Journal of the Society for

Psychological Anthropology

54 ETHOS

Psychoanalysis and Phenomenology

Thomas J. Csordas

Abstract If psychoanalysis and phenomenology are thoroughgoing, comprehensive, and complementary

accounts of subjectivity, anthropological analyses of subjectivity can benefit from them both as well as from the
dialogue between them. In the first part of this article I present and elaborate a preliminary outline of conceptual
correspondences between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. These are pairs of ideas that seem intuitively to
“go together” on either a parallel level of analysis or in terms of the role they play within the broader intellectual
movement. In the second part I call attention to a preexisting body of work that explores the relation between
psychoanalysis and phenomenology. This is work in phenomenological or existential psychiatry that developed
sometimes as a synthesis of the two fields, and sometimes as a critique of and alternative to psychoanalysis. I
conclude by suggesting that anthropology is a field sufficiently fertile for such a cross-pollinated mode of thinking
to take root. [anthropology, subjectivity, psychoanalysis, phenomenology]

In the spring of 2008, I attended two conferences, one week apart. At the first someone
stood and said that they were moving away from cultural phenomenology and toward
psychoanalysis because of inadequacies they sensed in the former. At the second conference
someone stood and said that they were going to become a cultural phenomenologist as
a way to get out of psychoanalysis. Having already accepted the invitation to discuss the
relation between phenomenology and psychoanalysis at the Emory conference which was
the immediate precursor of this dialogic collection, I was pleased that events had conspired
to endow me with an opening anecdote. To my mind, the significance of the back-to-back
declarations is to suggest that there is a kind of symmetry between these two intellectual
pursuits that constitutes a mutual invitation from one to the other, and in this article I place
considerable emphasis on this symmetry.

First, however, I must comment on one apparent element of asymmetry: why did both
speakers feel a need for an adjective to modify the term “phenomenology”—why did they
both refer to “cultural phenomenology” but not to “cultural psychoanalysis?” Perhaps the
asymmetry suggests a feeling that there is an implicit vagueness in phenomenology relative
to psychoanalysis. There may be a sense that phenomenology specifies method without
content, or more precisely that the subject matter of phenomenology is so all-encompassing
that it requires a qualifier, whereas the content of psychoanalysis is given relatively more
self-evidently in the domain of unconscious psychic conflicts. But it is not incidental that
the key phrase is cultural phenomenology instead of the phenomenology of culture. After
all, anthropology does not provide the content and philosophy the method. What is at
issue instead is convergence of an ethnographic and a phenomenological sensibility, an

ETHOS, Vol. 40, Issue 1, pp. 54–74, ISSN 0091-2131 online ISSN 1548-1352. 
C 2012 by the American Anthropological

Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1352.2011.01231.x

 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND PHENOMENOLOGY 55

attunement to the immediacy of experience. I admit to having a vested interest in this

terminology, since I have been using the phrase cultural phenomenology to describe one
aspect of my own work. To me the phrase means on the one hand using phenomenological
method, phenomenological concepts, or phenomenological sensibility in the interpretation
of ethnographic data, and on the other hand using ethnographic instances as the concrete data
for phenomenological reflection. This being said, in what follows I attempt to elaborate my
intuition of symmetry between psychoanalysis and phenomenology, in part by highlighting
corresponding terminological pairs from the two traditions, with the aim of enhancing the
potential for dialogue between them within anthropology.

If psychoanalysis and phenomenology are symmetrical intellectual pursuits, one element of

that symmetry is that they share a deep concern for the relation between science and subjec-
tivity. Phenomenology is an effort to establish a philosophy that can be a rigorous science
by becoming fully aware of the subjective conditions of knowledge, and psychoanalysis is
an effort to understand psychic life on the basis of scientific principles, a systematic study
ultimately grounded in our biological nature. Neither is adequately described as a science of
subjectivity, and there is no simple agreement on the nature of the subject, but the message
of both is that any science that eschews the subjective element is inadequate as science.
Because of this fundamental congruence, in contrast to what was implied by the conference
speakers I mentioned in opening, there is in principle no necessity to give one up in order
to pursue the other, and in fact a dialogue between them is both inevitable and necessary.1
In this spirit I first address the relationship between psychoanalysis and phenomenology in
general. I do so briefly in terms of encounters between adherents of the two movements,
then in somewhat more detail by juxtaposing concepts within them that appear to pertain
to similar levels of analysis. I then proceed to examine a specific instance of synthesis in the
work of phenomenological psychiatry, considering the contributions of Ludwig Binswanger
and Medard Boss in particular. I conclude with several remarks on the implications of a
shared agenda for phenomenology and psychoanalysis within anthropology.

Dialogical Partners

There are a number of ways to initiate a dialogue between psychoanalysis and phenomenol-
ogy, some more or less relevant to anthropology.2 One could undertake an intensive com-
parison of the works of Freud and Husserl, contemporaries who nevertheless did not directly
address one another’s work, or one could conduct an analysis of all the variants and schools
generated by the two movements. Each of these approaches would require a sustained anal-
ysis whose relevance to anthropology could only be assessed upon their completion, and my
ambition in this article must be considerably more modest. One could also examine com-
mentaries or syntheses attempted by members of one movement or the other, and concrete
instances of dialogue between adherents of the two movements; this will be considerably
more enlightening in the short term, though here I can only point to some of this work.
Spiegelberg (1972) has observed that such interaction was far more common and productive
in the French than in the German phases of the two movements. It is certainly relevant
that Paul Ricoeur (1970) brought his phenomenological sensibility to bear on the oeuvre
56 ETHOS

of Freud, particularly given the influence of Ricoeur’s understanding of interpretation on

Geertz and the widespread influence of his work on narrative. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s
career long interest in psychoanalysis has been observed (Phillips 1996; Slatman 2000), and
Slatman attributes to him a mature attempt to formulate a psychoanalysis of nature that
amounts to an integration of phenomenology and psychoanalysis, blurring the distinction
between conscious and unconscious, and virtually equating intentionality and desire.3

Perhaps of greatest consequence in this respect is the relatively sustained dialogue be-
tween the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (e.g., see
Lacan 1961, Merleau-Ponty 1964), both of whom have made a significant mark on con-
temporary anthropology. Here I can only point to a small but intriguing literature that
examines this dialogue. Most comprehensive is Phillips’s (1996) outline of the decades long
interaction, including the axis of disagreement due to the consequences of their respective
starting points in consciousness and perception versus the unconscious and language, and
Merleau-Ponty’s perspective that psychoanalysis should be considered one among a variety
of approaches versus Lacan’s that psychoanalysis required a comprehensive reformulation of
contemporary thought. O’Neill (1986) compares the approaches of the two thinkers on the
infant’s encounter with a mirror, treating the origins of subjectivity in terms of self–other
relations, infantile passivity and narcissism, and postural identification and schema. Shep-
herdson (1998) offers an interpretation of Lacan’s reading of Merleau-Ponty’s posthumous
book, The Visible and the Invisible, emphasizing their differing understandings of the gaze and
the flesh in relation to a theory of the subject.

