Phenomenology (Philosophical)

Phenomenology is a philosophical tradition that deals with fundamental philosophical problems but also has relevance for clinical psychology. Edmund Husserl (1859 –1938) defined phenomenological method in terms of an investigation of consciousness and intentionality. His noncausal notion of motivation, which portrays the person as a being intentionally related to her surrounding world and striving towards the realization of meaning, can serve as a premise for psychology as a human science. Later thinkers, like Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), developed an existential phenomenology. Others, like Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61), shifted the focus to embodied experience and set the stage for more contemporary encounters with cognitive science. Throughout this history, psychologists and psychiatrists, like Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) and Ludwig Binswanger (1881–1966), found useful phenomenological insights and distinctions that inform clinical practice.