Excursus: Badiou’s Sickle—Philosophy Against its Conditions

Whereas some thinkers have sutured or fused philosophy to one of its four generic procedures or conditions—art, love, science or politics—Badiou’s gesture is to separate philosophy from its conditions in a principled act of separation and discernment which I hereby name Badiou’s sickle. An argument could be made to call this gesture a scythe or shears—all three tools involving cutting or pruning. It is a cognate of Ockham’s razor (lex parsimoniae, the law of parsimony) and Hume’s fork, other instruments of thought denoting distinction and separation. There is a family resemblance,[i] too, to Wittgenstein’s ladder, invoked as an argument one uses like steps or a ladder to “climb beyond them.” The reference is to be found in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,

6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)[ii]

The difference is that the conditions from which we wish to separate philosophy are not merely stepping stones, instruments or means to an end which can be discarded once we arrive at the end. Neither are they “lies-to-children” in an update on Plato’s Noble Lie. The conditions have the force of suturing philosophy precisely because they are truth-procedures in themselves, hence it would be a mistake to dismiss them like so many “useful idiots.”[iii]

On the other hand, there is the temptation to make philosophy itself one of its conditions. This is the proposal of Slovenian theoretical psychoanalyst Alenka Zupancic in her essay on the “fifth condition.”[iv] To recapitulate, Zupancic argues the following: philosophy’s  conditions do not provide a foundation for philosophy, because if they did this would “suture” philosophy and lead to its “suspension,” or abandoning itself to one of its conditions. Nonetheless, she posits that:

One could thus say that there is also a fifth condition of philosophy: philosophy has to pull away from the immediate grip of its own conditions, while nevertheless remaining inder the effect of these conditions.[v]

She arrives at this by acknowledging that Badiou is the first philosopher to conceptualize the singular notion of the Two. Acknowledging that philosophy must “take place within the space of the infinite process of truth without itself becoming a process of truth” that is, “situated on the same level as generic procedures yet a certain distance from them,”[vi] Zupancic argues that philosophy must rely on the “immanent count-for-two.” Zupancic concludes that the count-for-two is also a fifth condition which “defines the very relationship of philosophy with its conditions and keeps it from merging with them, as well as from appearing as their independent sum.”[vii]

In a discussion of Badiou’s politics, Oliver Feltham poses the parallel problem of inhabiting philosophy, that is, “how to take a position within its field, how to even identify its domain via a ‘front,’ a line of conflict, while at the same time completely renaming and refiguring it.”[viii] Feltham calls it “the renovator’s problem[ix]: how do you inhabit what you want to tear down and rebuild?” Citing Althusser’s failed project of trying to fuse politics and philosophy, Feltham argues that philosophy must rigorously separate its own names from the immanent names of a truth procedure and avoid the trap of (con)fusing procedures or conditions with one another (e.g., political art). On the other hand, if these procedures do not intersect or have a common language (Badiou does not present Cantorian set theory or discuss a poem by Mallarmé in the same way), just how does philosophy discern their truths?

While I am aware of this aporia in Badiou’s thought and sympathetic to her argument, I think Zupancic’s resolution is not altogether coherent with Badiou’s approach, in part for the larger problems that Feltham poses. The problem with Zupancic’s elaboration of Badiou’s argument about conditions is that Badiou has posited an instrument of absolute separation, not of degrees. He draws a sharp line—an epistemological cut—between philosophy and its conditions that will be among his lasting gifts to thought. To this cut,  I give the name Badiou’s sickle or scythe, an instrument we will apply to other fields, notaby psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis. In this analysis, psychiatry cannot be reduced, fused or sutured to one of its conditions—be they the chimeras named  “cognitive behaviour therapy,” “existential analysis,” “neuroscience and genetics,” “phenomenological psychiatry,” “systemic family therapy” or “sociocultural studies.” It is in this sense that RD Laing eschewed the label “antipsychiatry” and described himself as an “orthodox psychiatrist,” affirming the key mission of psychiatry as clinical.   

In Jewish religious observance, there is a ritual called havdalah, meaning the separation of the sacred from the profane.[x]^,[xi] Badiou’s sickle functions as a rite of separation of philosophy, which is consacrated to pure thought, from its important, even necessary but subordinate, not to say profane, conditions.

