This volume explores existential questions within the following three thematic fields: first, experiences of anxiety and despair as related to the question of what these phenomena show about freedom and its difficulties; second, hermeneutical theories as related to the question of how we can develop an existential hermeneutics that can account for the ambiguities of self-understanding between transparency and opacity, and, third, selfhood between self-understanding and self-alienation as a focal point of existential psycho(patho)logy. What can disturbances to or breakdowns in self-understanding teach us about personhood? Making visible one's own blindness by articulating the shadows of our knowledge and abilities is at the core of a negativistic approach to existential questions discussed in a dialogue between philosophical anthropology, phenomenology, theology, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry.

Born 1974; studied theology and philosophy in Tübingen, Jerusalem, Munich and Heidelberg; PhD and habilitation at the Institute for Hermeneutics and Philosophy of Religion, University of Zurich; since 2010 Professor of Systematic Theology with special responsibilities in Ethics and Philosophy and Religion, and since 2014 Director of the Center for the Study of Jewish Thought in Modern Culture at the Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen.