[Open disponibility before self - on Medard Boss' Basis of Medicine and Psychology]

In this book, written in collaboration with Heidegger, Medard Boss endeavours for the first time to use Heidegger's late philosophical oeuvre as a basis for medicine and psychology. Boss attempts to uncover behind the understanding of man as existence, which prevail in "Sein und Zeit" and which has been so influential for Binswanger's existential analysis, a more original understanding of man as eksistence, as "open disponibility" (Offenständigkeit). The interest of this view resides in the resulting general principle of classification and interpretation of all forms of disease, giving rise to an "existenialistic pathology". The problematic aspect consists in the failure to integrate the "being-onself" in the understanding of human existence as open disponibility, which leads to a one-sided interpretation of disease processes.