You and I: Psycho-spiritual health and the voice of love
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 power of “love” is grounded in a tangible relationship with a self-transcendent good that is not reducible to simply subjective experience, affect, behavior, or social interaction.
To that end, the present paper aims to examine some individual, group, and collective psycho-spiritual health implications of a case wherein a patient experienced a moment of “spiritual perfection,” during which he felt “immersed in a self-transcendent spirit of love” that brought with it a sense of self-actualization. While the experience lasted, the patient reported a vivid sense that intentional wrongdoing harmed himself far more than others, and psycho-spiritual health was directly bound with loving others.
Methodologically, we approach this case from both a multidisciplinary and psychologically integrative “phenomenological” viewpoint that may speak to our patients as well as to a more professional audience, with two primary goals in view: first, to define and demonstrate the importance of this “love”, and second to elucidate the process by which individuals might operationalize and examine it in a reasoned, methodological, and testable fashion.
Through this case, we hope to provide readers with an appreciation for the utility of such an experience and knowledge, in particular as it relates to overcoming issues related to addiction, freedom, and power that can enable us to become more and better than we are.
Wyner, G. B., & Wyner, J. D. (in press). You and I: Psycho-spiritual health and the voice of love.NeuroQuantology 14(2)
Trauma and Hope
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 terminal illness destroying humanity from the inside out? In view of the Holocaust, and 75 million other atrocities committed in the last century, is hope for humanity naïve? The practical significance for psychotherapy, then, lies in the extent to which what we call pathology – including “normal neuroses” – may be symptomatic of this foundational problem.
The Wounded Healer: Finding Meaning in Suffering
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. (more…)
The Power of Moral Knowledge
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 moral knowledge of the appropriate kind constrains moral action. This knowledge is intuitive or experiential knowledge in contrast to mere thought, intentionality or reasoning. I claim that such knowledge is possible and that it places a greater constraint on action than mere moral thought or reasoning.