Phenomenology (psychology)
Encyclopedia
Phenomenology is an approach to psychological subject matter that has its roots in the philosophical work of Edmund Husserl
Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...

. Early phenomenologists such as Husserl, Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...

, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Karl Marx, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in addition to being closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir...

 conducted their own psychological investigations in the early 20th century. The work of these phenomenologists later influenced at least two main fields of contemporary psychology: the phenomenological psychological approach of the "Duquesne School", Amedeo Giorgi
Amedeo Giorgi
Amedeo Giorgi serves on the faculty of Saybrook Graduate School. He was an early member of the "Duquesne School" of psychology and is credited with formalizing phenomenological methods for psychology...

, Jonathan Smith
Jonathan Smith (psychologist)
Jonathan Smith is a psychologist currently based at Birkbeck, University of London. He has been very prominent in promoting qualitative research within social psychology and health psychology...

, Frederick Wertz, Steinar Kvale, Köhler
Köhler
Köhler is a German surname and may refer to:*August Köhler, microscopist and inventor of the Köhler illumination*Benjamin Köhler, football player*Ernesto Köhler, flute player and composer*Eva Köhler, First Lady of Germany*Georges J. F...

 and others (Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis
Interpretative phenomenological analysis
Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis is an approach to psychological qualitative research with an idiographic focus, which means that it aims to offer insights into how a given person, in a given context, makes sense of a given phenomenon...

); and the experimental approaches associated with Varela
Varela
Varela is a Spanish and Portuguese surname of Galician origin. It may refer to:-People:*Adrián Varela, Mexican reality show contestant*Adriana Varela, Argentine tango singer*Alexis M...

, Gallagher
Gallagher
-Sport:*Bob Gallagher, baseball player*Dave Gallagher, American baseball player*David Gallagher , , a former Australian rules footballer.*Charlie Gallagher , Celtic F.C. & Irish footballer...

, Thompson
Thompson
-Places:In Bulgaria:* Thompson, Bulgaria, a village in Sofia ProvinceIn Canada:* Thompson, Manitoba* Thompson , an electoral district in the above location* Thompson River, a river in British Columbia...

, and others (Embodied cognition
Embodied cognition
Philosophers, psychologists, cognitive scientists and artificial intelligence researchers who study embodied cognition and the embodied mind believe that the nature of the human mind is largely determined by the form of the human body. They argue that all aspects of cognition, such as ideas,...

). Phenomenological psychologists have also figured prominently in the history of the humanistic psychology
Humanistic psychology
Humanistic psychology is a psychological perspective which rose to prominence in the mid-20th century, drawing on the work of early pioneers like Carl Rogers and the philosophies of existentialism and phenomenology...

 movement.

The experiencing subject
Subject
-Philosophy:*Hypokeimenon or subiectum, in metaphysics, the essential being of a thing**Subject , a being that has subjective experiences, subjective consciousness, or a relationship with another entity...

 can be considered to be the person
Person
A person is a human being, or an entity that has certain capacities or attributes strongly associated with being human , for example in a particular moral or legal context...

 or self
Self (psychology)
The psychology of self is the study of either the cognitive and affective representation of one's identity or the subject of experience. The earliest formulation of the self in modern psychology derived from the distinction between the self as I, the subjective knower, and the self as Me, the...

, for purposes of convenience. In phenomenological philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

 (and in particular in the work of Husserl
Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...

, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty), "experience" is a considerably more complex concept than it is usually taken to be in everyday use. Instead, experience (or being, or existence itself) is an "in-relation-to" phenomenon, and it is defined by qualities of directedness, embodiment, and worldliness, which are evoked by the term "Being-in-the-World".

The quality or nature of a given experience is often referred to by the term qualia
Qualia
Qualia , singular "quale" , from a Latin word meaning for "what sort" or "what kind," is a term used in philosophy to refer to subjective conscious experiences as 'raw feels'. Examples of qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, the experience of taking a recreational drug, or the...

, whose archetypical exemplar is "redness". For example, we might ask, "Is my experience of redness the same as yours?" While it is difficult to answer such a question in any concrete way, the concept of intersubjectivity
Intersubjectivity
Intersubjectivity is a term used in philosophy, psychology, sociology and anthropology to describe a condition somewhere between subjectivity and objectivity, one in which a phenomenon is personally experienced but by more than one subject....

 is often used as a mechanism for understanding how it is that humans are able to empathise with one another's experiences, and indeed to engage in meaningful communication about them. The phenomenological formulation of Being-in-the-World, where person and world are mutually constitutive, is central here.

