**6. Philosophy: reason to keep or… reason, fast!…?**

Freud, a meticulous explorer of the Ucs, strives never to go beyond the framework of clinical experience and suddenly finds himself constrained to remain in a doctor-patient relationship based on a verbal exchange and, one could almost say fact of the absence of a possible recourse to an establishment, not symptomal [13]*.*

<sup>10</sup> Letter of Freud to Binswanger of April 27, 1922.

*Freud and Binswanger: An Asymptotic Relationship DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.94882*

Binswanger, for his part, enjoys the possibility of resorting to restraint but suddenly also takes the measure of its possible failure. For instance, the teaching of the Ellen West case and her suicide (1921) holds a capital place here in the abandonment of a "teleology of cure" but also the success of restraint, in its "relative" maintenance. We can refer to the case of the young girl suffering, at the time of her period, from hiccups and difficulty in breathing and who was cured by "sudden compression of the trachea" ("Über die Psychothérapie"). Binswanger is based on philosophy to think about the disease, the being-man of the patient (but also the being-sick of man) in his relationship to being-in-the-world and intone differently all his medical practice, including psychoanalytic treatment. If, moreover, as Freud claims, the doctor is not a philosopher, the patient, at least as a potential decision-maker of his cure, can be.

He summarizes:

*"The central concept of psychoanalysis is absolutely not that of illness but that of health"* (with, Binswanger notes below, a "restitutio ad integrum") [13]*.*

#### **6.1 The concept of philosophy**

During the first meetings, Binswanger is struck by Freud's apparent lack of appetite for philosophy: *"It was interesting for me to see what weak philosophical needs Freud had"* [11]*.* During his third visit, the Master will go so far as to confide to him that philosophy is, in his eyes, only a *"sublimation of repressed sexual impulses" (ibid.).*

This statement is not reserved for the Bellevue psychiatrist. In the Preface that he gives to Theodor Reik's work, *The Ritual, psychoanalysis of religious rites* (1919), we find, for example, this disconcerting statement: *"The delusional representations of the paranoid reveal a deep kinship with the systems of our philosophers."*

Ironically, Freud, when asked for his references, evokes the comics of Wilhelm Busch, in particular the series of Tobias Knopp in which the philistinism of the German bourgeois is denounced, and of Max and Moritz, the story of two rascals who terrorize their village, torture and pilfer the chickens, disembowel the bags of grain to end up … in mash for the ducks, crushed under the millstone of a mill. Freud placed Busch albums in his waiting room. There are a few anti-Semitic (irreligious) passages.

However, little by little, here again the gaze changes. First of all, there is a slip by Freud who qualifies the Ucs as a "metapsychical" phenomenon (as we say metaphysical) *(ibid.)* Then:

*"I discovered to my own surprise, that Freud had an authentic philosophical vein" (ibid.)*, affirmation which will come to corroborate, of course, the series of the last published works.

In the register of philosophy, Freud, in fact, read and read a lot "in his young years" (*dixit* Freud) for example, about religion, Feuerbach and about Ucs, Lipps (cf. the *Letter to Fliess*, cited above). His frequent references to primitive life are based on the most recent developments in anthropology, such as those of Morgan and Frazer.

#### **6.2 Role of phenomenology and fundamental ontology**

Henceforth, Binswanger considers himself empowered to research what are, precisely, the foundations of Freudian anthropology, what conception of man presides over his reflection. It is precisely this analysis that we find in the speech given in Vienna on the occasion of Freud's eightieth birthday (1936). Freud will not attend but will say that he was "happily surprised" by it. This discourse is centered on the notion of *homo natura* which refers to a certain form of determinist naturalism [14, 15]*,* which would have the effect of reducing the body to being only an economy of instinctual flow and epistemically, of removing it from its subjectivity by reifying it excessively to transform it into a pure object of analysis.

In spite of this epistemic monism which serves as a basis for his reflection, Freud remains aware of what he is advancing with the Ucs towards a blind spot in humanity - in the sense of being-man. In the account of his second visit, Binswanger notes: *"Freud asserts that just as Kant postulated the thing in itself behind appearance, he [Freud] postulated, behind the conscious accessible to our experience, the unconscious which can never be a direct object of experience".* But, he comments, *"one cannot learn anything from the thing in oneself apart from its existence whereas, by the conscience, one can learn a lot of things about the Ucs"* [5]*.* It does not say how one can know the existence of the thing in oneself without knowing anything about it, even if, already, the notion of presence and its possible deduction from an absence, are outlined here.