Let us therefore add Badiou’s scythe to the tool-kit of the philosopher. Along with the workaday objects every thinker needs—a ladder (Wittgenstein), a razor (Ockham) and a fork (Hume)—we can now add instruments for cutting, pruning, and sometimes clear-cutting: Badiou’s shears, sickle, scythe.

---

[i] “Family resemblance” is a term introduced by Ludwig Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations, trans. by G.E.M. Anscombe (1953), §67, p. 32.

[ii] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. by C.K. Ogden (1922), p. 189.

[iii] The term is often attributed to V.I. Lenin but its provenance is not established.

[iv] Alenka Zupancic, “The fifth condition” in Peter Hallward, ed., Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy (2004), pp. 191-201.

[v] Ibid., p. 191.

[vi] Ibid., p. 191.

[vii] Ibid., p. 201.

[viii] Oliver Feltham, op. cit., p. 17.

[ix] Ibid., p. 17 (emphasis added).

[x] Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966).

[xi] Jean Soler, “The dietary prescriptions of the Hebrews,” trans. by Elborg Forster, The New York Review of Books, June 14, 1979.

Derrida on the Event, Part II: Derrida the “Yad”

Repetition and first time: this is perhaps the question of the event as question of

the ghost.

—Jacques Derrida (1994, p. 10)

For Derrida, the event, if we can call it that, is repetition.

There is always something spectral in Derrida, ghosts are everywhere. More deeply, with his theory of iteration, everything is iteration, repetition, dissemination. A paradox: if there is only repetition, but repetition as alterity such that things are not perfectly preserved, the original utterance can only have a ghostly presence.

There is something incremental, geological about this view of change …

If something is an iteration as repetition, even if it altered, distorted then change is slowed down, it is evolution not revolution, suggesting glacial, geological processes not ruptures and novation.

What anxieties are harboured here? Indeed, one is always left with the feeling of a profound apprehension in Derrida, what RD Laing called “ontological insecurity.”

I have never seen a photo of Derrida with eyes at rest – his eyes seem furtive, darting, almost avoidant. The Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai wrote a poem that begins:

Of three or four people in a room, one is always at the window

Derrida is the one at the window, always on the lookout.

If in Heidegger,¹ we feel the thinker resigned (I hesitate to say reconciled) to serene solitude, blunting an ancient anguish, in Derrida, we sense something akin to Simone Weil’s uprootedness and together, their concerns create a new category, a new address for being, that is the non-address of non-place.

Real being can have no easy purchase here, only anxious repetitions of the word, fussy annotations of the text, philological dissections, ontological regressions, recapitulations and embellishments, glosses and supplements.

Both Derrida and Weil are propelled into the initiatory logos. For the ethereal Weil, a word that never quite takes flesh (she does not undertake the conversion to Catholicism, does not quite meet Christ in the flesh; she is as uncomfortable dans sa peau—in her skin, as the French say, as Pierre Janet’s “Nadia” or Ludwig Binswanger’s “Ellen West”).

For Derrida, the word can barely make it off the page let alone become flesh.

Like Jewish scholars whose respect for the written word is so great that they do not touch the page but rather use an avatar of the pointer called a yad (Hebrew: די, “hand”), so named because it is literally a small hand with the forefinger extended, to mark their place during a Torah reading, Derrida’s oeuvre can be imagined as a yad—pointing us, always “with patience and trembling, exact fingers” like the lovers that Amichai described in his poem, “Threading,” back to the word and its precise meanings and origins. Derrida the yad: who so loved the word that he could not bring himself to touch it, but only to point and to deconstruct our reading of it.

*

Footnote

In spite of everything, we can bracket Heidegger and Celan together, through Hölderlin if nothing else, for their anxiety about belonging, expressed physically (nature, the land) in Heidegger and Hölderlin and by almost schizophrenic “metaphors that are meant” in Celan (the ashes in the ground, the ashes rising with smoke to the sky). Anthropologist and systems theorist Gregory Bateson describes the peculiar analogical mind of both Catholic—“the communion host is the body”—and schizophrenic logic—he deftly deconstructs the psychotic “word salad” of a patient who starved himself, saying only “Manzanita wood.” Bateson is able to hear the message: “Man’s an eater (if the conditions were right, he) would.”

References

Amichai, Yehuda. “Threading.” In Songs of Jerusalem and Myself (trans. by Harold Schimmel. New York: Harper &  Row, p. 42.

Derrida, Jacques (1994). Specters of Marx (trans. by Peggy Kamuf). New York: Routledge.

