Phenomenological Psychology

The Threat of Givenness in Jean-Luc Marion: Toward a New Phenomenology of Psychosis

by Joseph Carew

Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy. Vol 13.2 (Fall 2009): 97-115.

Absent within Jean-Luc Marion’s theory of selfhood is an account of psychosis that displaces standard phenomenological... more Absent within Jean-Luc Marion’s theory of selfhood is an account of psychosis that displaces standard phenomenological and psychoanalytic models.  Working primarily with Book V of Being Given, my paper sketches the formal possibilities exhibited in a self who cannot manage the superabundance of the given and, swept away by an uncontrollable flood of givenness, thereby falls into a hysteria of self-experience and loses its ipseity.  Then, contrasting psychosis with positive figures of the self, I explore the dynamic relationship between givenness and the gifted highlighted by the phenomenological diremption and effacement of selfhood displayed in both.

Amedeo Giorgi and Psychology as a Human Science

by Marc Applebaum

Published 2011 in NeuroQuantology 9(3)

Over the course of the last fifty years Amedeo Giorgi has played a leading role in the movement to redirect... more Over the course of the last fifty years Amedeo Giorgi has played a leading role in the movement to redirect psychological research from an imitation of the natural sciences toward a human science paradigm. He founded the first phenomenological psychological research program in the United Stated at Duquesne University, and continued his development of phenomenological psychology at Saybrook Graduate School. Giorgi’s descriptive phenomenological method is a rigorous approach to qualitative research that is founded in the philosophical phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The descriptive phenomenological method makes use of the phenomenological epoché, reduction, imaginative variation, and search for essential psychological structures. Giorgi’s approach to conveying phenomenology embodies a wide-ranging and incisive critique of empirical psychology’s limitations, and seeks to establish scientific criteria appropriate for the study of lived, human subjectivity.

Dissertation: A Phenomenological Psychological Study of Muslim Leaders' Attitudes Toward Connection with the Prophet Muhammad

by Marc Applebaum

Chair: Amedeo Giorgi, Committee Members: Recep Senturk, Tony Stigliano

This study investigated the attitude toward connection with the Prophet Muhammad among Muslim leaders. Three... more This study investigated the attitude toward connection with the Prophet Muhammad among Muslim leaders. Three participants described their connection with the Prophet in the context of their leadership roles as traditionally authorized Sufi guides.
The data were analyzed using the phenomenological psychological method of Amedeo Giorgi. The results indicated a common psychological structure comprised of eight constituents: (a) motivation by a divinely inspired, gnostically informed, other-directed interest, (b) linkage of one’s personal qualifications to lead with one’s understanding of the Prophet’s role as leader, (c) struggle over time to adequately fulfill the leadership role, (d) perceiving one’s inadequacies in doing so as the result of an inflated sense of one’s autonomy and agency, (e) shifts to a more modest self-understanding, (f) such shifts eventuating in a less ego-burdened and more integrated mode of leading, (g) this change being validated by the Prophet’s example and presence, and (h) the view that disposability to this process was predicated upon altered states of consciousness experienced in spiritual practice. The findings contributed to a psychological understanding of both the meanings of the Prophet for Muslim leaders and of an Islamic envisioning of leadership as a relationship of simultaneous servant-hood to the Divine and to a community of others.

Considerazioni Critiche Sui Metodi Fenomenologici Di Moustakas E Di Van Manen (Critical Reflections on the Phenomenological Methods of Moustakas and Van Manen)

by Marc Applebaum

Published in: "Encyclopaideia: Rivista di Fenomenologia Pedagogia Formazione", Number 21, 2007, pp. 65-76

My objective in this paper is to critique Max van Manen’s Researching Lived Experience (1990) and Clark Moustakas’... more My objective in this paper is to critique Max van Manen’s Researching Lived Experience (1990) and Clark Moustakas’ Phenomenological Research Methods (1994) from the standpoint of Amedeo Giorgi’s phenomenological psychological method. All three men seek to develop qualitative research approaches that do justice to the human subject. Moustakas and Giorgi claim that their work is grounded upon Husserlian phenomenological principles, though Moustakas seeks to articulate a transcendental phenomenological approach while Giorgi presents an empirical-psychological approach. Van Manen likewise invokes Husserl, as well as Heidegger and Gadamer as providing the philosophical basis of his approach. From an empirical-phenomenological standpoint Moustakas is criticized for misunderstanding the central tenets of Husserl’s phenomenology and therefore offering a research approach that is neither psychological nor transcendental. Van Manen is criticized for blurring the important differences between hermeneutic and descriptive phenomenology and therefore obscuring the epistemological inconsistencies that underlie his research approach.

