ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some of Martin Heidegger’s central ideas to Wilfred Bion’s investigation of the capacity of human beings to understand their understanding as an aspect of their being and not only in relation to their cognition. It examines how the fundamentals of anxiety were first considered by Sigmund Freud in his pre-psychoanalytic writings. The chapter explores a change of language, it is written to bring out some of the underlying affinities. The relationship to the world-as-world is an important consideration for psychoanalysis as well as the existential phenomenology of Heidegger. The concept of care (Sorge) is a ‘term of art’ in Heidegger’s analysis – his ‘daseinsanalytic’. He is suggesting that an understanding from being, in which a quality of being-with is primordial, is foundational to the human being in the function of cognition, and is a precondition for it, and not the other way around.
