ABSTRACT
Medard Boss is without a doubt the foremost exponent of existential psychotherapy in its purest Heideggerian form. Of Swiss nationality, he worked in the Zürich area, which became a centre for the approach. Boss termed his approach ‘Daseinsanalysis’ to indicate the close links of his particular perspective with the work of Heidegger and he wanted to reserve this term exclusively to his own cause (Condrau 1991). Boss was trained as a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst, but his dissatisfaction with these professions brought him to collaborate for over a decade with C.G. Jung, as well as seeking inspiration from Binswanger’s methods. Eventually Boss turned to Heidegger’s work to find a more phenomenological basis for his own practice and he began an intensive collaboration with the German philosopher, who came to give seminars for Boss and his staff for over a decade. Boss published the notes of these seminars after Heidegger’s death under the title Zollikon Seminars (Boss 1987). Boss’s other publications are equally noteworthy. He published a book on sexual perversions and then several books on dreams (1946, 1957b, 1977). Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis, which was written in 1957, dealt with existing forms of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology, arguing that they are insufficient in terms of understanding people’s true preoccupations and proposing an existential alternative. His work culminated in the book Existential Foundations of Medicine and Psychology (1979), which argued strongly for the importance of a new direction for both of these disciplines and, because of this, proved extremely controversial. Boss created the Daseinsanalytic Institute in Zürich, as well as the International Federation for Daseinsanalysis which, to this day, remains the largest organisation of psychotherapists of this orientation.
