Phenomenology And Psychological Science

Phenomenology and Psychological Science places phenomenology firmly in the context of psychological tradition. Dispelling widely-held misconceptions, the editors and their seven collaborators trace the evolution of phenomenological philosophy (including the work of Sartre and Heidegger) and its parallel impact on psychological science along a variety of paths. This book is important reading for professionals and advanced students concerned with the search for meaning that unites philosophy and psychology.

This book clarifies the phenomenological approach to psychological research along with examples of application in four different content areas: learning and thinking (both being examples of alternative approaches to cognitive processes), self-deception (clinical psychology), and criminal victimization (social psychology).

Psychology as a Human Science: A Phenomenologically Based Approach is a classic text in the field of psychology that is as relevant today as it was when it was first published in 1970. Giorgi's text helped establish the philosophical foundation humanistic psychology and the human science approach. He provides an important critique of traditional methods in psychology while providing his alternative. This new version includes a new introduction by Giorgi along with a new Foreword by Rodger Broomé.

This book develops a new approach to naturalizing phenomenology. The author proposes to integrate phenomenology with the mechanistic framework that offers new methodological perspectives for studying complex mental phenomena such as consciousness. While mechanistic explanatory models are widely applied in cognitive science, their approach to describing subjective phenomena is limited. The author argues that phenomenology can fill this gap. He proposes two novel ways of integrating phenomenology and mechanism. First, he presents a new reading of phenomenological analyses as functional analyses. Such functional phenomenology delivers a functional sketch of a target system and provides constraints on the space of possible mechanisms. Second, he develops the neurophenomenological approach in the direction of dynamic modeling of experience. He shows that neurophenomenology can deliver dynamical constraints on mechanistic models and thus inform the search for an underlying mechanism. Mechanisms and Consciousness will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and the cognitive sciences.

Cognitive therapies are often biased in their assessment of clinical problems by their emphasis on the role of verbally-mediated thought in shaping our emotions, and in stressing the influence of thought upon feeling. Alternatively, a more phenomenological appraisal of psychological dysfunction suggests that emotion and thinking are complementary processes which influence each other. Cognitive psychology developed out of information-processing models, whereas phenomenological psychology is rooted in a philosophical perspective which avoids the assumptions of positivist methodology. But, despite their different origins, the two disciplines overlap and complement each other. This book, originally published in 1995, illustrates how feeling states are a crucial component of mental health problems and, if adequately differentiated, can result in a greater understanding of mental health.

One could describe the status of psychological research today as one in which qualitative methods based upon diverse philosophies have been developing and advancing at a fast pace. It is a time therefore when reflections on this state of affairs are appropriate. The five essays in this book are all concerned with qualitative methods and their philosophical backgrounds. Briefly, the first essay contrasts the relative merits of the three most used philosophical bases for qualitative methods: empirical philosophy, hermeneutics, and Husserlian descriptive phenomenology. The second essay tries to resolve the tensions between descriptive and interpretive methods. Both are of service to science, but they relate to different conditions. The third essay discusses certain pitfalls that should be avoided when conducting psychological research on oneself. The fourth essay describes the extension of certain guidelines when using the descriptive phenomenological method. The fifth essay challenges the assumption of naturalism for psychology and argues for the development of a non-naturalistic method for psychology.

This fine new book, the third in a series, brings psychologists up to date on the advances of phenomenological research methods in illuminating the nature of human awareness and ex periences. In the more congenial and welcoming intellectual climate of the 1990s, phe nomenological methods have moved to the forefront of discourse on research methods that support and advocate an expanding view of science. In Valle and King (1978), phenome nological methods were presented as alternatives to behavioral methods. In Valle and Halling (1989), phenomenological methods were advanced to perspectives in psychology. This new volume is even less cautious, indeed bolder, in relation to conventional methods and epistemologies. By now, people knowledgeable about psychology, and most psycholo gists, have digested the criticisms directed against methods that operationalize, quantify, and often minimize human behavior. In bringing us up to date on the growing power of phe nomenological methods, this volume brings welcome coherence and integrity to an in creasingly harried science attempting to reenchant itself with meaning and depth, an endeavor artfully exemplified by phenomenological inquiries of the last several decades.