1 By examining the threefold conjunction between “psychoanalysis, psychiatry and philosophy,” [1] we are reproducing a major examination that animated Ludwig Binswanger's entire life’s work.

2 Indeed, Binswanger pointed out that he worked precisely at the “crossroads,” [2] to use his own word, of these three types of discourse that are of concern to psychopathology. This is what makes Binswanger an overdetermined figure when it comes to examining, on the one hand, the complex relationships between psychoanalysis and psychiatry, and, on the other, between psychoanalysis and phenomenology: indeed, Binswanger represents that moment in the history of psychopathology when these three fields found themselves close together, as would rarely be the case thereafter, in a proximity that defines the very epistemic identity of Binswanger’s project.

Binswanger Between Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry and Philosophy

3 What is the nature of this project? And how is the identity of Binswanger’s research to be defined? This is a question that needs to be posed in all its abrupt clarity as we stand poised to approach Binswanger’s text, a text that seems to be endlessly fanning out across several different fields of competence in its realization, to the extent that one sometimes experiences some difficulty in identifying it – as though it were refusing to allow itself to be spontaneously inspected by an official discourse.

4 This “epistemic identity” is exceedingly hard to assign because the text works between several different discourses, but not within any single recognized discourse. We need, therefore, to indicate here a series of its distinctive signs.

5 By this we mean that, without necessarily producing the exhaustive inventory of all the references that Binswanger draws on in the psychoanalytical, psychiatric and philosophical heritage, we need at least to underline its eclecticism and to designate the knot that it forms. Binswanger does not allow himself to be captured, to be seized upon, by any one of the three discourses that concern us and that remain exterior to him. At most, these discourses draw him to the side of one influence or another.

6 Now, the first significant fact in this regard is that it needs to be said that the man, if not the oeuvre itself, was split apart very early on. Depending on the type of discourse with which he was invested, people have always tended to take an interest in a particular brand of Binswanger. Thus, there have been three Binswangers: one Binswanger who was Freud’s pupil, grappling with the defense of psychoanalysis, laboring away to keep philosophy and psychiatry informed of the earth-shaking impact of Freudianism, but going astray in the definition of his own project – this is the Binswanger of the psychoanalysts; on the other side, there is a Binswanger who was occupied with clinical tasks and firmly rooted in the historical context of German psychiatry at the start of the 19^th century, in dialogue with Kraepelin, Jaspers, Kretschmer, Hoche and Bleuler, among others, and letting Freud know that institutional clinical practice was turning its back on psychoanalysis – this is the Binswanger of the psychiatrists; and finally, there is a Husserlian Binswanger, and then a Heideggerian Binswanger, who reached maturity freed from his initial Freudian whims, promoting Daseinsanalysis as the reform that would finally and definitively remove psychiatry from the criteria of scientificity of the natural sciences – this is the Binswanger of the philosophers. [3]

7 This triple vision that has affected our reception of Binswanger, the impossibility of forming a grasp of him in any comprehensive manner (an ambition that is itself Binswagerian!) already illustrates, in a sense, the difficulties of articulating the analytical, psychiatric and philosophical fields – by forming a symptom therein. Whereas his oeuvre interests us precisely for the knotting that it brings about between the discourses, when taken for what it is, it ultimately appeared to be scattered across the three fields of competence – analytical, psychiatric and philosophical. Everything depends on which of these fields one grasps it from.

8 Likewise, this threefold iconography, which can lead one to fail to recognize what forms a pathway along his intellectual journey, already tells us something about the relationships between philosophy, psychiatry and analysis.

The Freudian Binswanger

9 It is at this point that one is forced to take a position by opting in some sense for one’s Binswanger of choice. As it happens, for our present purposes, we are about to examine the Freudian Binswanger – which amounts to examining as much the Binswanger’s Freud as Freud’s Binswanger .

