The Gaze of Finitude

Existentializing the Liminal Spaces of the Therapeutic Encounter

Amelio A. D'Onofrio, PhD

Prologue

“I always thought the end was over there. 
It’s not over there, it’s over here."
~A Patient

“It is death that sustains existence.”
~Jacques Lacan

“Death is a way to be…”
~Martin Heidegger

“Who does he think the analyst is? 
 Is he somebody to help him to live, or to die?”
~Wilfred Bion

“Where the danger is, 
also grows the saving power."
​~Holderlin​
          A patient once angrily declared as I offered a frame-securing intervention: “I can’t believe you’re making me face my mortality!”
          The poignancy of her comment took me aback. She noticed my reaction, and we both fell silent. Over the course of several minutes, her countenance slowly changed; sadness replaced anger. She sat pensively for a few moments. Then, as if masking an insight, she fought back a smile. “I’m smiling,” she finally confessed, “because I’m just realizing that during all these years I’ve known you—when you’ve refused to give in to my demands—you weren’t just being a [expletive], you were holding up a mirror to my mortality. That’s why I fought you every step of the way. It seems you’ve known the truth all along: I haven’t wanted to grow up and take responsibility for my life—and you have never given in to that.”
          The following week, she entered the office with uncharacteristic deliberateness. Before she even reached the couch, she announced: “I had a dream that has given me the answers I’ve needed.” After recounting her dream in detail and associating to it freely, she offered her conclusion: “The death in the dream was really my death. What the dream told me was that it’s ok for me to let go of the lie I’ve been holding on to and let that part of me die; it’s the only way I can become free to choose me and live.”

Death, the Psyche, and Subjectivity
          Freud well understood the intractable paradox of the dialectic between death and life. “If you want to endure life,” he advised, “prepare yourself for death.” He also knew, however, that preparing oneself for death is an almost impossible task. The unconscious, he maintained, “does not know its own death,” and, therefore, the essential nature of one’s end remains forever enigmatic and incomprehensible to the human subject. Death’s unrepresentability eclipses its intelligibility. 
          The irony, of course, is that while our own death might be unknowable, it lives ubiquitously in the psyche as the background condition of our lives. From the moment of birth, death abides in us as our possibility and our destiny. We know it will happen someday but know not when the end will present itself at our door. To quiet the terror of this unknown, lest we be consumed, we remove death from our line of sight and install it deep within our psyche. Once there, death inscribes itself as negative space, a hole, a lack, an absence, but it is an absence that is forever present as possibility. It is an absence under whose ominous shadow we perpetually reside. Death is, perhaps, the quintessential ‘unthought-known’ that is felt and enacted but un-metabolized into speech and thought. And it is precisely for this reason that the project of becoming an authentic subject is staggering, if not altogether impossible.
          What is clear is that death and subjectivity are intimately related. Subjectivity hurts. It hurts because when we human beings take the risk of appropriating ourselves as subjects, we stand alone. We stand separated from the crowd with its offer of ephemeral guarantees that veil the reality of our condition: that we are fragile, forever unformed, and contingent. To be a subject means to know in our being that we die, that our dying is real, and that no one can take our dying away from us. Subjectivity hurts because the price we pay for truth—for accepting reality—is, in fact, death.
          As we may have all experienced, however, some truths are more difficult than others to bear, and perhaps death is the greatest among these. To gaze upon the glare of our difficult truths, as Oedipus learned, can blind and annihilate, hence our inclination to turn and run. It is understandable, then, that in order to protect ourselves from death’s mortal sting, we would naturally want to recoil, flee, hide, or deny it as a possibility altogether. And so, we distract ourselves from its immanence and seek out ways to live out our lives in the shadow of the lie that we can fend off its approach and avoid its anguish.

‘Ontological Death’
          In his central philosophical work, Being and Time (1927), Martin Heidegger extends the notion of death from the purely physical—our return to inorganic matter—to the ontological. He proposes that when we die ‘ontologically,’ we don’t experience physical death but instead have the ‘as-if’ experience of dying. Our bodies are still alive and functioning, but what dies in our ‘ontological death’ are the structures of meaning that have constituted our sense of self and have created the identity that offers us the illusion of being a coherent and unified subject.
          Death, in its ontological form, inevitably returns to the foreground when we are disquieted by the capriciousness and tragedy of life or when we must choose. Trauma, catastrophe, as well as the experience of love all de-center us and send us searching. Such experiences can bring us back to ourselves and into our finitude because the meanings that defined us are thrown into doubt and no longer hold. They nullify the certitude we once had about our place in the world and make us strangers to ourselves. The foundations upon which we constructed our identity that once felt solid are now exposed as vulnerable and inadequate, and, as a result, we fall into the abyss of despair and feel ourselves as if dying. In our ‘ontological death,’ the ‘world’ collapses, our ‘ego’ collapses, and we collapse.
          Our initial salvo in response to this dying is often to feverishly mobilize and resist. We reexamine the entirety of our former world. We reconsider our histories. We work over in our imaginations the relationships we have lived and that have lived us. Love is reconsidered: We question the ways in which we have been loved, we find doubt in that love, and we are confronted with the ways we, in turn, have failed to love well. As we sift our memory and recollect the forgotten, we search for the “why” that brought us to this place of destitution. Past hurts are reawakened. Old pain is felt, perhaps, for the first time. And, sometimes, we may even begin to recognize the ways we have been complicit in perpetuating our own suffering.
          Not knowing where to turn, we frantically seek out harbors of safety in the outer world that will help us reconstruct the sense of ‘I’-ness, the ‘ego’ we once knew. We seek to restore that old ‘I’—that primary symptom that, although partly responsible for our suffering, nonetheless structured our meanings that superficially held us together within the mirage of our distorted narrative. We try in vain to return to a home we thought we once knew but no longer lies within reach, and in the attempt, we forget ourselves further and defer our being to a time never to arrive.

