the epigraph “Wahnsinn als lebensgeschichtliches Phänomen from Kierkegaard’s Postscript that Binswanger und als Geisteskrankheit” (“Madness as Life- placed at the start of “Dream and Existence” (and Historical Phenomenon and as Mental Disease”). elsewhere besides): “Above all, we must keep Foucault visited Binswanger at his clinic at firmly in mind what it means to be a human be- Kreuzlingen,14 possibly multiple times, as well as ing.” But it was more the case for Binswanger at his summer residence,15 and he also entered that the imperative here is to keep asking “what it into a correspondence with him. It was in a letter means to be a human being”—the to Foucault that Binswanger commented quite fa- Menschseinsfrage, as it were. As he claimed in vourably on Foucault’s text: “Your essay is for the article itself, “the question [as to] who ‘we me a life-historical event [ein lebensgeschicht- human beings’actually are, and what we are, has liches Ereignis]”16—although Foucault’s radi- never been given less of an answer than in our calization of his position was not lost on him.17 FOUCAULT AND BINSWANGER 93 © Depaul University 2011 Conversely, in later reflecting on his reading of tively) of Foucault. Yet on the surface, at least, Binswanger, Foucault noted that in looking for this seems scarcely compatible with Foucault’s some “counterbalance” to “the traditional grids later turn to the self and issues of ethical subjec- imposed by the medical gaze,” “these superb de- tivity. Connected to this interpretive problem are scriptions of madness as fundamental, unique, the larger questions of the practical and norma- incomparable experiences were, most certainly, tive consequences of the “anti-subjective hypoth- decisive for me.”18 esis” with respect to the viability—or even the Foucault’s first book, Maladie mentale et very possibility—of moral and transformative personnalité (1954),19 a short text for students agency. For if subjectivity is nothing but an effect that was written at the behest of Althusser for a of anonymous regimes of power/knowledge, series edited by Jean Lacroix, also included a then it would seem that Foucault’s project pre- number of significant references to Binswanger, cludes any possible grounding for even all of which remained in the drastically revised minimally autonomous forms of ethical and (and re-titled) edition of 1962—although as we political resistance to those regimes. know, Foucault had and always retained an ex- Now, I don’t think that this is the case. Rather, tremely negative—even hostile—attitude toward I think that Foucault’s characterization of his pro- that work. ject as “a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made sub- 2 jects”22 is accurate—that his abiding concern was It is, no doubt, largely for this and corollary with “the relations between the subject, truth, and reasons that this earliest period is usually given the constitution of experience”23—which is to very short shrift in the literature on Foucault—if say, as Foucault did indeed say, that “the subject” it is even mentioned at all. It is typically seen was all along “the general theme of [his] re- along the lines of what Alan Sheridan called a search.”24 It is just that his is a project of transcen- “false start,”20 a sort of juvenile pre-history of the dental critique. As such, it is focused on condi- real Foucault. Standard periodizations of tions of possibility. But in contradistinction to the Foucault’s work begin in 1961 with History of universalism of Kantian transcendental critique, Madness, and proceed thence to define periods of Foucault’s aims to come to terms with the social, “archaeology” and “genealogy,” followed by a fi- cultural, and especially historical conditions of nal period, centring on the subsequent volumes possibility—in a word, the historical a priori—of of The History of Sexuality which, dealing with modern subjectivity.25 As he wrote at the end of “practices of the self” or “ethics,” could be la- “What is an Author?” this sort of critique asks: belled “the return of the subject” (or something to “under what conditions and through what forms that effect). can an entity like the subject appear in the order But as is well known, there are difficult ques- of discourse? What position can it occupy, what tions concerning, not necessarily the overall functions does it exhibit, and what rules does it “unity” of Foucault’s