Thrownness (Geworfenheit) stands as one of the cardinal existential structures in Heidegger’s Being and Time, designating the condition by which Dasein always already finds itself delivered over to a ‘there’ it did not choose and cannot fully assume. The depth-psychology corpus engages this term primarily through Heidegger’s own extended elaborations, where thrownness is rigorously distinguished from a mere biographical event that has ‘befallen’ Dasein and then detached itself: rather, as long as Dasein exists, it is its thrownness. The term carries irreducible ontological weight — it names the nullity at the basis of Dasein’s Being-a-basis, the unchosen facticity that pervades every projection. What the corpus illuminates above all is the dialectical tension between thrownness and projection: Dasein is simultaneously thrown and projecting, a nullity that nonetheless must take over its own ground. The index entries catalogued in Being and Time reveal the structural richness of the concept: thrownness as it intersects with conscience, with Being-towards-death, with freedom, with having-been, and with time-reckoning. Authenticity, for Heidegger, requires a resolute coming back to one’s thrownness — a taking-over rather than an evasion. Yalom and the existential-psychotherapy tradition inherit this framework as the unchosen ground conditions of existence, though they tend to translate the ontological register into clinical categories of freedom and isolation. The concept has no direct counterpart in classical Greek psychology, rendering it distinctively modern in the library’s comparative frame.
Thrownness, however, does not lie behind it as some event which has happened to Dasein, which has factually befallen and fallen loose from Dasein again; on the contrary, as long as Dasein is, Dasein, as care, is constantly its ‘that-it-is’.
This passage delivers the core ontological definition: thrownness is not a past biographical event but the permanent structural condition of Dasein’s factical Being, inseparable from care itself.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
In one’s coming back resolutely to one’s thrownness, there is hidden a handing down to oneself of the possibilities that have come down to one, but not necessarily as having thus come down.
Heidegger here ties authentic resoluteness to a deliberate appropriation of thrownness, showing that heritage and possibility are constituted through, not despite, the thrown condition.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
It is not a free-floating self-projection; but its character is determined by thrownness as a Fact of the entity which it is; and, as so determined, it has in each case already been delivered over to existence.
Conscience is shown to be constituted by thrownness: Dasein’s factical determination forecloses any purely self-originating self-projection and grounds the call of conscience in unchosen facticity.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
A state-of-mind not only discloses Dasein in its thrownness and its submission to that world which is already disclosed with its own Being; it is itself the existential kind of Being in which Dasein constantly surrenders itself to the ‘world’.
States-of-mind (Stimmungen) are identified as the primary existential mode through which thrownness is disclosed, linking affectivity directly to the structure of factical abandonment.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
existentially surrendered to thrownness, Dasein has in every case already gone astray and failed to recognize itself. In its potentiality-for-Being it always stands in one possibility or another.
Dasein’s surrender to thrownness is described as the condition for inauthenticity and self-misrecognition, while simultaneously constituting the enabling ground of all existentiell possibility.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
truth, as Dasein’s disclosedness, must be. This belongs to Dasein’s essential thrownness into the world. Has Dasein as itself ever decided freely whether it wants to come into ‘Dasein’ or not?
Thrownness is linked to the ontological necessity of truth itself: Dasein’s disclosedness, and hence truth, is not chosen but belongs structurally to the condition of having-been-thrown into the world.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
thrownness and conscience: H. 291 thrownness and Being-towards-death H. 344, 348, 374 thrownness and freedom: H. 366 thrownness and having-been: H. 328, 340 taking over one’s thrownness: H. 383, 385
The index entry maps the full systematic range of thrownness in Being and Time, demonstrating its structural connections to conscience, death, freedom, and temporality as a network of co-constitutive concepts.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
anticipatory resoluteness understands the potentiality-for-Being-guilty authentically and wholly — that is to say, primordially.
Anticipatory resoluteness, the authentic response to thrownness, is shown to require the full appropriation of Being-guilty, establishing thrownness as the existential ground of conscience and guilt.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
the negative character to which Heidegger refers in this puzzling passage is implied in the ‘never’ of the preceding sentence… projection as one that has been thrown, and as determined by the nullity of Being-a-basis.
The editorial commentary clarifies the grammatical and conceptual negativity embedded in thrownness, foregrounding the nullity that characterizes Dasein’s basis as a thrown projector.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
Dasein exists factically. We shall inquire whether existentiality and facticity have an ontological unity, or whether facticity belongs essentially to existentiality.
The question of whether facticity (closely allied to thrownness) belongs essentially to existentiality frames the broader ontological inquiry into the unity of Dasein’s structural constitution.
, Being and Time, 1962aside