Rosemarie Zens

Embracing the Mystery – Accepting the Unknown
Health and illnes – In search of meaning in all the chaos

 

The existentialist approach to psychotherapy known as Daseinsanalyse was founded in the early 1970s by the Zurich psychiatrist Medard Boss (1903–1990), who borrowed many ideas from the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger. A method for interpreting life stories, this form of psychoanalysis considers human health from the existentialist point of view. Rather than examining the symptoms of illness and classifying states as either healthy or sick, it combines philosophical and medical anthropology with phenomenological approaches, in an attempt to determine the structures and histories of human existence. Instead of asking: What is illness? the question here is: In what way or how does something make us sick? And how free and open can the individual approach his behavior and express authentic emotions toward his state of being?

The whole essay will be published in English soon.
Meanwhile you can look it up in the German modified version

 

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The author, a Germanist and psychotherapist, gave this lecture (abridged here) at the Swiss Society for Daseinsanalysis in Zurich on May 15, 1990.

Rosemarie Henzler-Zens in: Süddeutsche Zeitung, Weekend edition, Munich, June 23./24. 1990