Qualitative research methods

by Peter Ashworth

Phenomenologically-based empirical studies of social attitude.

by Peter Ashworth

The logic, intentionality, and phenomenology of emotion

by michelle montague

(Mis)Appropriations of Gadamer in Qualitative Research, Part I

by Marc Applebaum

Published in the Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, Volume 11 Edition 1, May 2011

Within the Husserlian phenomenological philosophical tradition, description and interpretation coexist. Teaching the... more Within the Husserlian phenomenological philosophical tradition, description and interpretation coexist. Teaching the practice of phenomenological psychological research, however, requires careful articulation of the differences between a descriptive and an interpretive relationship to what is given in qualitative data. If as researchers we neglect the epistemological foundations of our work, or avoid working through difficult methodological issues, our work invites dismissal as inadequate science, undermining the effort to strongly establish psychology along qualitative lines. The first article in this two-part discussion is a Husserlian investigation of the meaning of “method” for psychology as a human science. This investigation is undertaken in the light of some researchers’ appropriations of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics in the service of non-methodical praxes. The second article will address some implications of the attempt to structure qualitative psychological research along “Gadamerian” lines, taking seriously the references to Gadamer’s work made by researchers such as van Manen and Smith.

O outro e a relação - O contributo das fenomenologias da intersubjectividade

by André Barata Nascimento

Neste artigo, aborda-se o problema da intersubjectividade, não tanto por um motivo teórico, mas por se entender ser o... more Neste artigo, aborda-se o problema da intersubjectividade, não tanto por um motivo teórico, mas por se entender ser o problema que estrutura, consoante as respostas que lhe proporcionemos, as diferentes maneiras práticas como se encara fenomenologicamente a relação com o outro.

Declerck, G. (2011). Physique de l’espace et phénoménologie de l’espace.

by Gunnar Declerck

Prepublication  version
Complete reference :
Declerck, G. Physique de l’espace et phénoménologie de l’espace. Philosophia Scientae, vol.15, n°3, numéro spécial « L'espace et le temps. Approches en philosophie, mathématiques et physique », éds. C. Bouriau, C. Dufour & P. Lombard, pp.197-219.

Qu’est-ce que l’espace ? Pourquoi y a-t-il de l’espace plutôt que rien ? La physique prétend aujourd’hui répondre à... more Qu’est-ce que l’espace ? Pourquoi y a-t-il de l’espace plutôt que rien ? La physique prétend aujourd’hui répondre à ces questions en se passant de toute référence à l’espace phénoménal du sujet, et donc en totale rupture avec son sens phénoménologique. Nous tiendrons que cette élusion, pour traditionnelle qu’elle soit dans les sciences de la Nature, condamne par avance toute tentative d’explication de l’espace. Et nous montrerons que l’espace que nous construisons comme à notre insu dans la perception est de part en part structuré par un rapport au possible, la spatialisation consistant dans son principe à se rendre intelligible les étants en représentant dans la structuration même du monde les possibilités dont nous disposons.

What is space? Why is there space rather than nothing? Nowadays Physics claims to answer these questions without making any reference to the phenomenal space of the subject, and thus in total rupture with respect to its phenomenological meaning. We defend the idea that this elusion, although traditional in natural sciences, condemns in advance any attempt to explain space. And we will show that perceptual space is structured by a connection to possibilities. Spatialization is an operation affording us to understand the beings by embodying in the structure of the world the opportunities we can rely on.

William James's “psychologist's fallacy” and contemporary human science research

by Peter Ashworth

"Breaking Out of One's Head (& Awakening to the World)"

by Gregory Nixon

In JCER 2(7): Focus Issue on Self-Transcendent Experiences: Narrative & Analysis

Herein, I review the moment in my life when I awoke from the dream of self to find being as part of the living world.... more Herein, I review the moment in my life when I awoke from the dream of self to find being as part of the living world. It was a sudden, momentous event that is difficult to explain since transcending the self ultimately requires transcending the language structures of which the self consists. Since awakening to the world took place beyond the enclosure of self-speech, it also took place outside our symbolic construction of time. It is strange to place this event and its aftermath as happening long ago in my lifetime, for it is forever present; it surrounds me all the time just as the world seems to do. This fact puts into question the reality of my daily journey from dawn to dusk with all the mundane tasks I must complete (like writing of that which cannot be captured in writing). My linear march to aging and death inexorably continues, yet it seems somehow unreal, the biggest joke of all. Still, I here review the events leading up to my time out of mind and then review the serious repercussions when I was drawn back into the ego-self only to find I did not have the conceptual tools or the maturity to understand what had happened.