10 By virtue of the points of clivage mentioned above, nowadays we often forget that Binswanger conducted a reading of Freud prior to those of Husserl and Heidegger, and that the latter do not efface everything. Of course, by minimizing the importance of psychoanalysis in Binswanger’s professional formation, in favor of his own innovation, one devalues what he inherited in order to better clarify the foundation. But this is why today we need to restore Freud’s destiny in Binswanger’s writing, without presupposing that there is nothing more than a disavowal of Freud and that Freud only features therein as an youthful error.

11

Once psychoanalysis has held one in its grip, it never lets go again; depending on predisposition, one surrenders to it practically or theoretically, unable to deny that it has become one’s life work. [4]

12 Here, in Binswanger’s own words, is an original motivation that no explicative attitude would ever be able to disavow and that deserves to be carefully evaluated in order to situate Freud in his rightful place in Binswanger’s horizons. This amounts to decreeing, as it has been remarkably well-expressed by Caroline Gros, that at the start of the Binswangerian problematic, the impulse “is a Freudian one.” [5]

13 There is a further point that it is all the more important to underline, in order to elucidate the later meaning of Binswanger’s confrontation with psychoanalysis: namely, that the distance between Binswanger and Freud would never be interpreted as dissidence. At the most, his “pathway” consisted rather in co-existing alongside Freud, more than simply following him or taking his distance from him.

14 Indeed, it turns out that Binswanger held a far more privileged place with respect to Freud given that he is the only person with whom Freud maintained an ongoing correspondence throughout his whole life. They wrote to each other over a period of some thirty years, from their first meeting in 1907 right up until Freud’s death.

15 Their relationship become much stronger on the basis of a very particular context: at the turn of the century, Freud felt that he was in “splendid” scientific isolation while psychoanalysis was being kept on the fringes of academic psychiatry; to Freud’s institutional marginality there then corresponded the hypercentrality of the Binswanger dynasty: three generations of psychiatrists who from father to son ran a psychiatric clinic of great renown, the Bellevue Sanatorium in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland. At the time of their first meeting, Freud was already acquainted with Ludwig’s uncle, Otto Binswanger, who was professor of psychiatry at the University of Jena, which he defined without hesitation as a “fortress of orthodoxy.” One can understand that Freud spontaneously turned the young Binswanger into a sort of ambassador, much as he had done with Jung at the Burghölzli hospital, by tasking him with being nothing less than a “connecting link with orthodox psychiatry, whose obduracy none of us indeed wishes to reinforce.” [6]

16 But then we come up against the following: when one casts a synoptic eye over the whole of Binswanger’s oeuvre, one nevertheless notices fairly quickly that to the “fight against orthodox psychiatry” on the part of a Binswanger, who had supposedly been invested by Freud with a diplomatic mission for psychoanalysis, there actually corresponds the “fight” of the psychiatrist Binswanger against the psychoanalysis of Freud, which he was only to take on board by utterly transforming it., once it became a matter of annexing it to an “anthropological” recasting of psychiatry. Therefore, the question needs to be asked: What does Freud make of Binswanger, and what does Binswanger make of Freud?

17 This supposes precisely that we follow the Freudian reference as it wends its way through Freud’s life and work. In order to do so, the short lecture entitled Erinnerungen an Freud [Memories of Sigmund Freud], delivered in 1956 for the centenary of Freud’s birth, can serve as a legitimate guide – since it constitutes the autobiographical fragment in which Binswanger shares with us his official relationship with psychoanalysis and makes an explicit return to his “Freudian career.”

18 At the very same time, he proclaims in this text his unswerving admiration for Freud’s gesture and reintroduces Freud by situating him in his own phenomenological reform. Therefore, this is a key text for assessing both his constantly reaffirmed loyalty and the freedom this brought him, through which he reappropriates himself and finds a completely novel motivation for Freud’s discovery. What is the pathway set out in this text? And what are its themes that have to be borne carefully in mind at this moment of restoring the relationships between psychoanalysis and phenomenology?