‘Being-Towards-Death’ and  ‘Being-Towards-Life’

          The despair of our ontological death, however, is not where the story ends. Death, Heidegger tells us, is a paradox. While gazing at death directly and holding it present in consciousness shudders the soul, the awareness of our mortality in lived experience can be the very source of our greatest liberation into subjectivity. From this perspective, death is not to be seen as a specter of nihilism—that nothing really matters because we all die. Rather, if we consider the possibility of death as “our own,” if we bring it into nearness—not relegating it to a place ‘out there’ but welcoming it ‘in here’—death and its power over us are transfigured. Instead of being annihilated by death’s approach, we can be awakened. Instead of being abandoned in the nothingness of the void, we can be reoriented to ourselves and actually empowered into greater fullness of our possibilities.
          Moreover, when we appropriate our death and bring it close, we no longer relate to it as object, but we transform it into the subject that it is. As our principle interlocutor, death as subject addresses us directly and questions us. It brings into stark relief the ontological reality that we are not merely the answer to someone else’s question but are a question unto ourselves—a question that transforms us from a what to a who. That question is not: What am I? but who am I? and How am I to live my life? Under death’s gaze, we are entreated to unbind the omnipotence of childhood and animate the present with a desire that was once abrogated and deferred. We are called out of our ‘forgetfulness-of-being’ and reminded that to be human is to constantly be at issue—that achieving our humanity is not a given but a task that must be lived every day, at every moment, and with every choice we make.
          Ultimately, death is the quintessential categorical imperative because it places an absolute demand upon us to become subjects. It demands that we not neglect our most essential duties to ourselves, that we stir our once-renounced desire, that we face the burdens of existence resolutely, and that we become conscious agents in the project of self-creation.
          The risk of opposing this ontological venture, however, can often prove to be costly. When we reject death’s paradox, we tighten our chains and risk further attachment to the lie—the one that seeks to convince us that we can escape the responsibility we bear for our own being. Without death as horizon, we fall and remain alienated: ego occludes subjectivity, desire repeats itself into oblivion, guilt consumes from within, love becomes fetishized, hope remains an infantile wish, anxiety incites the search for impermanent guarantees, and forgiveness forever remains an impossibility. By failing to live ‘towards-death’, we are ultimately rendered defenseless against the colonization of the death drive--the drive which hardens our tragic blindness and compels us to preserve our misery under the captivity of an amputated and prosthetic life.
          In the end, death presents us with a basic but defining choice: either we run from it in fear and thus live an anesthetized life immersed in the distractions of culture, living according to the desire of the other, bound to the inauthentic and to the lie, or we can turn toward it and toward the anxiety through which it speaks, and heed its insistence that we remember ourselves. Only through this courageous inward turn can we reclaim our authentic desire and, in spite of our fractured nature, speak ourselves into being and thus unfold into our subjectivity.
​          For this reason, death is the ultimate paradox. While it extinguishes, it also gifts us depth, truth, and the courage to face life in all its rawness and contradictions. At the end of the day, Heidegger concludes, it is only by ‘being-towards-death’ that we are able to commit most authentically and resolutely to our ‘being-towards-life.’
Amelio A. D'Onofrio, PhD
​Instructor​
The 2025 Gubbio Seminar
          The 2025 Gubbio Seminar is about the possibility of self-transcendence in spite of the fact that we human beings are finite creatures and that we die. 
          We will explore the relationship between human finitude (death) and freedom, and we’ll examine the fundamental paradox of living as authentic subjects situated in an inconstant world. To this end, we’ll consider the influence death (in both its ‘physical’ and ‘ontological’ forms) may have over the psyche, the defenses we muster to keep its anxiety at bay, and we’ll look at how death’s ubiquitous presence furtively operates in the liminal spaces of all that transpires in the consulting room.    
          With this goal in mind, we will playfully reconsider with ontological eyes the clinical concepts and processes that are part of the established canon of therapeutic discourse. In particular, we’ll interrogate some of the fundamental tensions we encounter in our work through the prism of death. For example, how does death put its thumb on the scale regarding the tensions between lack and desire, ego and subject, authenticity and inauthenticity, sex and aggression, anxiety and guilt, and, of course, the truth and the lie? In like manner, we’ll consider the tensions that may exist between ‘ontological death’ (Heidegger), the ‘death drive’ (Freud/Lacan), and the ‘truth drive’ (Bion/Grotstein), and how their respective dynamics may shape and propel the psyche.
          We’ll ask: What might it mean to view therapy as a limit-situation, and how might that both constrain and, at the same time, enlarge possibilities for our patients? How do we invite death into the consulting room not as a ‘drive’ but as a mirroring presence that pronounces truth in the face of the lie? If the therapist is to be the custodian of truth, how does the therapist, as a human being standing in the breach, become the de facto stand-in for death? And, how do we existentialize and transform the dread induced by death into a tolerable emotional truth that can be received by our patients?
          Our conversation will also take us into the realm of countertransference: What is the nature of our own relationship with anxiety, guilt, truth, and our own unlived life, and how might those relationships serve as barriers to encounter? With our own human frailty in sight, then, how might we develop a kind of  ‘ontological sturdiness’ that will insulate us from death’s consuming glare and help us resist colluding with our patients to ignore, obscure, or be in denial of death altogether?
                  Finally, if we take seriously Heidegger’s notion that ‘being-towards-death’ is the authentic route to ‘being-towards-life,’ how do we all, therapist and patient alike, practice death while yet we live?

