ABSTRACT
The real point about the phenomenological method is to be made. Human beings are born into a world which they accept and take for granted. Edmund Husserl had not only prescribed the method – of purely descriptive analysis of human consciousness; he had also made a statement of the ultimate aim of the phenomenologist. Husserl’s phenomenology became for him, as for Martin Heidegger, a method by which questions about man’s freedom and destiny could again be brought within the pale of philosophy. But Husserl’s talk about the ‘transcendental ego’ seemed to Jean Paul Sartre a survival of romantic idealism, and a threat to the status of phenomenology as an academic philosophy. Psychotherapy is a particularly rich field for the application of phenomenology – in fact, perhaps the richest of all. Whatever its field, phenomenology is an attempt to observe things as an emanation of consciousness, and ultimately to increase the control of the human being over Merleau-Ponty’s own existence.
