Einfühlung Als Gemeinschaft : Edith Stein, Emotional Numbing, and Anhedonia—A Way Forward

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. See Sarah Borden and Alfredo Carlos Taubenschlag; Kathleen Haney; James Jardine and Thomas Szanto; Alisdair MacIntyre; Rita Wengorovius Ferro Meneses; Philip Pettit; Katherina Westerhorstmann.2. Throughout this essay, I use the term “soldier” to denote someone currently in the military, engaging in wartime activities or training to engage in those activities. The term “veteran” appears when I denote someone no longer in active service, but who has left the military and returned to civilian life.3. All citations in the biographical section, unless otherwise noted, are taken from Edith Stein, The Collected Works of Edith Stein. This brief biography focuses on her wartime experiences and her experience after the death of Reinach. For other brief biographies, see Sarah Borden and Antonio Calcagno. For longer biographies, see Waltraud Herbstrith, Edith Stein: The Untold Story of the Philosopher and Mystic Who Lost Her Life in the Death Camps of Auschwitz, Ignatius Press, 1992; and Maria Ruiz Scaperlanda, Edith Stein: The Life and Legacy of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Sophia Institute Press, 2017.4. Stein states in her autobiography that, “Only when I saw that (the note from the man’s wife) did I fully realize what this death meant, humanly speaking.”5. For a psychological study of smoking cigarettes by soldiers during World War I, see Michael Reeve, “Special Needs, Cheerful Habits” 483–501. See also Lukasz Kamienski, Shooting Up.6. She discusses how many of these were still wearing their first bandages, applied immediately following the injury.7. These include her desire for chemical stimulants, her inability to sleep even though exhausted, her despair, and even her apathetic response to her precarious situation at the border.8. “I found it most pleasant to work all by myself, without outside influence, and without interruption for the sake of rendering bothersome accounts to the Master.” “The Master” was Stein’s nickname for Husserl.9. “Now I resolutely put aside everything derived from other sources and began, entirely at rock bottom, to make an objective examination of the problem of empathy according to phenomenological methods.”10. Rigorosum are the written and oral examinations one needed to pass receive a doctorate. It was also during this time when the narrative of Stein’s autobiography ends due to her arrest by the S.S. in August of 1942.11. For the intersection of Stein’s anthropology and her view of empathy, see Donald Wallenfang.12. Rita Meneses describes them as “three different ways into empathy” (author’s emphasis).13. Meneses calls this “directly perceiving.”14. If this produced fear for yourself regarding your own bodily wellbeing, this would be labeled as a contagion and thus not empathy because the fear is your own primordial experience, both in act and content.15. Here, “feeling” denotes “senses” and psychic interpretation of what is sensed.16. For further treatment, see Elmar Holenstein. The basic tenets of the phenomenological method can be found in Husserl.17. The idea of the “life power” (Die Lebenskraft) Stein sets forth here is similar to Theodor Lipps’s concept of “sensate power” as contained in his Leitfaden der Psychologie. Stein will build upon Lipps’s idea and set forth a concept of “Lebenskraft” that is built up (or conversely taken away from) by “life feelings” (Die Lebensgefühle). The relationship between Lebenskraft and Lebensgefühle will be important for our below discussion on these concepts for veterans postwar.18. In regards to being compelled to do something, Stein distinguishes between two cases: being compelled out of a positive aversion to the threat causing the compulsion (I desire to take a drink of water while in formation, but I know that the drill instructor will make me do pushups if I move out of turn and my will desires to not do pushups), and secondly, the stance of the will is taken out of the decision-making process due to complete fear. The first is still a free act, but the second is not. In veterans, certain present experiences can cause tremendous fear, even though the veteran is completely safe. For example, fireworks can set off reexperiencing or simple, paralyzing fear.19. We will see below that this innerlich erstarrt fühle is equivalent to emotional numbing.20. She will make a distinction between “mental life power” and “sensory life power.” However, she does not present a clear anthropology. She seems to set forth a tripartite view of the human being (body, soul, mind), and yet when discussing the nuances of Lebenskraft, she allows for overlap in that both the mental and the sensory can have positive and negative effects on the entire psycho-physical individual. She brings this complexity and overlap forth in her discussion of the psyche and how it is integrated into both the physical and mental areas.21. This section is not meant to be an exhaustive commentary on the ideas of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Nor do I intend to give full treatment of these concepts as contained in the second treatise in Beiträge zur philosophischen Begründung der Psycholgie und der Geisteswissenschaften. Our goal here is simply to discuss briefly constitutive elements of the community and its relationship to the individual as understood by Stein. Then we will be free to analyze the particularities of a military community from this standpoint.22. This represents her clearest departure from Husserl as he denied the existence of streams of experience.23. See also Calcagno, The Philosophy of Edith Stein 30–31.24. Unless otherwise noted, observations in this section come from the author’s seven years of experience as an active-duty Marine, including 20 months in the Iraq theater of war during the U.S.’s Second Iraq War (2003–2011).25. “The object of close order drill is to teach Marines by exercise to obey orders and to do so immediately in the correct way. Close order drill is one foundation of discipline and esprit de corps. Additionally, it is still one of the finest methods for developing confidence and troop leading abilities in our subordinate leaders.” See Marine Corps Order P5060.20, Marine Corps Drill and Ceremonies Manual (dtd. 5 May 2003), V.26. See also Kashdan et al., “Anhedonia, Emotional Numbing, and Symptom Overreporting in Male Veterans with PTSD” 726.27. Brett Litz argues for four possible causes: the symptoms result from (a) “chronic avoidance of trauma-related stimuli”; (b) stimuli that are present but cannot be accessed; (c) stimuli that are perceived, but the corresponding emotional response is inhibited or thwarted; and (d) PTSD patients particularly, “expend so much effort coping with reexperiencing symptoms and hyperarousal that they exhaust their affective resources” (418).28. Stein alludes to this very phenomena in Beiträge. The emotions of anxiety, fear, and grief are the major contributors to this, as Stein identifies. All three of these emotions are commonplace in the Lebenssphäre that is war, and thus it should not be surprising that an emotional deficit can and often does occur under these conditions.29. Litz identifies fear, anxiety, and grief as the three main causes of emotional numbing, just as Stein does.30. Through training lanes that consist of myriad and variable situations, small-unit leaders are repeatedly trained and evaluated before deploying. This repetition creates a bias for action in leaders. It helps them to become devoid of emotion when making battlefield decisions. Marines getting ready to deploy to the Iraqi theater of war would spend three to four weeks training at 29 Palms, California, running through repeated situations day and night in order to prepare for deployment.31. Although reexperiencing is not this article’s main focus, I should note that Stein clearly allows for this phenomenon to occur. She describes it as when a primordial experience in the past is given primordial value by both the body and the mind in the present. See Stein, Zum Problem der Einfühlung 65.32. See also, Svenaeus, “Edith Stein’s Phenomenology” 44.33. See also Frewen et al., “Assessment of Anhedonia in Psychological Trauma: Psychometric and Neuroimaging Perspectives.”34. Data shows higher success rates in group therapy situations due to the consistent interaction with other veterans with shared experiences. Veteran-to-veteran outreach groups also have higher success rates. See Iris Sunwoo Boston, “Veterans” Perspective on PTSD Support Groups,” 5.35. At this point in Stein’s life, she has not converted to Christianity. This is most likely more of a stoic thought, although it has a Christian bent to it. Epictetus makes fate divine, but also vastly impersonal. As we will see, Stein’s view of fate is not impersonal, but rather creates various positive feelings within the individual “I.”36. This example and observation derive solely from my personal experience with my own family after returning from the Iraqi war.