This interview with Yannis Toussulis is the first in a series of conversations about the role phenomenology, both descriptive and hermeneutic, plays in clinical practice. Yannis Toussulis received his PhD in Psychology from Saybrook Graduate School in 1995. His dissertation, supervised by Amedeo Giorgi, was entitled “Faith as A Lived-Experience: A Phenomenological Study”. He is a

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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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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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