Medard Boss, a Swiss psychotherapist and a representative of existential psychotherapy, expressed that a person cannot claim the existence of a thing if someone’s understanding does not reveal this thing. The views of Medard Boss consisted in the perception of the body primarily as an existential concept, with the help of which a person produces a bodying forth. According to his theory, just as people do not exist separate from the world, the world cannot exist differently from people.
While medicine considers the body a subject to causal and mechanistic processes, Boss does not agree with this approach. From a psychological point of view, Boss sees the main task of existential analysis in curing neuroses and psychoses by overcoming all preconceived concepts and subjectivist interpretations that have obscured existence from a person (Groth, 2019). According to his works, a person exists in existential space precisely because of the body, and the person himself, also being spatial, adheres to what is available to his perception. This means that for people, spatiality is part of an ontological structure, without which they would not exist in the world. From all of the above, there can be no object without human perception.
This idea does not seem modern and adaptive to contemporary psychology. While the opinion of medicine has not changed, and the body is still a body regardless of external circumstances, the psychological point of view radically changed the vector of existential understanding. The most common psychological opinion in the modern world has approached the medical one. This view can still be considered and discussed in theoretical psychology, but its application will no longer be justified in practice.
Reference
Groth, M. (2019). Medicine and Dasein-therapy: Medard Boss and the Beginnings of a Human Therapeutics. Free Associations, (76), 60-88. Web.