As valuable as it would be to extend a consideration of the dialogue between Lacan and

Merleau-Ponty, for present purposes I will adopt another strategy, which is to present an
outline of conceptual correspondences between phenomenology and psychoanalysis from
the standpoint of an anthropologist interested in both. I formulated these pairings without
an explicit method and with awareness that my own knowledge of psychoanalysis and phe-
nomenology is limited—in other words, by intuition. However, this intuition was guided
by the two criteria that the pairs of ideas seem to “go together” on either a parallel level of
analysis or in terms of the role they play within the broader intellectual movement. Then I
asked myself what I mean by these intuitive pairings. Some are obvious, others contestable.
The pairings do not exhaust the main concepts of either phenomenology or psychoanalysis,
and in some cases it is open to debate whether they are best described as parallel, symmet-
rical, overlapping, convergent, or contradictory. Thus the following can be taken only as an
incitement to further discussion (see Table 1).

The first pair is that which at the conceptual least common denominator defines the overt
goal of each intellectual movement. Phenomenology is descriptive, and what it describes are
phenomena, meaning everything that exists or can possibly exist for us as humans. Psycho-
analysis is therapeutic, and what it treats are pathologies, meaning conditions of emotional
distress or developmental frustration. This initial statement is of course too simple.4 Within
phenomenology there can be what we can call two stances toward the descriptive task,
namely transcendental and existential. Husserl said that the term “transcendental” refers to
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND PHENOMENOLOGY 57

Table 1. Conceptual Correspondences between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis

Phenomenology Psychoanalysis
Descriptive Therapeutic
Always beginning Never ending
Existence Unconscious
Essence Conflict, complex, imago
Dasein Ego
Immediacy/ Presence Memory/Reminiscence
Intersubjectivity Transference/Object relations
Embodiment Biology
Intentionality Drive/instinct
Being-in-the-world Human nature
Horizon Defense
Epoché and Reduction Dream interpretation
Imaginative free variation Free association

“the motif of inquiring back into the ultimate source of all the formations of knowledge, the
motif of the knower’s reflecting upon himself and his knowing life . . . the motif of a universal
philosophy which is grounded purely in this source and thus ultimately grounded” (Husserl
1970:97–98). The existential stance is more directly concerned with description of the life
world or world of everyday life, the phenomena encountered in the course of existence and
being-in-the-world. Likewise there can be what we can call two methodological orientations,
namely reflective and hermeneutic. Reflective phenomenology is a direct examination of the
contents of consciousness or, leaning on the basic structure of intersubjectivity to put oneself
in the shoes of another, a reflection on the consciousness of another person. Hermeneutic
phenomenology is an examination of phenomena treated in the manner of texts which can
be inhabited or lived-into, elaborated and explicated.

Within psychoanalysis, treatment can be carried out under a topographical model, a struc-
tural model, an economic model, a conflict model, an object-relations model, or an inter-
subjective model. We can also observe that the method is not always only applied to the
suffering of an individual in a treatment setting, such that we can say that there is not only
therapeutic but theoretical psychoanalysis. In the latter category we are familiar with psycho-
analysis in the study of literary texts, in certain kinds of cultural and media studies, in work
on psychosexual development and personality, psychohistory or psychoanalytic biography,
and ethnography that looks for Freudian themes and dynamics or applies psychoanalytic
concepts.

The second contrast is in part tongue-in-cheek because it is based on stereotypes of phe-

nomenology as always beginning and psychoanalysis as never ending, which nevertheless
have an important common basis in the nature of human experience. Most of Husserl’s
works were programmatic and indeed framed as introductions to phenomenology. In a
more pedestrian sense, phenomenological works sometimes seem to spend so much time
laying out their theoretical position and methodological concepts that the real work of analy-
sis is never engaged. Anthropology, with a richness of data, has the potential to complete this
58 ETHOS

program. In this task anthropologists should remain cognizant that phenomenology does
not require a different kind of data, but is “a manner or style of thinking” (Merleau-Ponty
1962:viii) with which one approaches data. That psychoanalysis has no ending is not simply a
stereotype based on the often-years-long process of treatment. Beyond the criterion of suc-
cessful resolution of transference, it is also an actuality based on the difficulty of determining
what constitutes a cure and the careful negotiation of treatment termination. In both cases,
when phenomenology appears to be always beginning and psychoanalysis appears never to
have an ending, each taps into the open-ended character of life that allows one to recognize
stillness and stasis not as peace but as constant movement and change, not as chaos but as
life itself.

This consideration is in accord with the pairing of existence and unconscious as terms that
define what I call the ground, terrain, or field upon which phenomenology and psychoanalysis
carry out their respective intellectual agendas. They occupy parallel levels of analysis insofar
as existence and unconscious identify not a content but a locus; they are not “about” existence
or the unconscious, but their entire problematic is predicated on these open-ended zones
of life activity. In elaborating this point, it is not very useful to say that the two concepts
have different scope in the sense that there is nothing outside, beyond, or over against
existence in the same way we could say that the unconscious can be distinguished from
the conscious.5 It is more useful to say that they constitute two styles of approaching the
meaning of being human, insofar as both are defining features of what distinguishes human
being from the nonhuman. For psychoanalysis the contents of the unconscious are typically
hidden or inaccessible while for phenomenology the elements of existence are typically
taken-for-granted or nonthematized. In both cases the method is to bring these contents
into the light of day and understand their consequences for peoples’ lives.

What are the contents to which we have just referred, the objects of these two modes
of understanding? For phenomenology they are essences. Because of the recent history of
anthropology we have to introduce this concept with some caution. Essentializing an identity
or a category is not the same thing as describing the essence of a phenomenon. Essence is
a kernel of human meaning at the intersection of all possible takes on the phenomenon,
the description of what it is in all its modalities across all imaginable contexts, and in its
distinctive relations with other phenomena that can be understood as more or less discrete
and distinct from the phenomenon of interest. On the other hand, essentializing as it has been
critiqued in anthropology stands for the attribution of something universal and immutable.
Thus in phenomenology, and particularly in cultural phenomenology, the goal is not to
define the “universal essence,” but to describe the “essence of the particular.” That is to say,
essence does not reside in a general class of phenomena but in the concrete instance of a
phenomenon; it is not described as a catalogue of shared traits but as the unique instantiation
of a trait; there is no universal essence of humanity but the particular essence of you or me as
human. The essence of the particular opens out upon the intelligibility of existence as truth.

