The thing, the phenomenon to which both therapist and client must be devoted is the client's discourse, not its conversational or functionally informative dimension but its hidden or latent quality. What has to be cared for is Dasein's own most self, its uncanny being-in-the-world which is covered-up in its everydayness.
In Being and Time, Heidegger asserts the fundamental uncanniness of being-in-the-world. This uncanniness, this not being at home in the world, is Dasein's state of being thrown into the uncertainties of a finite existence. As finite, Dasein's very being is at issue both in terms of "who" it will be and even that it will be at all (its impending death). In the face of this profound uncanniness, Dasein flees into the superficialities of daily life, loses itself in the busy activities of the "they" (being as everybody). "Uncanniness," writes Heidegger, "is the basic kind of Being-in-the-world, even though in an everyday way it has been covered up". The strangeness of human existing, its uncanniness, is what makes us, as Sophocles' chorus in Antigone says, "the strangest of the strange". Heidegger described the movement of the call of conscience as a calling back which calls forth. In being called back to its uncanniness, Dasein is called forth to exist as the very being which it is: mortal. Uncanniness cites our mortality. In its disruption of everyday life, the eruption of this latent uncanniness refers us to the radical finitude of existence that is covered over in our preoccupation with practical affairs.