This morning I’m rereading bits of Alain Badiou’s beautiful book Ethics (L’éthique: Essai sur la conscience du mal). I’m struck again by how revelatory this text is on such a range of issues, and how useful for a renewed psychology, at the same time. I mentioned to a friend recently that Badiou’s discussion of becoming-a-subject
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Magnus Englander’s 2012 article, “The Interview,” is an excellent resource for students learning how to conduct phenomenological research. As Englander points out, though Steiner Kvale’s excellent work on interviewing is well known among qualitative researchers, there are important differences between Kvale’s work and a phenomenological perspective. This article clarifies issues such as how to select
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Merleau-Ponty (1993) wrote, “For the speaker no less than for the listener, language is definitely something other than a technique for ciphering or deciphering ready-made significations” (p. 80). He is ever insistent that being-in-the-world is an embodied event, an ongoing discovery, and he relentlessly examines the ways in which experiences are given to us, prior
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Earlier this year I was invited to Volvo’s headquarters in Sweden to pilot my phenomenologically-based empathy training–afterwards, organizational consultants began to take an interest in what I was doing. Ahrenfelt, a well-known corporate consulting firm, invited me to give a talk at their yearly meeting in Stockholm. In preparing for such a talk outside of
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Shogo Tanaka’s site Embodied Knowledge, with which I’ve just become acquainted, approaches the philosophy and psychology of embodiment through the lens of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. Tanaka teaches at Tokai University in Japan, and he is particularly interested in the dialogue between phenomenological philosophy and empirical sciences such as “neuroscience, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, robotics, etc.”
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This PowerPoint presentation accompanied my 2-day graduate seminar introducing students to the descriptive phenomenological psychological research of Wertz, Halling, and Englander. The seminar was offered as an introduction for students who may never have encountered phenomenology before; its aim was to give students a sense of the kinds of questions descriptive phenomenologists ask, the careful
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Sebastian Elsaesser is a psychotherapist specializing in process work, psychosomatic medicine, and altered states of consciousness. He maintains an active practice in Stuttgart, Germany and in Brazil. For years he has collaborated with Peter Frör in developing a program in the Intensive Care Units of Klinikum der Universität München, one of Germany’s most technically sophisticated
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Husserl’s phenomenology is epitomized in his call for a return “back to the things themselves,” “Zurück zu den Sachen selbst.” We view this “return” as a shared project. The return, in other words, is intersubjective and not solipsistic: we return to the things in order to dialogue together about them together
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