Volume 4, 2011
Selected Essays from Northern Europe
Petr Kouba
Pages 398-433
Temporality of Madness
Even though our primal concern is strictly philosophical, this article has also relevance for psychiatry and psychotherapy, as it is focused on the application of Heidegger’s existential analysis in the area of mental disorders. After a critical examination of the works of Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss and Alice Holzhey-Kunz who based their psychiatric and psychotherapeutic conceptions on the ontological fundament laid by Heidegger’s existential analysis, we try to uncover new thematic possibilities relevant to psychopathological phenomena in the ontological frame of the existential analysis. This brings us to the notion of the third mode of temporality that differs both from the temporality of the authentic existence and from the temporality of the inauthentic existence. Finally, we come to the possibility of the temporal disintegration of Dasein, in which we find the very core of the psychopathological phenomena. The phenomenon of temporal disintegration of Da-sein, however, shows the whole ontological structure of Dasein in a new light which is why it brings us to a fundamental revision of Heidegger’s existential analytics.