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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I recently posted a short discussion of what “the natural attitude” means in Husserl’s phenomenology. As I mentioned, the natural attitude is the perspective of everyday life. For Husserl the process he calls the phenomenological reduction is the means by which the phenomenologist frees himself from the reifications of the natural attitude, gaining a standpoint

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This PowerPoint presentation was developed for the first meeting of a seminar introducing psychology students to phenomenological psychological research, and assumes no prior knowledge of Husserl or continental philosophy. The descriptive phenomenological research method itself is introduced in depth over the course of the semester–this presentation is a “first taste” of Husserlian terms for students. Naturally, I added

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This is the first in a series of our posts on central ideas in phenomenology—please add your observations, additions, or questions in the comments section! I’ll begin with what Husserl calls “the natural attitude.” In everyday life we see the objects of our experience such as physical objects, other people, and even ideas, as simply

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Here is the presentation I gave in Montreal at the 31st International Human Science Research Conference. My aim was to encourage dialogue between interpretive and descriptive researchers, and clinicians whose work is informed by these perspectives. My premise about the complementarity of description and interpretation is based on Jitendra Nath Mohanty’s work on Husserl’s phenomenology.

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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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