Chapters authored
Freud and Binswanger: An Asymptotic Relationship
The relationship between Freud and Binswanger can be thought as a productive misunderstanding. In search of institutional recognition, Freud sees in Binswanger above all a representative of classical psychiatry, moreover director of a prestigious institution, while the latter aspires to shatter this same psychiatry which seems to him marked by the discrediting of the patient. This misunderstanding will take the form of a doctrinal rather than a practical disagreement, centered on the notion of drive - too biological according to Binswanger - and in particular on the latter’s refusal of the drive origin of the ego and of the censorship. For Binswanger, psychiatry can renew itself from the inside by opening up to a philosophical, phenomenological, approach to the patient and his world, a world in which it is first necessary to enter through a patient-doctor co-journey in order to reconstitute the conditions for living together. For Freud, the therapeutic imperative proscribes such recourse to an external authority, the world of the philosopher being itself, by its closure on itself, suspect. In the end each of the respective thoughts of the two men will progress in contact with the other without ever a perfect agreement being able to take place.
Part of the book: Psychoanalysis