Heidegger matters to psychotherapy because Being and Time (1927) described a person not as a mind sealed inside a skull but as Dasein: a finite being whose existence is care, thrown into a world that matters to it. The Swiss psychiatrists Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss built Daseinsanalysis on that idea, Heidegger taught Boss’s colleagues in the Zollikon Seminars (1959–1969), and existential therapy still draws on it.

The argument here is that care is Heidegger’s most usable idea for clinicians. We are not containers of feelings but patterns of concern stretched across a world and across time. Read that way, trauma is more than a stored memory or an alarmed nervous system. It is the collapse of a world, in which the things that mattered stop mattering and the future stops making sense, and repair means rebuilding a livable world with another person. The idea is worth keeping. So is a clear view of the man who had it, because Heidegger was a committed Nazi.

Dasein, care and being-in-the-world

Heidegger was born in Messkirch, in rural southwest Germany, on 26 September 1889. He became Edmund Husserl’s assistant at Freiburg in 1919, taught at Marburg from 1923 to 1928, and then returned to Freiburg to take Husserl’s chair. Being and Time appeared in 1927, dedicated to Husserl, and it is unfinished: only about a third of the planned work was ever published.¹

The book asks what it means for anything to be, starting with the one entity for whom that question comes up. Heidegger called it Dasein, “being-there,” avoiding words like subject and consciousness that already picture a mind on one side and a world of objects on the other. Dasein’s basic constitution is being-in-the-world, hyphenated because person, world and “in” cannot be pulled apart.^{1, 2} The “in” is not the way a coin sits in a box. It is closer to the way you live in your own house: you belong there, and the place is organized by what you are doing.³

He called the whole structure care (Sorge). Care does not mean tenderness. It means something is always at stake for us. We find ourselves already in a situation we did not choose (thrownness), we press ahead into possibilities (projection), and we get absorbed in what is in front of us (falling). Heidegger reads these three as past, future and present, which is why time sits at the center of the book.³

The break with Husserl follows. Husserl’s phenomenology described the structures of consciousness; Heidegger treated consciousness as derived from existence and made phenomenology a matter of interpretation from inside a life already under way. His vocabulary has theological roots too: in 1921 he lectured on Book X of Augustine’s Confessions, a course now published in The Phenomenology of Religious Life.⁴ That lineage runs back through Augustine’s place in the prehistory of depth psychology, and forward through Gadamer’s hermeneutics and Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943), an existentialism Heidegger publicly disowned in his 1947 “Letter on Humanism.”¹

Mood, anxiety and death

For a therapist the most useful pages of Being and Time are about mood. Heidegger’s word is Befindlichkeit, rendered “state-of-mind” by Macquarrie and Robinson and “disposedness” by later scholars: the way we always already find ourselves somehow.³ Moods are not private colorings laid over a neutral world. They disclose how things matter before we think about them, and many are shared and shaped by culture.¹

Fear has a definite object approaching from within the world: the dog, the diagnosis, the boss. Anxiety has no such object. In anxiety our sense of how things matter “collapses,” in Heidegger’s words, and the world shows up as “of no consequence.”¹ The anxious person is no longer at home in the world.³ Heidegger’s German for this is unheimlich, the ordinary word for uncanny, built on Heim, home.

Two cautions. Existential anxiety is a philosophical description, not a diagnosis: panic disorder, generalized anxiety and PTSD are treatable conditions with their own evidence base, and decisions about medication belong with a prescriber. Readers also disagree about which experience Heidegger was describing: Robert Stolorow finds it closely resembles the state emotional trauma produces, while William Blattner sees in it the core features of depression.¹ Perhaps he described a structure several kinds of suffering share, the falling-away of a world’s significance.