*

Excursus: Philosophy & Poetry as Prologue

Every work can be regarded as a prologue (or rather, the broken cast) of a work never penned, and destined to remain so, because later works, which in turn will be the prologues or the moulds for other absent works, represents only sketches or death masks.               —Giorgio Agamben (1993, p. 3)

In his preface to The Pages of Day and Night, Adonis states, “I write in a language that exiles me.” Exile is the mother-country of the Arab poet: “in the beginning was the exile, not the word” (p. xiii).

This explains why the Arab poet embodies a double absence—and absence from himself as well as an absence from the Other. He lives between these two exiles: the internal one and the external one. To paraphrase Sartre, he lives between two hells: the I and the Other.

The I is not I, nor is it the Other.

Absence and exile constitute the only presence.

—Adonis, The Pages of Day and Night (p. xiv)

Being a poet means that I have already written but that I have actually written nothing. Poetry is an act without a beginning or an end. It is really a promise of a beginning, a perpetual beginning.”

—Adonis, The Pages of Day and Night (p. xiv)

For a whole series of poets and philosophers, from Adonis to Agamben, from Hölderlin to Heidegger, the event is language, the utterance, the possibility of human speech, the reach for meaning perhaps, but above all the utterance. Both Adonis and Agamben express it unambiguously here: poetry is the promise of a beginning, a beginning never ended, iterated in perpetuity (with echoes of Derrida); every work is prologue, a broken cast, a death mask, for other works which are themselves only sketches. This is neither nihilism nor resignation but an affirmation that it is the utterance, not the dialogue (Bakhtin), nor the face-to-face encounter (Levinas), nor the received meaning (Gadamer, Ricouer), nor the construction (Searle) of what is said. Simply the endless (iterable, repeatable—Derrida, again) effort to say it. 

Adonis is firm: “To be means to be something. Meanings are only apprehended through words. I speak; therefore, I am. My existence thus and then assumes meaning. It is through this distance and hope that the Arab poet attempts to speak, i.e., to write, to begin” (p. xv).

We may go further, recalling Primo Levi’s witnessing of the child Hurbinek in Auschwitz. A tremendous effort was expended to undertand his name—Hurbinek,  attributed to the child—and his one word, mastiklo. The stakes are not in what it means, but that it is said at all. This is a message from the concentration camp world, which we can neither understand nor ignore. And which simply demands of us that we listen to it, hear it, acknowledge it silently, lest we shatter all else that may follow …

If you do not witness what cannot be said, you will shatter what can be said.

—al-Niffari, a Sufi mystic (cited by Adonis, Sufism and Surrealism, p. 212)

References

Adonis (2000). The Pages of Day and Night (trans. by Samuel Hazo). Marlboro, VT: Marlboro Press.

Adonis (2005). Sufism and Surrealism (trans. by Judith Cumberbatch). London: Saqi Books.

Agamben, Giorgio (1993). Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience (trans. by Liz Heron). London: Verso.

“Homo Ludens” and the Event

From my research notes on “Trauma & Event”

It may surprise my readers that in addressing as sombre and serious a question as trauma, I should refer to Johan Huizinga’s great work, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, described by Martin Buber as “one of the few works informed about the problem of man.”

But it is almost impossible in fact to think about what trauma displaces, interrupts, closes down without considering the possibility that one of the characteristics that we may suspect is opposed to trauma is play. And as a corollary that Event would by definition be “in play” and open to play. Play is at the heart of the Event, as that which resists authority and which opens up discourse through a breaking, even a shattering at times, of rationality, order, logic. In any imaginable “logic of worlds,” to reference Badiou’s last great work, there must also be play …

In his chapter on “play-forms in philosophy,” Huizinga in fact traces play to the Greek sophists but eventually we encounter “at the centre of the circle” also Socrates and Plato. Who can forget the performative, playful, simultaneously mocking and deeply engaged dialogue of Socrates with  Lysias in Platos’s Phaedra? That rich, playful dialogue, the shelves of which have already stocked both Plato’s pharmacy and Derrida’s deconstruction.

From the theory of the riddle, especially the griphos, a joking “question-game” played for “rewards or forfeits” to the “pompous perorations of the sophist” to the Socratic dialogue, Huizinga holds (p. 148) that “the transition is always fluid.”

This is what interests us here—the elaboration of the dialogue as a form of play in the hands of Socrates and his scribe Plato. Describing the sophists, Huizinga says: “The argument goes back and forth like a shuttle and, in its flyings, epistemology takes on the appearance of a noble game.” Huizinga concludes: “It is not only the sophists that play—Socrates and Plato do likewise.” (p. 149)

Plato is supposed to have followed Sophron when composing his dialogues.

Aristotle declares the dialogue a form of mimos, which is an offshoot of comedy. It is not surprising then that Aristotle reckons Socrates and Plato among the jugglers and thaumaturges, along with the sophists (Huizinga, p. 150; Aristotle, Poetica 1147B; H. Reich, Der Mimus, 1903, p. 354).

Huizinga argues that the “dialogue is art-form, a fiction” and that no matter how polished “real conversation” was among the Greeks, “it could never have had the gloss of literary dialogue” (p. 150).

After taking us on a tour of the development of agonistic debates among the schoolmen (or Scholastics) in the Middle Ages with the invention of the University and the public debate as a form of intellectual jousting, with agonistic and playful elements, Huizinga introduces Erasmas, the great humanist who wielded humour, satire and play as deftly as a surgeon’s scalpel. And it is here that Huizinga, speaking through Erasmus, takes us on breathtaking leap from the origins of the dialogue among the sophists and in Socrates, through Aristotle and the Middle Ages, to arrive at this critical insight: that without play, there will not be novelty (what Badiou calls novation in French), there will not be the possibility of the Event …

Erasmus complains in “a letter to his stiff-necked opponent Noel Bédier, of the narrowness of the Schools which only deal with material handed down by their predecessors and, in a controversy, ban any point of view that does not conform to their own particular tenets.”

In my opinion, it is quite unnecessary to act in the Schools as you act when playing cards or dice, where any infringement of the rules spoils the game. In a learned discussion, however, there should be nothing outrageous or risky in putting forward a novel idea.

—Erasmus (cited in Huizinga, p. 156; Erasmi opus epist., ed. Allen, vi, No. 1581, 621 sq.)

Huizinga, Johan (1955). Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Vincenzo Di Nicola

Excursus: Psychoanalysis as a Paranoid Theory of Antiphilosophy

From my research notes on “Trauma & Event”

Psychoanalysis has a paranoid substrate in its discourse …

not because it points to specific entities, things or even processes but because it believes that things and events are connected, that they have meaning, that they are discoverable and analyzable, as Freud says. Furthermore, psychoanalysis holds that there is a traumatic origin and core to symptoms. As a result of all this, psychoanalysis believes that anything and everything that happens inside or outside of therapy is “grist for the mill”—meaning discoverable, analyzable and connected.

Psychoanalysis has no theory of contingency.

This has many consequences, both for its capacity to account for daily life and reality and its capacity to account for change in the shape of non-deterministic events.

Psychoanalysis cannot have a theory of the Event:

it is a hermetic universe, filled at best with hermeneutic possibilities

but these interpretations do not—pace catharsis, insight, mentalization and other such processes—actually open possibilities, only give meaning to what is already there, in a deterministic and rather closed way.

This is why psychoanalysis is and must perforce remain a theory of trauma, the closing down of possibilities laid by early processes, Anna Freud’s (1936) “developmental lines,” the drive and its defenses, and the whole infrastructure that this produces.

It is not accidental that Lacan’s reading, rereading and reformulation of Freud is antiphilosophical and that Badiou has been snared in a decades-long entanglement with Lacan.

Lacan is Badiou’s “Tar Baby,” like the Uncle Remus tale … once you get your paws stuck on it, there is no changing the nature of tar, it sticks to anything!

Lacan in fact goes much further than Freud in locating paranoia at the heart of human development, arguing that the ego is structured on a paranoiac basis and that human knowledge operates on a paranoiac principle (see Freedman, 1984, p. 17).

It is not only paranoia which is totalizing and hermeneutic but psychoanalysis itself.

This explains to me Freud’s investment in the Schreber case: the foundations of psychoanalysis were at stake in his making of this case both meaningful (as opposed to random, contingent) and canonical (emblematic, paradigmatic).

This project was bound to fail, above all because it is, in Freud’s own terms, overdetermined.