Now, to find a psychoanalytic concept that corresponds on any level to this one is a chal-
lenge; I am uncertain as to whether there is such a concept, or whether my knowledge
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND PHENOMENOLOGY 59

of psychoanalysis is simply inadequate to find one. It may also be that different schools
of psychoanalysis diverge on this issue whereas various forms of phenomenology are more
generally in agreement about the study of essences. Given these reservations, I venture
that insofar as psychoanalysis is fundamentally concerned with intrapsychic development,
what is at issue is the outcome of ongoing attempts to resolve the underlying conflicts
which determine that development. Again, it may be more appropriate to say that the
psychoanalytic notion of the complex is the equivalent of the phenomenological essence,
and is embedded in the unconscious as the essence is embedded in existence. This read-
ing perhaps also depends on an early Lacanian definition of the complex as dominated by
cultural rather than instinctual factors (Lacan 1938:6), where the complex reproduces a
reality of the environment at a certain developmental stage, and this fixed reality is called
into play and further conditioned by subsequent experiences. Yet again, insofar as the La-
canian complex admits of being at least partially accessible to consciousness, perhaps the
equivalent of the essence is the fully unconscious representation labeled the imago which
Lacan calls “the fundamental element of the complex” (1938:6). This is as far as I can
follow this thread, since the next series of questions would take me into consideration of
whether one must define imago as potentially positive or necessarily negative, as distillation
or distortion of experience, as individual (e.g., the maternal imago) or collective (e.g., the
archetype).

If for a moment I can say that the objects of phenomenology and psychoanalysis are essences
and imagos respectively, then what are their subjects? Here we can be relatively confident
about pairing dasein and ego, noting that dasein comes from the Heideggerian branch of
phenomenology and ego is most strongly associated with a certain phase in the development
of Freud’s thought. The pairing makes sense because dasein does not simply translate as an
abstract “being-there,” but can be used with the indefinite article to denote a particular be-
ing there. Yet the term dasein connotes something more inchoate, preliminary, and holistic
whereas one tends to think of the ego as not only already formed but analytically distinguish-
able from id and superego; and indeed one might need to include the full id–ego–superego
trinity as a better match for dasein.6 Phenomenology and psychoanalysis also have favored
ways in which the dasein and ego engage temporality. To be precise, the dasein is typically
described in the mode of immediacy and presence in the face of existence and the world of
everyday life. The ego is treated in the mode of memory and reminiscence to reconstruct
the unconscious processes in which it was constituted and continues to act.

With respect to sociality, the key concept for phenomenology is intersubjectivity. The de-
bate is whether intersubjectivity is experientially and ontologically prior to subjectivity, with
anthropologists in particular tending to favor the primacy of the intersubjective both be-
cause of an intellectual predisposition toward shared meaning and social interaction, and
as a way to sidestep the solipsism which in some instances creeps into phenomenologi-
cal discourse. Psychoanalysis does not foreground a general concept equivalent to inter-
subjectivity, but places considerable emphasis on specific experientially salient forms of
intersubjectivity. Transference and countertransference are critical components of intersub-
jectivity between analyst and analysand, object relations describe the unconscious grounds of
60 ETHOS

intersubjectivity among emotionally consequential others, and projection is an example of

distorted intersubjectivity in the ego’s immediate social milieu.

The next pair of parallel concepts has to do with the stance toward the body, wherein
the position of phenomenology can be summarized in the term embodiment and that of
psychoanalysis by biology. For phenomenology, embodiment does not denote a process in
any sense such as that meaning is put into the body or that experience is filtered through the
body, but refers to the primordial condition of human existence. In this respect it is not just
that the body or its sensory experience is a phenomenon to be studied, but that embodiment
is the essential ground of existence and experience. For psychoanalysis, biology is not just
a condition of experience but the starting point for understanding because all experience is
ultimately conditioned or determined by biology.

The difference is not merely a matter of emphasis reflecting Husserl’s background as a

philosopher and Freud’s as a medical doctor, but an important consequence of Freud’s
explicit espousal of a natural science position that psychic reality is grounded in neurobiology.
Coordinate with the embodiment–biology contrast, in the domain of motivation broadly
stated the central concept for phenomenology is intentionality whereas the parallel concept
for psychoanalysis is the drive. Intentionality is a global concept not limited to the specific
intention associated with an action but a kind of tension in relation to the world or a
tending toward engagement in the world. It is a going-out to the world and connecting to
it through innumerable “intentional threads,” as Merleau-Ponty was wont to say. There is
a kind of tropism implied in the phenomenological notion of intentionality, but more of
a kind related to an inherent vitality (as Brentano, a teacher of Husserl, might say), rather
than to an autonomic response as with the heliotropism of a sunflower. The drive, on the
other hand, is predicated on biological instinct. It is a genetic rather than an existential
characteristic of the human species, and originates in a place that connects to our animality.
It also implies a kind of tension, but more of a kind suggestive of the buildup of pneumatic or
hydraulic pressure than of taut muscles reaching toward another or engaging in movement,
and certainly more explicitly focused on the attainment of pleasure and the satisfaction
of desire. At the most general level of conceptual contrast, for phenomenology the body
affords a particular mode of being-in-the-world, adding a strong measure of specificity to
consideration of existence and the dasein. For psychoanalysis the body connotes a particular
understanding of human nature as determined by biological evolution, in the manner that
was espoused by the generation of psychoanalytic anthropology defined by scholars such as
George Devereux, Weston LaBarre, and Melford Spiro.

The next conceptual pair I have juxtaposed are the phenomenological notion of horizon and
the psychoanalytic notion of defense. My rationale is that in some way both terms define a
kind of experiential limit. The importance of horizon is evident in its literal sense for the
phenomenology of perception, but perception is not the only human phenomenon that has
a horizonal structure, and these others can be considered metaphorical only in the narrow
sense that the basic idea is designated by a term borrowed from visual distance perception.
Thus we can talk in a very concrete sense about an emotional horizon, an intellectual horizon,
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND PHENOMENOLOGY 61

a horizon of creativity, a horizon of aspiration and so on. The horizon is a moveable limit
that depends entirely on a person’s perspective and position and is constantly readjusted in
accordance with the person’s movement in the world. There is always a horizon, but it is
always in principle possible to find out what is on the other side. If there is something “on
the other side” for psychoanalysis, in the absence of psychoanalytic intervention the defense
prevents one from arriving there. The defense masks, walls off, or distorts an experience and
its emotional consequences, and most precisely it is a foreclosure of experience. In distinct
contrast to a horizon, it does not move with the movements of the person, and whereas the
horizon is an intrinsic part of the world’s structure, the defense is precisely a mechanism, an
artifice constructed and self-imposed on the psyche. It not only prevents one from arriving at
the emotional truth of a specific developmental moment or life experience, it often impedes
one’s ability to move in other domains such as emotion, intellect, or aspiration.

Two final pairs of contrastive concepts have to do with method. First, in phenomenology
a privileged place is given to the epoché and reduction, and in psychoanalysis an equally
privileged place is given to dream interpretation. Each method is in its own way concerned
with sorting through the residue of consciousness and the secondary baggage of experience
in order to attain an essential kernel of experiential truth. This is a truth profoundly bound
up with the perspective of an individual subject, but far from being solipsistic it is the case
for both phenomenology and psychoanalysis that the most unique, private, and idiosyn-
cratic moment opens out onto the universal human panorama, and moreover is ultimately
reinserted either descriptively or therapeutically into the life context that produced it. The
epoché is often described as a bracketing, suspension, or abstention of the world of everyday
life in order then to reduce a phenomenon to its unencumbered essence—in anthropology
the term best names the process of identifying and thematizing the taken-for-granted.7 The
method could just as well be described as a methodical taking apart and putting back together
of a phenomenon to see precisely how it works, like a curious child dismantles and reassem-
bles a clock to see what makes it tick. Something similar could be said of psychoanalytic
dream interpretation, where nothing is taken at face value as multiple levels of meaning are
peeled away like the layers of an onion, and a jumble of images is spread out as if on a table
so that particularly meaningful images can be isolated and examined for their emotional
consequences.8

A second methodological pair is the phenomenological technique of imaginative free vari-

ation and the psychoanalytic technique of free association. With as much spontaneity as
can be mustered or tolerated, the phenomenologist concentrates on the phenomenon of
interest reduced as far as possible to its existential core, while the psychoanalytic patient
concentrates on his or her immediate state of emotional sensibility. The phenomenon is
subjected to the imaginative equivalent of studying a stone by turning it over and over in
one’s hand, feeling it and viewing it from all possible angles, and furthermore seeing it fall
from the clouds, lie silently in a dark cave, be worn by millennia of flowing water, become
part of a rustic stone house or an imposing cathedral. The essence of the phenomenon is
to be found at the intersection of all its possible contexts and associations, to the point of
testing the limits of reality and feasibility. It is precisely the limits of reality and feasibility
62 ETHOS

that are of utmost concern in psychoanalytic free association, since it is the patient’s grip on
reality and the emotional feasibility of his or her mode of life that are most at stake therapeu-
tically. In this sense the valence of the phenomenological technique is shifted toward pure
possibility while that of the psychoanalytic technique is shifted toward fantasy; said another
way, phenomenology in this respect engages the imagination while psychoanalysis taps the
imaginary. For phenomenology there is a methodical engagement of the imaginative process
to supplement spontaneity, and this measured approach stands in contrast to the feeling in
psychoanalysis of either apprehension that nothing will come up or that one will be deluged
with tangled ideas and feelings. The attitude of free variation is to leave no stone unturned
and the potential pitfall is interpretive incompleteness or lack of closure, whereas the attitude
in free association is that something is being avoided and the potential pitfall is foreclosure
of meaning.

Phenomenological Psychiatry
The second part of my contribution is to call attention to a preexisting body of work that
has already posed our question of the relation between psychoanalysis and phenomenol-
ogy. This is work in the area of phenomenological or existential psychiatry that developed
sometimes as a synthesis of psychoanalysis and phenomenology, sometimes as a critique
of and alternative to psychoanalysis. For the present I will take only a small first step in a
study of this area, touching on the work of Ludwig Binswanger, the Swiss psychiatrist and
director of the Bellevue psychiatric hospital who received his medical degree under Carl
Jung and served his internship under Eugen Bleuler, was a friend and correspondent of
Freud, and a colleague of Heidegger who invited his colleague Heidegger to lecture at his
hospital; and Medard Boss, also a Swiss psychiatrist who trained under Eugen Bleuler, read
Binswanger, was associated with Jung, friends with Heidegger, taught by Karen Horney
and Kurt Goldstein, and analyzed by Freud. This exercise will be of use first in addressing
the theoretical grounds of the convergence between psychoanalysis and phenomenology,
second in its relevance to our empirical interests in psychiatric anthropology and cultural
influences on psychopathology, and third in the light it can shed on how the methodological
intersection between phenomenology and psychoanalysis can help define what is at stake in
the anthropology of experience.

Binswanger’s essay “Dream and Existence,” originally published in 1930 (Binswanger 1986)
and known as the first substantial work in existential psychiatry, is like a sonata in three
movements. The first part closely examines the existential theme of rising, falling, and
hovering in dream imagery, particularly as manifest by birds soaring and falling dead, but
also as modulations in sensuous and erotic feelings, fading and intensifying of light and vision,
or sensations of flying and hovering. This existential theme is the same as that appearing
in poetry or everyday language when one expresses disappointment by phrases like “falling
from the clouds” or “having the rug pulled out from under one’s feet,” and it points to
an element of subjectivity that is objectively shared and helps define the meaning of being
human, or as Binswanger says, “the who of our existence.”
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND PHENOMENOLOGY 63

This starting point is one step removed from, or one step prior to, the Freudian locus of
dream analysis in the individual ego and its unconscious. However, this locus is strictly
speaking neither biology nor language. In the first instance, the idea is that the imagery is
rooted either in the living structure of the organism or an “asthenic affect” that takes the
form of falling as a physical model: “According to this view, our falling from the clouds or
the giving way of ground beneath our feet is a purely analogical or metaphorical transference
from the sphere of the body to that of the mind, and within the latter it is simply a picturesque
form of expression without genuine content or substance, a mere façon de parler” (Binswanger
1963:223). This position, revived several decades later by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
(1980) is unsatisfactory to Binswanger. In the second instance, Binswanger remarks in the
opening paragraph that “it is language that ‘envisions and thinks’ for all of us before any one
individual brings it to the services of his own creative intellectual powers” (1963:222). Yet,
although this statement appears to grant language a determinative status comparable to that
granted by Foucault to discourse and discursive formations—and I will return to this point
momentarily—there is something even more basic than language at issue here:

When, for example, we speak of a high and a low tower, a high and a low tone, high
and low morals, high and low spirits, what is involved is not a linguistic carrying over
from one existential sphere to the others, but, rather, a general meaning matrix in
which all particular regional spheres have an equal “share,” i.e., which contains within it
these same specific meanings (spatial, acoustic, spiritual, psychic, etc.) . . . language of
itself . . . grasps hold of a particular element lying deep within man’s ontological struc-
ture . . . Language, the poetic imagination and—above all—the dream, draw from this
basic ontological structure. [Binswanger 1963:224–225]

Binswanger’s position here is that there is not simply a linguistic carrying over or extension
from biology to other domains; and neither is language itself given a more privileged status
than the poetic imagination or the dream. Instead, biology participates in, and language
grasps hold of, a basic ontological structure that is the ground of human existence.

