If Heidegger were to criticize Freud, it certainly would not have anything to do with the depth part of depth-psychology. Heidegger is one of the most prominent philosophers of concealment in the history of the West, and while doubts have often been sown about whether Heideggerian concealment has anything to do with the psychoanalytic sort, we will see that Freud makes an explicit comparison between his own concept of the unconscious and Kant’s notion of the unattainable thing-in-itself. Heidegger’s objection to Freud would lie along a different path. Heidegger is concerned primarily with one relation, and only one: the relation between the always concealed Being and the multitude of visible beings that we encounter either as present-at-hand in consciousness or in the readiness-to-hand of reliable equipment taken for granted until it fails. Any discussion of the transformations between one individual being and another could not be of much interest to Heidegger, who would dismiss such considerations as “ontic” (pertaining to accessible individual beings) rather than “ontological” (pertaining to Being itself).

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