Mattar and Sá: The meanings of “analysis” and “analytics” in Heidegger’s thinking and its implications for psychotherapy

Abstract:

This study deals with some of the main concepts of daseinsanalytical psychotherapy, inspired by the thinking of German philosopher Martin Heidegger. To fulfill this aim, it begins by expliciting the choice of the term “analytics” (Analytik) made by Heidegger in his piece Being and Time (1927) instead of “analysis” (Analyse). It points out the difference in meaning between both terms, highlighting the modern detachment from the original meaning of “analysis”, which reduces it to a decomposition of elements, in an analogy to Chemistry. However, analysis comes from the Greek analisein, which means the unweaving of a web, or freeing, releasing someone or something from his/its ties. The term analytics, used by Kant and resumed by Heidegger, does not lead to a disintegration of the phenomenon, but to its original character, to its meaning, its condition of possibility. Analytics weaves and unweaves to free the meaning that makes fabric possible, to catch a glimpse of the very activity of weaving and unweaving. This is the way through which Heidegger will understand analytics. Daseinsanalyse, the analysis of existence, is defined by him in Zollikon Seminars as the ontic exercise of ontological analysis carried out in Being and Time. It is possible, then, to think of Daseinsanalyse as the exercise of analytics in practice, which elaborates thematically the factual existence of the client, submitting it to its constitutive existential-ontological structures. This unweaving, guided by analysis, frees existing to all that summons it as an opening in meaning, helping it become present to all beings, including itself, through reflection. After presenting the ideas of two Swiss psychiatrists who established a relationship between Heidegger’s philosophy and practice, Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss, the article proposes some ways through which the psychotherapist can guide his/her attitudes according to Daseinsanalyse. Once the demands of existential suffering, addressed to psychotherapeutical practice, are more and more related to a historical leveling of meaning which can be accounted in the global figures of exploitation and consume, it is indispensable, so that psychotherapy can be a space for reflection which allows other ways of existing, that psychotherapy itself does not remain acritically subordinate to this same historical horizon of reducing meaning.

Keywords: Analytics, Analysis, Psychotherapeutical Practice, Daseinsanalyse.

Mattar, C. M; Sá, R. N. (2008) Os sentidos de “análise” e “analítica” no pensamento de Heidegger e suas implicações para a psicoterapia. Estudos e Pesquisas em Psicologia V8n2. Rio de Janeiro.