Edith Stein was trained in Edmund Husserl's school and adopted phenomenology as a means to investigate the theme of anthropology and consequently the social ontology. In fact, she argued that the study of the origin and structure of communal aggregates is possible only by studying the human subject as a whole of body, psyche and spirit [Geist], namely as a person. Stein analyzed this tripartition using the phenomenological method, whose purpose is to grasp the essence of things themselves [Sache selbst].