As therapists, we regularly observe the extent to which our patients are distanced from a voice of love or compassion toward themselves and others (e.g., inner good voice, benevolent superego, good internal object, spirit of love, God). We believe the extent to which one realizes an intimate relationship to this voice (through the tangible mediation of loving others) is the defining measure of psycho-spiritual health. As such, the curative...

What distinguishes the suicidal despair of a trauma victim like Primo Levi from Viktor Frankl, who retained a sense of hope? Both were Holocaust survivors. Both concede there’s something wrong with “the world.” But is this, as Frankl claims, merely a temporary anomaly in the stability of opposing forces of good and evil or life and death drives? Or is it, as Levi claims, symptomatic of a moral de-evolution comparable to the end stage of a...

In modern history, no event has more profoundly symbolized suffering than the Holocaust. This novel “Husserlian-realist” phenomenological dissertation elucidates the meaning of existential trauma through an interdisciplinary and psychologically integrative vantage point. I use the testimony of a select group of Holocaust witnesses who committed suicide decades after that event as a lens to examine what their despair may reveal about an...

 TOWARD A PHENOMENOLOGY OF CONSCIENTIOUS ACTION AND A THEORY OF THE PRACTICALITY OF REASON: STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF THE PROBLEM Abstract My thesis is that there is a way of understanding moral knowledge in terms of Husserl’s theory of the fulfillment of consciousness, which may unify the main types of views held with respect to “the practicality of reason.” By “the practicality of reason” I mean the claim that...