Explorations

Future Paths of Phenomenology

1st OPHEN Summer Meeting

Repository | Series | Book | Chapter

146816

Conclusion

Ian R Owen

pp. 311-315

Abstract

The importance of phenomenology for psychologies, psychotherapies and other empirical disciplines that involve understanding behaviour and meaningful experience is that their referents can be formulated by phenomenology's grounded manner of interpreting. It's not the case that pure psychology prevents interpretation from novel stances but there can be a collegiate approach to interpretation, which to a degree, standardises the interpretative process. For instance, the psychological is co-extensive with meaning for consciousness, intentionality in intersubjectivity, lifeworld, culture, society and History. Within the whole there is the co-existence of thought, emotion, memory, anticipation, apperception, empathy and all else besides. Terminology and hermeneutic stances are important because they represent processes that are otherwise implicit and embodied in people's lives and cannot be expressed or understood in any other way. The pure psychological attitude is a development from the natural one in a way parallel to how mathematicians map natural being. The pure psychological attitude is a way of making a professional discourse about thoughts, feelings, behaviours and relationships and all else that comes to consciousness. Besides the focus on the conscious, there are implicit processes of the unconscious aspect of intentional implication that make themselves known in consciousness, because neurological and biological endowments contribute manifest behaviour and felt-experience also. The difference between the natural and the psychological attitude is that for the latter, experiences are understood against an ideal framework that understands how human beings are simultaneously self-reflexive in being aware. To engage with another human being in any way can also be represented ideally through understanding the triangular intersubjective being of self, other and cultural object senses. Without the phenomenological methods that ground theory and practice in the psychologies, therapies and mental health practices, including the biological and neurological sorts, then there will be a reduced ability to communicate and collaborate.

Publication details

Published in:

Owen Ian R (2015) Phenomenology in action in psychotherapy: on pure psychology and its applications in psychotherapy and mental health care. Dordrecht, Springer.

Pages: 311-315

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-13605-9_16

Full citation:

Owen Ian R (2015) Conclusion, In: Phenomenology in action in psychotherapy, Dordrecht, Springer, 311–315.