                                                                                                                                    ~~~~~~~~~~

          Join us in Gubbio this summer for a deep dive into the paradoxes of the human condition reflected so powerfully in the poetic movements of the therapeutic process. Our conversation will stimulate and energize and is sure to deepen our relationship with ourselves and to the work. Be part of a growing community of depth psychotherapists committed to pursuing clinical truth, expanding personal horizons, and who are willing to share themselves in the service of fostering mutual growth. You’ll be challenged and inspired to broaden your understanding of the therapeutic process and deepen your participation in the renewal of your patients’ lives.
          And, while there are very few bankable guarantees in life, your leap of faith in joining our adventure, is sure to enkindle hope in your own possibilities and leave you renewed and re-inspired!
 “A life-changing experience!"
~A 2024 Seminar Participant

Opening Conversation and Themes for the Seminar

Monday, July 14, 2025 (Welcome and Opening Session 9:30am - 1:00pm)

Our 'Beginning' and Our 'End':
Temporal Horizons and the Problem of Human Freedom

Opening Conversation​
Glouster: “O, let me kiss that hand!"
Lear: “Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality."
~William Shakespeare, King Lear

“The very notion of being makes the 
soul feel pain in its places of deadness.”
~Helen Luke

“Consciousness of death is the primary repression."
~Ernest Becker
​
“Death and the dread of it are the origin of human inwardness."
~Walter Davis

“The end always penetrates the whole of existence."
~William Richardson

​“Humankind cannot bear too much reality."
~T. S. Eliot

“I bring no consolation."
~Sigmund Freud

“That which you most need 
will be found where you least want to go.”
~C. G. Jung

“Existentialism means that no one can take a bath for you."
​~Delmore Schwartz

Outline for Monday's Session

  • Temporal Horizons and the Psyche: Freud and Heidegger in Conversation
  • Death, Ontological Death, and the Birth of Psyche
  • ​The Forgetfulness-of-Being
  • Being, Meaning, and the Flight from Death
    • ​From Duality and Opposition to Dialectics
  • Our Situatedness:
    • Impediments to Contingency
      • The Demythologization of Experience into the Rational
      • The Culture of ‘Mental Health' and ‘Psychotherapy'
      • The ‘Secret' Knowledge of the Therapist
    • Language as Guardian of the Unspeakable
    • ​A Conspiracy of Silence: The Drive that Drives Death Away
  • Psychotherapy as Space of Revolt
  • ​​Death as the Therapeutic “Third"​
  • Death and Its Anxiety: T​he Ineffable Silence​
  • Toward the Humanistic Recovery of Death

Tuesday, July 15, 2025 (9:30am - 1:00pm)

Death and its Anxiety Existentialized

Opening Conversation
“How can I not live in fear knowing what's coming?"
~A Patient

​“Everyone is the other and no one is himself."
~Martin Heidegger

“Death is the subject and we are its object."
~Emmanuel Levinas

“Death doesn't extinguish, it organizes."
~Walter Davis

“The ‘they’ does not permit us the
courage for anxiety in the face of death.”
~Martin Heidegger

​“Approaching the unconscious 
destitutes the subject yet summon it as well.”
~Colette Soler

​“The only thing of which one can be guilty of is
​of having given ground relative to one's desire.”
~Jacques Lacan

​“The subject is essentially other to the ego."
~Richard Boothby
​
​“Anxiety is that which does not deceive."
~Jacques Lacan

“The deepest lesson anxiety teaches us
is not that we exist, but that we must act."
​~Walter Davis

“Anxiety is freedom's possibility."
~Soren Kierkegaard

“Secured frames, in which all the fundamental, archetypal, deep unconsciously
sought and validated ground rules are in place...offer optimally healing and inherently supportive conditions
for a therapeutic experience, but they also evoke entrapping existential death anxieties."
~Robert Langs

Outline for Tuesday's Session

  • Death by Any Other Name...
  • Death as a Double-Faced Entity
  • The Dynamic Absence of Death
  • Ego as Foundational Symptom
  • ​How Trauma, Guilt, and Love Existentialize
  • Anxiety Redux
    • What is anxiety anxious over?
    • Anxiety and the Felt Encounter with the Ineffable and Ourselves 
    • Anxiety's Threat to the Integrity of the Ego
    • Anxiety and Subjectivity
    • Anxiety and the Introjected Parents
    • Anxiety and Love
    • Anxiety and its Transformation into Guilt
  • Anxiety: Finitude in Awareness
  • Anxiety: A Bridge Between the  Psychoanalytic and the Ontological

Tuesday Afternoon: Optional Visit to Umbria Jazz Festival in Perugia

Wednesday, July 16, 2025 (9:30am - 1:00pm)

Desire, Death, and Truth

Opening Conversation
​“All desire is a desire for being."
~Rene Girard

​“True words seem contradictory."
​~ Tao Te Ching

“We speak with the voice we lack."
~Giorgio Agamben

“The subject despairs of existing in the other's desire
and thus of being recognized and becoming alive."
~Giuseppe Civitarese

​​“The neurotic takes seriously the other's demand.”
~Julia Kristeva

​​“...the essentially repressed element is always what is feminine."
​~Sigmund Freud

“Ontology comes into its own as the pathogenesis of a false life."
~Theodore Adorno

​​“A higher order of consciousness cannot be reached
​without a situation of extreme gravity."
​~C. G. Jung
​
​“The ego...in order to grow, must voluntarily allow itself
to become less than intact--to regress."
~Philip Bromberg