The second movement of Binswanger’s dream sonata changes keys and discusses the dream
in ancient Greek society. Many of the images are still of birds in flight, but the existential
structure is markedly different. There is no necessary distinction among the dream as sub-
jective process in the dreamer’s psyche, the signification of an event in the external world,
and the pronouncement of an oracular cult. This is because the subject source of all three
is one and the same—Zeus—and thus all three form an “inseparable unity.” Binswanger
elaborates:

Where do we hear any talk of an individual subject and where, then, is the possibility
of the ontological grounding of that individual? And who can say here whether truth is
to be sought in the inwardness of subjectivity or in the outwardness of objectivity? For
here all “inner” is “outer,” just as all outer is inner. It is thus of no consequence whether
an oracular event follows upon a dream or bears no connection with it—just as often
a dream alone, without the oracular, can express the will of the godhead. [Binswanger
1963:237]
64 ETHOS

One might be tempted to say in Foucault’s terms that ancient Greek discourse constituted
a different regime of truth of dreams—but we must be wary of this position, and again we
shall return to the reason why it is of interest in a moment. In the early Greek imagery
Binswanger finds “no mention of rising and falling in the sense of the life-flow of a particular
individual,” but instead “The individual, the species, fate, and the godhead are intertwined in
one common space” (1963:238). Likewise there is no contrast between inner and outer such
as emerged with Neoplatonism and remains characteristic of contemporary psychology,
but instead there is “the opposition of night and day, darkness and light, earth and sun”
(Binswanger 1963:238). More than a discursive regime of truth that is incommensurable
with that of the contemporary world, what is of interest for Binswanger is “that we find in
this existential space—which differs so markedly from our own—so clear a manifestation of
the ontological structural element of rising and falling” (Binswanger 1963:238).

In the third movement, Binswanger arrives at the problem of individual subjectivity, citing
the doctrine (associated with Heraclitus, Plato, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger) that
it is a distinct mode, type or way of being human and stands in a particular relationship
to the communal, the universal, and the intersubjective world of mutual understanding.
In this view image, feeling, subjective opinion, and doxic form stand in contrast to mind,
objectivity, truth, reflective thought, and Logos. Life according to individual understanding
or private thoughts is dreaming regardless of one’s physiological state, and only a sensibility
that grounds one in the universal human–divine community of understanding can be called
awakeness. In this state of awakeness Binswanger interprets Hegel’s understanding of “the
spirit as an individuation of objectivity: it is not singular in its universality” (1963:243). He
immediately makes this abstract insight concrete by referring to psychoanalysis, in which
the patient “must decide whether, in pride and defiance, to cling to private opinion—his
private theater, as one patient put it—or whether to place himself in the hands of a physician,
viewed as the wise mediator between the private and the communal world, between deception
and truth” (Binswanger 1963:244). The therapeutic process does not relieve the patient of
images, feelings, wishes, and hopes, but removes them from the sphere of despair and descent
to that of ascending and even soaring life by “reclaiming objectivity in subjectivity” through
authentic resolution of the transference. Where Binswanger claims to go beyond Hegel is to
recognize with Kierkegaard that here we are not dealing with objective but with subjective
truth, “with the ‘innermost passion’ by virtue of which subjectivity must work itself through
objectivity (the objectivity of communication, consensus, submission to a superpersonal
norm) and out of it again” (Binswanger 1963:245).

Binswanger asserts that these issues remain dormant in Freud’s theory of transference be-
cause of his attempt to derive human spirit from instincts rather than recognizing that these
two concepts are incommensurable and each belongs to its own proper sphere. He feels that
Jung’s theory of individuation is stronger, but it too remains unsatisfactory because it does
not adequately take into account the contrast between image–feeling and intellect, which
continues unmitigated both in the notion of the collective unconscious and that of the self.
From here he returns to the initial theme of disappointment as “falling,” feeling that “I
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND PHENOMENOLOGY 65

didn’t know what hit me,” and where in Heidegger’s terms “Dasein knows neither the ‘how’
nor the ‘what’ of the happening” (Binswanger 1963:247).

Binswanger ends with a crescendo in one of the most profound statements that is simulta-
neously about the ontology of dreaming and about life lived in a dream in their relation to
anxiety. “To dream means: I don’t know what is happening to me” (1963:247). The dreamer
awakens to selfhood only when she or he decides to determine “what hit me” and further-
more to “take hold of the dynamics in these events . . . to bring continuity or consistency
into a life that rises and falls, falls and rises” (1963:247). Here the person finally goes beyond
mere dreaming as “life-function”—that which, once again to invoke Foucault, is the primary
subject of biopolitics—and creates “life-history.” In the final analysis these are again just
as incommensurable as are instinct and human spirit; nevertheless, the transition between
them is gradual and indistinct because, and most importantly, they share a common base in
existence.

The reason I have made occasional allusion to Foucault in my exposition of Binswanger’s ex-
istential theory of dreams is that Foucault’s first published work as a doctoral student in 1954
at age 28 was an “Introduction” to Binswanger’s essay (Foucault 1986). It will be worthwhile
to spend a bit of time with this Introduction, which is twice as long as Binswanger’s piece,
not only because Foucault starts with acknowledgment that Husserl’s Logical Investigations
and Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams were published only one year apart (1899 [Husserl 2001]
and 1900 [Freud 2010], respectively), but that from our current stance there is something
amusingly gratifying to imagine being able in 1954 to describe Foucault as a “brilliant young
phenomenologist.” In addition, Foucault uses the term anthropology to describe his under-
taking, and defines it in such a way that we can recognize the common ground between
philosophical anthropology and cultural anthropology. For him, the theme of anthropol-
ogy “is the human fact, if one understands by ‘fact,’ not some objective sector of a natural
universe, but the real content of an existence which is living itself and is experiencing itself,
which recognizes itself or loses itself, in a world that is at once the plenitude of its own
project and the ‘element’ of its situation. Anthropology may thus call itself a ‘science of
facts’ by developing in rigorous fashion the existential content of presence-to-the-world”
(Foucault 1986:32). In this context, Foucault lauds Binswanger for his ability to continually
cross “back and forth between the anthropological forms and the ontological conditions of
existence . . . bringing to light, by returning to the concrete individual, the place where the
forms and conditions of existence articulate” (1986:32). Foucault’s fascination with the essay
on dreams is in Binswanger’s gamble that existence can be understood by examining the
mode in which it is least engaged with the world. This approach goes beyond a hermeneu-
tic of symbols toward comprehension of existential structures, and furthermore implies
a whole anthropology of imagination requiring a new understanding of how meaning is
manifest.