19 Binswanger himself isolates five stages in his dialogue with psychoanalysis, which he thematizes at the very start when he is declaring his program, as a “half-century’s battle” with “the research style, the research results and the figure of the research who was Freud.” [7]

The First Years: With Freud

20 We may perform a rapid overview of the first two stages of this “clash:” first of all there was the Bildungsroman, the enchanted captivation of the first meeting with Freud and the “textual” discovery of the analytic doctrine (Binswanger never went through his own analysis).

21 The second stage, the stage during which the Freudian knowledge was put into practice, aimed to experiment so as to evaluate whether, in Binswanger’s terms, “Freud was right.” His initial practice is thus described as a “technical verification” that sought to ascertain whether the Freudian view had a “true aim.” And Binswanger did in fact award Freud with a glowing grade, since at that time his initial skepticism increasingly gave way to analytic “conviction.” [8] As testimony to this test, both the first case reports from Binswanger (which, moreover, were published in the Jahrbuch; that is to say, they were addressed to analysts), and the series of first theoretical texts sought to place Freud’s work at the cutting edge of epistemology compared with the chaos of reflections from psychiatry on scientificity. [9] In all of this, Binswanger set about “paving the way for psychoanalysis in medical practice” [10] (to state the terms of Freud’s mission as dictated to him) even though here and there he “might also have wished that [Binswanger’s] support […] could have been expressed now and again in more forceful and less diplomatic terms.” [11] (This is a formula that of course already calls into question our own “diplomatic” position when today we work at the interface between psychoanalysis and psychiatry.)

22 But it is with the third step that Binswanger’s true originality comes to the fore and the properly Binswangian path gets under way: his reverential reception of Freud’s work gave way to his critical ambition, with Binswanger showing, if I may say so, his true colors.

23 The declared point of departure is a lecture that Binswanger attended in 1911 on “The Influence of Wernicke on Classical Psychiatry” – which gives him the idea of putting Freud face to face with Wernicke by proposing in turn “The Influence of Freud on Classical Psychiatry.”

24 In order to form a comprehensive understanding of what was at stake during this period, we need to mention the historiographical necessity of embedding Binswanger’s project in the historical context of psychiatry at the start of the 20^th century – which the work of Elisabetta Basso has accomplished remarkably well. [12] We mean that it is necessary to exhume the vestiges of the first work, a “Binswanger before Binswanger,” just as there is a “Freud before Freud” – even if this should entail coming across a relatively unknown first Binswanger, or even one that has been effaced once and for all by the second Binswanger (who has become Binswanger proper) by making the figure of the epistemologist emerge from behind the face of the “Heideggerian psychiatrist.”

25 For this first Binswanger, the general idea at that time was to call upon psychoanalysis in order to address philosophy and psychiatry, as is attested in exemplary fashion by the text from 1920, which is utterly essential for our purposes: Psychoanalysis and Clinical Psychiatry. [13]

26 In appearance, Binswanger calls upon psychoanalysis in this text as a critical operator with respect to psychiatric scientificity. Here, psychoanalysis plays the role of a “goad” in the sustained examination that he addresses to this psychiatric scientificity. This amounts to discerning the place of psychoanalysis as a third party in the head-to-head between philosophy and psychiatry.

