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THE INTERNET ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF
PERSONAL CONSTRUCT PSYCHOLOGY |
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| Main Page |
| Contents |
| Alphabetical Index |
| Hints for prints |
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| Impressum |
| Phenomenology | |
| Phenomenology is a philosophical
movement that is normally seen as originating with the work of Edmund
Husserl in the early Twentieth Century. It focuses on phenomena,
the way the world appears to us. Husserl advocated methods of achieving
phenomenological seeing. This was essentially an alternative
construction to what he termed ‘the natural attitude’. This was the
taken for granted way of perceiving that carries with it cultural
prejudices that pre-dispose us to seeing things in a particular
perspective. In modern society, the natural attitude is infused
with the doctrine of Cartesian dualism that separates subject from
object.
This has led to epistemologies (philosophy concerning our knowledge of
the
world) being either materialist or idealist. Materialism emphasises the
way in which the world becomes known through our senses while idealism
stresses
the role of the mind in structuring our perception. This separation of
subject
and object has proved problematic for many sciences, none more so than
psychology.
Husserl hoped that phenomenology would become the basis of all
scientific
inquiry, arguing that the way the world appears must be fully
appreciated
before scientific explanations are sought. The generation of phenomenologists that followed Husserl (for example, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre) are referred to as existential phenomenologists. In their different ways, they each emphasised our ‘being-in-the-world’. This hyphenated phrase underlines that the person should not be conceived as a body containing a mind, but as situated in a social and physical context. This was seen by the existentialists as a necessary corrective to what they saw as Husserl’s drift into idealism. The position of being-in-the-world means that all perceptions and constructions are ultimately from a particular perspective in time and space. It is never possible to distil once-and-for-all truths and essences from individuals' constructions. There are strong links here with constructivism (Chiari & Nuzzo, 1996) and some contemporary construct theorists see PCP as fitting most comfortably into the phenomenological tradition (Warren, 1985, 1998; Butt, 2003). Like the phenomenologists, Kelly was concerned with how the world appeared to particular people; with their meanings that required the therapist/interviewer adopting a credulous approach. The pragmatic tradition in which Kelly worked also rejected the Cartesian dualism that haunted traditional philosophy and psychology. In 'The Psychology of Personal Constructs', Kelly recognised a link between his work and what he termed ‘neo-phenomenology’, which he wanted to balance with the use of ‘a more traditional methodology’. However, in his later writing he distanced himself from phenomenology, which he saw as imprisoning people within their own private worlds. (Kelly, 1969) This confusing of phenomenology with idealism probably came from Kelly associating phenomenology with the work of Rogers and Maslow, both of whom drew very selectively on European philosophers in their ideas about human nature (Holland, 1977). In fact, Kelly’s focus on a psychology of personal constructs can be seen as a phenomenological approach. His suggestions for understanding the person, and in particular, his instructions for analysing self-characterization sketches (Kelly, 1955) provide good examples of elaboration of the phenomenological method. |
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| References |
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Trevor Butt
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