Perhaps the most exciting thing I have found in becoming a phenomenological psychologist is how fundamentally important it is to value the subjective psychological perspective when seeking to understand people (Giorgi & Giorgi, 2003). Television “reality shows” have become popular because they provide a “fly on the wall” perspective of dramatic events in a world
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Empathy “is taken to disclose rather than establish intersubjectivity” (Zahavi, 2001, p. 154). 2012 marks the 10th year of my phenomenologically-based empathy training (Englander, submitted) and what better way to spend an anniversary than bringing a practical application of descriptive phenomenological psychology to the corporate world. In 2012 I was asked to pilot my empathy training with a
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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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As a phenomenological psychologist, I participate in the tradition of human science (Ger: Geisteswissenschaften). Since the foundation of this movement in the pioneering work of Giambattista Vico in the 18th century and Wilhelm Dilthey in the 19th, human science researchers have claimed that the study of human beings demands a radically different approach from that
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I teach and mentor graduate psychology students in Descriptive Phenomenological Psychology. Learning how to practice phenomenological research, students gain a lived-sense of the feature of consciousness that Edmund Husserl, drawing on the work of his teacher Franz Brentano, termed “intentionality”. Within Husserl’s phenomenology intentionality signifies (in part) that everything we can experience and know is
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“Husserlian phenomenology, in its search for meanings, is guided by respect for the given.” –Jitendranath Mohanty Practicing phenomenological psychology, whether as a researcher or as a clinician, means learning a craft. Its raw materials are the descriptions given to us by interview participants—or, if we are psychotherapists, by our clients. Our “tools” derive from the
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Community: from the Latin communis, meaning common, public, general, shared by all or many. Phenomenological psychology as expressed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty is an exploration intended to illuminate the shared psychological meanings and structures that we live pre-reflectively in daily experience. He offers an elegant example at the beginning of the essay Science and the Experience
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