309
HEIDEGGER'S PHILOSOPHY AND ITS IMPLICATIONS
he, as a trained psychoanalyst, who introduced Heidegger to Freud's metapsychology:
Even before our first encounter, I had heard of Heidegger's abysmal aversion to all modern scientific psychology. To me, too, he made no secret of his opposition to it His repugnance mounted considerably after I had induced him with much guile and cunning to delve directly for the first time into Freud's own writings. During his perusal of the theoretical, "metapsychologica" works, Heidegger never ceased shaking his head. He simply did not want to have to accept that such a highly intelligent and gifted man as Freud could produce such artificial, inhuman, indeed absurd and purely fictitious constructions about homo sapiens. This reading made him literally feel ill. Freud's "Papers on Technique," in which he gives advice on the practical conduct of the therapeutic analysis of the neurotic patient, made Heidegger more conciliatory. He immediately discovered the crass mutual contradiction of these writings: namely, the unbridgeable gulf between the absolute, natural scientific determinism of his theories and the repeated emphasis of the freeing of the patient through psychoanalytic practice.12
In his book Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis, Boss extended this point by arguing that the entire system of philosophical presuppositions underlying Freud's "metapsychology" and his "therapeutic techniques" were fundamentally diverse, and the latter were at least compatible with Heidegger's hermeneutical ontology.13
To understand the reason for Heidegger's dual reaction to Freud, one need only consider the following pronouncements by the latter: "[Psychoanalysis] must accept the scientific Weltanschauung... the intellect and the mind are objects for scientific research in exacdy the same way as non-human things.... Our best hope for the future is that intellect—the scientific spirit, reason—may in process of time establish a dictatorship in the mental life of man."14 Science was the only source of genuine knowledge for Freud the theorist. Such remarks could have only caused the greatest ontological dyspepsia in Heidegger. On the other hand, for Heidegger more palatable remarks were strewn throughout Freud's papers on technique. Freud often alluded to the human capacity for free choice, the truth-disclosing and truth-fleeing tendencies of human beings, the capacity for being absorbed into an anonymous group mentality, thereby forfeiting individual distinctiveness, freedom, concomitant responsibility, and so forth. Indeed, in stark contrast to the quote above, in his essay "The Ways of Psycho-analytic Therapy" Freud stressed that "we cannot accept... that psycho-analysis should place itself in the service of a particular philosophical outlook on the world and should urge this upon the patient in order to ennoble him. I would say