ABSTRACT
Despite James’ attempts in Principles to resolve the dichotomy between the physical and psychological dimensions of the self and Rank’s desire to study human beings as both creature and creator, their redescriptions of the embodied self remain troubled by metaphysics. Overlapping with the major phase of Rank’s work, the Swiss psychiatrist and existential analyst Ludwig Binswanger (18811966) tackled a similar set of issues between the 1910s and 1950s, in order to reconceptualize the sphere of human existence without retaining the dualisms implicit in the work of James and Rank. 1 Binswanger radically questioned the ‘Magna Charta’ of psychiatry established in the mid-nineteenth century, which, like Freud’s early work, based the psychological study of humans on a model taken from natural science. Binswanger’s extensive correspondence with Freud in the 1910s revolved around a disagreement over the purpose of analytic inquiry, echoing the concerns of Adler, Jung and Rank about the authority Freud was beginning to exert over European psychoanalysis. However, although he was careful to distance himself from psychoanalytic terminology, Binswanger’s emphasis on Being (Sein) was not devised as an outright assault on Freudian psychoanalysis, but an attempt to complement it by introducing an dimension of inquiry hitherto neglected in the human sciences.
