The Existential Analysis School of Thought by £udwig Binswanger I Existential Analysis-Its Nature and GoalsBY "EXISTENTIAL ANALYSIS" we understand an anthropological 1 type of scientific investigation-that is, one which is aimed at the essence of being human. Its name as well as its philosophical foundation are derived from Heidegger's Analysis of Being, "Daseins Analytics." It is his-not yet properly recognized-merit to have uncovered a fundamental structure of existence and to have described it in its essential parts, that is, the structure of being-in-the-world. By identifying the basic condition or structure of existence with being-in-the-world, Heidegger intends to say something about the condition of the possibility for existence. The formulation "being-inthe-world" as used by Heidegger is, therefore, in the nature of an ontological thesis, a statement about an essential condition that determines existence in general. From the discovery and presentation of this essential condition, existential analysis received its decisive stimulation, its philosophical foundation and justification, as well as its methodological directives. However, existential analysis itself is neither an ontology nor a philosophy and therefore must refuse to be termed a philosophical anthropology; as the reader will soon realize, only the designation of phenomenological anthropology meets the facts of the situation. * Translated by ERNEST ANGEL from the original, "t)ber die daseinsanalytische Forschungsrichtung in der Psychiatrie/'

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I Case History 2 HeredityELLEN WEST, a non-Swiss, is the only daughter of a Jewish father for whom her love and veneration know no bounds. She has a dark-haired brother four years older than she, who resembles his father, and a younger brother who is blond. Whereas the older one "has no nerves" and is very well adjusted and cheerful, the younger is "a bundle of nerves" and is a soft 3 and womanish aesthete. At seventeen he was in a psychiatric clinic for some weeks on account of a mental ailment with suicidal ideas, and even after his recovery he remained easily excitable. He has married.The sixty-six-year-old father is described as an externally very self-controlled, rather stiffly formal, very reserved, willful man of action; internally, however, as very soft 3 and sensitive and suffering from nocturnal depressions and states of fear accompanied by self-reproaches, "as if a wave of fear closed over his head." He sleeps poorly and is often under the pressure of fear when he gets up in the morning.

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