“The drama only begins...
when the regression becomes ontological."
~Walter Davis

Shepherd: “If I speak the truth, I am worse than dead."
~Sophocles, Oedipus Rex​

​“The subject that psychoanalysis receives and deals with is the one who suffers. 
And not from just anything, but from a suffering tied to truth.”
~Colette Soler

​“When it comes to death there is only one truth and countless lies.
The truth is forbidding and the lies enormously appealing."
~Wilfred Bion

“Everything that is threatened  by time secretes falsehoods in order not to die,
and in proportion to the danger it is in of dying. That is why there is not any love of truth
without an unconditional acceptance of death.
​~Simone Weil​

Outline for Wednesday's Session

  • Desire and its Vicissitudes
  • Trauma, Ontological Death, and the Origin of Subjectivity
    • ​Epistemic Crises and the Imposition of Self-Knowledge
  • Dancing with the Death Drive: Sex, Aggression, and Repetition
  • Ontological Death and The Truth Drive
    • How is authenticity to be determined at all?
    • Authentic and Inauthentic relationship with Death
    • Truth as Correspondence or as Aletheia
    • The Persecutory Nature of the Truth (and of an Interpretation)
  • The Voice and the Guilty Call: Pure Meaning that Utters Not a Sound
  •  Aletheia: The Transformation of the Unbearable 

Wednesday Afternoon: Optional Visit to Assisi and Dinner

Thursday, July 17, 2018 (9:30 - 1:00pm)

The Custodian of Truth:
​Holding Open in Lyric Suspension and Creating a Space for Dreams

Opening Conversation
“The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a 
very rare and difficult thing; It is almost a miracle; it is a miracle.”
~Simone Weil

“The therapist's role changed from that of a counselor who takes the part of client against the world, 
to a guide who puts before the client the claim of the world.”
~Sarah Corrie

“There is an encountering way of seeing and a grasping way of seeing."
​~David Levin

“Subjectivity is intersubjective: in reflecting on myself,
​the first thing I confront is the massive presence of the other."
~Walter Davis

“We must allow ourselves to be exiled with him in the destitution of meaning."
~David Levin Kleinberg

“No one can take the other's death away from him."
~Martin Heidegger 

“There where another was, there shall I come into being."
​~Jacques Lacan

“I think I know something, but I give up and allow you to speak.
You are the one who must know, speak, lie, think."
~Julia Kristeva

“There is only one resistance, the resistance of the analyst."
​~Jacques Lacan

​“Guilt is not a psychological condition to be avoided at all costs
but the primary source of knowledge and inner transformation."
​~Walter Davis

“Analytic listening consists in locating the lines of cleavage between
​the empty discourse of the ego and the emergent speech of the true subject."
~Richard Boothby

​“There is a listening that works this way: a listening that is responsible for creating what it hears--
a listening, for example, with the power to cause or alleviate the very suffering it hears."
~David Levin

Outline for Thursday's Session

  • The Ontological Paradoxes of Therapeutic Encounter
  • The Situatedness of the Therapist
    • Standing in the Breach
      • ‘Das Ding,' ‘O,' ‘The Real,'  ‘Death,' ‘The Truth'
    • The Necessity of the Lie
    • Unknowing Mindfulness: On Containing and Being Contained
    • Living in Truth
    • Receiving Death in Silence
    • Punctuating the Dialectical and the Unacknowledged
  • On De-ciding: Holding Open, Killing off, and Epiphanizing
  • The Reifying Gaze, the Gaze of Finitude, and Gelassenheit
  • Therapist Collusion: the removal of the Patient's own Dying
  • From Dogma to Dialectics, from Insight to Internalization, and from the Epistemological to the Ontological​
  • ​The Dialectical Discourse

Thursday evening: Closing Dinner In Gubbio

Friday, July 17, 2025 (9:30 - 1:00pm)

The Quest for Being and the Tension of Paradox:
Towards a Dialectic of Death in Life

Opening Conversation
“To be, or not to be, that is the question..."
~William Shakespeare, Hamlet

​“Psychoanalysis does not cure, it merely reconciles.”
~Phillip Rieff

“To identify with the symptom at the 
end of analysis is thus to change the symptom.”
~Collette Soler
​
“To know the world in which we suffer, love, and die, 
without interposing the comfort of self-deceit, is to live in the gladness of being.”
~Walter Davis

“Where superego was, existential autonomy must be."
​~Walter Davis

“The genuine sense of self, then, is not the stable identity of a subject,
but the unity of concern."
​~William Richardson

​“Healing or saving does not mean the removal of our finitude, 
on the contrary, it means its acceptance.”
~Paul Tillich

​“Then, knowing nothing, I went on.”
~Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus

“Amen, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children,
you will not enter the kingdom of heaven."
~Matthew 18:3

​“Psychological  maturity is the capacity for conscious suffering...
healing from the instinct of running from death.” 
~Carl Jung

​“Along with the sober anxiety which brings us face to face with our individualized 
potentiality-for-Being, there goes an unshakable joy in this possibility.”
​~Martin Heidegger

​“Does this mean now that I am freer than I was?
I do not know. I shall learn.”
~Samuel Beckett

Concluding Thoughts

  • Recovering a Psychotherapy of Depth
    • ​Speaking Being and Mortal Being in Dialogue
  • Integrating Death: On Seeing Truth in Full Consciousness
  • When are we at the end of the road?
    • Freud and Lacan et al.​
      • ​​Castration, Subjective Destitution, and more...
    • ​Jung's Answer to Job​
      • The Liberation of the Repressed Feminine
      • The Reconciliation of Logos and Mythos
    • Heidegger's Ontology
      • Being-Towards-death/Being-towards-life 
      • Inflected by Authenticity​
      • Dying Authentically and the Practice of Death
    • The Reconciliation of ‘to be' with ‘not to be'​
  •  On the Possibility of Transcendence in Psychotherapy​
    • The Heroic Movement Toward Authenticity
      • Making Strange the Familiar
      • Resignation: Submission (Dying) to the process of becoming
      • Holding the Tension of Paradox
    • ​Rene Girard: Freedom from Mimetic Desire
• On Dreaming:“The Old Woman Who Stole My Shoes and I Found My Freedom Anyway."

