Ludwig Binswanger

Ludwig Binswanger
Born	April 13, 1881 Kreuzlingen, Switzerland
Died	February 5, 1966 (84 years old) Kreuzlingen, Switzerland
Nationality	Swiss
Fields	Psychiatry
Known for	Daseinsanalysis
Influences	Martin Heidegger Edmund Husserl Martin Buber
Influenced	Eugène Minkowski Laurence A. Rickels Medard Boss Franco Basaglia Jürgen Habermas

Ludwig Binswanger (April 13, 1881 – February 5, 1966) was a Swiss psychiatrist and pioneer in the field of existential psychology. His grandfather (also named Ludwig Binswanger) was founder of the "Bellevue Sanatorium" in Kreuzlingen, and his uncle Otto Binswanger was a professor of psychiatry at the University of Jena.

He is considered the most distinguished of the phenomenological psychologists, and the most influential in making the concepts of existential psychology known in Europe and the United States.

In 1907 Binswanger received his medical degree from the University of Zurich. As a young man he worked and studied with some of the greatest psychiatrists of the era, such as Carl Jung, Eugen Bleuler and Sigmund Freud. He visited Freud (who had cited his uncle Otto's work on Neurasthenia) in 1907 alongside Jung, approvingly noting his host's "distaste for all formality and etiquette, his personal charm, his simplicity, casual openness and goodness". The two men became lifelong friends, Freud finding Binswanger's 1912 illness "particularly painful", and Binswanger offering Freud a refuge in Switzerland in 1938.

Binswanger became a member of the early 'Freud Group' Jung led in Switzerland; but nevertheless wrestled throughout his life over the place of psychoanalysis in his thinking - his 1921 article on 'Psychoanalysis and clinical Psychiatry' being only one landmark of that lifelong struggle.

Binswanger was further influenced by existential philosophy, particularly after World War I, through the works of Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Buber, eventually evolving his own distinctive brand of existential-phenomenological psychology.

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