Phenomenological philosophy as the basis for a human scientific psychology.

Abstract

First of all, I would like to thank Dr. Leswin Laubscher, the current Chair of the Psychology Department at Duquesne University, for inviting me to speak to the department more than half a century after I started my career here as a phenomenological psychologist. It is also my first visit to the department in more than a quarter of a century, so you must forgive me if certain nostalgic feelings come through. However, it is good to see that there is still a phenomenological presence in the department because the development of a phenomenological psychology was the very raison d’etre of the department. In my talk today, I shall try to indicate how we believed that the application of phenomenological philosophical thought to psychology would be helpful to a psychology that wanted to understand human persons in an adequate way. If in the 1950s some of us found psychology to be lacking, what was wrong with it and how would one go about correcting it? What was holding back its vigorous development? Why was our understanding of the human person not advancing the way that our knowledge of nature was progressing? Well, for one thing, the human person was not so much the theme of the research psychologists of that era as an animal was, and if a human was thematized, it was not the essential human that was studied so much as human phenomena with primarily sensorial and physiological manifestations. Why did this state of affairs exist? Because psychology strove to become a natural science and the phenomena that were studied had to show characteristics that were similar to nature and they had to have an empirical basis. In that era, whether or not such an approach clarified human phenomena was not as important as psychology’s scientific status. More important than the clarification of human phenomena was psychology’s determination to be a natural science, although mainstream psychologists honestly believed they were doing both.

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