Heideggerian deconstruction (as the attempt to return to the original experience of Being which initiates an epochal decision, the attempt to gather the beginning together with the end) would be interesting to juxtapose to psychoanalytic practice.

Thanks for your comment – my understanding of Heidegger is limited as I’ve only read a handful of texts and I would be interested to hear more about the nothing in relation to the Real. As I understand it – the nothing that Heidegger discusses seems to be more of an active force than the real, acting as a kind of destructing force. I think the real comes closest to the nothing in relation to freedom – that for psychoanalysis freedom comes from our leaky finitude, where the real intervenes. Heidegger’s use of the nothing seems to fall somewhere between the Real and Benjamin’s notion of blasting, maybe?

On your last comment I would say that psychoanalysis does not stop with the real but that the interacting of the three, paying serious attention to the function of time, comes close to the fourth category – that of being.

Here we encounter the problem with Zizek’s criticism of Heidegger’s notion of Ge-stell. It has an essentially different thrust than the Levinasian notion of egoistic reduction of the Other to the Same. Nihilism, as Heidegger understands it, involves a forgetting of the Nothing’s Being. He says this again and again: the Nothing *is*, though it is not anything like a being. Nihilism is the notion that when you get rid of beings there is no longer anything at issue in thinking. Heideggerian phenomenology involves a penetration through the technological predominance of beings to ask the question of their Being.

A key difference between psychoanalysis and Heideggerianism is that Heidegger does not cease with the exceptional third (the Real, the Nothing) but asks the question of the belonging together of the three (Dasein/World/Nothing, Imaginary/Symbolic/Real). In the belonging together of the three, Being holds sway.