Daseinsanalysis

Holzhey-Kunz sets out daseinsanalysis as it was shaped by Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss, then argues for her own reading of what the approach can be. She traces its double debt: to Heidegger, whose account of finitude, anxiety and being-in-the-world supplies its philosophical ground, and to Freud, whose clinical technique she treats as the practical means best suited to that ground. Rather than reconciling the two founders, she marks where Binswanger and Boss diverge and shows why the difference matters for practice.

The central claim is that neurotic symptoms register a person's confrontation with the conditions of existence, so mental distress is read as suffering that carries philosophical weight rather than as malfunction alone. This amounts to a hermeneutic reading of the symptom, where distress discloses something true about existence.

For the clinician, the book offers a way to hear existential meaning in ordinary complaint while keeping the analytic frame, connecting phenomenological insight to the consulting room.