Merleau-Ponty, Perception, and Environmental Embodiment: Implications for Architectural and Environmental Studies

by David Seamon

chapter prepared for Carnal Echoes: Merleau-Ponty and the Flesh of Architecture, Rachel McCann and Patricia M. Locke, editors, forthcoming, 2012 or 2013. © David Seamon 2010.

In this chapter, I draw on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy to explore environmental embodiment—the various lived ways,... more In this chapter, I draw on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy to explore environmental embodiment—the various lived ways, sensorily and motility-wise, that the body in its pre-reflective perceptual presence engages and synchronizes with the world at hand, especially its architectural and environmental aspects. First, I consider Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of perception, giving particular attention to his claim that perception involves a lived dynamic between perceptual body and world such that aspects of the world—for example, the heavy hardness of a granite block or the cool smoothness of a chrome railing—are known because they immediately evoke in the lived body their experienced qualities.

Second, I consider the architectural and environmental significance of what Merleau-Ponty calls body-subject—pre-reflective corporeal awareness expressed through action and typically in sync with and enmeshed in the physical world in which the action unfolds. I focus on the taken-for-granted sensibility of body-subject to manifest in extended ways over time and space. I ask how routine actions and behaviors of individuals coming together regularly in an environment can transform that environment into a place with a unique dynamic and character—a lived situation I term place ballet. For both perception and body-subject, I consider how qualities of the physical and designable world—for example, materiality, form, and spatiality—contribute to the lived body’s engagement with and actions in the world.

Da eticidade própria às práticas psicológicas fenomenológico existenciais

by Herlon Bezerra

BEZERRA, Herlon A. Da eticidade própria às práticas psicológicas fenomenológico existenciais. (Apresentação Oral). I Seminário do Lab. de Psicologia em Subjetividade e Sociedade (LAPSUS) - “Consumo, Ética e Brasilidade”. 04 e 05.11.2004.

Num momento cultural em que não são mais possíveis nem as garantias fundamentais da tradição nem a referência moderna... more Num momento cultural em que não são mais possíveis nem as garantias fundamentais da tradição nem a referência moderna à vontade livre de um Eu soberano como instâncias últimas de decisão ética, jurídica e política, revelam-se as práticas psicológicas fenomenológico existenciais, em seu compromisso com aquele horizonte da trágica verdade humana, fundamento da irrepetível singularidade de seu existir que se subtrai por essência a toda captura por parte do conhecer, uma bem sucedida resposta cultural ao modo como se coloca contemporaneamente o problema irrecusável da verdade e sentido da ação humana no mundo – núcleo originário mesmo das questões éticas.

The Bodily Unconscious in Freud's "Three Essays"

by John Russon

Chapter 3 of Jon Mills (ed), Rereading Freud: Psychoanalysis Through Philosophy, (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004) pp 33-50.

I interpret, defend and partially transform Freud’s notion of “the unconscious” as it is developed in Freud's work,... more I interpret, defend and partially transform Freud’s notion of “the unconscious” as it is developed in Freud's work, "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality." In Section 1, I focus on the conceptions of childhood and of the body that are at play in the “Three Essays,” in order to develop an understanding of the self-transcending character of human experience. In Section 2, I carry over the conclusions from Section 1 to show that Freud’s studies require that the human family be reconceived as an experiential reality, rather than a biological one. Section 3 investigates the experience of other persons upon which the child’s experience of the family depends; this leads to a criticism of Freud, and an argument that the unconscious must be understood as inherently intersubjective. Section 4 uses the results of Section 3 to show that it is phenomenological philosophy that properly lives up to the demands of method that are entailed by the Freudian conception of the unconscious, and that it is thus phenomenological philosophy.

Da Totalidade ao Infinito - Quanto às possibilidades de superação das limitações éticas da Cultura Ocidental Contemporânea: um estudo à luz do pensamento de Emmanuel Lévinas

by Herlon Bezerra

BEZERRA, Herlon A. Da Totalidade ao Infinito - Quanto às possibilidades de superação das limitações éticas da Cultura Ocidental Contemporânea: um estudo à luz do pensamento de Emmanuel Lévinas. Universidade Federal do Ceará. Programa de Pós-graduação em Filosofia. Fortaleza: 2006.(Dissertação)

