Shadowing Practice: Heidegger’s Forgotten Lectures to Psychiatrists - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Once, during the Second World War, the Swiss psychiatrist Madden Boss came across Heidegger's being and time.

Under time, Boss was serving as a military doctor and, by his own account, had a lot of free time.

So, mostly just to avoid dying of boredom, he decided to start reading Heidegger.

The experience was painful.

Boss later said that he understood almost nothing.

But at the same time, he couldn't shake the feeling that behind this strange and extremely difficult language,

there was some completely new way of talking about the human being.

So he couldn't simply put the book aside either.

He kept returning to Heidegger and gradually become more and more drawn into his thoughts.

After the war, Bosz began to learn more about Heidegger himself.

By that point, Heidegger had become an extremely controversial figure because of his involvement with National Socialism,

and many of Bosse's colleagues strongly advised him to stay away from the philosopher.

Nevertheless, in 1947, Bosse decided to write him a letter.

He didn't really expect to get a reply, but Heidegger answered.

That was the beginning of a correspondence that would continue for many years.

Eventually, they began meeting in person, and over time, the two became close friends.

Boss recalled that Heidegger once explained why his first letter had caught his attention.

For a long time, Heidegger had hoped to meet a doctor who could genuinely understand his thought

and bring it into the field of medicine.

He hoped that one day his ideas might actually prove useful.

Eventually, this friendship led to a rather unusual project.

In 1959, Boss invited Heidegger to give a series of seminars for doctors, psychiatrists and medical students.

The first meeting took place at the psychiatric clinic of the University of Zurich.

But the setting there turned out not to be very suitable, so the later meetings were moved to Bosse's home in Zollikon, a small town near Zurich.

The seminars continued there for almost 10 years, from 1959 to 1969.

Whenever Heidegger came, Bosse would gather around 50 to 70 people at his home.

According to Bosse, the first meetings were difficult.

The audience had been professionally trained to think in scientific terms, and Heidegger was asking them something like, what does it mean to be?

Posse recalled it at times it felt like someone from another planet trying to communicate with people on Earth.

The earliest meetings weren't documented.

Posse only began writing the seminars down later, so a large part of the material we have today comes from the 1960s.

Heidegger himself later went through these records, making corrections and clarifications.

They were eventually published under the title Zolicon Seminus.

Besides the Philosophical Seminus themselves, the book also includes personal conversations between Heidegger and Boss and fragments of their correspondence over the years.

This book became the main source for this video.

But what could a philosopher possibly teach psychiatrists?

In the Seminus, Heidegger himself says

that his goal is not to turn psychiatrists into philosophers

but to teach them to notice something that is fundamental to human existence

but usually remains hidden just because it seems too obvious and too familiar.

He wants to teach them a different way of thinking

and right at the beginning he asks them to set aside that scientific way of looking at things.

Heidegger thinks psychiatry runs the risk of applying to human beings a way of thinking that was originally developed for studying objects,

looking for causes, properties and regularities.

Once this model is applied to the human being, the person gradually becomes just another object among other objects.

But Heidegger thinks that human beings don't exist in the same way things do.

And because of

that, the way we approach them can't simply reproduce the model

of the natural sciences as Heidegger says in one of the

seminars of course the human being can be seen as part

of nature in the scientific manner yet the question still remains whether something human will result something

which relates to the human being as a human being Heidegger insists

that the way human beings exist requires a different kind of investigation but what does that actually mean?

If you can't simply study a human being in the same way you study other objects, Then how are you supposed to study one at all?

To answer that, you first have to ask what is distinctive about human existence in the first place.

And in this seminus Heidegger turns to embodiment, space and time to show what the difference consists in.

He speaks about embodiment.

When Heidegger talks about the body, he points out that German has two words that can both mean body.

Kerpa and Leib.

Kerpa is the body understood as a physical thing, something with mass, volume, organs, something that follows certain laws and can be studied scientifically.

But German also has another word for the body, Leib.

Leib is the living body or lived body.

In ordinary life, this is how you actually experience your own body.

You don't normally experience your hand or your leg as an object with particular length

and mass your body is already involved in the world you pick up a cup open a door turn around

when someone calls your name most of the time your body

is simply there involved in everything you do in phenomenology this distinction between kerpa

and lieb is sometimes described as the difference between the body you have and the body you are

Heidegger wants the psychiatrists to learn to see the human being not only as an organism, but also through lived embodiment.

And this point is actually not just about the body.

In this seminus, Heidegger is genuinely trying to bring this lived dimension back into the discussion of the human being.

He also speaks about space and time.

In a natural scientific description, space is treated as something homogeneous and measurable.

You can locate things, measure distances, give coordinates.

But human beings don't experience space that way.

We don't simply exist at a measurable distance from things.

We experience things as near or far, familiar or strange, as something we can move toward or move away from.

