Particularly congenial with Heidegger’s perspective, in my view, is Lacan’s conception of psychotherapy and of the rootedness of illness in a “lack of being.” Several passages in the Zoliikon Seminars link human pathology with an ontological lack or “privation.” “If we negate something not by simply excluding it but rather by retaining it as a lack or want,” Heidegger says at one point, “then we call such negation a privation.” The endeavors of the medical profession, he continues addressing his psychiatric audience, occur “in the domain of negation understood as a privation” — because they revolve around human illness or pathology. In the case of illness, well-being or being in-the-world is not simply absent or eliminated but disturbed. In this sense, illness is not a “mere” negation of Dasein’s situatedness. but a phenomenon of privation; every privation, however, implies a relatedness to being or to the condition which is wanting or of which one is in want. Thus, “to the extent that you deal with illness you actually deal with well-being in the sense of a lack of well-being which is to be restored.”

Heidegger’s affinities with a non-orthodox Freudianism are underscored in the Zollikon Seminars by frequent protestations against idealism and mentalism (which, it is true, do not fully cancel certain cuhuralist overtones). In my own estimate, the path to a viable connection of existential ontology and psychoanalysis was traced some time ago by Merleau-Ponty in his essay “Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis.” In this essay, Merleau-Ponty sided with those who, separating psychoanalysis from a “scientistic or objectivist ideology.” treat the Freudian unconscious rather as “an archaic or primordial consciousness” and the repressed as “a zone of experience that we have not integrated.” This construal, in his view, did not vindicate a mentalist approach nor the integration of psychoanalysis into the “philosophy of consciousness” (along Husserlian lines). As he observed, drawing his inspiration more from Heidegger than Husserl: “All consciousness is consciousness of something or of the world, but this something, this world, s no longer . . . an object that is what it is, exactly adjusted to acts of consciousness. Consciousness is now the ‘soul of Heraclitus’ and being, which is around it rather than in front of it, is a being of dreams, by definition hidden.”

Pp. 560-1

¶ 7:17 AM