*The full itinerary for the week, including: breakfast and lunch schedules and optional activities, can be found on the General Information page.

Sources for Inspiration and Conversation
​
Selected Bibliography*

Selected Bibliography for 2025 Seminar

  • Agamben, G. (1991). Language and death: The place of negativity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  • Arendt, H. (1996). Love and Saint Augustine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Becker, E. (1972). The denial of death. New York: The Free Press.
  • Bion, W. R. (1962/1984). Learning from experience. London: Karnac.
  • Bion, W. R. (1981). Notes on memory and desire. In R. Langs (Ed.), Classics in psychoanalytic technique (pp. 259-260). New York: Jason Aronson. 
  • Bion, W. (1983). Attention and interpretation. Northvale: Aronson.
  • Bion, W. (1984). Transformations. London: Routledge.
  • Bion, W. (2005). The Tavistock lectures. London: Karnac.
  • Bion, W. (2005). The Italian Seminars. London: Karnac.
  • Biswanger, L. (1963). Being-in-the-world. (J. Needleman, trans.). New York: Harper & Row.
  • Blattner, W. (1999). Heidegger's temporal idealism. ​Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Boss, M. (1979). Existential foundations for medicine and psychology. New York: Jason Aronson.
  • Boss, M. (1994). Existential foundations of medicine and psychology. Northvale, NJ: Aronson. 
  • Boothby, R. (1991). Death and desire: Psychoanalytic theory in Lacan's return to Freud. London: Routledge.
  • Civitarese, G. (2016). Truth and the unconscious in psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.
  • Dalle Pezze, B. (2006). Heidegger on gelassenheit. Minerva--An internet Journal of Philosophy, 10, 94-122.
  • Davis, W. A. (1989). Inwardness and existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, and Freud. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
  • Davis, W. A. (2001). Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the tragic imperative. Albany: SUNY Press.
  • Davis. W. A. (2006). Death's dream kingdom: The American psyche since 9-1-1. London: Pluto Press.
  • Dreyfus, H. L. (1991). Being-in-the-world: A commentary of Heidegger's Being and Time, Div. 1. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
  • Freud, S., In Strachey, J., In Freud, A., & In Richards, A. (1966). The Standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press.
  • Girard, R. (1987). Things hidden since the foundation of the world. ​Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
  • Girard, R. (2023). All desire is a desire for being. London: Penguin.
  • Grotstein. J. S. (2004). The seventh servant: Implications of a truth drive in Bion's theory of 'O'. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 85, 1081-1101.
  • Grotstein, J. S. (2024). The beam of intense darkness: Wilfred Bion's Legacy to Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.
  • Harrang, C. (2023). On Grotstein's 'truth' in Bion's theory of 'O'. The American Journal of Psychoanalysis.
  • Harrang, C. (2023). Truth and lies: Psychoanalytic perspectives. The American Journal of Psychoanalysis.
  • Heidegger, M. (1927/1962). Being and time. (J. Macquarrie and E Robinson, trans.). San Francisco: HarperCollins.
  • Heidegger, M. (1959). An introduction to metaphysics. New Haven: Yale.
  • Heidegger, M. (1971). Poetry, language, thought (A. Hofstadter, trans.). New York: Harper Colophon Books.
  • Heidegger, M. (1977). Basic Writings, (David Krell, Ed.). New York: Harper & Row.
  • Heidegger, M. (2001). Zollikon seminars. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
  • Heidegger, M. (2010). Being and truth, (G. Fried and R. Polt, trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
  • Hillman, J. (1962/1972). The myth of analysis. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.
  • Ireton, S. (2007). An ontological study of death: From Hegel to Heidegger. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
  • Jung, C. G. (1958). Answer to Job. Collected works of C. G. Jung, v. 11. Princeton: Princetown University Press.
  • Kierkegaard, S. (1980). The concept of anxiety : a simple psychologically orienting deliberation on the dogmatic issue of hereditary sin. Princeton, N.J. :Princeton University Press.
  • Kierkegaard, S. (1849/1989). The Sickness unto death. (A. Hannah, trans.). London: Penguin. 
  • Kleinberg-Levin, D. M. (2008). Before the voice of reason: Echoes of responsibility in Merleau-Ponty’s and Levinas’s Ethics. New York: SUNY Press.
  • Kleinberg-Levin, D. M. (2020). Heidegger's phenomenology of perception: An Introduction (Vol. 1). Lanham: Rowen & Littlefield.
  • Kleinberg-Levin, D. M. (2021). Heidegger's Phenomenology of perception: learning to see and hear hermeneutically (Vol. II).  Lanham: Rowen & Littlefield.
  • Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of horror: An essay on abjection. (L. S. Roudiez, trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Lacan, J. (2006). Ecrits. (B. Fink, trans.). New York: Norton. (and his seminars)
  • Langs, R. (1997). Death anxiety in clinical practice. London: Karnac.
  • Langs, R. (2006). Love and death in psychotherapy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Laplanche, J. (1970). Life and death in psychoanalysis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • Lear, J. (2011). The case for irony. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.
  • Levin, D. (1985). The body's recollection of being: Phenomenological psychology and the deconstruction of nihilism. New York: Routledge.
  • Levin, D. (1988). The opening of vision: Nihilism and the post-modern situation. New York: Routledge.
  • Levin, D. (1989). The listening self: Personal growth, social change, and the closure of metaphysics. London: Routledge.
  • Levinas, E. (1980). God, death, and time. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
  • Mawson, C. (2019). Psychoanalysis and anxiety: From knowing to being. London: Routledge.
  • McManus, D. (Ed.) (2015). Heidegger, authenticity and the self. London: Routledge.
  • Razinsky, L. (2013).  Freud, Psychoanalysis and death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Ricoeur, P. (1970). Freud and philosophy: An essay on interpretation. (D. Savage, trans.). New Haven: Yale University Press.
  • Speziale-Bagliacca, R. (2004). Guilt: Revenge, remorse and responsibility after Freud. London: Routledge.
  • Westphal, M. (1984). God, guilt, and death: An existential phenomenology of religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
  • Wilberg, P. (2004). The therapist as listener: Martin Heidegger and the missing dimension of counseling and psychotherapy Training. Eastbourne, Sussex: New Gnosis Publications.
  • Wilberg, P. (2013). Being and listening: Counselling, psychoanalysis, and the ontology of listening. Whistable, Great Britain: New Yoga Publications.
  • Wilberg, P. (2015). Heidegger, medicine, & 'scientific method'. Eastbourne, Sussex: New Gnosis Publications.
  • Zimmerman, M. E. (1981). Eclipse of the self: The development of Heidegger's concept of authenticity.  Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press.

