Philosophical Whitewashing. Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966) and the Sterilisation of Manic-depressive Patients

The Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger is known as the founder of the Daseinsanalyse (existential analysis) and more generally for having applied contemporary philosophical concepts and theories to psychiatry. The fortune of the philosopher Binswanger constituted a formidable obstacle to a historical scrutiny of his actual clinical practice. In the long run, the philosopher overshadowed the psychiatrist. The present paper takes the move from a "minor" work, an essay on the sterilisation of manic-depressive patients Binswanger published in 1938. This essay represents a rare exception in Binswanger's scientific production in many respects: for its editorial collocation, for the subject (a concrete medical intervention) and the complete absence of philosophical references. Nevertheless, or precisely for this reason, the essay has been largely ignored by the scholarship, both of Swiss eugenics and of Binswanger himself. This paper explores the epistemological circumstances of this negligence and its historiographic significance, with special attention to the philosophical-anthropological refashioning of a psychiatric myth.