ABSTRACT
The inability of existentialist thought to generate any useful or, indeed, intelligible psychological theory is not restricted to Binswanger, but in my opinion is general and inescapable. As the 1970s progressed, and the internal creakings that heralded the collapse of stimulus–response behaviourism became clearer, psychologists again began a self-conscious search for the distinguishing characteristics of their subject-matter and the methods appropriate to its study. Phenomenology insists that the world of phenomenal appearances is at least as real as the world of neutral objective facts, stripped of their significance as objects that ordinary human perception can grasp, or so it is said. Phenomenologists seem to agree that the natural sciences have their rightful subject-matter, but that this does not include the kinds of thing we can apprehend in everyday experience; presumably, natural science reduces everything to collections of atoms and physical vibrations of one kind and another, and has nothing to say about tables and chairs and men and women.
