Ludwig Binswanger (/ˈbɪnzwæŋər/; German: [ˈbɪnsvaŋɐ]; 13 April 1881 – 5 February 1966) was a Swiss psychiatrist and pioneer in the field of existential psychology.

Ludwig Binswanger is the most prominent phenomenological psychologist and the most influential in making the concepts of existential psychology known in Europe and the United States.

As a young man he worked and studied with some of the greatest psychiatrists of the era, such as Carl Jung, Eugen Bleuler and Sigmund Freud.

He visited Freud (who had cited his uncle Otto's work on neurasthenia)[3] in 1907 alongside Jung, approvingly noting his host's "distaste for all formality and etiquette, his personal charm, his simplicity, casual openness and goodness".

Binswanger is considered the first physician to combine psychotherapy with existential and phenomenological ideas, a concept he expounds in his 1942 book; Grundformen und Erkenntnis menschlichen Daseins (Basic Forms and Knowledge of Human Existence).

In this work, he explains existential analysis as an empirical science that involves an anthropological approach to the individual essential character of being human.

[12] For Binswanger, mental illness involved the remaking of a world - including alterations in the lived experience of time, space, body sense and social relationships.

[14] Binswanger's Dream and Existence — which was translated from German into French by Michel Foucault who added a substantial essay-introduction — highlighted in similar fashion the necessity of "steeping oneself in the manifest content of the dream - which, since Freud's epoch-making postulate concerning the reconstruction of latent thoughts, has in modern times receded all to[o] far into the background".

[15] Eugène Minkowski had earlier introduced Binswanger's ideas into France, influencing thereby among others the early work of Jacques Lacan.

[16] In his study of existentialism, his most famous subject was Ellen West, a deeply troubled patient whose case-study was translated into English for the 1958 volume Existence.

He held that such an existence "transcends the being," making the being accessible to itself in numerous different outcomes in life based on the existential path one chooses.