work, for that may be a mis- follow in each type of discourse?”26 It is, as Allen placed idea, but rather the consistency of archae- argued, a matter of treating subjectivity as ology and/or genealogy with that work of the fi- explanandum and consequently bracketing it out nal period. For what Amy Allen called the “anti- methodologically (Allen herself doesn’t put it subjective hypothesis”—consisting in the belief that way) from any explanatory (that is, constitu- that “the point of Foucault’s archaeological anal- tive) role.27 “Foucault’s archaeological and gene- yses of discourse and his genealogical analyses alogical works should not be understood as at- of power/knowledge is to attack, undermine, and tempts to eradicate the concept of subjectivity; eventually eradicate the concept of the human on the contrary, they are attempts to specify the subject”21—in other words, to participate in the discursive and non-discursive practices that (structuralist) “death of the subject”—is a widely make a particular . . . conception of subjectivity subscribed reading (whether positively or nega- possible,”28 and this in a way, Allen claims, that PHILOSOPHY TODAY SPEP SUPPLEMENT 2011 94 © Depaul University 2011 allows for coherent sense to be made of the later with regard to the human being, i.e., Anthropol- concern with (constitutive) “practices of the ogy.”34 self.” Now, despite Foucault’s late claim that, for This is generally correct, I think. I would, him, Heidegger was “the essential philosopher,” however, take issue with Allen concerning how and that his “entire philosophical development she frames her conclusion: “this way of reading was determined by [his] reading of Heidegger,”35 Foucault holds out the possibility of a new under- this view of Kant is not quite the line he follows. standing of Foucault’s philosophical project, one He did not, that is, take up anthropology as an an- which emphasizes the continuity between the alytic of finitude lying on this side of the empiri- three periods ...ofhiswork,”29 that is, in a way cal-transcendental divide. It is thus not just the that stretches back “almost [to] the very begin- sense of the transcendental that gets reworked in ning of his philosophical project.”30 For I would Foucault, but the sense of the empirical as well. contend that Foucault’s earliest, pre-archaeologi- And he was drawn to consider the point of their cal period also fits into this continuity, and, connection—the point where, as Merleau-Ponty what’s more, that it may be necessary to include it echoed Husserl, the empirical and the transcen- therein. For it is by no means immediately clear dental sich einströmen, where they flow into one just how the interpretive shift that Allen suggests another. Such is exactly what the young Foucault will result in “a conception of a subject that hints perceived in Binswanger’s Daseinsanalyse.As at the possibility of new and potentially liberat- he wrote in the Introduction to “Dream and Exis- ing modes of subjectivity.”31 With this in mind, I tence,” Binswanger, rejecting any a priori dis- would rather take literally Foucault’s statement tinction between them, “outflanks the problem of that the later return to the subject was a matter, as ontology and anthropology by going straight to he said, of “reintroducing the problem of the sub- concrete existence, to its historical content and ject that [he] had more or less left aside in [his] development. From there, by way of an analysis first studies.”32 of the structures of existence ...hemovescontin- Béatrice Han called that a “curious under- ually back and forth between the anthropological statement.”33 This is because it seems to contra- forms and the ontological conditions of exis- dict Foucault’s unambiguous rejection of any ap- tence. He continually crosses a dividing line that proach—paradigmatically, phenomenology— seems so difficult to draw, or rather, he sees it that remains committed to a constitutive notion ceaselessly crossed by a concrete existence in of the subject. But this view is inattentive (or which the real limit of Menschsein and Dasein is oblivious) to what it was that Foucault had found manifested. ...Itisamatter, for [Binswanger], of so interesting in Binswanger’s Daseinsanalyse. bringing to light, by returning to the concrete in- Most generally, this has to do with Kant, and the dividual, the point at which the forms and