Physical proximity doesn't always mean closeness in the human sense.

someone can literally be sitting next to another person

and have almost no relation to them at all

while someone thousands of kilometers away may at

that very moment be far closer

because they are the one toward whom your thoughts attention

or expectation are directed heidegger says

that a human being can in a certain sense be there

while remaining physically here because humans spatiality cannot be reduced to the physical location of the body.

It is also determined by what a person is directed toward and by what matters to them at that moment.

The same applies to time.

For a human being, time is not simply a sequence of homogeneous, measurable nows, following one another.

Because every temporal expression already belongs to a concrete context.

Now means now while I am speaking to you.

Tomorrow means tomorrow when you arrive.

Every expression of time belongs to a concrete context.

It refers to what is happening, what it is connected to.

The time of human existence is therefore always already lived and meaningfully structured.

Heidegger is trying to show that there is a more primordial human relation to time

that is already there before any measurement begins.

We wait, remember, hurry, have time, run out of time.

And in all of these cases, time is already bound up with the possibilities of our existence.

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So the time we actually live has a structure of its own, rooted in the very way human beings exist in the world,

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while clock time is only one possible way of dealing with time.

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Another important topic for Heidegger in these lectures is distinction between causality and motivation.

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In the natural sciences, causality means that one event follows from another in a regular and predictable way.

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The sun shines on a stone, the stone becomes warm.

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And this connection can be observed, repeated and described as a law.

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But can a human action really be understood in the same way?

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If someone closes a window because it is noisy outside, the noise is not the cause of that action in the same sense that sunlight causes a stone to become warm,

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because the noise first has to be heard as disturbing, silence has to matter to the person, and peace has to be something they want.

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Heidegger calls what moves a person in this way a motive.

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He describes a motive as something that concerns me, something that calls for response, while a cause works whether or not they think it affects,

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understand what is happening the stone doesn't need to know

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that the sun is shining on it in order to become warm

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but the motive leaves room for freedom it doesn't physically push you

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or force you to act it addresses you heidegger compares this to hearing a voice

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and answering it heidegger sometimes writes in a very poetic way

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okay now we see why heidegger is critical of the scientific approach to the human being

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because he thinks he cannot fully capture the lived world

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but this raises another question why should we care about the lived world maybe it is simply something subjective

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that we can safely leave aside let me try to explain

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take a drinking glass in your hand where does this glass

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actually exists does it simply exist out there independently of us

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or is everything we see just some kind of representations inside consciousness For Heidegger,

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the glass obviously exists independently of whether I am looking at it or not.

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But as a glass, as something you can drink from, put on a table, hand to another person, it appears only within an interconnected whole.

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The glass refers to the table, to drinking and to the situation in which it is being used

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and it is within this whole network of references that a glass can appear as a glass

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just as a sound can be heard as disturbing to encounter

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any particular thing i must already be open to much more

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than the isolated object in front of me i am always

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already open to a whole field of relations a totality of references

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and in this sense this is why the whole is more primordial because in order to study something scientifically,

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we first have to single it out from that field and detach it from its ordinary involvements.

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Measurement, scientific investigations are themselves grounded in a prior way of encountering and understanding the world.

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The lived world cannot be something secondary, because before anything can be isolated and studied as an object, it has to appear within a lived world.

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And that is what Heidegger was talking in this seminus.

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Basically, the Zolikon seminus are just being and time retold in a more accessible form.

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Everything I've been talking about here is built out of the same basic ideas.

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Being in the world, openness, temporality.

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Heidegger explains all of this in being and time too, but in a much more abstract and difficult way.

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In the Zolikon seminars he at least tries to make himself a little clearer.

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By the end of the 19th century and in the first half of the 20th,

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many psychiatrists and psychologists started to feel that it was wrong to build psychiatry on the model of the natural sciences,

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and that this model was missing something specifically human.

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Mad at Boss was one of the people who felt this way.

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And this is why Heidegger fascinated him so much.

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Bos saw that Heidegger was talking about human beings in a radically different way,

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shifting the focus toward the person's lived world itself and toward the way that person exists within it.

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For Bos this seemed like a much better foundation for understanding human existence.

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This Heideggerian approach also changes the relationship between therapist and patient.

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I'm not an expert in design analysis, but in very general terms,

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the therapist shouldn't begin with the assumption that they already know what is happening to the patient.

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They shouldn't immediately attach labels like this is complex, this is defense mechanism.

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They should try to understand how the world itself has changed for this particular person.

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What has happened to their experience of their own body?

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How do they experience time?

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How do they experience their own future?

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Which possibilities still seem open to them and which ones seem to have disappeared?

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In a sense, Dasein analysis is an attempt to rethink what kind of being the patient is

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and what kind of understanding psychiatry should be aiming for.

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By the way, Boss wasn't the first to try to bring Heidegger's philosophy into clinical practice.

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Back in the 1930s, another Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger had begun developing his own version of design analysis,

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inspired by being and time.