In setting up the exposition of how Binswanger’s dream theory implicitly surpasses Freud,
Foucault makes the critical observation that “Freud caused the world of the imaginary to
be inhabited by Desire as classical metaphysics caused the world of physics to be inhabited
66 ETHOS

by Divine Will and Understanding: a theology of meaning, in which the truth anticipates
its own formulations and completely constitutes them. The meanings exhaust the reality of
the world which displays that reality” (Foucault 1986:35). One can see here a foreshadowing
of the argument that later led to a critique of the repressive hypothesis in the history of
sexuality, as well as the notion of the discursive constitution of regimes of truth, but here
following Binswanger the critique of Freud takes a different direction. Foucault formulates
the problem as that Freud analyzes the dream only in its semantic function, leaving its
morphological and syntactic structure in the dark, and again in Saussurian terms that the
dream has only the status of speech to the neglect of its reality as language. He argues that
“The imaginary world has its own laws, its specific structures, and the image is somewhat
more than the immediate fulfillment of meaning” (Foucault 1986:35). In this he is clearly
alluding to the ontological structure identified by Binswanger, and he carries on to say that
Freud is ultimately unable to handle the relationship between meaning and image despite
his analysis of the mediating functions of repression and fantasy. In Foucault’s view, this
is probably because of an inadequate concept of symbol as the point of contact between
image and meaning, inner world and external world, unconscious impulse and perceptual
consciousness. This gap has been exaggerated in the development of psychoanalysis as a
field, with Melanie Klein on the side of image attempting to determine meaning solely from
the movement of fantasy, and Lacan on the side of meaning attempting to identify in the
Imago the essential movement of language.

Foucault then asks whether Husserl offers a theory of the symbol that can successfully re-
instate the immanence of meaning to the image. The answer is yes, because unlike psycho-
analysis, Husserl distinguishes between the index elements of which the symbol is composed
and which designate an objective situation, and the signification of meaning such as incestu-
ous desire or narcissistic envelopment which constitute the dream experience from within.
Furthermore, phenomenology does not make the psychoanalytic mistake of assuming an
immediate identity between meaning and image, but instead finds their common ground
in the expressive act, or to be precise in the immediacy of the expressive act insofar as that
act opens a horizon of additional meaning, or meaning somewhat different from what was
expected. In this specific respect the difference in the two approaches is that

Freudian analysis could see only an artificial connection between meaning and expres-
sion, namely, the hallucinatory nature of the satisfaction of desire. Phenomenology, on
the contrary, enables one to recapture the meaning in the context of the expressive act
which founds it. To that extent, a phenomenological description can make manifest the
presence of meaning in an imaginary content. [Foucault 1986:38]

The critical point in this last comment, however, is not that phenomenology is ultimately
successful, for it ends up stranded in the imaginary. The conclusion is thus that psychoanalysis
has never succeeded in making images speak, while phenomenology has succeeded in doing
so but has given no possibility of understanding what they say. Still, taken as a “twofold
tradition,” phenomenology and psychoanalysis pose the problem of a common foundation
to objective structures of indication, significant ensembles, and acts of expression. This,
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND PHENOMENOLOGY 67

Foucault says, is what Binswanger tried to bring to light, though without ever saying so
either explicitly or implicitly.

Foucault had more to say than this, but I want to move on to a brief consideration of the
relation between psychoanalysis and daseinanalysis as conceived by Medard Boss. Boss made
an explicit distinction between psychoanalytic therapy and psychoanalytic theory, holding
that the sensibility of daseinanalysis was much more in harmony with the former than with
the latter. His enthusiasm for the compatibility of Heidegger’s approach to being and Freud’s
therapeutic stance is somewhat undercut by the fact that the positions explicitly articulated
by Heidegger are most often asserted by Boss to be implicit in Freud. Nevertheless, there are
some interesting points here. The central insight they share is into “existence as being of the
nature of a primordial openness and lucidity. No thought of unveiling hidden phenomena
could have occurred in Freud’s mind without his tacit awareness of man’s existence as an
open, lucid realm into which something can unveil itself and shine forth out of the dark”
(Boss 1963:62). Boss gives an extended discussion of how this tacit insight is displayed in
Freud’s insistence that patients lie down during treatment, allowing the patient to loosen
up physically with all limbs horizontal and thus on a hierarchically equal level, to neutralize
self-assertion and create the possibility for the patient to be “totally delivered up to himself”
such that infantile impulses emerge in complete openness without the obstruction of a
face-to-face adult relationship. According to Boss, Freud as therapist also transcended the
natural science attunement to cause and effect and implicitly achieved a Daseinanalytic
valorization of meaning and sense in the form of a life history that verged on a Heideggerian
understanding of fundamental human temporality. He also sees similarities between Freud
and Heidegger in their conceptions of humanity in relation to morality and in the centrality
of language as the “home of Being-ness.”

Perhaps most significant to Boss, however, is the commonality he perceives in their con-
ceptions of human freedom. For Heidegger, freedom was the ability to choose or renounce
engagement in meaning-disclosing relationships to other beings, and this “freedom in the
Daseinanalytic sense is the condition for the possibility of psychoanalytic practice as taught
by Freud” (Boss 1963:67). Yet both Heidegger and Freud saw that humanity “basically and
customarily avoids independent, responsible selfhood” (Boss 1963:68) and that living in the
lucidity of existence—what from Binswanger I also call awakeness—required overcoming
what Freud tellingly called resistance. To encourage freedom and openness, the relation be-
tween analyst and patient for Freud becomes an almost limitless “playground” (Tummelplatz)
where all the patient’s possibilities for relating come out into the open. The silent analyst
as a “mirror” is not cold and glassy but ultimately respectful of patient’s individuality and
wary of obstructing his or her freedom. Finally, Freud insisted that the stance of the analyst
not be one of “intervening” care but of “anticipating” care based on being quietly “ahead
of the patient in his existential unfolding” so that the patient can become “transparent to
himself and free for his existence” (Boss 1963:73). Boss feels that he has decisively made his
case when he points out that the terms “intervening” and “anticipating” are applied directly
from Heidegger’s description of the two kinds of existential care.
68 ETHOS

