Freedom-Wound: Towards the Embodiment of Human Openness in Psychotherapy

Abstract

I take my task here as a kind of weaving. I wish to throw the net wide and show how Martin Heidegger and Medard Boss have offered me an understanding of the human realm, and its grounding in Being that has intimately informed how I am as a psychotherapist. They have communicated this human realm, between sky and earth, not just in philosophically logical ways, but also in evocatively human ways that may be ‘held’ and embodied. It is in this spirit that I wish to use the term ‘freedom-wound’ in order to indicate and evoke what I will call the ‘soulful space’ of being human — how we are grounded in both great freedom and great vulnerability. Such ambiguity may describe the essence of a human kind of openness, and the lived understanding of such ambiguity may be shown to give direction to psychotherapy in the following ways:

• • Such understanding welcomes psychotherapy clients to the human realm as wound and freedom. Such ‘wound’ and ‘freedom’ is not merely historical and social but is given, and can be taken up and lived in more welcome ways. There are ‘wounds’ and vulnerabilities that can be avoided or can be ‘healed’, but there is a great vulnerability that cannot. There are many freedoms that can be taken away or fought for, but there is a great freedom (with its responsibility) that cannot. An existentially oriented psychotherapy may give deep permission to clients to encounter and experience a kind of ‘settling down’ into these dimensions as they come through in the unique vicissitudes of their own life, and to take them up and live them forward.

• • Such understanding sees so-called psychopathology as flights and distortions of the human freedom to which one is called and also as the forms of refusal to the human vulnerabilities and limits that are existentially given. In this respect, one of the ways that Heidegger has served us is to indicate the relevance of grounding the understanding of human beings in a larger ontological context from which he/she is not separate. Such non-separation is the ground of a ‘calling’ beyond us yet intimate to us, and as such, cannot be fully understood by humanism, cognitivism, or psychologism. So-called psychopathology thus goes beyond psychology to the so-called spiritual and moral realms of our response to ‘callings’ that are not just ‘within’ our ‘minds’, but are ‘there’ in the mutual arising of being and beings.