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Merleau-Ponty’s statement applies exactly to the divergence between psychological science as it currently exists and any phenomenologically based human study. Even in circles in which it has become the vogue to employ “qualitative methods” there is often an underlying scientism of the kind Merleau-Ponty indicated. Human experience, or discursive action, is seen as part of a causal nexus, a set of variables within the “world.” The chapters in this volume explore the meaning of the “other point of view, that of consciousness.”

The account in this chapter is intended to provide an introductory framework, allowing some of the detailed arguments of later chapters to be contextualized. The following, therefore, attempts to locate the points at which there has been contact between phenomenological philosophy and psychological science—and the various ways in which phenomenologists have argued that there should have been contact.

Phenomenology is a philosophy that had its beginnings in 1900 when Edmund Husserl (1900/1970), its founder, wrote one of his more famous works. Logical Investigations . The notion of phenomenology that Husserl advocated was more implicit in that work than defined, but his sense of phenomenology became explicit in his subsequent work. Ideas I (1913/1983). Phenomenology takes as its theme the relationship between conscious acts and the objects to which they are directed, the term object referring to anything, real or imaginary, or even illusory, that can be related to acts of consciousness. More briefly, one could say that phenomenology is the study of the relationship between consciousness and its objects. It is a philosophy that tries to develop this theme in a rigorous and consistent way, and it has also articulated an attitude and a method whereby the relationship between conscious acts and their objects can be accessed and thoroughly studied. Over the course of the last century phenomenology has developed in disparate and almost contrary ways, but as Spiegelberg (1982) has shown, there is nevertheless a unifying theme to its development.

This chapter will seek to explore some of Husserl’s ideas about consciousness that are helpful to contemporary research. A descriptive phenomenological psychological research method was founded by Amedeo Giorgi (Giorgi, 1985) which is based on Husserl’s philosophical method and which will serve as the framework for the discussion in this chapter. There are numerous publications already in existence that deal with many aspects involved in the method (Giorgi, 1970, 1981,1983, 1992, 1994, 2000), however, this chapter will attempt to cover the manner in which some of Husserl’s concepts are implicitly involved not all of which have received sufficient articulation elsewhere.

Husserl’s notion of transcendence has been and continues to be the source of much philosophical discussion and dispute among human science researchers. As long as there has been a phenomenological tradition there has been debate as to whether or not to follow Husserl’s ideas about transcendental phenomenology. Typically, such discussions easily become debates between extreme and opposing positions. One viewpoint sees transcendence as a notion of standing aside from one’s subjective experience, in order to observe the world or a particular phenomenon from a pure epistemological perspective, one of total objectivity. One might imagine a free-floating platform upon which the phenomenologist sits and that provides an unhindered view of the phenomenon in question. People defending this position put forward the notion that the reduction is a necessary part of a methodological approach that aims to be scientific. The other viewpoint holds that such a position of pure transcendence is impossible and that the transcendental idea was built on a false understanding. These critics deny the possibility of a pure consciousness. They emphasize that transcendence should be considered a hypothetical philosophical notion, which therefore ought to be discarded altogether. In the wake of this dispute is the debate about whether HusserFs well-known followers Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Gadamer reject his idea of transcendentality or not. It is obvious that Husserl’s lifeworld theory became a substantial gift to subsequent philosophy, but whether or not Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Gadamer also took up his transcendental phenomenology is more veiled.

So many ways to say that one is against someone, especially in the context of also saying that one agrees with or follows someone (as we shall see below). How far does one have to be no longer with a thinker’s thought to be against that thinker’s thought? Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty repeatedly acknowledged in print that one of their points of departure was in Husseri’s phenomenological approach. But equal to and parallel with their claims to be going along with Husseri were their vigorous declamations of his mistakes, dead-ends and failures. It seems to have been vitally important to thinkers during the 1920s and 1930s to create as much distance as possible between themselves and their former “master.” Less well remarked perhaps is the discrepancy between the Existentialists’ complaints about Husserl’s aborted achievements and what Husserl actually delivered. Husserl’s protracted reflections on any given issue are peculiarly difficult to expound, and collaterally it is often very hard to identify a specific doctrine or discursive position in such a way that it is clear what assertion his critic is attempting to rebut. At any given time, Husserl the mediator was rarely satisfied with his written work; he thought of his analytic studies as “a process of endless corrections and revisions.” The few works that he published in his lifetime look like ’purely momentary states of rest, or ‘condensations’ of a thought movement that was constantly in flux.” (Bernet, Kern, & Marbach, 1992, p. 2) In 1925, Heidegger himself said that ’it is characteristic of Husserl that his questioning is still fully in flux, so that we must in the final analysis be cautious in our critique.” (Heidegger, 1982b, p. 121) Husserl’s thought on central phenomenological notions never stood still; he was, in his own memorable image, ’an endless beginner,” and would be the first to open a new path when the woods became lost in the trees.

In this chapter, I will address two questions: What was Sartre’s contribution to psychology and to what extent was Sartre’s psychology influenced by Heidegger’s thought? I will concentrate on Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis as outlined in Being and Nothingness (Sartre, 1956). After some preliminaries, I give an account of Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis and then, in the third section of the chapter, review the intellectual encounter between Heidegger and Sartre, especially as it bears on the early Sartre’s alternative to the several incarnations of empirical psychoanalysis, which began with Freud.

Born on 4th October 1903 (he died in 1990), the son of a distinguished professional Swiss family in St Gallen, in Switzerland, Medard Boss became a student of medicine primarily in Zurich. There he was subsequently, in 1939, given the title of professor, but that was long after also studying in Paris, London, and Vienna. In Vienna, he had a training analysis with Sigmund Freud. Later in Zurich, for nearly a decade, there were monthly conversations with Carl Gustav Jung.

Modem psychology’s relation to existentialism takes at least three discernible forms. Firstly, theory and practice (particularly in psychotherapy, but also in other areas of psychology) that is directly traceable to philosophers and other writers who are termed “existentialist.” Secondly, theory and practice that is not traceable in this way, but which raises questions, uses concepts or interprets findings in ways that are markedly existential. (Here, it is often the case that the researchers in question are unaware of the connection.) Thirdly, apparently non-existentialist psychological ideas—say, naturalistic, or psychodynamic insights—that are (coincidentally or not) found in the works of existentialist philosophers.

The direct impact of phenomenological thinking on psychological science has not been great (as we have seen in Chapter 2). There has certainly been indirect influence, especially through the migration of German Gestalt psychologists to the United States during the 1930s. There has also been a definite effect of existential phenomenology—the engagement of phenomenology with the elements of Kierkegaard’s existentialist thinking, engineered by Heidegger. This had an undeniable role in the establishment of humanistic psychology, some kinds of counseling, and (perhaps more peripherally) on psychiatry. But the authors of this book are united in their view that the low impact of phenomenological thinking on psychology is much to be regretted. Psychologists have in very large measure chosen a natural science model of research somewhat in line with the positivist tendency (though not always fully, technically positivist, since the criterion of truth is not always that the “facts” should be observable and the relationships between observables). It is, however, true to say that psychological science generally assumes—without reflecting overmuch on the assumption—that there is one real world which has determinate characteristics, and the purpose of science is to model this world in its theories. These theories will show how certain variables interrelate, especially how they relate to each other in a cause-and-effect fashion. Mathematical formulations of the relationships between variables are to be sought if at all possible.