Anyway, Binswanger will continue his path towards philosophy: "*Over the years I had to recognize that the essential scientific and philosophical bases were lacking*"*(ibid.)*. What are the consequences? Is this what, gradually, will separate the two men, on the theoretical level of course?

Let us first see the approach of the Ucs where Binswanger collects the fruit of his efforts to erase the role of self-awareness, of the ego.

*"By turning to phenomenology and existential analysis,"* writes Binswanger, *"the problem of the Ucs has changed for me; it widened and deepened insofar as it was always less opposed to the "conscious" - opposition which still largely determines it in psychoanalysis (…) Insofar as in the existential analytics of Heidegger - unlike Sartre - we start precisely not from the conscious but from being-present, as being-in-the-world, this opposition was erased for me*" *(ibid)*.

As in Heidegger, the notion of body will gradually fade away in favor of a bodily existing (a *leiben*, a "corporealize", a "corporéiser"), just as the world will unravel in favor of a "worldize", a "mondéiser" ("das weltet", Heidegger will say) in the same way, we see, over time, does the Ucs become, in Binswanger's eyes, a mode of being-in-the-world among others, a "way" of being-there (only the word "there" will allow him to save in this process the specificity of the body as a source of a space stretching its "directions of meaning").

Mode of presence of Dasein which, let us repeat, can also affect a collective "way" (one could here draw a parallel between the evolution of Freud towards the collective problematic of the Ucs and the Jungian discovery of a collective Ucs. Binswanger who keeps a distance between the two tries to federate them - at least doctrinally - through the notion of Dasein).

But the effort of synthesis and, it is true, his somewhat obsessive concern for continuity, will take Binswanger further, especially after the disappearance of the master, substitute for a father who died precociously, helped him to deploy resources of his system: *"Beyond psychology, psychoanalysis and biology, we must begin with an anthropology"(ibid.).*

Perhaps we will be criticized for forcing the line here? But many elements militate in this direction. The most convincing remains the procrastination which surrounds the publication - which ends in a non-publication - of the second volume of the *Einführung in die allgemeine Psychologie*, which was, after having been updated, in the first volume (1922), the philosophical roots of classical psychiatry, showing how psychoanalysis revolutionizes the psychiatric field while remaining faithful to it.

*Freud and Binswanger: An Asymptotic Relationship DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.94882*

The planned summary is11 :

1.Freud's psychology and the building of the person (genetics)

Definition of psychic (meaning and signifiance) and Cs (Lipps, Freud)

2.Psychic conflict: personification of instances and dramatization

3.Social and instinctual

## **7. Interpretation (in connection with Schleiermacher and Dilthey)**

But Binswanger does not publish, will never publish this work because already, in his eyes, this work is "outdated". In particular, the notion of interpretation which Freud made, applied to dreams, the royal way of access to the Ucs, can, according to him, be understood only from hermeneutics. Once again, it is not the dream but the whole existing which requires, according to a dynamic process, to be - indefinitely – deciphered. We find in the *Journal*: *"Read the Psychology… of Schleiermacher with the feeling of finding myself on known and sure ground. His work on Hermeneutics confirms to me that my book must begin with hermeneutics and be articulated with it"*. But such an introduction to psychoanalysis immediately deported Freud to the territory of the religious (Schleiermacher is first of all a theologian). Binswanger therefore preferred, with good reason, to abstain.