27

The confrontation between psychoanalysis and clinical psychiatry is, in our eyes, allowing the dilemma that psychiatry currently faces to emerge in all its clarity. It needs to decide whether it simply wants to remain an applied science, a conglomeration of psychopathology, neurology and biology, kept together simply by its practical tasks, or whether it wants to become a unitary psychiatric science. [14]

28 This is a position that is rigorously identical to the one that oversaw the Freudian program, for which psychoanalysis had been summoned to “make a scientific psychiatry of the future possible.” Indeed, what might be termed the “critical virtue” of psychoanalysis allows Binswanger to point out that

29

[…] psychiatry has been assigned a research method that has settled the metaphysical problem of body and soul in much the same way as slicing through the Gordian knot. In modern psychiatry, it goes as follows: considering […] the psychical processes as “higher” cerebro-physiological processes. It is as carefree as the knight from Lake Constance in the legend in the way it leaps over this metaphysical abyss. [15]

30 According to Binswanger, in contradistinction to this approach, psychoanalysis, by finding its foundation in the concept of the drive, “a concept on the borderline between the mental and the physical,” promotes a methodology that articulates the biological and psychological aims by weaving them together in keeping with the point of view of what he calls a “science of life.”

31 This is an eloquent epistemological promotion if ever there were. First and foremost it is eloquent in as much as one absolutely cannot recognize Freud in it, since Freud thought of psychoanalysis in apparently much more modest terms as a science of nature [Naturwissenschaft]. [16] Furthermore, far from being the last word on the subject of scientificity, this turn to the Freudian contribution in reality finds itself being referred back to a premetaphysical condition: “In Freud’s drive there lies concealed this metaphysical imp that in psychiatry wreaks its havoc in the cortex.” [17] In the guise of this “metaphysical imp,” it is quite clearly the return of philosophy that takes its revenge on psychoanalysis and psychiatry. Psychoanalysis finds that it is not spared any more than psychiatry is by Binswanger’s philosophizing consciousness: thus we are able to understand in extremis why it is that the epistemological promise should tend “in the direction of the phenomenological research stemming from Husserl, a current from which psychoanalysis too can only hope for a welcome revision of its conceptual foundations.” [18] In this breakaway towards phenomenology we can see the first true reproach against Freud coming to light.

The Epistemological Critique: Against, and Totally Against, Freud

32 If one looks closely, however, it is even his own response to Freud that is being organized in this third stage. We may indeed recall that it was during his second visit to Vienna, in January 1910, that Binswanger was struck by the “low level of metaphysical exigency in Freud.” [19] This surprises Binswanger to the point of incomprehension: “One might have thought that the finest connoisseur of the unconscious would have also formed a metaphysical idea of it […]. But there is nothing of the sort.” [20]

33 We see Binswanger during these years, having gone down the pathof this surprise, taking an interest, through metonymy, no longer in analytic technique itself, but in an “examination of the instrument of this technique.” It was as though he wanted to rectify this “low level of metaphysical exigency” on the part of Freud and to break a heavy silence that was weighing down upon the epistemology that was implicit in the Freudian discovery. So, from that point forth, Binswanger set about producing “a theoretical and scientific table of psychoanalysis, to pay it its rightful homage,” by engaging himself resolutely not in analytic research but in an endless enquiry into its “presuppositions.” [21] The Binswangerian intention is thus duplicated by a kind of “epistemological mission” for psychoanalysis that aims to set it up on solid conceptual ground by making it aware of where it comes from and where it is going.

34 Thus, far from being interested in psychoanalysis by conducting analyses, Binswanger opens up the worksite of a “grand project” for the proto-refoundation of psychoanalysis, side by side with a fresh assigning of the true references of its origin. This is what he calls “probably his life's work, his “great work on psychoanalysis:” now, this work with and against Freud constitutes the most striking aspect of this third step towards Freud since – as he recognizes himself – he was never to get to the end of it. This research on the “foundations” of psychoanalysis, which sought to produce a genealogy, might well have kept him busy for over ten years, but it sank ever deeper inter the examination of the elementary concepts of psychology and their signification: such that the contribution to psychoanalysis that was announced at the outset, and of which Freud was so hopeful, was ceaselessly put off until later, if not put off sine die.