Boss devotes a much longer discussion to the critique of psychoanalytic theory from a
Daseinanalytic perspective. He is unequivocal in arguing that through rigid adherence to
a natural science approach Freud destroyed the immediate and primary understanding of
humans acquired in practice in a “truly catastrophic fashion.” In his theoretical approach,
Freud objectifies the psyche into a reflex mechanism that operates by the cathexis and
discharge of libidinal energy, bisects the mutually caring therapist and patient relationship
into the medical observer and observable object, and introduces a further split among
psyche, body, and world that not only precludes their being recombined but leads to a
further dissection of humanity into a multiplicity of psychic elements (e.g., instincts, partial
instincts, id–ego–superego), while the external world can be reduced to mere stimuli. While
transference and resistance are real observable phenomena in treatment, theoretical ideas
such as the brain as an isolated organ or the notion of “act of consciousness” are conceptual
abstractions beholden to prescientific presuppositions. Freud’s theory and much of that
offered by his followers remain inadequate from the stance of Daseinanalysis because insofar
as they do not allow us adequately to “understand man’s essential nature as being of meaning-
disclosing, elucidating character, we remain unable even to understand how someone is able
to perceive a fellow man as a fellow man, let alone how he could enter into so-called
interpersonal relationships” (Boss 1963:80).

Boss proceeds to examine a series of concepts beginning with that of an “idea,” or psychic
object representation, which he regards as an abstraction predicated on an equally abstract
entity called the “psyche.” Instead of an analysis of neurosis that begins with the idea of
a tree, Boss wants to back up and start with the immediacy and authenticity of a tree as
a being. It is not that humans don’t have ideas, but that we are not certain what an idea
actually is, and therefore the “idea” is not an appropriate starting place for understanding.
He moves next to the hypothesis of an unconscious and psychic topography. The significant
development was transformation of the insight that unconsciousness can be a property of a
mental phenomenon into an entification of the Unconscious as a psychic locality or system
“with properties and laws peculiar to itself” (Boss 1963:88). The situation becomes more
obscure when consciousness is then explained in terms of the unconscious, as the surface of
a psychic apparatus that allows for an abstract “capacity” for becoming aware which is much
more simply understood as direct “evidence of man’s primary openness and awareness,
which, in turn, is the very essence of his existence and never merely the property of an
unknown X” (Boss 1963:92). Boss then makes the bold claim that Daseinanalysis renders
the Unconscious superfluous, making it unnecessary to go beyond immediate experience
“because it has not prejudged a whole host of phenomena according to an arbitrary decision
as to the nature of the world and reality” (1963:94). Boss will not brook a question of the
form “where does an idea go when it goes out of awareness.” With some convincingness
he presents Daseinanalytic interpretations of the way in which one is existentially “with”
another being when thinking about an idea, as well as in terms of posthypnotic suggestion,
everyday parapraxes, pathogenic factors, and symptoms in neurosis. These interpretations
dispense with the unconscious and related notions of depth and surface, psychic locality
and entity, replacing them with existential openness and closedness, presence and absence,
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND PHENOMENOLOGY 69

complete existence and partial observation, light and darkness, concealment and disclosure,
freedom and unfreedom.

Boss examines the notions of psychodynamics and drives by pointing out that the mechanistic
understanding of force or energy that motivates in pushing one from behind or below does
not account for what in existence may be attractive and draw one toward engagement and
caring. Here again he argues for the inadequacy of a causal approach as opposed to an
attempt to understand the meaning-disclosing relationships of an explicitly human world.
In addressing the domain of emotions, Boss distinguishes between affects such as anger and
passions such as hate, and observes that their status is no less abstract than that of ideas
unless we acknowledge that from an existential standpoint we cannot say they are objective
things such that we have anger but that we are angry as a particular manner of being open to
the world, a state of attunement or resonance with the world. Repression in Freud’s sense
does not exist at all according to Boss, and in the example of a young girl who had received
a prudish upbringing and developed a hysterical paralysis upon being smitten with a young
man, he argues that “a ‘repression’ of thoughts and emotions into an ‘unconscious’ can be
understood much more adequately as the inability of an existence to become engaged in
an open, free, authentic, and responsible kind of relationship” (1963:120). Transference is
not the shifting of an entified affect from one person to another, but bespeaks a genuine
and primary relationship between the analyst and patient, and if the adult neurotic treats
the analyst like a father it is because his development remains so childlike that “he is open
to the perception only of the father-like aspects of all the adult men he encounters” (Boss
1963:124). Likewise, a paranoid delusion is not the result of projection of an internal affect
onto the outside world, but the consequence of a fundamentally immature existence that
cannot handle its life-situation and really experiences it as threatening or “poisonous;”
similar arguments can be made about “introjection” and “identification” (Boss 1963:126–
27). Finally, Boss understands Freud’s interpretation of dream images and symbols—and
here I return to the ground covered by Binswanger—as an attempt to undo or reverse
the mechanisms of “dream-work” at the superficial level of the dream’s immediately given
content, judging dreams by the standards of the waking state as composed of isolated symbols
in the form of mere pictures or “images” within a “psyche.” Instead, he asserts, dreams have
their own mode of both being-in-the-world and being open to the world that is “an equally
autonomous and ‘real’ way of existing—i.e., of an understanding, meaning-disclosing relating
to what is encountered” (1963:128–29).

Implications for Anthropology

My aim in this article has been to help prepare the ground for further discussion by tracing
the conceptual outline of a relationship between psychoanalysis and phenomenology, and
the roots of an earlier movement that placed the two schools of thought in direct dialogue. If
in fact they are thoroughgoing, comprehensive, and complementary accounts of subjectivity,
anthropological analyses of subjectivity can benefit from each of them as well as from the
dialogue between them. In the first half of the article, for example, this premise led to
70 ETHOS

juxtaposing the “immediacy” of phenomenology with the “memory” of psychoanalysis. As a

result it was possible in the second half of the paper to see Binswanger’s understanding that
one “chooses” mental illness emerging at this level of experiential immediacy in such a way
as to deepen and problematize the concept of agency. Likewise it is possible to see in Boss’s
analysis of experiential immediacy the transcendence of the very categories of depth and
surface as primary referents of subjectivity, broadening the existential repertoire to include
oppositions such as openness and closedness, presence and absence, freedom and unfreedom.
Such considerations do not do away with the psychoanalytic concern with depth but help to
create a balance in the conceptual relation between psychoanalysis and phenomenology.

