Romano Guardini (1885-1968) was a German Catholic priest and philosopher who was one of the most important influences on Catholic intellectual life in the 20th century.  His work influenced Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict) and Jorge Mario Bergoglio (later Pope Francis), who made Guardini’s work the focus of his doctoral dissertation (which was never completed). ...Read More

The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875-1961) did not formulate a specific stage theory of the human life cycle as did his mentor Sigmund Freud who theorized about the stages of psycho-sexual development (oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital). However, throughout his life he gave us hints and insights into the chronological features of the human...Read More

Jean Gebser (1905-1973) was a German philosopher, linguist, poet, and autodidact who wrote The Ever-Present Origin, an interdisciplinary survey of human and cultural consciousness that was decades ahead of its time.  His integral perspective did not deal with the stages of a human life per se (e.g. birth to death), but rather focused on the...Read More

Jane Loevinger (1918-2008) was an American psychologist working in the 20th century who focused on the idea of ego development across the lifespan. According to Loevinger (who worked as an assistant to Erik Erikson in graduate school), the ego (originally formulated by Sigmund Freud) was not a ”thing” but rather a ”process.” Loevinger believed that...Read More

I have a new article just out today published by the website Arts of Thought, that discusses my psycho-spiritual views of the human life cycle.  It suggests that we develop through the stages of life along two fundamentally different trajectories, one spiritual and the other physical.   The physical journey of life is chronicled in most...Read More