35 This was both the ambition and the symptom of Binswanger’s research during the years from 1910 to 1920: not being able to present psychoanalysis “on the basis of itself,” Binswanger intended to situate it “from outside” [22] within the perspective of “general psychological problems” [23] with a highly particular research methodology:

36

Should you agree that I am trying to reach in a conceptual way the same goal that you have approached so closely along the empirical path, namely laying the foundations for a psychological interpretation of man, then I should be very glad indeed. It goes without saying that the empiricist must pave the way, but I should be glad if you in particular appreciated […] that ‘work on the concept’ is important even for empirical research. [24]

37 Aside from the fact that Binswanger seems therefore to be working right where Freud was expecting him to, the psychoanalyst can seriously have the impression that Binswanger is now effectively setting about observing the instrument – something like the analytic microscope – in order to understand its construction and its functioning, but to the extent that he forgets to look through the eyepiece!

38 At the time we can read Binswanger necessarily and endlessly excusing himself to Freud because his work is not advancing: it is that, on his side, running after the unprecedented aspect of Freud’s work that he never manages to grasp because he has set off from sources that are completely foreign to Freud, Binswanger does not bring his gaze to bear on the thing itself but on its presuppositions – thereby opening up a “path to Freud” that is perhaps more demonstrative in its errors than in what it effectively accomplished.

39 In Binswanger’s oeuvre, the project of returning to the supposed sources of the variety of Freudian a priori does not bring him any closer to Freud himself: quite the contrary, this return leads to a detour that temporarily makes him lose sight of the Freudian unconscious.

40 Freud picks this out in dramatic fashion when, in response to the preparatory documents to the book that Binswanger has sent him, he writes:

41

What are you proposing to do about the unconscious, or rather, how will you manage without the unconscious? Has the philosophical devil finally got you in his clutches? Reassure me. [25]

42 Truth be told, this is a warning whose necessity is quite striking given that Freud is addressing someone who means to found nothing less than the epistemological base of psychoanalysis! Here then is an epistemologist and an ambassador of psychoanalysis who has forgotten the unconscious!

43 The following fact speaks volumes: the crucial reply from Binswanger, who had been backed into a corner by Freud and summoned to take a position with respect to Freud’s uneasy questioning as to the absolute limit of belonging to the analytic discourse, has since been lost. Thus we find ourselves being referred back to a response articulated after the fact when Binswanger was looking back on his pathway from the perspective of his preoccupations in 1956. And with this distance, the response can strike one as a disappointing one in that it re-channels, or so it seems to us, the fundamental misunderstanding by refusing to slice the Gordian knot that unites psychoanalysis and the phenomenological project:

44

Needless to say, I have never “managed without the unconscious,” either in psychotherapeutic practice, which is indeed impossible without using Freud’s concept of the unconscious, or in “theory.” But after I turned to phenomenology and existential analysis, I conceived the unconscious in a different way. The problems it presented became broader and deeper, as it became less defined as merely the opposite of the “conscious,” whereas in psychoanalysis it is still seen largely in terms of this simple opposition. Heidegger’s existential analysis […] takes as its point of departure not consciousness, but existence conceived as being in the world; accordingly, the opposition in question recedes into the background in favor of a description of the various phenomenologically demonstrable modes and structures of being in the world. [26]

45 This is a moment of truth in which we can categorically identify the Binswanger that we know, the Binswanger of Daseinanalysis – but it is at this moment that we lose sight of Freud, in so far as by “broadening” and “deepening” the unconscious, in a word, by transforming it, “Freud’s conception” finds itself abruptly dissolved and its vestiges are put down to “phenomenologically demonstrable […] structures of being in the world.”

The Phenomenological Reform: Beyond Freud

46 In 1922, when the time came to publish his initial work, Binswanger was nevertheless maintaining that the impulse was a Freudian one:

47

I tried to express in the preface that the scientific stimulation that the pupil receives from the master goes far beyond the latter’s research domain, and constitutes a general scientific stimulation for his work. [27]

48 But this is the whole problem: the “stimulation” that Freud gave seems to have been carried to such lengths that it turns Binswanger far away from the realm of psychoanalysis.

