Professional Documents
Culture Documents
jour menol
nal ogical
of psych
ology
Amedeo Giorgi
Saybrook University
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 latters 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, psy-
chophysical. 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 clini-
cian or a researcher. I chose to become a researcher and so I received rigor-
ous 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 Jamess (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 Geisteswissen-
schaft 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 diffferent from the natural sci-
ences because the subject matterhuman persons and relationships
had characteristics diffferent from the object of the natural sciencesthings
and processes. Consequently, in order to found another scientific approach
that would satisfy my interests, I had to dialogue among the perspectives of
psychology, phenomenology and science. However, since my training was
in natural science and I wanted to implement a human science approach, I
also frequently had to reject or modify the criteria of the natural sciences
because as they were articulated they were not appropriate for the study of
human persons.1 In any case, the result was the method that will be briefly
described in this article and that is the subject of discussion in the subse-
quent articles. I think that the best way to introduce the method is to give a
brief description of it and then to comment on each of the key words that
describe the method.
The researcher who wants to employ the descriptive phenomenological
psychological method has to begin by assuming the correct attitude. First
of all, she has to assume the attitude of the phenomenological reduction
which means that she must resist from positing as existing whatever object
or state of afffairs is present to her. The researcher still considers what is
given to her but she treats it as something that is present to her conscious-
ness and she refrains from saying that it actually is the way it presents itself
to her. In addition, she refrains from bringing in non-given past knowledge
to help account for whatever she is present to. She concentrates on the
1)A more detailed description of this process is described in Chapter Two of Giorgi (1985)
and in Giorgi (2009).
A. Giorgi / Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 43 (2012) 312 5
variation is critical for the completion of this step. Step three is the heart of
the method. (4) The direct and psychologically more sensitive expressions
are then reviewed and with the help of free imaginative variation an essen-
tial structure of the experience is written. (5) The essential structure is then
used to help clarify and interpret the raw data of the research. (Examples of
the application of this method can be found in Giorgi, 1985; Giorgi & Giorgi,
2003; Giorgi & Giorgi, 2008; and Giorgi, 2009.)
Description
A large part of phenomenology is descriptive but this does not rule out
phases where interpretations also take place (Husserl, 1970, 309311). Phe-
nomenology does not dictate to phenomena but rather it wants to under-
stand how phenomena present themselves to consciousness and the
elucidation of this process is a descriptive task. Description is the use of
language to articulate the intentional objects of experience. The process of
describing is similar to what takes place when one interprets but in the
former case the analysis takes into account noetic (acts) factors that are
usually not referred to by interpretive theorists working in the realm of the
social sciences (but they could be). One reason that the act side of the act-
object relation is not noted in interpretation is that in straightforward per-
ception the act is lived through but not noticed. It takes an act of reflection
to detect the meaning-conferring or interpretive act and once it is detected
it can be described.
Another diffference between description and interpretation is that in
description there is an acknowledgement that there is a given that needs
to be described precisely as it appears and nothing is to be added to it nor
subtracted from it.2 Interpretation is a polyvalent word so the sense in
which I am diffferentiating it from description has to be clarified. In this
context what I mean by interpretation is the adoption of a non-given factor
to help account for what is given in experience (e.g., a theoretical stance,
an hypothesis, an assumption, etc.). For example, I may want to give a psy-
choanalytic interpretation of a dream so I describe it with the use of psy-
choanalytic terms initially rather than first providing a nave description of
2)Given is placed in quotation marks because strictly speaking even the given is consti-
tuted by consciousness but it happens at a level much lower than that at which we are
speaking.
A. Giorgi / Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 43 (2012) 312 7
learner was a high anxiety type of personality and that was why he was
experiencing so many distortions. However, there is no evidence in the
description that that was the case. That would be bringing in an interpre-
tive assumption in order to help account for the data rather than merely
describing it.
In a larger sense, of course, the psychological analyses we perform are
interpretations. They are psychological interpretations of life-world events
that are broader than the psychological understandings we bring to them.
