Existential Analysis

The book presents the method of personality analysis proposed by Ludwig Binswanger, revealing the full and unique nature of existence. From a blend of ideas by Jaspers, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Buber, Kant, and other philosophers, Binswanger created a unique theory of existential analysis, a scientific tool that allows one to approach a scientific understanding of the "incomprehensible mental life." As a conduit for the ideas of Heidegger and Husserl into the realm of psychiatry, Binswanger builds the analysis of individual existence on the ontology of abstract Being developed by Heidegger, seeing the task as penetrating through the surface of phenomena into the inner world of the person, in order to describe, through the phenomenological method, the world of the sick individual, a world vastly different from our own. Not to interpret and not to try to rationally explain, but to "grasp in the integrity and unity of experience the irrational world arising in the consciousness of the schizophrenic, neurotic, child." According to Binswanger, existential analysis was born to achieve a new scientific understanding of the problems of psychiatry, psychopathology, and psychotherapy. For psychologists, psychiatrists, helping professionals, and all those interested in the questions of health and illness, norm and pathology, being and nothingness, and the problems of understanding the inner world of the individual.