49 This is the meaning of the confession from Binswanger, who recognizes that his project was leading him

50

[…] ever further into the problems of general psychology and occupied me to such an extent that in 1922 I was able to publish a large book, the Einführung in die probleme der allgemeinen psychologie [Introduction to the Problems of General Psychology], which was supposed to be followed by a second volume that would have tackled and worked over the problems of psychoanalysis itself. [28]

51 There is further cause for surprise here: while Binswanger is working on psychoanalysis – or rather, is being worked on by it – for some ten years it keeps being pushed back to a later work, for fear of actually having to engage with it. This is a case of epistemic procrastination, which shows us that Binswanger’s effective grasp of the determining aspects of Freudism is being constantly sidelined.

52 But there was worse to come, at the very least as far as Binswanger’s psychoanalytic orthodoxy was concerned: in reality, the “epistemological mission” that he had taken on by wanting to offer a fresh grounding and legitimization for Freud, certainly swept him “ever further” into the problems of psychology, but it also swept him “ever further” from the analytic experience itself.

53 Indeed, there is something striking when one casts an eye over Binswanger’s preoccupations at this time – that he did not manage to publish, but that he did not manage to forget either, since he insists on testifying in his “Path to Freud” text: it is that all the problematics that have to so with “the essence of man,” “the definition of the psyche in Freud,” its “signification” for the problem of the “edification of the person,” speak about Freud but not with Freud, even to the extent that Freud does not recognize himself, or does not feel concerned. Binswanger sees this quite clearly: during their brief meetings, Freud listens to him politely, but “would surely have preferred to hear him speak about analyses.”

54 What is at stake here is quite straightforward: it is that Binswanger is raising a whole set of philosophical questions that mobilize Freud but which are not Freudian questions. The proof of this is that Freud declines to reply, simply indicating that it seems to him “that it is not useful to evoke the deeper problems” – as though the analyst were arguing that philosophy is chronically lacking in use when it comes to tackling analytical problems, or that it were not up to psychoanalysis to draw the consequences from this, whatever their “philosophical signification” might be. [29]

55 In so doing we notice that Binswanger intends to invest a place that is supposedly vacant in the analytic discourse. He conscientiously takes on a task that Freud refuses, almost disdainfully, to acknowledge as pertinent: but it is perhaps the case that analysis has no need of such a thing to be carried out.

56 He does not insist on it any the less: in his constant epistemological preoccupation, not to mention his epistemological anxiety, he insists absolutely on keeping Freud informed “from outside” of what he is, and on warning psychoanalysis that it is firmly linked to something that precedes it, so that “it should know that it is merely a wave in an historical current that is never immobile […]. Psychoanalysis does not have the right, any more than any other science, to abstract itself from the course of the history of the human mind.” [30]

57 But in the dialogue that he pursues with Freud in order to warn him of the wealth of what lies before psychoanalysis, which the latter does no more than extend, the most interesting thing is Freud’s response. He admits when he finally receives the book that he had been expecting for so long, not only his lack of interest in what is said in it, but above all his disappointment with regard to what is not said in it:

58

Your book has impressed me greatly – but has, admittedly, also been a disappointment for it is not what you have repeatedly led me to expect in correspondence. I anticipated that you would be building a bridge between clinical psychiatry and psychoanalysis which you would then cross in a second volume. [31]

59 Instead of this, far from having played the role of emissary that he was supposed to be taking up in the “Freudian battle,” Binswanger put himself in the position of having to reply with a vigorous disavowal of an acerbic suspicion of Freud’s: “nothing was further from my mind than a ‘philosophical neutralization’ of psychoanalysis.” [32]