General Psychotherapy Related Bibliography

  • Ahktar, S. (2007). The 'listening cure': An overview. In S. Ahktar (Ed.) Listening to others: Developmental and clinical aspects of empathy and attunement (pp 1-16). Lahnam: Jason Aronson.Bateman, A., & Fonagy, P. (2004). Psychotherapy for borderline personality disorder: Mentalization–based treatment. London: Oxford University Press.
  • Arendt, H. (1996). Love and Saint Augustine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Becker, E. (1972). The Denial of Death. New York: The Free Press.
  • Bion, W. R. (1962/1984). Learning from experience. London: Karnac.
  • Bion, W. R. (1981). Notes on memory and desire. In R. Langs (Ed.), Classics in psychoanalytic technique (pp. 259-260). New York: Jason Aronson. 
  • Bion, W. (1983). Attention and interpretation. Northvale: Aronson.
  • Bion, W. (2005). The Tavistock lectures. London: Karnac.
  • Biswanger, L. (1963). Being-in-the-world. (J. Needleman, trans.). New York: Harper & Row.
  • Bowlby, J. (1982). Attachment (2nd ed.). New York: Basic Books.
  • Bowlby, J. (1988). A secure base: Parent-child attachment and healthy human development. New York: Basic Books.
  • Bollas, C. (1987). The shadow of the object: Psychoanalysis of the unthought known. New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Boss, M. (1979). Existential foundations for medicine and psychology. New York: Jason Aronson.
  • Boss, M. (1994). Existential foundations of medicine and psychology. Northvale, NJ: Aronson. 
  • Bromberg, P. (1998). Standing in the spaces: Essays on clinical process, trauma, and dissociation. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
  • Buber, M. (1955). Between man and man. Boston: Beacon Press. 
  • Buber, M (1958). The I and Thou. New York: Macmillan.
  • Buber, M. (1999). Martin Buber on psychology and psychotherapy (J. Agassi, Ed.). Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
  • Carveth, D. (2018). ​The still small voice: Psychoanalytic reflections on guilt and conscience. London: Routledge.
  • Casement, P. (1991). Learning from the patient. London: Routledge. 
  • Casement, P. (2002).  Learning from our mistakes: Beyond dogma in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.  New York: Guilford.
  • Casement, P. (2006). Learning from life: Becoming a psychoanalyst. London: Routledge.
  • Cozolino, L. (2006). The neuroscience of psychotherapy, 2nd. New York: Norton.
  • Dalle Pezze, B. (2006). Heidegger on gelassenheit. Minerva--An internet Journal of Philosophy, 10, 94-122.
  • Davis, W. A. (1989). Inwardness and existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, and Freud. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
  • Davis, W. A. (2001). Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the tragic imperative. Albany: SUNY Press.
  • Dreyfus, H. L. (1991). Being-in-the-world: A commentary of Heidegger's Being and Time, Div. 1. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
  • Eigen, M. (2018). Faith. London: Routledge.
  • Fink, B. (2017). A clinical introduction to Freud: Techniques for everyday practice. New York: Norton.
  • Fink, B. (2014). Against understanding (Vols 1& 2). London: Routledge.
  • Fink, B. (2007). Fundamentals of psychoanalytic technique. New York: Norton.
  • Fink, B. (1997). A clinical introduction to Lacanian psychoanalysis. New York: Norton.
  • Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E., Target, M. (2002). Affect regulation, mentalization, and the development of the self. New York: Other Press.
  • Freud, S., In Strachey, J., In Freud, A., & In Richards, A. (1966). The Standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press.
  • Friedman, M. (1985). The healing dialogue in psychotherapy. New York: Jason Aaronson.
  • Friedman, M. (1992). Dialogue and the human image: Beyond humanistic psychology. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
  • Fromm, E. (1951). The forgotten language: An introduction to the understanding of dreamsn, fairytales, and myths. New York: Grove Press.
  • Fromm-Reichmann, F. (1960). Principles of intensive psychotherapy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Hall, B. (2016). Psychotherapy's pilgrim-poet: The story within. Colorado Springs, CO: University Professor's Press.
  • Heidegger, M. (1927/1962). Being and time. (J. Macquarrie and E Robinson, trans.). San Francisco: HarperCollins.
  • Heidegger, M. (1959). An introduction to metaphysics. New Haven: Yale.
  • Heidegger, M. (1971). Poetry, language, thought (A. Hofstadter, trans.). New York: Harper Colophon Books.
  • Heidegger, M. (1977). Basic Writings, (David Krell, Ed.). New York: Harper & Row.
  • Heidegger, M. (2001). Zollikon seminars. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
  • Heidegger, M. (2010). Being and truth, (G. Fried and R. Polt, trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
  • Hillman, J. (1962/1972). The myth of analysis. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.
  • Hillman, J. (1977). Re-Visioning Psychology. New York: Harper & Row.
  • Jung, C. (1954). The practice of psychotherapy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  • Jung, C. (1959). The concept of the collective unconscious (pp.42-53), Concerning the archetypes, with special reference to the anima concept (pp. 54-72), & Psychological aspects of the mother archetype (pp. 73-110). The archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, V 9,I of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  • Kennedy, R. (2014). The psychic home: Psychanalysis, consciousness, and the human soul. London: Routledge.