Death is the other half. Heidegger separates the event of dying from death as the possibility that bounds every other possibility. Facing it, which he calls anticipation, is explicitly not brooding over when and how one will die. It means taking up a finite life as finite, so that choices are made rather than drifted into.¹ The drift has a name, das Man, “the they” or, in Hubert Dreyfus’s rendering, “the one”: what one does, what one is supposed to want.³ Thrownness sets the other limit: we are never in control of our own being “from the ground up.”¹ Paul Tillich, who knew Heidegger at Marburg, carried these themes into The Courage to Be (1952); our essay on Paul Tillich and the soul’s depth follows that thread.⁵

Trauma as the collapse of a world

Heidegger offered no theory of trauma. The idea of trauma as world collapse is often pinned on him, but it belongs to later writers who used his framework, above all Robert Stolorow. Stolorow, a psychoanalyst who also holds a doctorate in philosophy, came to the subject partly through a traumatic loss of his own.⁶ In 1999 he described trauma as the shattering of the “absolutisms of everyday life,” the unexamined confidence that lets us plan tomorrow as if it were guaranteed.^{7, 8} In Trauma and Human Existence (2007) he called it a “catastrophic loss of innocence that permanently alters one’s sense of being-in-the-world.”^{6, 8} He argued that the possibility of trauma is built into human existence, and that whether it comes lastingly to the foreground depends on a person’s relational contexts.⁶ His World, Affectivity, Trauma (2011) argues that Heidegger’s account of anxiety bears a close similarity to the affective state emotional trauma produces.⁹

Matthew Ratcliffe and colleagues took up one symptom, the “sense of a foreshortened future.” Focusing on the effects of torture, they argued that trauma, especially harm deliberately inflicted by another person, can destroy a basic trust in the world. That loss undermines the intelligibility of a person’s projects, cares and commitments, and so changes how time itself is experienced.⁸ They cite Jean Améry’s enduring loss of “trust in the world” after torture and Auschwitz, and Judith Herman’s observation that traumatized people can feel “they belong more to the dead than to the living,” which they connect to Heidegger’s being-toward-death.⁸

Some Heidegger scholars read his “death” the same way, as the collapse of the projects and roles that define a life, something a person can live through.¹ Kevin Aho’s Contexts of Suffering (2019) applies this to depression and anxiety, describing from inside “the collapse of our world and the paralyzing dissolution of the self.”¹⁰

This is where the thesis pays off. If a person is their involvement in what matters, an event that breaks trust does not only leave a memory to process. It changes what the world is for that person: which things invite action, which people feel safe, how far ahead it makes sense to plan.

From Kreuzlingen to the Zollikon Seminars

The first psychiatrist to build on Heidegger was Ludwig Binswanger (1881–1966), medical director of his family’s sanatorium at Kreuzlingen from 1911 to 1956 and a lifelong friend of Freud. Binswanger read psychiatric illness as an alteration in a person’s whole way of being-in-the-world: lived time, lived space, the felt body, relations with others. He called the approach Daseinsanalyse, existential analysis.¹¹ He also added love, a “being-beyond-the-world,” alongside Heidegger’s care, and Heidegger became one of his sharpest critics; scholars still argue over whether the dispute was a misunderstanding or a real difference.¹² His best-known case shows the method’s risks. He diagnosed schizophrenia in Ellen West, a young woman consumed by a dread of gaining weight, a picture now recognized as a severe eating disorder; she died by suicide in 1921, shortly after leaving his clinic.¹³ Carl Rogers later objected that she had been treated as an object of study rather than met as a person.

Medard Boss (1903–1990) came from the center of psychoanalysis: a few sessions of analysis with Freud, training at the Burghölzli under Eugen Bleuler, and nearly ten years in a study group Jung ran for physicians. He read Being and Time as a Swiss Army doctor during the Second World War, and in 1947, after being warned about Heidegger’s Nazi past, he decided to judge the philosophy apart from the man and wrote to him.¹⁴ From 1959 to 1969 Heidegger taught Boss’s psychiatric colleagues and students, first at the Burghölzli clinic and then in Boss’s house at Zollikon.¹⁴

The Zollikon Seminars show what Heidegger thought clinicians should take from him. He told the doctors to give up picturing the psyche as a capsule, and asked why sorrow could not be real without being exactly measurable. He called his own analytic of Dasein ontological, a description of any human existence, and the doctors’ Daseinsanalysis ontic, the study of particular lives.¹⁴ He also separated causes from motives: a motive works only insofar as it is understood, so the physician is the occasion of a cure rather than its efficient cause.¹⁵ Boss’s Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis (1963 in English) kept the analytic setting, dropped Freud’s metapsychology, and read dreams as expressions of a whole existence rather than disguised wishes.¹⁶

