Abstract
This article attempts to bring philosophy to clinical psychological practice by applying philosophical concepts to autobiographical experience. Through reflective engagement with personal narratives, the author tells three personal stories to illustrate ways in which the concept of Dasein in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas’s development of an ethical responsibility to the Other, in tandem with thanatology, helped the author come to terms with existential dilemmas evoked by the deaths of others.
Highlights
How do we live when the Other dies? While providing psychological care with hospice for individuals who were facing their own impending death and for those who were grieving the death of a loved one, I worked within the bio-psycho-social-spiritual model of care that was used at the time by the hospice interdisciplinary team and is still a predominant model among hospice providers (Ferrell and Coyle 2010; Sulmasy 2002)
I could not make sense of the role death played in the lives of my patients and their loved ones or, for that matter, in my own life
I became despondent; I felt overwhelmed and empty. This manifested within me as a desire to distance myself from providing more hospice care
Summary
While providing psychological care with hospice for individuals who were facing their own impending death and for those who were grieving the death of a loved one, I worked within the bio-psycho-social-spiritual model of care that was used at the time by the hospice interdisciplinary team and is still a predominant model among hospice providers (Ferrell and Coyle 2010; Sulmasy 2002). This model did not provide answers to the larger, existential questions I faced about the meaning and purpose of living and dying. I discovered that, in both philosophical and thanatological literature, the impact of death is discussed in two seminal ways—the death of the self, and the death of the Other
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