ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the ways in which self-observation has been historically conceptualized in the phenomenological tradition of philosophy and psychology. It aims to help clarify the rationale behind the phenomenological tradition’s widely noted conceptually and methodologically heterogenous approach to self-observation as a vehicle of psychological research. The chapter discusses a brief survey of the work of three major contributors to the contemporary phenomenological understanding of self-observation: Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger. A phenomenological approach in psychology is one that seeks to provide insight into the meaning of actual lived experience through a process of self-observation and careful reflection. From the Heideggerian perspective, then, self-observation as a method of psychological research is not the observation of the self as an object of detached scientific or rational consideration. The conceptual approach to self-observation in the phenomenological tradition has undergone dramatic changes and revisions.
