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.