At the beginning of this discussion I commented on the terminological asymmetry between

psychoanalysis and cultural phenomenology. In closing I want to offer a similar brief reflec-
tion on the phrases psychoanalytic anthropology and phenomenological anthropology. The
former has unquestioned temporal and substantive depth within anthropology, evocative
of scholars including Roheim, Devereux, Mead, La Barre, and Spiro along with the entire
school of culture and personality, generating a body of scholarship summarized in extensive
articles (Paul 1989; LeVine and Sharma 1997), and for a period (1978–87) even sustaining a
Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology. The same cannot be said of phenomenological anthro-
pology, where one is hard pressed in previous decades to find more than Hallowell’s (1955)
use of the term phenomenology “for want of a better word,” Geertz’s (1966) somewhat
strained application of Alfred Schutz’s phenomenology to Balinese culture, and the seldom
read work of Bidney (1973). At present, however, the relative retreat of psychoanalysis in
the face of an aggressive neuroscience and the relative advance of phenomenology with the
assertion that experience is a legitimate topic of analysis has resulted in a situation in which
the two approaches are more equally matched as dialogical partners. This is evident in the
tenor of recent anthropological work on both sides (Corin 2010; Fischer 2007; Heald and
Deluz 1994; Jackson 1996; Katz and Csordas 2003; Molino 2004; Moore 2007), though as
yet there has been little explicit dialogue or synthesis.9

For anthropology, psychoanalysis has always been put to use for interpretive rather than
therapeutic ends regardless of whether the material being analyzed originates in the clinic,
while phenomenology has found its appeal among those interested in the interpretation
of experience as well as of symbol systems and culture analogized to text. The encounter
between psychoanalysis and phenomenology per se has also largely been in an interpretive
register, more precisely understood as the encounter between psychoanalysis and philosophy
where phenomenology has been the most willing philosophical interlocutor for the Freudian
discipline, creating a philosophy of psychoanlysis and a consideration of the implications of
psychoanalysis for philosophy. From this perspective the dialogue about interpretation is at
the same time a privileged instance of the relation between anthropology and philosophy.
I would go so far as to say that it allows one to appreciate that the questions asked by
anthropology and philosophy are the same. These are questions having to do with meaning
and experience, subjectivity and intersubjectivity, embodiment and desire, language and
self, emotion and imagination. The difference, and a critical one by all means, is that
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND PHENOMENOLOGY 71

anthropology poses these questions in terms of the particular kind of empirical data produced
by ethnography.10

In the present essay I have attempted, by demonstrating a conceptual complementarity be-

tween psychoanalysis and phenomenology, and by examining attempts to synthesize them in
phenomenological psychiatry, to suggest that there is nothing to prevent their collaboration
from taking place. Anthropology is an ideal locus for such an intellectual enterprise, and
psychological anthropology in particular stands to benefit from an alliance of two powerful
methodologies as it turns increasingly toward analysis that transcends individual subjectivity
to encompass larger social processes (Biehl et al. 2007; Good et al. 2008; Jenkins 2011).
For a phenomenologically informed psychoanalytic anthropology this does not have to be
restricted to reiteration of the culture and personality maxim that neurosis is to an individual
what religion is to a culture, but can be extended to an analytic appreciation of the sometimes
traumatic and sometimes imaginative consequences of repression and its imminent irruption
into social reality. For a psychoanalytically informed phenomenological anthropology this
does not have to be limited to an incremental extension of face-to-face intersubjectivity to
wider social domains, but can enhance analytic appreciation of experiential immediacy and
both its interpellation to action and its sedimentation into cultural forms. The diversity
among contributors to this collection indicates that there is no one definitive form that
this enterprise is obliged to take, but the field is fertile for such a cross-pollinated mode of
thinking to take root.

THOMAS J. CSORDAS is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San

Diego.

Notes
1. Spiegelberg observes the virtual simultaneity of these movements’ emergence in the Germanic cultural milieu,
noting that Husserl’s Logical Investigations appeared in 1900–01 and Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams in 1901
(1972:127).

2. See, for example, the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center (1988), Askay and Farquhar (2006).

3. Although he lectured on psychoanalysis and philosophy, Merleau-Ponty did not publish an extended analysis,
but has left a number of intriguing comments worthy of repetition. In a preface to a book on Freud by his colleague
Hesnard he writes, “Phenomenology and psychoanalysis are not parallel; much better, they are both aiming toward
the same latency” (1982–83:67). In the working notes at the end of his posthumous The Visible and the Invisible he
writes “A philosophy of the flesh is the condition without which psychoanalysis remains anthropology” (1968:267)
and “Hence the philosophy of Freud is not a philosophy of the body but of the flesh—The Id, the unconscious—and
the Ego (correlative) to be understood on the basis of the flesh” (1968:270). These statements are pregnant with
significance.

4. In his comments at the Emory conference, Michael M. J. Fischer suggested that the term liberatory be substituted
for descriptive on the phenomenological side. I would rather say that liberation is a shared existential goal underlying
the descriptive and therapeutic methodological goals of the two intellectual styles, or perhaps that description and
therapy represent different types of dispositif liberatoire. Certainly psychoanalysis attempts to liberate people from
constraints and conflicts that forestall maturity and perpetuate anxiety, while phenomenology’s concern is nowhere
72 ETHOS

more evident than in the trajectory of Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) Phenomenology of Perception toward its ultimate
chapter on freedom.

5. In my view the consequence of pairing existence and unconscious instead of conscious and unconscious is that
in the latter case one might more easily be led to the question of the degree to which conscious and unconscious
overlap, whereas in the former one might be inclined to ask whether the unconscious determines existence or
whether existence encompasses the unconscious.

6. This may not be adequate either, since one may argue that the id–ego–superego trinity more aptly name the
self than dasein, and that a closer approximation would be the subject’s simultaneous engagement with what Lacan
(1998) labeled the symbolic, imaginary, and real.

7. See also Throop (this issue).

8. Freud’s 1900 Interpretation of Dreams (2010) could even today be a valuable primer for an anthropology applicable
to dreams, ritual, myth, and culture in general from the standpoint of bodily experience, morality, symbolic process,
memory and desire, and the relation of consciousness and the unconscious.

9. One exception is the explicit synthesis of psychoanalysis and phenomenology in the anthropological work on
psychopathology of Ellen Corin (1998; Corin et al. 2004).

10. Anthropology shares equally important thresholds with other discplines, of course. History and ethnology,
for example, can be characterized as asking the same questions about development and diversity with the former
emphasizing time and the latter space.

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