condi- relative priority between the Critiques and the tions of existence mutually articulate.”36 It is be- Anthropology—of universality and finitude cause Binswangerian “existentiality”—that is, within the transcendental theme. Is it the case, as the existential a priori—is in this way orthogonal Kant is standardly read, that the latter is to be to the Heideggerian distinction between the exis- grasped in terms of the former? Or is it rather the tential and the existentiell that Daseinsanalyse case that the Critiques themselves need to be can maintain a coherent, non-aporetic commit- founded in a critical anthropology that discloses ment to a concrete sense of constitutive subjec- the ontological finitude of Menschsein? This lat- tivity. ter view is along the lines of Heidegger’s claim Here some brief comments concerning that the essence of Kant’s philosophical project Binswanger’s relation to Heidegger are neces- lay in the attempt to ground metaphysics through sary—comments which, as far as I know, go a disclosure of its “inner possibility” in “the sub- against virtually every reference to Binswanger jectivity of the human subject,” and that “the in the Foucault literature. For these tend to gloss grounding of metaphysics is [thus] a questioning Daseinsanalyse as in effect simply the applica- FOUCAULT AND BINSWANGER 95 © Depaul University 2011 tion of Heidegger’s thought to the psycho- 3 pathological domain. Whereas in fact, notwith- standing an enormous intellectual debt,37 Even this coherence, however, has its limits. Binswanger’s work—under the contrary influ- Binswanger’s is, after all, a phenomenological ence of Martin Buber, for example, as well as project. Above I used the term “bracketing out” Karl Löwith’s important early critique of deliberately to indicate the family relation be- Heidegger—differed in certain fundamental tween phenomenology and Foucauldian archae- ways from what Heidegger was doing. As ology and genealogy as radical reprises of tran- Binswanger himself once put it, Daseinsanalyse scendental critique. The key point of contact is based on “a productive misunderstanding” concerns a profound methodological problem af- [eine produktive Mißverständis] of Heidegger’s flicting phenomenology at its very core, namely, Daseinsanalytik.38 Basically, whereas Heidegger that its definitive reliance upon the self- approached Dasein in strictly ontological terms, evidentness of intuitional givenness renders it Binswanger’s approach was, as we have seen, an- congenitally incapable of undertaking a critical interrogation of the socio-historical horizons thropological—something which, as made ex- within which (that is, against the background of plicit in the Zollikon seminars, was wholly anath- which) this self-evidentness is experienced. ema to what Heidegger was doing. Rather than Without such an interrogation phenomenology just on the general structures of “being-in-the- would be left (in Husserl’s terms) “transcenden- world” interpreted in terms of “care” [Sorge], tally naïve”—yet it is a task that phenomenol- Binswanger focused on what he termed particu- ogy’s methodological commitment to givenness lar “world-designs” [Weltentwürfe], the articula- renders it incapable of discharging. It cannot get tion of Eigen-, Mit-, and Umwelten, that are as beyond the level of “genetic phenomenology,” much a function of “love” [Liebe], understood as and thus necessarily remains limited within the an irreducible dimension of intersubjective co- framework of egological self-temporalization existence that is, in an existential sense, “be- (Lebensgeschichte).40 yond” the world [über-die-Welt-hinaus]. Indeed, We can see this in Foucault’s first book— criticizing the narrowness and inadequacy of which is accordingly divided into two parts. (It Heidegger’s account of existence as simply In- was primarily the second part that Foucault re- der-Welt-Sein, and extending it into an account of wrote.) The first part deals with “the psychologi- In-der-Welt-Über-die-Welt-hinaus-Sein (“being- cal dimensions of mental illness,” and it is here in-and-beyond-the-world”), is in effect the prin- that we find the references to Binswanger. cipal task undertaken by Binswanger in Foucault presented phenomenological psychol- Grundformen und Erkenntnis menschlichen ogy as the proper culmination of psychology. For Daseins, and it lies at the very heart of his since “the way