Este trabalho apresenta dois contextos significadores últimos: (1) por um lado, deve o mesmo ser entendido como... more Este trabalho apresenta dois contextos significadores últimos: (1) por um lado, deve o mesmo ser entendido como participante dos jogos argumentativos praticados na tradição hermenêutica do pensamento filosófico, particularmente naquele espaço teorético que reúne Fenomenologia, Pensamento Existencial e as Filosofias da Vida; (2) por outro lado, este exercício compartilha das preocupações morais que marcam a humanidade nos últimos séculos, em especial àquelas que dizem respeito à possibilidade e necessidade de significação ético-filosófica do multiculturalismo, tenso e caótico, que marca as urbanizadas sociedades contemporâneas, visando produzir condições culturais globais capazes de possibilitar a convivência pacífica entre as inúmeras diferenças em choque cotidiano. Nesse sentido, o mesmo encontra suas direções investigativas nas seguintes pressuposições: embora seja a Ética uma particularidade cultural grega, foi mesma “imposta” às mais diversas culturas “incorporadas” pelo violento processo
global de expansão e domínio em que se possibilitou, estabeleceu e desenvolveu a Civilização Ocidental. Os efeitos das evidentes contradições morais de tal processo
impõem severas limitações éticas à Cultura Ocidental Contemporânea, uma vez que, em resposta a tais contradições, dissemina-se o relativismo como único critério universal de julgamento ético das condutas, quer de indivíduos quer de
coletividades humanas. À luz do pensamento ético de Emmanuel Lévinas, propõe-se neste trabalho que a possibilidade de superação ética de tal condição cultural reside numa difícil escolha a ser hoje realizada pela consciência filosófica: de um
lado, a reposição do universalismo, fictício e violento, possibilitado na tendência intelectualista do logos grego e as abstrações de suas Luzes; de outro, a assunção das exigências advindas da imediaticidade concreta da Sensibilidade e da Proximidade, única fonte para uma universalidade humanamente significativa, já que pré-originária do próprio humano e, assim, anterior a toda possível cultura.

Phenomenological Sociography and Time Travel

by Peter Theodoropoulos

Related to questions of Time, structure and aspectual dimensions of relational time. Related theories that I am working on to discuss this are syntactogenerics and syntactogenesis, Syntacto generics and Semanto Generics, Syntactogenesis and Semantogenesis relations, and the nature of time as emminative, immanent and transcendent meaning both virtual and ontological. Please offer your input if you so wish.

What is time? How is time non linear? What are the relational or assemblages of subjective structure, how can we... more What is time? How is time non linear? What are the relational or assemblages of subjective structure, how can we create a taxonomy of types of relational time? By what features does time seem linear, and what is the nature of conditioning, or ritual space that instantiates regularities IN the mind? How is this relation both physical and immaterial? IS there such thing as the immaterial? Can time be said to be Immaterial and materializable? Is time instantiative or phasic, normative and bound to rules or flexible? How do we understand distinctions in subjective and objective time, how can we quantify and compare and contrast variables of each? Is there such thing as a phase shift in which ontological bias may be met with nomological or noumenal objectivity, if so what are the expectations, means of discernment and systems available to explore critique, modify and experiment with time relations? What, finally, are some means to codify and structure simulations of these relations utilizing electromagnetic fields that may interface with the Neural correlates of Consciousness study to explore results? What should our ethical considerations with regards to this sort of study be? How was your day?

TUNNELLING BELOW

by Alan MacKenzie

SUBTITLE:  Exploring individual perspectives and specific meanings from below ground

This essay explores epistemological implications and supporting arguments of interpretive phenomenology and examines... more This essay explores epistemological implications and supporting arguments of interpretive phenomenology and examines in detail how these might influence A Christians’ view of this particular
method of qualitative study.

Existential Phenomenology, Psychiatric Illness and the Death of Possibilities

by Matthew Broome

Due to come out in Cambridge Companion to Existentialism, ed. Crowell

Subjects Without a World? An Husserlian Analysis of Solitary Confinement

by Lisa Guenther

Psychiatrist Stuart Grassian has proposed the term “SHU syndrome” to name the cluster of cognitive, perceptual and... more Psychiatrist Stuart Grassian has proposed the term “SHU syndrome” to name the cluster of cognitive, perceptual and affective symptoms that commonly arise for inmates held in the Special Housing Units (SHU) of supermax prisons. In this paper, I analyze the harm of solitary confinement from a phenomenological perspective by drawing on Husserl’s account of the essential relation between consciousness, the experience of an alter ego and the sense of a real, Objective world. While Husserl’s prioritization of transcendental subjectivity over transcendental intersubjectivity underestimates the degree to which first-person consciousness is constitutively intertwined with the embodied consciousness of others, Husserl’s phenomenology nevertheless provides a fruitful starting-point for a philosophical engagement with the psychiatric research on solitary confinement.