Binswanger's approach was heavily influenced by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger and psychoanalysis founder Sigmund Freud.
After World War II a form of Daseinsanalysis that differed from Binswanger's evolved in Zurich by Medard Boss.
This new form of Daseinsanalysis focused on the practical application of Heidegger's phenomenology to the theory of neuroses and psychotherapy.
Heavily influenced by Edmund Husserl, Binswanger believed that lifeworld was the key to understanding a patient's subjective experience.
For Binswanger, mental illness involved the remaking of the world in the patient's mind, including alterations in the lived experience of time, space, body sense, and social relationships.
[4] It's important to say "the intention governing Binswanger’s Daseinsanalyse was to understand psychiatric symptoms as the expression of an alteration of the structural components of one’s basic being-in-the-world.
[5] As Binswanger continued his research he began to relate his analysis more towards the ideas of Dasein, as popularized and discussed by the philosopher, Martin Heidegger.
Ludwig Binswanger was against the idea of institutionalizing his "psychiatric Daseinsanalysis" and focused solely on research.
However, Medard Boss, a friend and colleague of both Ludwig Binswanger and Martin Heidegger wanted to take Daseinsanalysis beyond research and turn it into a practical therapy.
[3] Boss, through his studies with Heidegger, found that modern medicine and psychology, including psychoanalysis and Binswanger's form of Daseinsanlysis made incorrect assumptions on what it means to be human.
[3][6] For Boss and Heidegger, mental illness was not caused by an alternation of a patient's lived experience, but rather a conflict between themselves and the meaning of life and their purpose, or Dasein.
One of the pivotal claim that daseinsanalytical therapy holds to be true is that there is no objective way to explain the openness of the human dasein.
[1] This approach takes out the complications that psychotherapy brings by lathering the manifest content of the patient's existence with latent meaning.
The question of 'why' someone does or thinks something can be misleading and assumes that events and thoughts in a person's life are causal to the patient's obstacles; further, it only grasps at the meaning behind a behavior and not the root cause.
[3] Why not leads the therapist to challenge those self-imposed limitations as stated earlier and facilitate a line of logic that is not explanatory, but probing of new thinking.
The reason that meaning is not imposed on the manifest experienced content is because it is yet another construct that limits the patient in their understanding of themselves.
This means that the therapist tries to challenge the self-imposed limitations and barriers that the dreamer is putting upon themselves in order to allow a free relationship with their own dream world, which is the overall goal of Daseinsanalysis.