  • Kierkegaard, S. (1980). The concept of anxiety : a simple psychologically orienting deliberation on the dogmatic issue of hereditary sin. Princeton, N.J. :Princeton University Press.
  • Kierkegaard, S. (1987). Fear and trembling/Repetition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
  • Kierkegaard, S. (1849/1989). The Sickness unto death. (A. Hannah, trans.). London: Penguin. 
  • Klein, M. (1952). The Origins of Transference. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 33:433-438
  • Klein, M. (1946). Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms1. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 27:99-110
  • Klein, M. (1937/1975). Love, Guilt and Reparation. In Love, Guilt, and Reparation and other essays, 1921-1945, pp. 306-343. New York: The Free Press.
  • Klein, M. (1975). Envy and Gratitude. In Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963. Int. Psycho-Anal. Lib., 176-235. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
  • Kleinberg-Levin, D. M. (2008). Before the voice of reason: Echoes of responsibility in Merleau-Ponty’s and Levinas’s Ethics. New York: SUNY Press.
  • Kleinberg-Levin, D. M. (2020). Heidegger's phenomenology of perception: An Introduction (Vol. 1). Lanham: Rowen & Littlefield.
  • Kleinberg-Levin, D. M. (2021). Heidegger's Phenomenology of perception: learning to see and hear hermeneutically (Vol. II).  Lanham: Rowen & Littlefield.
  • Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of horror: An essay on abjection. (L. S. Roudiez, trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Kristeva, J. (1987).  Tales of love. New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Kristeva, J. (1989). Black sun: Depression and melancholia.  New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Kristeva, J. (1995).  New maladies of the soul. (R. Guberman, trans). New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Kristeva, J. (2010). Hatred and forgiveness. New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Lacan, J. (1988). The seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I: Freud's papers on technique 1953-1954, (J. Forrester, trans.). New York: Norton.
  • Lacan, J. (1988). The seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II: The ego in Freud's theory and in the technique of psychoanalysis 1954-1955. (S. Tomasselli, trans.). New York: Norton.
  • Lacan, J. (1993). The seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book III: Psychoses 1955-1956. (R. Grigg, trans.). New York: Norton.
  • Lacan, J. (1997). The Seminar f Jacques Lacan: Book VII: The ethics of psychoanalysis 1959-1960. (D. Porter, Trans.). New York Norton.
  • Lacan, J. (1998). The seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XI: The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. (A. Sheridan, trans.). New York: Norton.
  • Lacan, J. (1999). The seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XX: Encore: On feminine sexuality, the limits of love and knowledge 1972-1973 (B. Fink, trans.).. New York: Norton.
  • Lacan, J. (2006). Ecrits. (B. Fink, trans.). New York: Norton.
  • Lacan, J. (2007). The seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XVII: The other side of psychoanalysis (R. Grigg, trans.). New York: Norton.
  • Lacan, J. (2015). The seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book X: Anxiety. New York: Polity.
  • Lacan, J. (2016). The seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XXIII: The sinthome. (A. R. Price, trans.). Malden, MA: Polity.
  • Langs, R. (1976). The bi-personal field. New York: Jason Aronson.
  • Langs, R. (1978). The listening process. New York: Jason Aronson.
  • Langs, R. (1979). The supervisory experience. New York: Jason Aronson.
  • Langs, R. (1979). The therapeutic environment. New York: Jason Aronson.
  • Langs, R. (1980). Interactions: The realm of transference and countertransference. New York: Jason Aronson.
  • Langs, R. (1981). Resistances and interventions. New York: Jason Aronson.
  • Langs, R. (1982). The psychotherapeutic conspiracy. New York: Jason Aronson.
  • Langs, R. (1988). Decoding your dreams: A revolutionary technique for  understanding your dreams. New York: Balantine.
  • Langs, R. (1993). Empowered psychotherapy: Teaching self-processing.  London: Karnac.
  • Langs, R. (1994). Doing supervision and being supervised. London: Karnac.
  • Langs, R. (1995). Clinical Practice and the architecture of the mind. London: Karnac.
  • Langs, R. (1996). The evolution of the emotion-processing mind. Madison: International Universities Press.
  • Langs, R. (1997). Death anxiety in clinical practice. London: Karnac.
  • Langs, R. (1999). The Evolution of the emotion processing mind: With an introduction to mental Darwinism. New York: International Universities Press.
  • Langs, R. (2004). Fundamentals of adaptive psychotherapy and counselling. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
  • Langs, R. (2006). Love and death in psychotherapy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Lear, J. (2003). Therapeutic action. London: Karnac.
  • Lear, J. (2011). The case for irony. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.