However, these analyses are done by means of a descriptive method. The
method is descriptive because the researcher posits that there is a specific
expression that will satisfy the problem with which he is confronted (a
good psychological description of the participants lifeworld expression)
but he does not yet know what it is. That is, the intentional object (the
desired expression) is lacking; the act is empty or unfulfilled. He or she
begins the process of imaginative variation, examining various possible
expressions, and then the researcher comes across a description that fits
precisely the intentional act he or she was seeking to fulfill. The fulfilling
expression is then precisely described.
Psychology
Psychology is a discipline whose precise meaning is still not an historical
achievement. There is a vague awareness concerning its subject matter but
mostly it is defined by theoretical perspectives that are strong in certain
areas but less than adequate in covering the full range of phenomena with
which psychology must deal. So what can it possibly mean for a phenome-
nological researcher to assume a psychological perspective? Must he
choose a limited perspective or must he refrain from doing psychological
work until the definition of the field is clarified? Neither of the above
options is satisfactory. Instead, I project the possibility of an integrated,
well-defined psychology based upon the rather primitive notion that psy-
chology has to do with subjectivity in all its forms and so I seek the pres-
ence of subjectively dominated moments that the individual expresses in
the description. When we are rational or objective, subjectivity is efffaced
and objects appear to us as they really are. When subjectivity dominates an
interaction with the world, or is not suffficiently present, that is when psy-
chological phenomena manifest themselves. In other words, psychological
A. Giorgi / Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 43 (2012) 312 9
Phenomenology
Phenomenology in the contemporary sense of the term is the philosophy
initiated by Edmund Husserl at the beginning of the 20th century. Basi-
cally, phenomenology is interested in the activities of consciousness and
the objects that present themselves to consciousness. Husserl realized the
essential relationality of consciousness, that is, consciousness is basically a
medium between a person and the world. Husserl, based upon the teach-
ings of his professor, Brentano, elaborated the notion of intentionality,
which is a characteristic of many acts of consciousness, and it means that
certain acts of consciousness are intrinsically directed towards objects and
the objects may be transcendent to the acts or immanent to them. In either
case, an object is correlated with an act of consciousness and it can be
examined in relation to the act with which it is correlated.
While Husserl started with the relationship between consciousness and
world, as his thought developed he expanded his analyses to include the
body as partaking of consciousness and so more generally, one could say
that there is a relationship between embodied subjectivity and world. This
is the theme that existentially leaning thinkers such as Heidegger (1962)
and Merleau-Ponty (1962) developed in their own ways and so phenome-
nology became diversified. Other variations emerged with the writings of
Scheler (1973), Sartre (1956) and Ricoeur (1976). However, the method being
articulated in this article is largely based upon the work of Husserl, and to
some extent, on the thought of Merleau-Ponty that is consistent with Hus-
serls program. Thus, the method is described as descriptive, not interpre-
tive, and since it deals with human consciousness, it is a pretranscendental
and not a transcendental method.
It is important to emphasize again that Husserls philosophical method
is a transcendental one, which means that he is interested in the qualities
of consciousness as such, not necessarily human consciousness. However,
10 A. Giorgi / Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 43 (2012) 312
the objects of science it can be argued that the characteristics of science are
diffferent even though the same goals of science are being sought. Of course,
this diffference depends upon ones philosophical anthropology. If one is a
believer in naturalism, then human phenomena are no diffferent from the
objects of nature and so the characteristics of science would remain the
same. However, if one believes that human phenomena are not reducible
to natural phenomena, the conduct of science would not be excluded. It
would involve thinking about validated groundings, theoretical coher-
ences and methods in diffferent ways. That is the opening that a phenom-
enological approach gives the human sciences.
References
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Giorgi, A. (2009). The descriptive phenomenological method in psychology: A modified Hus-
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Giorgi, A. & Giorgi, B. (2008). Phenomenology. In J. A. Smith (Ed.) Qualitative psychology: A
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