In this wide-ranging conversation, Marc Applebaum and Scott Churchill explore one of the most contested questions in phenomenological psychology and qualitative research: the supposed divide between “descriptive” and “interpretive” phenomenology. Drawing on the work of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Amedeo Giorgi, Max van Manen and others, they challenge the common assumption that description and interpretation

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In this opening conversation, Marc Applebaum and Scott Churchill introduce the philosophical and psychological foundations of existential phenomenological research, centered on Churchill’s book Essentials of Existential Phenomenological Research. The discussion explores how phenomenology emerged within psychology through the influence of thinkers such as Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Viktor Frankl, Rollo May, Sartre, and Dilthey, while also

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I recorded this short talk in response to psychology students who asked “What does “interpretation” mean in phenomenological research?” Merleau-Ponty makes a critical distinction in the first pages of the Phenomenology of Perception between explicitation (making the implicit explicit) and expliquer (explaining). A bit more of the passage in Merleau-Ponty that I’m reading from is: “…all

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Notes from a seminar I’m giving this weekend introducing phenomenology to psychological researchers. Those familiar with the tradition will see how the epochê, reduction, bracketing, striving for presuppositionlessness, and inquiring into the Other’s natural attitude meanings are represented here–as well the situatedness of research findings–reflecting a particular, psychological interest.            

  This is an expanded version of the presentation I gave at Meiji University in Tokyo on July 30, 2016, as part of a workshop Human Science and Phenomenology:Reconsidering the Approach to Experiences of Others, kindly organized by Dr. Shogo Tanaka of Tokai University and Kayoko Ueda of Kawasaki Univesity. Dr. Ueda, Dr. Masahiro Nochi of the

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My latest article in the Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology explores the psychological meanings of narratives through Husserl’s phenomenology in dialogue with Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. Ricoeur (1975) wrote, “On the one hand, hermeneutics is erected on the basis of phenomenology and thus preserves something of the philosophy from which it nevertheless differs: phenomenology remains the unsurpassable presupposition of hermeneutics. On the other

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Dr. Scott Churchill joined Dr. Ferrarello and myself to present a two-day seminar on Empathy, Phenomenology and Hermeneutics at Saybrook in August 2014. Dr. Churchill is Professor of Psychology at the University of Dallas, and Editor-in-Chief of The Humanistic Psychologist. We wanted to share a selection of his articles and a link to an interview with him

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In this chapter Magnus Englander explores Subjectivity, Memory, and Human Science as part of a festschrift volume honoring Amedeo Giorgi.

Dr. Ferrarello co-taught a graduate seminar in phenomenological psychology in January 2014 for doctoral students at Saybrook. She led students in a day-long reflection on the steps in qualitative data gathering and analysis which they had practiced during the preceding days, guiding their reflection on the meaning of the steps in the research process, and

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  “It is one thing to sift the data of inner observation conceptually and to set them up as compounds, then to decompose these into ultimate ‘simple’ elements and to study through artificial variation by observation and experiment, the conditions and results of such combinations. It is quite another to describe and understand the units

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