ABSTRACT
Freud believed the process of cultural and linguistic embeddedness was responsible for the presentation of neurotic illnesses. Gadamer, in Truth and Method, argues that people worldview is circumscribed by the language one uses to describe our experiences. James Strachey, in his editorial annotations of Freud's English translation of Charcot, noted a detailed account of a sixteenth-century case of demonic possession. Freud concluded that the symbols in fairy tales, legends, myths, religions and dreams share common origins. Newberg and d'Aquili, like Freud, proposed that myths developed as a result of the human need to grasp, analyse and understand the phenomenology of experience. The chapter identifies how the formative personal contexts of four philosophers S ren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger shaped their philosophical theories, which in turn reflected the personal contexts in which they were developed.
