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Abstract
The author explains that his background was in experimental psychology but that he wanted to study the whole person and not fragmented psychological processes. He also desired a non-reductionistic method for studying humans. Fortunately he came across the work of Edmund Husserl and discovered in the tatter's thought a way of researching humans that met the criteria he was seeking. Eventually he developed a phenomenological method for researching humans in a psychological way based upon the work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. This article briefly describes the method.
Keywords
phenomenology, human science, method, psychology, description
Introduction
My training as a psychologist was experimental, and more specifically, psychophysical. Both of my dissertations were in the field of vision and I was considered to be an expert in the psychophysics of vision. Moreover, when I was a graduate student there were only two options: one became a clinician or a researcher. I chose to become a researcher and so I received rigorous training in natural scientific psychology. I knew natural science from the inside and I practiced it and taught it in the early years of my career.
However, my reasons for choosing psychology as a field of study were that I wanted to understand the whole human person. I was motivated in part because I had read James's (1950) Principles. However, my graduate education rarely raised the question of how to study the whole person. Human functions were separated from one another and were studied in isolated manners. Strong atomistic trends were popular because that was the strength of the natural scientific approach. After a few years of working in this fashion, I became restless and began searching for other ways of fulfilling my vocation as a research psychologist.
To make a long story short, I discovered that there was a Geisteswissenschaft tradition and I came across phenomenology. As I probed what the phenomenological philosophers were saying, especially Husserl, I began to see possibilities for developing a frame of reference for studying human experiential and behavioral phenomena that would be both rigorous and non-reductionistic. The spirit of science would be respected but it would be implemented with methods and concepts different from the natural sciences because the subject matter - human persons and relationships...