ABSTRACT
Martin Heidegger’s Zollikon seminars are unique in the philosopher’s published work in at least two different ways. First of all, they are a collection of seminars, recorded discussions and correspondence covering a period of over 20 years (1947-72) where Heidegger specifically addresses a group of physicians as scientists and not as philosophers. With painstaking efforts Heidegger elaborates the basic starting points of his philosophical premises to a group of medical doctors who as Ludwig Binswanger’s followers and Daseinanalysts (see Binswanger 1964) were already at the outer reaches of their own discipline. These physicians have, nevertheless, received their formal training in the sciences and wish to remain scientists. One of the key issues in the seminars becomes the very possibility of a scientific position after Heidegger. But secondly, the texts are also revealing because they expose so clearly Hei-
degger’s own aversion to both psychoanalysis in general and to Freud in particular. During the course of the seminars, Heidegger identifies what he believes to be a central flaw in Freud’s metapsychological aspirations. One comment in particular is worth quoting at length:
Freud’s metapsychology is the application of neo-Kantian philosophy to man. On the one hand, he has the natural sciences and, on the other, the
Kantian theory of objectivity. Even for conscious human phenomena, he postulates the gaplessness [Lückenlosigkeit] of explanation, that is, the continuity of causal relations. Since there is no such thing ‘within consciousness,’ he has to forge ‘the unconscious’ that must include within itself the gaplessness of causal relations. The postulate is the ability to comprehensively explain the psychical and, consequently, explanation is identified with understanding. This postulate is not inferred from psychical phenomena themselves, but it is the postulate of modern natural science.
