The article considers Alzheimer’s disease by looking at the experiences of the patient and the resulting relationship to the surroundings. It begins with a critique of the rationalist approach, which is principally interested in the person’s loss of intellectual faculties. This preoccupation eclipses and inhibits the person’s initiatives and efforts to continue existing in his surroundings and in relation to others. The analysis opens with a description of a “being in the world” appropriate to an immediate and sensory existence. This handicap can thus be characterized not as a closure to the world, but rather as a confinement to the perceptive aspects of experience. Two therapeutic approaches result from this analysis: listening to the expression of the person’s sensory perception, and providing supportive reasoning abilities.