— Ch. 1 · Early Training And Mentors —
Medard Boss.
~3 min read · Ch. 1 of 6
Medard Boss entered medical school in Vienna during the early 1920s. He began his psychoanalytic training by undergoing sessions with Sigmund Freud. This initial analysis continued later at length in Zurich under Swiss psychoanalyst Hans Behn Eschenburg. Upon returning to Zurich, he trained at Burghölzli Hospital under psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler. Boss then pursued formal psychoanalytic training at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. His supervisory analyst there was Karen Horney. While studying at BPI, he learned from Hanns Sachs, Otto Fenichel, Wilhelm Reich, and Kurt Goldstein. Later he traveled to London to work closely with Ernest Jones for six months at the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases. Back in Zurich, Carl Gustav Jung invited him to join a workshop with other doctors. This experience lasted nearly ten years and helped Boss see that psychoanalysis need not be limited to Freudian interpretations.
Encounter With Heidegger
During World War II, while serving in the Swiss Army, Boss began studying Martin Heidegger's Being and Time. After the war concluded, Boss contacted Heidegger directly. They initiated a mentoring friendship that lasted twenty-five years. Through this study with Heidegger, Boss came to believe modern medicine made incorrect assumptions about human beings. He argued that psychology premised on Cartesian philosophy and Newtonian physics failed to understand what it means to be human. Boss addressed an existential foundation for medicine and psychology through two classic texts. The first appeared as Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis in 1963. The second text became Existential Foundations of Medicine and Psychology in 1979. Whereas his older colleague Ludwig Binswanger founded the first systematic existential approach to psychiatry, Boss is regarded as having founded the first systematic approach to existential psychotherapy.Founding Daseinsanalysis
Boss developed a form of psychotherapy known as Daseinsanalysis. This method united the psychotherapeutic practice of psychoanalysis with the existential phenomenological philosophy of friend and mentor Martin Heidegger. He published key works including The Meaning and Content of Sexual Perversions in 1949. Another significant contribution was The Analysis of Dreams which received an English translation in 1958. A Psychiatrist Discovers India followed in 1965. These writings established his reputation beyond standard clinical practice. Boss saw dreams as coming from a person's life as a whole rather than from a separate dream state. He also did not see the unconscious as a place where denied impulses were kept. Freud presented the unconscious differently, but Boss rejected that specific framing. His work sought to integrate philosophical inquiry directly into therapeutic sessions.