This lecture examines the fundamental difference between psychology as an empirical science and phenomenology as an eidetic science of consciousness. While empirical psychology formulates its research problems from how the external world affects the mind and thereby causes experiences to occur, phenomenology takes the opposite approach by investigating the very conditions that make the experience of our lifeworld possible.

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Phenomenological theory posits that the world we experience is the world in our experience, constituted through subjectivity and intersubjectivity, such that objectivity itself is a product of subjectivity. To understand the world, we take to exist “out there,” we must return to its source: Consciousness and its derivative - psychological subjectivity.

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Drawing on Edmund Husserl, Franz Brentano, Max Scheler, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, this lecture traces how phenomenology emerged as a response to psychology’s naturalistic reduction of mind to mechanism. Husserl argued that psychology, when constrained by the scientific method, risks inventing phenomena that mirror its research methods, which may not be essential to the actual lived expereince. By clarifying how intentional acts of the lived experience such as perceiving, apperceiving, desiring, judging etc. constitute our lifeworld reality, phenomenological psychology examines the ontological foundation upon which any genuine psychology must rest. Specifically, the phenomenological psychological method aims to provide ontological clarifications of the concepts we use in empirical psychology and to align these with the lived experience.  In this manner, phenomenological psychology sees itself as a foundational research discipline that ensures that the variables and concepts that psychological researchers deploy are grounded in the lived experience and our lifeworld reality.

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Henrik Gert Larsen, PhD (The Chicago School of Professional Psychology)

Author of: 

 

Larsen, H. G. (2023). Eight domains of phenomenology and research methods. Routledge.

 

Larsen, H. G., & Adu, P. (2021). The Theoretical framework in phenomenological research: Development and application. Routledge.

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