American clinicians met these ideas mainly through Existence (1958), edited by Rollo May, Ernest Angel and Henri Ellenberger, which translated Binswanger’s Ellen West study.¹⁷ Rollo May’s theories of anxiety and freedom, shaped by his teacher Tillich, carry that lineage. Irvin Yalom’s existential psychotherapy organized the field around four givens: death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness.¹⁸ Eugene Gendlin, the developer of Focusing, wrote a long essay on Heidegger’s Befindlichkeit.¹⁹ His “felt sense,” a bodily, not-yet-verbal sense of a whole situation, is close kin to Heidegger’s claim that mood discloses a world before thought does.

The Nazi problem

Heidegger was elected rector of Freiburg University in April 1933 and joined the Nazi Party on 1 May. As rector he was responsible for aligning the university with the party’s aims, and that year he publicly backed Hitler in an article and a speech to students and signed the professors’ vow of allegiance. He resigned the rectorship in April 1934 but stayed in the party until 1945.¹ After the war the French military government barred him from teaching for several years.

The Stanford Encyclopedia summarizes the scholarship plainly. His involvement was a matter of conviction. He was an anti-Semite who held a racist conception of the German people while rejecting the Nazis’ biological theory of race. After the war he distorted the record of his political activity and never publicly renounced National Socialism.¹ The Black Notebooks, published in his collected works from 2014, made this impossible to wave away. Their editor, Peter Trawny, found in them a “being-historical” anti-Semitism tied into Heidegger’s history of being.²⁰ Critics such as Johannes Fritsche argue that even this understates how far it reached.²¹

Hannah Arendt was Heidegger’s student, and for a time his lover, at Marburg in the 1920s. In “Martin Heidegger at Eighty” (1971) she put “error” in quotation marks when referring to his Nazi episode, and observed that Plato and Heidegger, when they entered human affairs, “turned to tyrants and Führers.”²² Karl Löwith, Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor Adorno argued instead that the politics exposed flaws in the thought itself.

For a therapist, the practical answer is to test the clinical ideas against what patients report, not to accept them on Heidegger’s authority. One weak point, which Levinas pressed, is ethical. Authentic resolve, in Heidegger’s hands, says little about what one should resolve to do. A therapy built on care has to add what he left out: the claim another person’s suffering makes on us.

What this looks like in therapy

A Heideggerian stance comes with no protocol; it changes what a therapist attends to. Psychoanalysis taught clinicians to ask why. Daseinsanalysts put more weight on how: how the world shows up for this person now, what has gone flat, what time feels like. In Heidegger’s terms, a therapist is less a mechanic applying a cause than an occasion for the person to see their situation differently.¹⁵

With trauma, that means asking about the world as well as the event. What did the person stop trusting? Which plans stopped making sense? How far ahead can they picture their life? On Ratcliffe’s account, a foreshortened future is not only a set of pessimistic beliefs to be argued with. It also expresses a change in the structure of experience after trust in the world has broken.⁸ On Stolorow’s, the relationship is part of the treatment, because whether pain becomes lasting trauma depends on the relational contexts that can or cannot hold it.⁶

With anxiety, it means telling apart a panic disorder that needs direct treatment from the existential anxiety of a life that no longer fits; a person can have both. With mood, it means attending to the bodily sense of a situation before it has words, where Focusing and somatic approaches pick up the thread. With thrownness, it means helping a person own a history they did not choose without blaming themselves for it.

The evidence is modest. A 2015 meta-analysis by Joël Vos, Meghan Craig and Mick Cooper pooled 15 randomized trials of existential therapies with 1,792 participants. Structured meaning-centered therapies had large effects on meaning in life and moderate effects on anxiety and depression, mostly among people with physical illness. Supportive-expressive approaches had small effects, two other types had no significant effects, and the authors called the studies few and of low quality.²³ Daseinsanalysis was not among the types the review could evaluate. Heidegger offers a way of understanding suffering, not a proven treatment for any disorder.

