ABSTRACT
Phenomenology and Existentialism must be approached with a number of caveats. This chapter considers some sense of where people are headed, towards just what phenomenology and existentialism actually have to do with the understanding of psychopathology and the clinical practice of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Although Martin Heidegger's and Edmund Husserl's positions in Existential Phenomenology are markedly different, they are still seen today by contemporary phenomenologists as being of great importance. The chapter explains the ways in which phenomenology, intersubjectivity, and neuroscience mutually inform one another, and how they further illuminate psychoanalysis and its praxis in the absence of metapsychology. Heidegger can be differentiated from other phenomenologists by his use of two concepts Dasein and being-in-the-world and the centrality of their position in his phenomenology. Neuroscience can and already does make use of phenomenological descriptions of experience obtained from research subjects to correlate with functional neuroanatomy.