60 We may rapidly skip over the details of the questions raised yet never resolved during this stage, of which there is an account in the only text that bears the mark of this period, published in 1926: Erfahren, Verstehen, Deuten in der Psychoanalyse [“Learning by Experience, Understanding and Interpreting in Psychoanalysis”]. What is essentially at stake in this text for Binswanger is to identify Freudian interpretation with a hermeneutic procedure by in some sense inspecting the Freudian discourse by calling upon it to explain itself: “I believe that psychoanalytic interpretation and understanding are, in principle and historically, highly significant extensions and reinforcements of so-called hermeneutic interpretation and exegesis as practiced and investigated at length, especially by Schleiermacher and Dilthey.” [33]

61 This new stage consists therefore in installing psychoanalysis within a “hermeneuticizing” project as though it had to be recycled into a theory of meaning:

62

I have always wondered on what “capacity” or intellectual faculty you think that this type of “understanding” is really based. The reply: “on the unconscious itself,” would be circular and no real answer. You have to postulate a uniform intellectual disposition, equal in all people, and assume that, provided this disposition functions without personal strains (affective inhibitions), understanding will come about by itself. Now it is precisely in this ‘by itself’ that my problem lies. Far more interesting to me than making a successful interpretation and learning something new about someone else’s unconscious is the problem of what it is that enables me to make the interpretation in the first place. [34]

63 Now, here is the astounding part: here we can see, in Binswanger, the epistemological passion getting the better of the desire to know something about the unconscious. “Far more interesting to me than making a successful interpretation and learning something new about someone else’s unconscious is the problem of what it is that enables me to make the interpretation in the first place:” this is surely a position that is well-founded philosophically speaking, but diametrically opposed, so to speak, to the position of Freud, who willingly dispenses with such a preoccupation, this being a question that is not really a question for the analyst. This is just one step away from saying that the “question” puts itself in the service of a resistance. Whether or not one takes this step (we shall leave this interpretative question to the reader, since in this register one reaches a conclusion in accordance with one’s desire), either way this falls in line with the famous reply that Freud gave to those who, instead of examining a problem, simply presented epistemological programs for the treatment of scientific questions: “Does reading menus fill your stomach?” [35] Indeed, as we know, Freud placidly refused all the different forms of “methodologizing” passions, firmly condemning all “methodological evasions:”

64

Those critics who limit their studies to methodological investigations remind me of people who are always polishing their glasses instead of putting them on and seeing with them. [36]

65 One does effectively get the feeling that Binswanger’s methodological preoccupation with offering a foundation for Freud turns him away from the unprecedented dimension of Freud’s work.

66 This is precisely the meaning of Freud's reiterated reminder to Binswanger with respect to the significance of his gesture, during their fourth meeting on the Semmering, in 1927: “Indeed, humanity knew that it is endowed with a main; I had to show it that there exist drives as well.” [37] This is a remark that is as vital for psychoanalysis as it is simplistic: but precisely its ingenious and almost dissonant character when compared with the usual level of their exchanges only reveals its astonishing necessity. From where does the need stem that Freud feels to remind precisely this to someone who is supposed to know it very well from elsewhere – if not from the fact that he has a presentiment of the fact that Binswanger’s path is tending to make him once again fail to recognize this truth that is constantly threatened with effacement?

67 It is a fact that by intensifying the hermeneutic project of psychoanalysis, by accentuating its procedure of interpretation and by minimizing his explicative ambition, Binswanger’s text from 1926 had, in fact, the effect of fortifying the discourse of meaning, in order to overestimate the discourse of force: but it was precisely the reference of the drive that thus found itself vanishing in the hermeneutic examination.

