Medard Boss (1903 - 1990)
Medard Boss was born in St. Gallen, Switzerland, on October 4, 1903.
He received a medical degree from the university there in 1928, and then became an assistant to Eugen
Bleuler. Four years later, he went on to study in Berlin and London, where his teachers included
several people in Freud's inner circle as well as Karen Horney.
Over time, Boss read the works of Ludwig Binswanger and Martin Heidegger.
In 1946, after meeting and befriending Heidegger, he turned his interests toward
existential psychology, and made such contributions as to be regarded as a cofounder, along with Ludwig Binswanger, of Existential Psychology.
Theory
Boss was much more an existentialist, in the vein of Heidegger, than Binswanger was. For example, Boss downplays Binswanger's concept of "world-view" because it detracts from Boss's belief that the world is not so much something to interpret (in the sense that a person's "world-view" is their interpretation of the world), as it is something to experience directly. According to Boss, we should not regard ourselves as individuals locked up inside our bodies, but rather as living in a shared world. In other words, human existence is shared existence.
Attunement
Of importance to Boss was a person's mood, or what he referred to as attunement. Boss believed that if you are in a particular mood, then you are "attuned" to perceive and experience things related to that mood. In other words, our moods influence our perception. For example, if you are happy, then you will be attuned to happiness and will thus be more inclined to perceive other things as happy or bright.
Dreams
Boss studied dreams more than any other existentialist, and regarded them as important with regard to the meaning that unfolds from them. In contrast to Freud and Jung, he did not regard dreams as necessarily reflective of hidden wishes, archetypes, or inferiorities, or even to hold much symbolic content at all.
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