ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the approaches that might be best used for a journey of exploration into the experience of being human. In-depth inquiry values human experience and, rather than being truth seeking, is individual reality seeking. Integrative psychotherapy carries a flavour of the romantic, without sentimentalization of experience, in its spiritual dimension. The empirical phenomenological research approach "involves a return to experience, in order to obtain comprehensive descriptions that provide the basis for a reflective structural analysis that portrays the essences of the experience". In phenomenological inquiry, the level of subject involvement is high, and the alliance between subject and researcher is enhanced through the skills of applying interpersonal process recall (IPR). The kind of knowledge in human science gleaned from a deep empathic understanding of someone else's experience, alongside awareness of one's own phenomenology, underpins both heuristic research process and the integrative psychotherapeutic aims of attunement and contact.
