ABSTRACT

Phenomenology is a rather general term denoting the study of the nature of conscious experience itself, and ‘how something is experienced’. Thus we might talk of ‘the phenomenology of fear’ meaning how fear is actually experienced by the fearful individual or oneself. Since Psychology has (with the exception of hard-line behaviourism) invariably considered consciousness as part of its remit, there has always been a tension between its phenomenological interests and its behavioural ones. In mainland Europe a number of philosophers resisted the behavioural direction Psychology was taking during the early 1900s and persisted in trying to develop a rigorous science of the nature of pure experience. The founder this phenomenological school was E. Husserl (1859-1938), with his two-volume Logical Investigations (Husserl, 1900/ 1901), but his most original and influential work appeared in the 1920s and 1930s (notably Husserl, 1928, 1931, 1936). (The on-line Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Hussserl is excellent.) By the late 1940s, the approached had evolved, via Heidegger, into existentialism, notably in the work of M. Merleau-Ponty (e.g. Merleau-Ponty, 1962). See Chung and Ashworth (2006) for an overview of the current state of play.