Zollikon Seminars - The Seminars

The Seminars

The Zollikon Seminars were conducted intermittently, "two to three times per semester", between 1959 and 1969. Boss noted that Heidegger dedicated three hours a night, two nights a week to the task, and typically spent the day before preparing the lectures. Typically, fifty to seventy of Boss's psychiatric colleagues and students were invited to the lectures.

The first seminar was on 8 September 1959 in the auditorium of the Burghölzli Clinic at University of Zurich. Heidegger included in his introductory lecture a brief explication of Da-sein, "the basic constitution of human being" as "being-in-the-world". He also offered to the students a radical diversion from conventional Cartesian epistemology, namely "all objectifying representations of a capsule-like psyche, subject, person, ego or consciousness in psychology and psychopathology must be abandoned in favor of a new understanding." Boss observed at this time that the modern, technological conveniences of the lecture hall were ill-fitting for Heidegger's thought, so the remainder of the seminars were held at Boss's home.

The first lecture was documented only as a result of Heidegger's notes. The lectures given between 1960 and 1964 do not appear to have been recorded; they are absent from the Zollikon Seminars text. The subsequent lectures, given between 24 January 1964 until the end were transcribed verbatim (though possibly not in their entirety) or condensed.

Boss observed that the initial sessions were extremely difficult. He likened Heidegger's attempt to discuss his philosophy with medically trained doctors and students "as if a man from Mars were visiting a group of earth-dwellers and trying to communicate with them." Boss also noted that many of Heidegger's questions about the human being (and the human kind of being), existence, space, time, and so on were answered with prolonged periods of silence, or worse, "shock or even outrage" that the questions were being asked in the first place. As late as 1964, even Heidgger still conceded difficulty. In the lecture dated 9 July 1964, Heidegger said, "The last seminar rather was a failure. However, the difficulty lies in the subject matter itself...which is being itself." Yet, Boss was consistently sympathetic to Heidegger's task, which he described as "Sisyphean, of "giving my friends, colleagues, and students a sound philosophical foundation for the medical practice." Neither Heidegger nor the seminar students "grew tired" of the material and worked to "achieve a common ground in their thinking.