ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author describes Edith Stein's life, having been born into a Jewish family in the late 1800s, studying Psychology with Stern, and then Phenomenology with Husserl. Stein renounced her Jewish faith and later became a Catholic and Carmelite nun, having been very much influenced by Teresa of Avila. The author reviews how Stein, using a phenomenological approach within her writing before becoming a Christian, describes the human being as made up of layers: physical, sentient, mental, and personal. Stein is already wondering at this point about how to describe the soul. The author also describes how Stein's thinking about the person as one element of the human being further expands after she studies Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Thomas Aquinas. Her later writing comes from her work as a Christian philosopher, as she uses the image of the Trinity to imagine the various elements of a human being. Stein's posthumously published work on John of the Cross's image of the dark night of the soul is also described, especially as it relates to liminal, or betwixt and between, stages within therapeutic journeys.