His essay “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954) warned against treating everything, people included, as standing-reserve, a stock of resources on call.^{1, 24} A person in distress is not a broken machine. Their world has changed, and the work is to understand it well enough to help them live in it again.

If the language of a collapsed world fits something you are living through, existential therapy is one place to work on it. Taproot Therapy Collective offers it in Hoover, near Birmingham, and by teletherapy across Alabama; read how we approach it on our page about existential therapy in Birmingham, or reach us through our contact page. If you are in crisis or thinking about suicide, call or text 988, or see our crisis resources in Birmingham.

References

1. Wrathall, M. (2025). Martin Heidegger. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/
2. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). Basil Blackwell. (Original work published 1927)
3. Wheeler, M. (2020). Martin Heidegger. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Fall 2020 ed.). Stanford University. (Original entry published 2011) https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/heidegger/
4. Heidegger, M. (2004). The phenomenology of religious life (M. Fritsch & J. A. Gosetti-Ferencei, Trans.). Indiana University Press.
5. Tillich, P. (1952). The courage to be. Yale University Press.
6. Stolorow, R. D. (2007). Trauma and human existence: Autobiographical, psychoanalytic, and philosophical reflections. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203837801
7. Stolorow, R. D. (1999). The phenomenology of trauma and the absolutisms of everyday life: A personal journey. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 16(3), 464–468. https://doi.org/10.1037/0736-9735.16.3.464
8. Ratcliffe, M., Ruddell, M., & Smith, B. (2014). What is a “sense of foreshortened future?” A phenomenological study of trauma, trust, and time. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1026. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01026
9. Stolorow, R. D. (2011). World, affectivity, trauma: Heidegger and post-Cartesian psychoanalysis. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203815816
10. Aho, K. (2019). Contexts of suffering: A Heideggerian approach to psychopathology. Rowman & Littlefield. Reviewed in Taubeneck, S. (2020), Human Studies, 43(3), 487–494. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-020-09552-5
11. Binswanger, L. (1958). The existential analysis school of thought. In R. May, E. Angel, & H. F. Ellenberger (Eds.), Existence: A new dimension in psychiatry and psychology (pp. 191–213). Basic Books. https://doi.org/10.1037/11321-007
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13. Binswanger, L. (1958). The case of Ellen West: An anthropological-clinical study. In R. May, E. Angel, & H. F. Ellenberger (Eds.), Existence: A new dimension in psychiatry and psychology (pp. 237–364). Basic Books. https://doi.org/10.1037/11321-009
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16. Boss, M. (1963). Psychoanalysis and daseinsanalysis (L. B. Lefebre, Trans.). Basic Books.
17. May, R., Angel, E., & Ellenberger, H. F. (Eds.). (1958). Existence: A new dimension in psychiatry and psychology. Basic Books. https://doi.org/10.1037/11321-000
18. Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential psychotherapy. Basic Books.
19. Gendlin, E. T. (2017). Befindlichkeit: Heidegger and the philosophy of psychology. In E. S. Casey & D. M. Schoeller (Eds.), Saying what we mean: Implicit precision and the responsive order (pp. 194–224). Northwestern University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv7tq4qc.16
20. Trawny, P. (2015). Heidegger and the myth of a Jewish world conspiracy (A. J. Mitchell, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226303871.001.0001
21. Fritsche, J. (2016). National Socialism, anti-Semitism, and philosophy in Heidegger and Scheler: On Peter Trawny’s Heidegger & the myth of a Jewish world-conspiracy. Philosophy Today, 60(2), 583–608. https://doi.org/10.5840/philtoday2016602109
22. Arendt, H. (1971, October 21). Martin Heidegger at eighty (A. Hofstadter, Trans.). The New York Review of Books. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1971/10/21/martin-heidegger-at-eighty/
23. Vos, J., Craig, M., & Cooper, M. (2015). Existential therapies: A meta-analysis of their effects on psychological outcomes. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 83(1), 115–128. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037167
24. Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology and other essays (W. Lovitt, Trans.). Harper & Row.