Binswanger's phenomenology of the clinical encounter stressed the role of the clinician as the epistemological instrument of perception and feeling and offered a striking alternative to the patient-psychiatrist encounter as described by psychoanalysis. Binswanger's work thus stands in a phenomenological psychotherapeutic tradition that departs significantly from Freudian psychoanalysis and that has had profound influence in Central Europe, as well as in England and the United States⁸ In the years following World War II, Binswanger's rendering of the phenomenological vision would inspire Maurice Merleau-Ponty as well as the young Michel Foucault. ⁹ As a source of intersubjective and social definitions of mental disorder, it would also provide philosophical fuel for the antipsychiatry movement. ¹⁰In formulating a hybrid science melding the domains of philosophy and psychiatry, Binswanger went further than most in demonstrating the potential of phenomenology to bridge intellectual and practical worlds: from European psychiatric asylum practice, to critiques of psychoanalysis, to philosophical discourse on intersubjectivity.

It is perhaps obvious that a clinical psychiatrist, especially the director of a psychiatric asylum, would take an interest in intersubjectivity as it pertained to the clinical encounter. New therapeutic practices-suggestion and hypnosis in the late nineteenth century and psychoanalytic transference in the early twentieth-had focused attention on the healing possibilities of doctor-patient contact. For the majority of Binswanger's asylum patients, however, who suffered from psychotic disturbances such as mania and schizophrenia, these therapeutic techniques had limited value. For such cases, the more basic challenge to the practicing psychiatrist was merely to understand schizophrenic experience, which seemed so unlike the normal, both cognitively and emotionally. Jaspers, one of the pioneers of phenomenological psychiatry, found phenomenological methods useful for understanding individual psychotic symptoms but did not think they could lead to a comprehensive understanding of psychosis¹¹ Binswanger, in contrast, boldly claimed that phenomenological intuition and empathy could provide a direct pathway to understanding the psychotic person holistically.