Introduction

Something is fracturing. The social fabric that sustains human existence – the shared spaces, the common world, the capacity to be genuinely with one another – is under increasing pressure. Loneliness has become a mass phenomenon, no longer merely a personal misfortune but a structural feature of contemporary life. Democratic publics are eroding as authoritarian politics attacks the conditions under which a shared world becomes possible. Inequality turns recognition – the experience of being seen, heard, and acknowledged – into a privilege rather than a birthright. And now artificial intelligence begins to simulate the very forms of human presence on which belonging, care, and therapy depend.

These developments are not merely political or social. They reach into the ontological conditions of human existence itself: into what Heidegger called Mitsein – the embodied, temporal, and vulnerable being-with-others through which selfhood and world are constituted. They demand not only policy responses but thinking – the kind of thinking that does justice to the full weight of what is at stake. This conference proceeds from the conviction that Mitsein remains our unfinished business – unfinished for philosophy, for the social sciences, and for psychotherapy alike. A structure acknowledged, but never sufficiently elaborated in its ontological, ethical, political, and clinical implications. It asks what is at stake when we take seriously that existence is always already co-constituted: for our understanding of selfhood, suffering, social life, political order, and the practice of psychotherapy.

Central Question

We have not yet thought shared existence sufficiently. What does it mean to say that we are never simply alone, that selfhood arises only in and through a world shared with others – and that this shared world is now, visibly and urgently, under strain?

We Especially Welcome Contributions That…

• bring philosophical concepts of being-with into dialogue with clinical or therapeutic practice

• explore social and political forms of suffering from a phenomenological or psychotherapeutic perspective,

• reflect on loneliness, withdrawal, exclusion, or loss of world in contemporary societies

• examine the therapeutic encounter as a form of shared existence

• develop interdisciplinary conversations between philosophy, psychotherapy, social theory, and critical theory

Philosophy, Psychotherapy, and the Social Sciences

Philosophy and psychotherapy rarely speak directly to one another. They have their own languages, institutions, and standards of rigour. And yet, at their best, they remain answerable to the same reality: the reality of a human being thrown into a world, suffering, searching, trying to live. When they enter into genuine dialogue – rather than merely borrowing concepts from one another – a field opens up that neither can reach alone. Philosophy gains traction in the concrete; psychotherapy gains philosophical depth in its understanding of suffering, relationality, and world. The Zollikon Seminars remain the most sustained example of what this can look like: over seventeen years of thinking with physicians and psychiatrists, Martin Heidegger hoped – in Medard Boss’s words – to break out of the philosopher’s study and reach those who suffer. Out of that encounter grew Daseinsanalysis: a form of psychotherapy that takes philosophy not as a mere accessory, but as its ground. Yet even there, Mitsein – the ‘with’ of existence – was left largely unthought: the encounter was primarily between a philosopher and individual clinicians. The social, the political, the co-constituted world in which suffering is produced and situated remained in the background. This conference is an attempt to bring it into the foreground: to think Mitsein with the same seriousness, and to do so together – across philosophy, psychotherapy, and the social sciences. Mitsein is not first a concept we apply to a situation – it is always already happening in the moment of being together. The interdisciplinary encounter this conference invites is itself an instance of what it seeks to think.