Heidegger occupies a contested but substantial position within the depth-psychology corpus. His influence is most extensively elaborated by Iain McGilchrist, who systematically recruits Heideggerian concepts — inauthenticity, Vorhandenheit, the forgetting of Being, Dasein's worldly embeddedness, and the hiddenness of truth in art — as philosophical cognates for his neuropsychological thesis about hemispheric asymmetry. For McGilchrist, Heidegger's entire trajectory away from analytic clarity maps onto the right hemisphere's mode of apprehension, while conceptual abstraction and technicity characterize the left. Paul Ricoeur deploys Heidegger's existential analytic — particularly the question 'who?' and the structure of care — as a foundation for narrative identity and selfhood. David Miller invokes Heidegger's critique of the spatialization of thinking in Western philosophy to illuminate the loss of temporal, mythic sensibility. James Hillman draws on Heidegger's poetics of blue and holiness to illuminate Jungian visionary experience. Derrida interrogates Heidegger's temporality from within, pressing on the concept of authentic versus inauthentic time. Jung himself, by contrast, issues a pointed dismissal, condemning Heidegger's language as neurotic and his philosophy as psychically disordered. This range — from indispensable resource to symptom requiring diagnosis — makes Heidegger one of the most productively controversial presences in the library.
In the library
18 substantive passages
the routine of daily life, in which things have their familiar place and order (right hemisphere), can dull things into what Heidegger called inauthenticity (left hemisphere), through the very weight of familiarity
McGilchrist maps Heidegger's distinction between inauthenticity and the renewed encounter with things onto the left/right hemisphere opposition, making Heideggerian phenomenology a direct neuropsychological analogue.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis
Heidegger saw the disasters of Western materialism as stemming from a 'forgetting of Being', and the apparently opposed forces of capitalism and communism as merely variants in a common technicity and exploitation of nature.
McGilchrist presents Heidegger's 'forgetting of Being' and critique of technicity as a diagnosis of Western civilizational pathology that transcends left/right political opposition.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis
Heidegger's entire thrust is away from the clear light of analysis, and this has led to misunderstandings. While he has been admired as a wise philosopher-teacher by some, he has been reviled as an obfuscator by others.
McGilchrist defends Heidegger's anti-analytic orientation as philosophically profound rather than obfuscatory, aligning his project with right-hemispheric modes of understanding that resist reduction to clarity.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis
'das Nichts selbst nichtet'. In my view, the tetchy responses of analytic philosophers to Heidegger's words merely advertise their own limited thinking.
McGilchrist defends Heidegger's paradoxical formulation 'nothing noths' as genuinely illuminating about the ontological status of nothingness and Being, against dismissals by analytic philosophy.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
'das Nichts selbst nichtet'. In my view, the tetchy responses of analytic philosophers to Heidegger's words merely advertise their own limited thinking.
A parallel passage to par0292 in the 2021 edition reiterating McGilchrist's advocacy for Heidegger's ontological paradox of nothingness against analytic dismissal.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
The stance, or disposition, that we need to adopt, according to Heidegger, is one of 'waiting on' (nachdenken) something, rather than just 'waiting for' it; a patient, respectful nurturing of something into disclosure.
McGilchrist uses Heidegger's concept of nachdenken and the hiddenness of truth in artworks to articulate a right-hemispheric mode of attentive, non-grasping disclosure.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis
Heidegger's modus philosophandi is neurotic through and through and is ultimately rooted in his psychic crankiness. His kindred spirits, close or distant, are sitting in lunatic asylums.
Jung delivers a sharp psychopathological verdict on Heidegger, dismissing his philosophical method as symptomatic neurosis rather than genuine insight, in direct contrast to his reception by McGilchrist and others.
Heidegger's modus philosophandi is neurotic through and through and is ultimately rooted in his psychic crankiness. His kindred spirits, close or distant, are sitting in lunatic asylums.
A near-identical passage in Jung's second letters volume reaffirms his consistent and emphatic rejection of Heidegger across multiple decades of correspondence.
Jung, C. G., Letters Volume 2, 1951-1961, 1975thesis
Care then appears as the ground of the philosophical anthropology of Being and Time, before ontology is oriented beyond philosophical anthropology by the notion of temporality.
Ricoeur positions Heidegger's concept of care as foundational to a philosophical anthropology of selfhood, linking it to his own categories of narrative identity and the idem/ipse distinction.
In Heidegger, the investigation of 'who?' belongs to the same ontological sphere as that of the self (Selbstheit).
Ricoeur identifies a productive affinity between Heidegger's existential question 'who?' and his own project of selfhood, using Heidegger to ground the concept of personal agency ontologically.
Heidegger writes: 'Blue is not an image to indicate the sense of the holy. Blueness itself is the holy, in virtue of its gathering depth which shines forth only as it veils itself.'
Hillman invites Heidegger's poetics of blueness as holy depth to illuminate Jung's visionary experience of sanctity, drawing a direct phenomenological bridge between the two thinkers.
Martin Heidegger has long had a concern for the loss I am indicating. He sees the problem in his first major work, Being and Time (1927), and in his later essay, Time and Being (1962), as linked to the spatialization of thinking.
Miller enlists Heidegger's critique of the spatialization of temporal thinking in Western philosophy to diagnose the loss of mythic, narrative, and polytheistic sensibility in modernity.
Miller, David L., The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting
It is not in closing but in interrupting Being and Time that Heidegger wonders whether 'primordial temporality' leads to the meaning of Being.
Derrida reads the incompletion of Being and Time as philosophically significant, questioning whether Heidegger's concept of primordial temporality can bear the weight of grounding the meaning of Being.
Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
What he found in Heidegger (and in a way in Sartre) was an analysis of the history of Western philosophy and culture that made sense of the polarities, such as Orthodoxy–the West, that he had found himself
Louth documents how the Orthodox theologian Yannaras found in Heidegger's critique of Western metaphysics a framework for articulating the difference between Orthodox and Western theological sensibilities.
Louth, Andrew, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Presentsupporting
man must first let himself be claimed again (wieder ansprechen) by Being, taking the risk that under this claim he will seldom have much to say.
Derrida cites Heidegger on the priority of Being's claim over human speech, using this to explore the relation between language, homelessness, and the humanist tradition.
Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
a being in the proper sense of the term (das eigentlich Seiend) is understood as ousia, parousia, i.e. basically as 'presence' (das 'Anwesen), the immediate and always present possession.
Derrida engages Heidegger's analysis of Being as presence in the history of metaphysics, tracing how the Western understanding of ousia reduces Being to permanent, temporal presence.
Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 284. … Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 233.
Yalom cites Being and Time twice in footnotes on isolation and loneliness, indicating Heidegger's presence as a background theoretical authority in existential psychotherapy without substantive engagement.
Yalom, Irvin D., Existential Psychotherapy, 1980aside
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967). Martin Heidegger, 'Time and Being,' in On Time and Being.
Abram references Being and Time and 'Time and Being' in the context of phenomenological accounts of temporality, locating Heidegger within a lineage from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty.
Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996aside