in which a subject accepts or re- Daseinsanalyse. This “misunderstanding” of jects his illness . . . constitutes one of the essential dimensions of the illness,”41 it is necessary to un- Heidegger—which, in addition to Buber and derstand pathological experience “from the in- Löwith, also reflects the earlier influence on 42 39 side.” Fundamentally, as he put it in an histori- Binswanger of Husserl —centers Binswanger’s cal survey of psychology published in 1957, the work on a notion of “encounter” [Begegnung] coherence of the discipline necessitates that it be and gives it a robust dialogical and founded upon an “existential analysis of the way intersubjective orientation that differs radically in which human reality is temporalized, [how it from Heideggerian phenomenology. It is this is] spatialized, and how it projects a world.”43 view of existentiality as “being-in-and-beyond- This prioritizes precisely the sort of phenomeno- the-world” that enables Binswanger to maintain logical psychopathology practiced by a coherent commitment to a concrete sense of Binswanger, which is at root “a matter of restor- constitutive subjectivity. ing . . . both the experience that the patient has of PHILOSOPHY TODAY SPEP SUPPLEMENT 2011 96 © Depaul University 2011 his illness . . . and the morbid world on which this Verweltlichung of mental illness in terms of the consciousness of illness opens, the world at world itself. which this consciousness is directed, and which This is addressed in the second part of the it constitutes.”44 book, and herein lies the rupture between the two Qua world, the “morbid” world of mental ill- editions. One the one hand, in the first edition ness serves as the background condition of possi- Foucault looked toward the “external and objec- bility for the inner history of the illness itself.45 tive conditions” of the world, in effect laying out But at the same time, “it is never an absolute that a Marxist materialist account of mental illness in abolishes all reference to the normal.” Rather, terms of the alienating structural contradictions “the sick consciousness always opens out with a of modern society.51 This left the book hanging double reference, either to the normal and the on a disconnect between a phenomenological an- 52 pathological, the familiar and the strange, the thropology and a materialist social history. It is particular and the universal, or wakefulness and with respect to this that Foucault later recol- dreaming [l’onirisme].”46 How, then, Foucault lected: “I wondered whether, rather than playing asks, does such a world relate to the ‘normal’ on this alternative, it would not be possible to consider the very historicity of forms of experi- world? Fundamentally, it is as a matter of aban- 53 donment or detachment—or more generally, of ence.” As he had written in 1957, the possibility alienation. Whereas—and here Foucault cites an of psychology does depend on an existential-an- alytical basis, but also a return to “what is most important invocation of Heraclitus that 54 Binswanger makes in “Dream and Existence”47 human in man, namely, his history.” —the “normal” world is the single world of com- (Geschichte, not just Lebensgeschichte.) Thus, on the other hand, the revised second mon wakeful life, Heraclitus’ koinos cosmos, the part offers what amounts to a summary of His- “morbid” world is a “private world”— tory of Madness. Here the concern is with Heraclitus’ idios cosmos—that results from a psychopathology as “a fact of civilization”—not process of Verweltlichung. Foucault leaves this the socio-economic conditions that would cause term untranslated, but we could call it “mundani- mental illness in some (in principle) universally zation”—by which is meant a disintegrative col- true and ahistorical sense, but rather the histori- lapse that “abandons the subject to the world as to 48 cally specific cultural and discursive conditions an external fate.” It is the loss of the dimension in virtue of which madness has been of existence “beyond” the world. “The nucleus of pathologized as such, and the subsequent institu- [mental] illness lies in this contradictory unity of tion of normalizing disciplinary practices. The a private world and an abandonment to the work thus no longer seeks “the root of mental ill- 49 inauthenticity of the world.” ness” through “a reflection on man himself,”55 But Foucault did not stop there. Even