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But Binswanger reworked Heidegger's ideas quite freely, and Heidegger himself was fairly critical of his interpretation.

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With Bosch, the situation was different, because his design analysis developed through direct long -term contact with Heidegger himself.

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Heidegger was actually present throughout this process process and could literally explain what he meant.

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Today design analysis still exists, but it remains a fairly niche approach.

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The question behind the whole project, though, hasn't disappeared, and if anything, it has become even more interesting now that we have AI.

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AI can already hold a conversation, follow context and give coherent responses, which makes the old boundary between humans and machines much less obvious.

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At one point, we could at least comfort ourselves with the thought

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that we were uniquely capable of selecting all the traffic lights in a picture, but unfortunately AI can do that now too.

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And this brings us back to the same question.

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What exactly is distinctive about a human being?

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Heidegger would say that the difference lies in the very way human beings exist.

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We have a world, an interconnected field of meanings, possibilities, fears, expectations, past and future,

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within which things can matter to us at all and can appear as close or distant, familiar or alien, desirable or threatening?

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Can a machine have a world like that?

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A lived world in this specifically Heideggerian sense?

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That is already the next turn of the question, and answering it is a task for those who come after Heidegger, which means, unfortunately, us.

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Anyway, thanks for watching, see you next time, bye!

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This video has 179 sentences and 2430 words to shadow. The speech runs for 16:20. The speaker talks at a steady 149 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. 83% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.

Key vocabulary in this video

15 less common words from the video, with pronunciation and meaning:

psychiatrist /ˌsaɪˈkaɪ.ə.tɹɪst/ (noun) — A medical doctor specializing in psychiatry.
seminar /ˈsɛmɪnɑɹ/ (noun) — A class held for advanced studies in which students meet regularly to discuss original research, under the guidance of a professor.
relation /ɹɪˈleɪʃ(ə)n/ (noun) — The manner in which two things may be associated.
motive /ˈmoʊtɪv/ (noun) — An incentive to act in a particular way; a reason or emotion that makes one want to do something; anything that prompts a choice of action.
philosopher /fəˈlɑsəfɚ/ (noun) — A lover of wisdom.
psychiatry /saɪˈkaɪ.əˌtɹi/ (noun) — The branch of medicine that focuses on mental and behavioral health by subjectively diagnosing, treating, or preventing mental disorders (mental illnesses) and…
refer /ɹɪˈfɜː/ (verb) — To direct the attention of (someone toward something).
concrete /ˌkɑnˈkɹit/ (adjective) — Real, actual, tangible.
ordinary /ˈɔɹdɪnɛɹi/ (adjective) — Having regular jurisdiction; now only used in certain phrases.
recall /ɹɪˈkɔl/ (verb) — To withdraw, retract (one's words etc.); to revoke (an order).
belong /bɪˈlɒŋ/ (verb) — To have its proper place.
involvement /ɪnˈvɑlv.mənt/ (noun) — The act of involving, or the state of being involved.
physically /ˈfɪz.ɪ.kli/ (adverb) — In a physical manner.
encounter /ɪnˈkaʊntɚ/ (verb) — To meet (someone) or find (something), especially unexpectedly.
gradually /ˈɡɹæd͡ʒuəli/ (adverb) — In a gradual manner; making slow progress; slowly.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

talk about (verb) — Used to draw attention to the speaker's characterization of someone or something.
look at (verb) — To observe or watch.
back in (verb) — To reverse a vehicle into a space.
back into (verb) — To advance to the post-season as a result of another team's loss, especially where one's own team has also lost.
call for (verb) — To shout out in order to summon (a person).
come across (verb) — To change sides; to cross over to work for the opposition.
come after (verb) — To pursue or follow; to pursue with hostile intent.
come from (verb) — To have as one's origin, birthplace or nationality.

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 19 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, doesn't, can't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: therapist /ˈθɛɹəpɪst/, nevertheless /ˌnɛvɚðəˈlɛs/, gather /ˈɡæðɚ/, threaten /ˈθɹɛt.n̩/, rethink /ɹiːˈθɪŋk/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: relation /ɹɪˈleɪʃ(ə)n/, shine /ʃaɪn/, distinction /dɪˈstɪŋkʃən/, measurement /ˈmɛʒ.ə.mənt/, expectation /ˌɛk.spɛkˈteɪ.ʃən/
Long words — get the stress right: psychiatrist /ˌsaɪˈkaɪ.ə.tɹɪst/, philosopher /fəˈlɑsəfɚ/, psychiatry /saɪˈkaɪ.əˌtɹi/, ordinary /ˈɔɹdɪnɛɹi/, genuinely /ˈd͡ʒɛn.ju.ɪn.li/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like psychiatrist, seminar, relation.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	were moved · weren't documented · is applied
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	has changed · has happened · hasn't disappeared
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	people who felt · responses, which makes · those who come

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: Heidegger’s Forgotten Lectures to Psychiatrists - Learn English Speaking with Video

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