*

In his essay on Philip K. Dick, Freedman elaborates a theory of paranoia …

“But not only is the paranoiac an interpreter: he or she is one of an especially systematic and ambitious type. In the essay ‘On Narcissism,’ Freud explicitly links paranoia with the formation of speculative systems (XIV: 96), and in the reading of Schreber he notes a profound affinity between paranoia and megalomaniacal delusions of world catastrophe (XII:68-71). The paranoiac is not only someone for whom every detail is meaningful - for whom nothing can be left uninterpreted or taken for granted – but someone who holds a conception of meaning that is both totalizing and hermeneutic. The paranoiac is the most rigorous of metaphysicians. The typical paranoid outlook is thoroughgoing, internally logical, never trivializing, and capable of explaining the multitude of observed phenomena as aspects of a symmetrical and expressive totality. No particular of empirical reality is so contingent or heterogeneous that the paranoiac cannot, by a straightforward process of point-for-point correspondence, interpret its meaning within the framework of his or her own grand system. The totalizing closure of paranoia is, in fact, noted as lucidly by Dick as by Freud: in ‘Shell Game’ (one of Dick’s finest stories and the germ of ‘Clans of the Alphane Moon’ [19641]), the massive frustration of attempting to break down such closure is powerfully recorded, and the basic problem is clearly stated. ‘The paranoid is totally rigid,’ says one of the characters. ‘He logically weaves all events, all persons, all chance remarks and happenings, into his system’ (Dick, 1977, p. 181). (My italics)

Carl Freedman (1984). Towards a Theory of Paranoia: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick. Science Fiction Studies, 11: 15-24.

Philip K. Dick (1977). The Turning Wheel and Other Stories. London: Coronet Books.

Vincenzo Di Nicola

Who Killed Ellen West? A Philosophical-Psychiatric Investigation of Ludwig Binswanger’s Case of Existential Analysis

The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an 

illness.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953)

One cannot understand psychological disturbances from the outside, on the basis of a positivistic determinism, or reconstruct them with a combination of concepts that remain outside the illness as lived and experienced.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, Foreword, Reason and Violence by Ronnie Laing & David Cooper (1964)

 

Who Killed Ellen West?

In 1944-45, Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966), a Swiss psychiatrist, published The Case of Ellen West, the founding case of existential analysis and one of the most famous cases in modern psychiatry. Searching for a meaningful alternative to the reductive models of contemporary psychiatry, I began reading this case and entered a labyrinth where I investigated the founders of clinical psychiatry, questioned phenomenology, discovered a “whodunit” mystery and triggered a crisis of conscience as a psychiatrist.

With his account of the treatment of a “non-Swiss” Jewish woman at Bellevue, the private sanatorium he directed at Kreuzlingen in Switzerland, Binswanger proposes an analysis of “the existential Gestalt to which we have given the name Ellen West” (1888-1921). To do this, he consults the patient’s clinical notes as well as her private journal, poems and letters to grasp the “totality of her existence.” Her two psychoanalysts are quoted—one sees hysteria, while another pronounces her a severe obsessional neurotic with manic-depressive oscillations. After two suicide attempts, a series of consultations with the founders of modern psychiatry begins. Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926), architect of today’s psychiatric classification, diagnoses melancholy (a profound depression akin to psychosis) while an unnamed “foreign” psychiatrist, finds simple psychasthenia (obsessive-compulsive disorder). Binswanger has another idea—schizophrenia—confirmed by Eugen Bleuler (1857-1939), who named this emblematic condition of psychiatry.

Ellen West’s melancholy and suicide attempts persist, accompanied by serious eating problems. Convinced of her incurable diagnosis, more hopeless than ever, Ellen West demands to be released from hospital. After three days with her family, she appears transformed: she has breakfast, at midday she eats well for the first time in 13 years, in the afternoon she goes for a walk with her husband, reads poems and writes letters; all heaviness is lifted from her. In the evening, she takes poison. The next day, at the age of 33 years, Ellen West is dead.

Writing more than 20 years after her death, when the principals of the case are dead, Binswanger assures us no less than 17 times that her suicide is “authentic.” Who was he trying to convince? Was her death an “authentic suicide” as he insists, an “assisted suicide” (see Akavia, 2008) or a case of “psychic homicide,” a kind of soul murder (see Lester, 1971)? Stripped down, little in Binswanger’s account supports the diagnosis of schizophrenia, then an incurable disease. Against her family’s wishes, Binswanger consults “a foreign psychiatrist” who can now be named, Alfred Hoche (1865-1943), known to support euthanasia for life unworthy of life; all therapy is suspended; and, in spite of her suicidal plans, she is discharged home where her husband provides the poison that kills her.