Difficulties in considering subjective phenomena

The philosophical psychology prevalent before the end of the 19th century relied heavily on introspection
Introspection
Introspection is the self-observation and reporting of conscious inner thoughts, desires and sensations. It is a conscious and purposive process relying on thinking, reasoning, and examining one's own thoughts, feelings, and, in more spiritual cases, one's soul...

. The speculations concerning the mind based on those observations were criticized by the pioneering advocates of a more scientific approach to psychology, such as William James
William James
William James was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a physician. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism...

 and the behaviorists Edward Thorndike
Edward Thorndike
Edward Lee "Ted" Thorndike was an American psychologist who spent nearly his entire career at Teachers College, Columbia University. His work on animal behavior and the learning process led to the theory of connectionism and helped lay the scientific foundation for modern educational psychology...

, Clark Hull, John B. Watson
John B. Watson
John Broadus Watson was an American psychologist who established the psychological school of behaviorism. Watson promoted a change in psychology through his address Psychology as the Behaviorist Views it which was given at Columbia University in 1913...

, and B. F. Skinner
B. F. Skinner
Burrhus Frederic Skinner was an American behaviorist, author, inventor, baseball enthusiast, social philosopher and poet...

. However, not everyone agrees that introspection is intrinsically problematic, such as Francisco Varela
Francisco Varela
Francisco Javier Varela García , was a Chilean biologist, philosopher and neuroscientist who, together with his teacher Humberto Maturana, is best known for introducing the concept of autopoiesis to biology.-Biography:...

, who has trained experimental participants in the structured "introspection" of phenomenological reduction.

Philosophers have long confronted the problem of "qualia
Qualia
Qualia , singular "quale" , from a Latin word meaning for "what sort" or "what kind," is a term used in philosophy to refer to subjective conscious experiences as 'raw feels'. Examples of qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, the experience of taking a recreational drug, or the...

". Few philosophers believe that it is possible to be sure that one person's experience of the "redness" of an object is the same as another person's, even if both persons had effectively identical genetic and experiential histories. In principle, the same difficulty arises in feeling
Feeling
Feeling is the nominalization of the verb to feel. The word was first used in the English language to describe the physical sensation of touch through either experience or perception. The word is also used to describe experiences, other than the physical sensation of touch, such as "a feeling of...

s (the subjective experience of emotion), in the experience of effort, and especially in the "meaning" of concepts. As a result, many qualitative psychologists have claimed phenomenological inquiry to be essentially a matter of "meaning-making" and thus a question to be addressed by interpretive approaches.

Psychotherapy and the phenomenology of emotion

Carl Rogers
Carl Rogers
Carl Ransom Rogers was an influential American psychologist and among the founders of the humanistic approach to psychology...

' person-centered psychotherapy
Person-centered psychotherapy
Person-centered therapy is also known as person-centered psychotherapy, person-centered counseling, client-centered therapy and Rogerian psychotherapy. PCT is a form of talk-psychotherapy developed by psychologist Carl Rogers in the 1940s and 1950s...

 theory is based directly on the "phenomenal field" personality theory of Combs
Combs
-Geography:*Combs, Derbyshire, a small village in Derbyshire, England within the Peak District National Park*Combs, Suffolk, a hamlet in the English county of Suffolk*Combs, Kentucky, a US community...

 and Snygg (1949). That theory in turn was grounded in phenomenological thinking. Rogers attempts to put a therapist in closer contact with a person by listening to the person's report of their recent subjective experiences, especially emotions of which the person is not fully aware. For example, in relationships the problem at hand is often not based around what actually happened but, instead, based around the perceptions and feelings of each individual in the relationship. The phenomenal field focuses on "how one feels right now".

See also

  • Stream of consciousness (psychology)
    Stream of consciousness (psychology)
    Stream of consciousness refers to the flow of thoughts in the conscious mind. The full range of thoughts that one can be aware of can form the content of this stream, not just verbal thoughts...

  • Associationism
    Associationism
    Associationism in philosophy refers to the idea that mental processes operate by the association of one state with its successor states.The idea is first recorded in Plato and Aristotle, especially with regard to the succession of memories....

  • Association of Ideas
    Association of Ideas
    Association of Ideas, or Mental association, is a term used principally in the history of philosophy and of psychology to refer to explanations about the conditions under which representations arise in consciousness, and also for a principle put forward by an important historical school of thinkers...

  • Ideology
    Ideology
    An ideology is a set of ideas that constitutes one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to...

    , Prejudice
    Prejudice
    Prejudice is making a judgment or assumption about someone or something before having enough knowledge to be able to do so with guaranteed accuracy, or "judging a book by its cover"...


External links

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