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11 Being versus Id
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190 11 The simple hardly speaks to us any longer in its simplicity because the traditional scientific way of thinking has ruined our capacity to be astonished about what is supposedly and specifically self-evident. —Heidegger But however much ado the philosophers may make, they cannot alter the situation . . . The benighted traveller may sing aloud in the dark to deny his own fears; but, for all that, he will not see an inch further beyond his nose. —Freud We have just witnessed the failure of Freud and Husserl—contemporary intellectual giants in related fields of investigation—to notice or recognize each other’s work. We now approach a similar situation in the case of Freud and Martin Heidegger.1 Although Heidegger was thirty years younger than Freud, they shared the same language; lived relatively close to one another; had been directly influenced by the philosophy of Franz Brentano;2 had close relationships with some of the same people (for example , the Swiss existential psychoanalysts Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss); and were both concerned about the emergence of meaning into the world and the development of psychology. Yet Freud did not once mention Heidegger—or anything even obliquely referring to him or his philosophy—in his major works composed after the publication of Being and Time.3 Heidegger had little to say about Freud until relatively late in his philosophical career. Being versus Id: Heidegger’s Critique of Freud’s Worldview in the Zollikon Seminars The History of Heidegger’s Relationship to Freud Historically speaking, Heidegger’s familiarity with and general reaction to Freud’s work is fairly clear. Medard Boss had been an analysand of Freud’s over dozens of sessions in 1925,4 and it was he—as a trained psychoanalyst —who initiated a relationship with Heidegger in 1947 and subsequently introduced him to Freud’s metapsychological theory. In an essay on Daseinsanalysis, Boss poignantly described Heidegger’s feelings toward Freud: Even before our first encounter, I had heard of Heidegger’s abysmal aversion to all modern scientific psychology. To me, too, he made no secret of his opposition to it. His repugnance mounted considerably after I had induced him with much guile and cunning to delve directly for the first time into Freud’s own writings. During his perusal of the theoretical , “metapsychological” works, Heidegger never ceased shaking his head. He simply did not want to have to accept that such a highly intelligent and gifted man as Freud could produce such artificial, inhuman, indeed absurd and purely fictitious constructions about Homo sapiens. This reading made him literally feel ill.5 What was the reason for Heidegger’s strong distaste for Freud’s metapsychological theory? According to Heidegger, Freud was the epitome of a great contemporary scientific mind uncritically adopting and subsequently becoming entrapped by the tacit ontological commitments of his philosophical heritage.6 To understand what Heidegger had in mind, it is important to recall the following credo of Freud’s: “[Psychoanalysis] must accept the scientific Weltanschauung . . . the intellect and the mind are objects for scientific research in exactly the same way as non-human things . . . Our best hope for the future is that intellect—the scientific spirit, reason—may in process of time establish a dictatorship in the mental life of man.”7 The reaction was twofold for Heidegger. First, Heidegger considered Freud to be a representative of “modern science” which, he pointed out, was “based on the fact that the human being posits himself as an authoritative subject to whom everything which can be investigated becomes an object.”8 Second, Freud was an unabashed advocate of “the dictatorship of scientific thinking” that Heidegger so vociferously opposed.9 In a speech in Meskirch in 1947, Heidegger made it clear that he saw psychoanalysis as a major threat: “the view that psychology—which long ago turned into psychoanalysis—is taken in Switzerland and elsewhere as a substitute for philosophy (if not for religion) . . .”10 Heidegger con191 B E I N G V E R S U S I D [54.224.52.210] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 06:05 GMT) comitantly was worried about the spread of scientism generally in Europe: “The prevailing opinion nowadays is [that it is] as if science alone could provide objective truth. Science is the new religion. Compared to it, any attempt to think of being appears arbitrary and ‘mystical.’”11 Heidegger was concerned that not only was science becoming too powerful and hence its limitations no longer being seen, but...