if in but rather in “a certain historically situated rela- 1954 he positioned Binswanger’s phenomeno- tion of man to the madman and to the true man.”56 logical anthropology at the apex of psychology, The overall task changes accordingly from an at- he did not think that psychology was the whole tempt to situate personal existence socially, to story. Even then he recognized the need to carry one of situating (phenomenological) psychology the analysis further. As he wrote at the beginning and its attendant concepts (e.g., mental pathol- of the Introduction to “Dream and Existence,” it ogy) in its historical context. As the revised first is necessary “to situate existential analysis within part concludes: “Is there not in mental illness a the development of contemporary reflection on whole nucleus of significations that belongs to man,” and, by following—i.e., taking further— the domain in which it appeared—and, to begin “the inflection of phenomenology toward an- with, the simple fact that it is in that domain that it thropology,” to show “what foundations have is circumscribed as an illness?” been proposed for concrete reflection on man.”50 It was this additional level of self-critique that It is a matter of accounting for the enigmatic Binswanger’s phenomenology lacked. For FOUCAULT AND BINSWANGER 97 © Depaul University 2011 Foucault, then, the problem with Daseinsanalyse revolutionarily-minded Jewish woman suffering is that it operated uncritically within the parame- from anorexia, who, after two failed analyses and ters of normalcy of the modern world. But this several suicide attempts, ended up in world is not the world. It is, rather, a historically Binswanger’s care. By means of a “hermeneutic specific and contingent world, and this must be exegesis [of her life] on the ontic-anthropologi- taken into account, if one’s perspective is not to cal level,” he ultimately diagnosed her as suffer- suffer an insupportable transcendental naïveté. ing an incurable sort of schizophrenia: basically, No less important than identifying this line of he thought that there were existentially irrecon- criticism is recognizing Foucault’s work as a cor- cilable rifts between her Eigenwelt and her Mit- rective generalization of Daseinsanalyse—the and Umwelten. Her mortification of her body was historical generalization of existential apriority. an expression of this. Her dreams and desires Archaeology and genealogy respond to the meth- were could not be rooted concretely. “Ellen’s be- odological impasse of phenomenology by articu- ing-beyond does not begin and end in being-in- lating the historical horizons of its experience the-world [but] in a return to Nothingness.”60 and thus providing a critical perspective on the “Nowhere does her existence find a loving shel- forms of subjectivity that are operative within it. ter, nor can it anywhere lay hold of its ground. This need not replace phenomenology, but rather This means that her existence is threatened by its can be seen as situating it in a way that allows for own nothingness.”61 Her authentic self-realiza- a more complete and critical fulfillment of the tion thus required her corporeal de-realization. common radical transcendental thematic—and Binswanger thus consented to her leaving the this in a way that can maintain a non-aporetic sanatorium, fully confident—correctly, as it commitment to a concrete sense of constitutive turned out—that her suicide was inevitable. And, subjectivity.57 indeed, she poisoned herself just days later. By way of analogy with Daseinsanalyse as Binswanger infamously argued that this was an therapy, then, “one can think of later Foucault as “authentic suicide,” that it was “the fulfillment of practicing genealogical therapy on the madness the life-meaning of this existence,”62 and he con- of modernity. He is trying to historicize ...the sequently regarded this case as methodologically closed, normalized view we have of ourselves as important for understanding Daseinsanalyse. ... subjects in order to ready us for the possibility Historically, though, this case has been the fo- of a new interpretation of the human self that cus of a variety of criticisms, (albeit without ac- could take up currently marginalized practices, cess to original documentation), including mal- thus opening up our world rather than shutting it practice,63 “psychic homicide,”64 misdiagnosis down.”58 In short, the