ABSTRACT
To consider Ludwig Binswanger’s theoretical reflection on psychiatry as one of the contexts within which the concept of care can be conceived might raise some objections, insofar as “existential analysis” (Daseinsanalyse) seems to fail on the level of therapeutic praxis, that is, the level of concrete caregiving. Indeed, many psychiatrists equate existential psychopathology with a vaguely ethical-humanistic discourse on the care relationship focused on “listening” and “understanding” the sick person, rather than considering his/her experience of suffering as a pathological phenomenon to be treated in a medical context. In other words, this experience is supposed to be a “form of existence” and not a disease. Thus, for its detractors existential psychiatry does nothing but outline an anthropological doctrine, which sets itself against all forms of medical psychiatry, considered as “pathologizing.”