In spite of the efforts of many great 20^th century thinkers—from her psychiatrists to later psychiatric readings (Mara Selvini Palazzoli, 1982; R.D. Laing, 1982; Salvador Minuchin, 1984) and even philosopher Michel Foucault (1954)—“Ellen West” remains an enigma. The case of “Ellen West” is a mirror of 20^th century psychiatry but the issues and the risks that we find there are still relevant for us (Di Nicola, 2011). And they speak to the debates about the state of psychiatry today.

After 25 years as a practising psychiatrist, this case makes me wonder: What is the mission of psychiatry? Is it to understand (Binswanger’s goal with existential analysis), to classify (Kraepelin’s and Bleuler’s contribution) or to heal (Freud’s contribution through psychoanalysis)? Are these different goals compatible or mutually exclusive? Critics of the case of Ellen West assert that she was misunderstood and mistreated. What lessons does she demand that we learn, at last? Can we let her find a voice to express her suffering, as Minuchin tries to do in his family drama about her?

 

About Me: Vincenzo Di Nicola

I am an academic psychiatrist with interests in the history of psychiatry, phenomenology and philosophy. By chance, I had a relationship with three psychiatrists in this story: Ronnie Laing was my therapist in London, I trained with Mara Selvini Palazzoli in Milan and know Sal Minuchin. All three wrote extensively about families. Selvini Palazzoli and Minuchin are also family therapists and specialists in eating disorders (a key aspect of Ellen West’s predicament). Like my mentors, I specialized in family therapy and eating disorders. Currently, I am doctoral candidate in philosophy in Switzerland, which makes the case more poignant for me. I have presented versions of this research at the Culture and Mental Health Research Seminar at McGill University and Clinical Grand Rounds of Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital and will soon present it at the Institute of Mental Health of the University of Montreal. Parts of this research will be integrated into my doctoral thesis and I am working on a book and a documentary film about this case.

Bibliography

Binswanger’s “Case of Ellen West”

Binswanger, Ludwig (1944-45). Der Fall Ellen West. Schweizer Archiv für Neurologie und Psychologie, 1944, 53: 255-277, 54: 69-117; 1945, 55: 16-40. (Original in German.)

---- (1958). The case of Ellen West: An anthropological-clinical study (trans. Werner M. Mendel & Joseph Lyons). In: Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology (Rollo May, Ernest Angel & Henri F. Ellenberger, eds.). New York: Basic Books, pp. 237-364. (Complete translation in English.)

Secondary Literature

Akavia, Naamah (2008). Writing “The case of Ellen West”: Clinical knowledge and historical representation. Science in Context, 21: 119-144.

Berlinck, Manoel Tosta & Magtaz, Ana Cecília (2008). Reflexões sobre O caso de Ellen West: estudo anthropológico, de Binswanger. Revista Latinoamericana de Psicopatologia Fundamental, 11(2): 232-238.

Di Nicola, Vincenzo (2011). The enigma of Ellen West. In: Letters to a Young Therapist: Relational Practices for the Coming Community. New York and Dresden: Atropos Press, pp. 121-125.

Foucault, Michel (1954). Introduction et notes. Le Rêve et l’Existence par Ludwig Binswanger (trans. Jacqueline Verdeaux). Paris: Desclée de Brouweret.

Ghaemi, S. Nassir (2001). Rediscovering existential psychotherapy: The contribution of Ludwig Binswanger. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 55 (1): 51–64.

Laing, Ronald D. (1982). The Voice of Experience: Experience, Science and Psychiatry. New York: Penguin Books.

Lester, David (1971). Ellen West’s suicide as a case of psychic homicide. Psychoanalytic Review, 58: 251-263.

Marceau, Jean-Claude (2002). La question de la corporéité dans le cas Ellen West de L. Binswanger. L’Évolution Psychiatrique, 67(2): 367-378.

Minuchin, Salvador (1984). The triumph of Ellen West: An ecological perspective. In: Kaleidoscope: Images of Violence and Healing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 195-246.

Selvini Palazzoli, Mara (1982). L’anoressia mentale: Dalla terapia individuale alla terapia familiare. Nuova edizione interamenta riveduta. Milano: Feltrinelli Editore.

Vandereycken, Walter (2004). Book review: A. Hirschmüller (ed.), Ellen West. Eine Patientin Ludwig Binswangers zwischen Kreativität und destruktivem Leiden. Heidelberg-Kroning: Asanger, 2003. History of Psychiatry, 15(1): 125-126.