hints and gestures toward (concerning eating disorders),65 misogyny, and liberation and disalienation that are sensed in anti-Semitism.66 Such criticism has led some to Foucault’s later work especially point back to the suggest that Daseinsanalyse represents a kind of normative spark that animated the Daseins-ana- “therapeutic nihilism.”67 Recently available ar- lytical account of existentiality with which he chival material has given rise to renewed scrutiny originally engaged. As Foucault once wrote in a and criticism of the case.68 This exceeds the Nietzschean vein: “Historical sense has more in scope of the present essay. But what is germane is common with medicine than philosophy....Its that in the 1950s Foucault endorsed Binswan- 59 task is to become a curative science.” ger’s diagnosis, in both the Introduction to “Dream and Existence”—where, indeed, death 4 and suicide form a leitmotiv—as well as in both The issues that I have been discussing are in editions of Maladie mentale. What are we to many ways crystallized in Binswanger’s case of make of this? “Ellen West.” This is a well-known but contro- We can relate this to the question of “the death versial case study published by Binswanger in of the subject.” While there is something like “the 1945 of an intelligent, creative, idealistic, death of the subject” in Foucault’s archaeological PHILOSOPHY TODAY SPEP SUPPLEMENT 2011 98 © Depaul University 2011 and genealogical works, that is just a mistaken oppression were beyond the ken of Binswanger’s view of the “bracketing out” of the subject. And perspective. The inauthenticity and impossibility this sort of “de-subjectivation” is geared toward of her existence are real enough, but a more radi- the goal of a less “alienated” realization of sub- cally “curative” view is possible through a more jectivity. There is something truly like “the death radically historical analysis. Taken naïvely, her of the subject” in Foucault—but unexpectedly, it case shows that subjectivity is a dream, and that is in the earliest period, and it is manifested in the “death is the absolute meaning of the dream.”69 case of Ellen West. This shows simultaneously But a more complete transcendental analysis the radical nature but also the pitfalls of would show that we can wake up, surpass the pri- Binswanger’s project as phenomenological. The macy of the dream, and find real happiness in the subject’s death—her suicide —is accepted as order of expression by engaging subjectivity as “authentic” and inevitable solely and precisely “an ethical task and an historical necessity.”70 because of the inherent methodological limita- Unexpectedly, then, it is precisely through the ar- tions of the genetic phenomenological frame- chaeological and genealogical work that many work. Ellen West was aspiring to constitutive have indicted in “the death of the subject” that subjectivity—in an important sense she is “the Foucault may actually contribute something subject”—but the structural obstacles of the quite valuable to saving it.71 modern world that underlay her alienation and NOTES

1. Alan Sheridan, Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth four questions: What can I know? [Was kann ich (London: Tavistock, 1980), 195. wissen?] What should I do? [Was soll ich tun?] What 2. Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault,trans.B.Wing may I hope for? [Was darf ich hoffen?] What is a hu- (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), man being? [Was ist der Mensch?] Kant says that the 44; David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault: A first question is answered in metaphysics, the second Biography (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 59. in morals, the third in religion and the fourth in an- 3. Susan Lanzoni, Bridging Phenomenology and the thropology. But crucially, he adds that all of this can Clinic: Ludwig Binswanger’s “Science of Subjectiv- be included under anthropology because all of the ity” (Dissertation, Department of the History of Sci- questions “relate to anthropology.” Lectures on ence, Harvard University, 2001). Cf. Mitchell G. Logic, trans. and ed. J. M. Young (New York: Cam- Ash, Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, bridge University Press, 1992), 538. 1890–1967: Holism and the Quest for Objectivity 10. See Foucault, Dits et écrits I, 22. (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 11; Louis Sass, 11. Ibid., 95. Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of 12. James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New Modern Art, Literature, and Thought (Harvard Uni- York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 73. versity Press, 1994), 329. 13. See Foucault, Dits et écrits I, 21. 4. See Ludwig Binswanger, Ausgewählte Werke, 14. Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, 60. 4 vols, eds. M. Herzog, H.-J. Braun, and A. Holzhey- 15. Eribon, Michel Foucault, 45–46. Kunz (Heidelberg: Roland Asanger, 1992–94), 16. Binswanger to Foucault, 10.5.1954. Cited in Max 1.214. Herzog, Weltentwürfe: Ludwig Binswangers 5. Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits I: 1954–1975 (Paris: phänomenologische Psychologie (Berlin: Walter de Gallimard, 2001), 94. Gruyter, 1994), 118. 6. Ibid. 17. As Binswanger put it: “your essay is for me a life-his- 7. Binswanger, “Traum und Existenz” [1930]. In torical-event, for I have lived through the time when Ausgewählte Werke, 3:98. the dream had the greatest difficulty securing its right 8. Binswanger, Ausgewählte Werke, 1:141. to scientific investigation, wehreas now it is virutally 9. In the Jäsche Logic (1800) Kant summarizes “the truiumphant and existence in the sense of wakeful field of philosophy in [the] cosmopolitan sense” in experience is already nearly disparaged.” FOUCAULT AND BINSWANGER 99 © Depaul University 2011 18. Duccio Trombadori, Colloqui con Foucault (Coop- 37. See in particular Ludwig Binswanger, “Die erative editrice, 1981). Cited in Eribon, Michel Bedeutung der Daseinsanalytik Martin Heideggers Foucault, 47. für das Selbstverständnis der Psychiatrie” [1949], in 19. The chronological order in which Foucault respec- Ausgewählte Aufsätze und Vorträge, vol. 2 (Bern: tively composed this work and the Introduction to Francke, 1955), 264. Binswanger’s article is not clear. 38. Binswanger, Grundformen und Erkenntnis mensch- 20. Sheridan, Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth, 195. lichen Daseins [1942], Ausgewählte Werke, 2:4. 21. Amy Allen, “The Anti-Subjective Hypothesis: 39. On Husserl and love, see R. Philip Buckley, Michel Foucault and the Death of the Subject,” The “Husserl’s Rational ‘Liebesgemeinschaft’,” in Re- Philosophical Forum 31 (2000): 114. search in Phenomenology 26 (1996): 116–26, and 22. Michel Foucault, “Afterword: The Subject and Ullrich Melle, “Edmund Husserl: From Reason to Power,” in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Love,” in Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Michel Foucault: Between Structuralism and Her- Philosophy: A Handbook, ed. John J. Drummond meneutics, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago and Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002): Press, 1983), 208. 229–48. 23. Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: In- 40. This is precisely the primary issue in Trân Dúc Phénoménologie et matérialisme terviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, ed. L. D. Tháo’s work, dialectique (Paris: Minh-Tân, 1951). Kritzman, trans. A. Sheridan et al. (New York: Routledge, 1990), 48. 41. Michel Foucault, Maladie mentale et personnalité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954), 56. 24. Foucault, “Afterword: The Subject and Power,” 209. 42. Ibid., 53. 25. See Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” 43. Foucault, Dits et écrits I, 164. 26. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, 44. Foucault, Maladie mentale et personnalité, 55-6. Practice, ed. D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell Univer- sity Press, 1977), 137–38. 45. Ibid., 68. 27. “There is nothing particularly disturbing about the 46. Ibid., 60–61. death of man. It is just a particular case—or if you 47. Binswanger, Ausgewählte Werke, 3:112–15. like, one of the visible forms—of a muchmore gen- 48. Foucault, Maladie mentale et personnalité, 69. eral death. I do not mean by it the death of God, but 49. Ibid., 69. For Binswanger, the aim of therapy is thus that of the subject, of the Suject with a capital S, of to establish new intersubjective bonds that overcome the the subject understood as the origin and such “detachment from life” and thereby liberate the foundationof knowledge, Freedom, Language, and person from captivation in/by his subjective realm. The therapist is a link between individual idiosyn- History” (“La naissance d'un monde,” in Dits et crasy and the shared intelligibility of the public écrits i, 816). world. Her task is to help free the patient “from out of 28. Allen “The Anti-Subjective Hypothesis,” 125. blind isolation, out of the idios cosmos . . . thus from 29. Ibid., 126–27, my emphasis. mere life in his body, his dreams, his private inclina- 30. Ibid., 125, my emphasis. tions, his pride and his exuberance, and to illuminate 31. Ibid. and liberate him for the ability to share in the koinos 32. FoucaultLive: Interviews, 1966–84, ed. S. Lotringer, cosmos, the life of genuine fellowship (Koinoinia)or trans. J. Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), community” (“Über Psychotherapie” [1935], 329. Ausgewählte Werke, 3:215f.). 33. Béatrice Han, Foucault’s Critical Project: Between 50. Foucault, Dits et écrits I, 93. the Transcendental and the Historical, trans. E. Pile 51. A project that Joseph Gabel had already commenced (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 10. and would later express in terms of a “socio-patho- 34. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Meta- logical parallelism”—a global theory of psychic and physics, 5th, enlarged edition, trans. R. Taft (Indiana social alienation. See Joseph Gabel, “La Réification: University Press, 1997), 144. Essai d’une psychopathologie de la pensée 35. Michel Foucault, “Final Interview,”Raritan dialectique,” Esprit (October 1951): 459–82; La 5 (1985): 8. conscience fausse: Essai sur la réification (Paris: 36. Foucault, Dits et écrits I, 95. Éditions de Minuit, 1962). PHILOSOPHY TODAY SPEP SUPPLEMENT 2011 100 © Depaul University 2011 52. A situation that mirrors the structure of Trân’s Phe- 162–77; Liliane Studer, “Ellen West (ca. 1890–ca. nomenology and Dialectical Materialism. 1924): ‘Das Leben lastet wie eine Wolke auf mir’,” in 53. Cited in Eribon, Michel Foucault, 47–48. WahnsinnsFrauen, ed. S. Duda and L. F. Pusch 54. Foucault, Dits et écrits I, 165. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992): 226–54. 55. Foucault, Maladie mentale et personnalité, 66. Abigail Bray “The Silence Surrounding ‘Ellen 2 [l’homme lui-même]. West’: Binswanger and Foucault,” Journal of the 56. Ibid. [l’homme fou … l’homme vrai]. British Society for Phenomenology 32 (2001): 57. Cf. Han, Foucault’s Critical Project, 11. 125–46. Cf. Roger Frie and Klaus Hoffmann, 58. Hubert Dreyfus, Introduction to Michel Foucault, “Binswanger, Heidegger, and Antisemitism: Reply Mental Illness and Psychology, trans. A. Sheridan to Abigail Bray,” ibid., 33 (2002): 221–28, and Bray (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), xxxix. “A Question of Indifference?—Reply to Frie and 59. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, and His- Hoffmann,” ibid., 228–32. tory,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 156. 67. Lanzoni, Bridging Phenomenology and the Clinic, 60. Ludwig Binswanger, “Der Fall Ellen West: Eine 267; cf. 271. anthropologisch-klinische Studie” [1944/45], 68. See Albrecht Hirschmüller, “Ludwig Binswangers Ausgewählte Werke, 4:278. Fall ‘Ellen West’: Zum Verhältnis von Diagnostik 61. Ibid., 280. und Übertragung,” Luzifer-Amor 29 (2002): 18–76; 62. Ibid., 295. Hirschmüller, ed., Ellen West:Eine Patientin Ludwig 63. Carl R. Rogers“Ellen West and Loneliness,” Review Binswangers zwischen Kreativität und destruktivem of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 1 (1961): Leiden (Heidelberg: Roland Asanger, 2003); and 94–101; R. D. Laing, The Voice of Experience (Lon- Naanah Akavia, and Albrecht Hirschmüller, eds., El- don: Allen Lane, 1982), 53–62; John Maltsberger et len West: Gedichte, Prosatexte, Tagebücher, al., “The Case of Ellen West Revisited: A Permitted Krankengeschichte (Heidelberg: Roland Asanger, Suicide,” in Suicide & Life-threatening Behavior 2007). 26 (1996): 86–97. 69. Foucault, Dits et écrits I, 123. 64. David Lester, “Ellen West’s Suicide as a Case of Psy- 70. Ibid., 147. chic Homicide,” Psychoanalytic Review 71. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 58:2 (1971): 259–60. 2009 meeting of the Society for Existential and 65. Kim Chernin, Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny Phenomenological Theory and Culture, on a panel of Slenderness (New York: Harper Collins, 1981), organized by Chloë Taylor and Bettina Bergo.

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