In "Freud and the constitution of psychiatry" [16], Binswanger goes back to the ethical code of psychiatry as formulated by Griesinger and he writes: *"With Freud, man is no longer simply a living organism but an essence of life dying its life and living its death (…) disease is no longer a disturbance coming from the outside or the inside but the expression of the "normal" course of life on the way to death".* This affirmation seems to recognize in psychoanalysis a theoretical overhang (linked to the superposition of infantile development and the successive repressions that accompany it) but it is immediately strongly qualified*: "That we are lived by the powers of life, it is not there only one aspect of the truth; the other aspect is that we determine it as our destiny. And only these two aspects manage to embrace the problem of meaning and madness, of delirium" (ibid.).*

This is the second message that Binswanger sends to psychoanalysis: freedom can only initiate a process of healing (that is to say of recognition of its destiny) from the moment its role in the morbid process has been recognized - and in that this process cannot be totally disavowed (doctrine inspired by the Heideggerian one of "freedom at the bottom"). To disavow the original choice of madness would deprive the patient of all continuity in his being-in-the-world, in subjective terms: to suppress the self-confidence which guarantees "healing". In this process, another recognition will have to take place: that madness itself has its roots in the exercise of this freedom because, if I am free, I am "only that".

#### **7.1 The religious**

A disagreement remains between the two thoughts but not between the two thinkers. Here again, however, it will not be identified in the same way.

<sup>11</sup> *Journal*, II, p. 50–57. Quoted in *Correspondance Freud-Binswanger, 1908–1938*, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1995. A series of notes based on the examination of Binswanger's Journal enlightens the progression of the work, pp. 216, 218, 221, 238, 245 and 257.

For Freud, this disagreement is primarily of religious origin. Neither of the two men, in fact, wishes to go beyond this problematic and here, the question of the biological (in génétic sense) reappears because neither Freud – who evolves on that point - nor Binswanger grants it any primacy. Regarding Judaism for example, Freud writes: "*There is only one serious fact: Semites and Aryans (or anti-Semites) that I wanted to bring to a fusion within psychoanalysis, separate again like oil and water"*12.

Now Freud is irreligious: *"I still accept, at a pinch, a good binge with alcohol, but a binge without alcohol …*" he wrote after Binswanger had questioned him on this question.13 In fact, here again, Freud never ceases to take up this question in his last texts, about the writing of which, moreover, he never ceases to talk to his colleague. *The Future of an Illusion*, which appeared in 1927, links the religious phenomenon to the need for relief linked to the anguish of the child. For his part, Binswanger revamps his concept of religion which he finally resolves, under the influence of Martin Buber, into a religion of the I-You relation (*Grundformen*, I) and of which he finally announces the definitive substitution:

*"In place of theology should come psychology; instead of Salvation, health; instead of suffering, the symptom; in place of the pastor, the doctor"* [5]*.*

Thus he pays homage, post-mortem certainly but sincere and fair, to the one who, beyond the misunderstandings, has never ceased to keep hope and confidence in his young teammate.

### **8. Conclusion**

In the management of the relationship, what was Freud's mistake in the end? If there was an error, it was to consider that Binswanger embodied, in the circle he had drawn around him, classical psychiatry, an institutional psychiatry, well established on its foundations but also, at the same time, misoneist and pusillanimous. and which closed its doors to its new approach to care, an approach whose legitimacy was constantly reinforced by clinical experience.

But this was an approach in terms of influence struggle and Binswanger expected something else, something else he could not find despite the rich exchanges of information between the two men, for example on the development of their respective families, strangely similar it must be admitted.

What Freud did not understand is that in fact, Binswanger was in turn trying to get out of this same psychiatry and that therefore, in fact, he could not embody it, striving on his side. to purge it of a representation of the man whom he judged devaluing, sterile, but in exchange for which Freud offered nothing that met his expectations. It was, however, in Freud that Binswanger had to find the most relevant elements in order to think at new expense the fundamental forms of human presence and define the new modalities of his knowledge, Freud for his part drawing from his exchanges with his colleague a fertile questioning.

*"Man,* the master of Kreuzlingen wrote in *Memories [5], takes too much at his ease with being-present. One of the forms of this lightness is neurosis, it is a life suspended in the moment, opaque to itself. The world of such a present-being oppressed by the moment is the wish for fate, the inordinate imagination. In the face of this, creation stands in truth, as the existence of Freud exemplarily reveals to us. Only a productive man can endure the painful life".*

Dr. Philippe VEYSSET.

<sup>12</sup> Letter from Freud to Binswanger of July 29, 1912.

<sup>13</sup> Lettre from Freud to Binswanger of April 2, 1928.

*Freud and Binswanger: An Asymptotic Relationship DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.94882*