68 It was “message received” on Binswanger’s part, who concludes for the fourth step of his pathway by completely re-orienting his epistemological critique: by following Freud to the letter with respect to the scope of the drive, it is then his “drive-based mechanicism” that becomes the target of Binswanger’s attack: “that which links Freud’s scientific procedure to the scientific procedure of clinical psychiatry is precisely that both of them ‘reduce’ the essence of man to a naturalist schema.” [38] Referring Freud back to the model of the homo natura, [39] Binswanger was able to conclude that

69

[…] contrary to Freud’s conception, being a man does not mean simply being a creature thrown into life who dies in life, and who is tossed around by it back and forth, in harmony and discord; it also means being a determined being, with one’s own state, or being established by oneself: autonomous! [40]

70 So it is that Binswanger accomplishes his path towards Freud only to remind him, at the end of the day, of his naturalist origins, which are supposed to have been ignored or even repressed – which would give him legitimacy in “interpreting” its fault lines: hence, from this point forth, Binswanger’s discourse of suspicion vis-à-vis psychoanalysis, suspecting it of being secretly complicit with naturalism.

71 We may pass over the fifth stage, somewhat artificial, that aims at a “return to Freud” of a particular type, since after having accused him of a crude naturalism, it is now a matter of “saving” Freud – via a philosophy of nature inspired by Goethe – by recalling Freud’s own message on the mythology of the drives. This stage is less interesting because it does not displace Freud and Binswanger in their relation to one another.

Conclusion

72 Therefore, this is a singular “path towards Freud” in that it steers Binswanger away from the Freudian thing much more than bringing him closer to it. Indeed, we are often astonished by the extent to which this pathway towards describes the trajectory of a distancing from. What are we to conclude from such a route?

73 First of all, we may conclude that we find, firmly thematized in the correspondence, if not a disinterest on Freud’s part for the questions of method, then at the very least a refusal addressed to Binswanger’s epistemological anxiety. But on the other hand, we find that this silence about the negative criticism of psychoanalysis is coupled with a second form of mutism that touches on the positive project: Freud was never to make use of, nor even comment on, the “phenomenological path” opened up by Binswanger. [41]

74 In order to explain this, one can doubtless argue that Binswanger did not dare to carry out this work under the eye of the master, and that he carefully held his tongue about his work in this field: indeed, their correspondence testifies to the fact that Binswanger was much more likely to let Freud know about his texts towards Freud than to speak about the texts in which he was becoming himself.

75 But there is more: without replying to Binswanger explicitly, not even inviting him to join his own path, as though he could not see any point to it on the plane of his experience, Freud seems to be telling us that he does not know what to do with it, analytically speaking. [42]

76 This is due to the fact that, whether he denies it or not, Binswanger’s enterprise has this effect de facto: to relativize the “significance” of the libido, to put the drive in its place, certainly acknowledging it as an active entity but restricting it to its place, and “autonomizing,” to use his own word, the existential issue of the question of the drive.

77 Now, this is precisely what Freud cannot accept, as is attested in his appreciative response to the Binswanger’s axial critique, which he formulates after Binswanger sends him his “frank avowal of our points of agreement and of difference.” [43] The response is all the more crucial for our enquiry in that it is both unique and definitive: it announces, in its cutting dimension, Freud’s refusal to participate in the phenomenological “monument”:

78

Of course, I still do not believe you. I have never ventured beyond the ground floor and basement of the building. – You maintain that if one changes one’s point of view one can also see a higher floor, in which there live such distinguished guests as religion, art, etc. You are not alone in this; most cultivated specimens of homo natura think likewise. You see the conservative in this respect, and I the revolutionary. If I still had a lifetime of work ahead of me, I should dare to assign a home in my lowly little house to those highborn personages. I have already done so for religion since coming across the category ‘neurosis of mankind.’ But we are probably speaking at cross purposes and it will take centuries before our differences are settled. [44]

79 At this point of – secular – disaccord between psychoanalysis and phenomenology, this stands as the last word, therefore, by which the founder of psychoanalysis means to sum up the meaning of the fundamental misunderstanding that pits the respectability of the anthropological edifice against the “basement” of the drive in psychoanalysis: this is one way of embellishing an image of the fairly unilateral “dialogue” between the “philosophical devil” and the “metapsychological sorcerer.”