Ludwig Binswanger, the Swiss psychiatrist whose school of Daseinsanalyse, or existential analysis, is the most extensive attempt to relate the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger to the field of psychiatry, was born in Kreuzlingen, Thurgau, Switzerland, into a family line of eminent physicians and psychiatrists. After attending the universities of Lausanne, Heidelberg, and Zürich, he received his medical degree from Zürich in 1907. In 1910 he succeeded his father, Dr. Robert Binswanger, as chief medical director of the Sanitorium Bellevue, an institution founded by his grandfather at Kreuzlingen. He relinquished his directorship in 1956.

Daseinsanalyse is an original amalgam of phenomenology, Heideggerian existentialism, and psychoanalysis, the goal of which is to counter the tendency of scientific psychology to view man's being as solely that of a natural object. However, the school does not seek spheres of human existence that argue against the explanatory...