  • Lear, J. (2017). Wisdom won from illness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.
  • Levin, D. (1985). The body's recollection of being: Phenomenological psychology and the deconstruction of nihilism. New York: Routledge.
  • Levin, D. (1988). The opening of vision: Nihilism and the post-modern situation. New York: Routledge.
  • Levin, D. (1989). The listening self: Personal growth, social change, and the closure of metaphysics. London: Routledge.
  • Mahler, M., Pine, F., & Bergman, A. (1975). The psychological birth of the infant: Symbiosis and individuation. New York: Basic Books.
  • May, R., Angel, E., & Ellenberger, H. F. (1958). Existence: A new dimension in psychiatry and psychology. New York: Simon & Schuster. 
  • McGilchrist, I. (2009). The master and his emissary: The divided brain and the making of the western world. New Haven: Yale University Press.
  • McGilchrist, I. (2021). The matter with things (Vols. 1 & 2). London: Perspectiva.
  • Neumann, E. (1954). The origins and history of consciousness. (R. F. C. Hull, trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  • Neumann, E. (1963). The great mother. (R. Manheim, trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  • Neumann, E. (1973). The child. Boston: Shambahala Publications.
  • Neumann, E. (1990). Depth psychology and a new ethic. Boston: Shambhala.
  • Oliver, K. (1998). Tracing the signifier behind the scenes of desire: Krestiva’s challenge to Lacan’s analysis. In H. Silverman, ed. Cultural Semiosis: Tracing the signifier, (pp. 83-104). New York: Routledge.
  • Orange, D. (2011). The suffering stranger: Hermeneutics for everyday practice. New York: Routledge.
  • Ricoeur, P. (1967). The symbolism of evil. Boston: Beacon.
  • Ricoeur, P. (1970). Freud and philosophy: An essay on interpretation. (D. Savage, trans.). New Haven: Yale University Press.
  • Ricoeur, P. (1974). The conflict of interpretations: Essays in hermeneutics (D. Ihde, Ed.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
  • Rogers, C. (1980). A way of being. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
  • Seinfeld, J. (1990). The bad object: Handling the negative therapeutic reaction in psychotherapy. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
  • Seinfeld, J. (1993). Interpreting and holding. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
  • Seinfeld, J. (1996). Containing Rage, Terror, and Despair. New York: Aronson.
  • Searles, H.F. (1973). Concerning Therapeutic Symbiosis. Annu. Psychoanal., 1:247-262
  • Searles, H. (1965). Collected papers on schizophrenia and related subjects. NY: International Universities Press. 
  • Searles, H. (1979). Countertransference and related subjects. Madison: International Universities Press.
  • Schneiderman, S. (1980). Returning to Freud: Clinical psychoanalysis in the school of Lacan. New Haven: Yale University Press.
  • Schore, A. (2012). The science of the art of psychotherapy. New York: Norton.
  • Silverman, H. J. (Ed.) (1998). Cultural semiosis: Tracing the signifier. New York: Routledge.
  • Soler, C. (2014). Lacan--The unconscious reinvented. London: Karnac.
  • Soler, C. (2016). Lacanian affects. London: Routledge.
  • Solms, M. (2015). The feeling brain: Selected papers on neuropsychoanalysis. London: Karnac.
  • Solms, M., & Turnbull, O.  (2002). The brain and the inner world: An introduction to the neuroscience of subjective experience. New York: Other Press.
  • Sussman, M. (2007). A curious calling: Unconscious motivations for practicing psychotherapy, (2nd ed.). New York: Aronson.
  • Thomson, M. G. (1994). The truth about Freud's technique. New York: NYU Press.
  • Tillich, P. (1952). The courage to be. New Haven: Yale.
  • Tillich, P. (1957). Systematic theology, Vol II. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Verhaeghe, P. (2004). On being normal and other disorders: A manual for clinical psychodiagnostics, (S. Jotthandt, trans.).  New York: Other Press.
  • White, C. (2016). Time and death: Heidegger's analysis of finitude. London: Routledge.
  • Wilberg, P. (2004). The therapist as listener: Martin Heidegger and the missing dimension of counseling and psychotherapy Training. Eastbourne, Sussex: New Gnosis Publications.
  • Wilberg, P. (2013). Being and listening: Counselling, psychoanalysis, and the ontology of listening. Whistable, Great Britain: New Yoga Publications.
  • Wilberg, P. (2015). Heidegger, medicine, & 'scientific method'. Eastbourne, Sussex: New Gnosis Publications.
  • Winnicott, D. (1958/1992). Through pediatrics to psycho-analysis: Collected papers. New York: Brunner/Mazel.
  • Winnicott, D.W. (1949). Hate in the Counter-Transference. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 30:69-74
  • Winnicott, D.W. (1958). The Capacity to be Alone. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 39:416-420
  • Winnicott, D.W. (1960). The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship1. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 41:585-595
  • Winnicott, D. W. (1965). Maturational processes and the facilitative environment. New York: International Universities Press.
  • Winnicott, D. (1971/2005). Playing with reality. London: Routledge.
  • Winnicott, D.W. (1974). Fear of Breakdown. Int. Rev. Psycho-Anal., 1:103-107.

​      *This selected bibliography represents some sources of influence for the ideas presented in this seminar.