On first glance, Phenomenology and Psychology may seem like similar disciplines, and the relationship between them is super interesting, so thank you anon subscriber for asking after this. Here is my write-up.

Both Phenomenology and Psychology are interested in the human mind or consciousness, but they come at it from very different perspectives. If the object of study (i.e., the mind) were a city, Psychology would be interested in mapping the streets, getting a bird’s eye view of the infrastructure, knowing the city limits and what lay beyond. Phenomenology would be more interested in what experiences are possible in that city - the sights, sounds, smells, the emotions it evokes, what we can do in that city. In other words, Phenomenology is more focused on the subjective experience of that city.  All of our subjective, human experiences of the same city put together and shared give us access to affect and knowledge of the life of that city.

As a research discipline, Psychology abstracts away from human experience to produce scientifically validated knowledge that it then applies to individual experiences after the fact. It is looking for patterns, for those generalizable principles that hold true for everyone. Psychology strives for objectivity and leans heavily on scientific methods — experiments, statistical analysis, trying to isolate and measure very specific things, and is always searching for cause and effect relationships. Even studies using qualitative methods engage with individual experiences in order to* inform* their theories and applications.

Phenomenology, on the other hand, embraces the subjective as the seat of knowledge. It relies on description, interpretation, and analysis of first person accounts. It recognizes that each person experiences the world in their own unique way, and is faithful to this richness and diversity. Rather than reduce experience to a common denominator, Phenomenology builds up truth from the ground up. It instills in us the capacity, and a taste for, widely diverging experiences. With it’s motto, “To the things themselves!,” Phenomenology calls us to the anarchic flux of the phenomenal world, ever present and always within our reach.

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In so far as Psychology models itself on medicine — thinks of itself as a kind of mind doctor — it also inherits the pathologizing instinct. That is, just like you go to see a doctor when something is wrong, so medicine establishes what is a healthy body by dealing in sickness and sick bodies, Psychology establishes what is “normal” behavior by studying what it defines as perversions and disorders that it catalogues in the DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). It thus establishes itself as an authority on what is proper behavior. There is a normative sense in which if your experience or behavior doesn’t fit the established norm, there is something wrong with you and you need to change. The phenomenologist is more likely to say, if the theory clashes with the experience, the theory is lacking and wrong.

This makes me think of Jennifer Terry’s An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (University of Chicago Press, 1999), a history of sexuality that shows how psychology cut it’s teeth on the study of sexuality. In pathologizing behaviours like cross-dressing and homosexuality, Psychology shaped societal norms, and also reinforced anxieties about social and sexual order. Homosexuality way predates Psychology, but it took the (often well meaning) early psychologists, taking up the methods of medicine and science, to establish homosexuality as a perversion of the human spirit. If this were true (tongue in cheek here), how could “gay” ever have been a synonym for “happy”?

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Psychology typically operates within a naturalistic framework, assuming that the mind is a product of natural processes, a natural order that we can study and explain using scientific methods.  Phenomenology, especially the Husserlian kind, takes a transcendental turn. It tries to reach the very foundations of our knowledge, asking those big questions like what makes experience possible in the first place? What are the structures of subjectivity without which human experience would no longer be, well, human experience. Phenomenology can be speculative and ask what must be the grounds for human consciousness, given what and how we experience the world.

Psychology tends to be more down to earth, more focused on what we can observe and measure in the natural world.  Metaphysical questions that lie outside the purview of the sciences also lie outside the purview of Psychology.

Franz Brentano (1838-1917), a key figure in the development of both Phenomenology and Psychology — and a major influence on Edmond Husserl, the father of Phenomenology — used the term “descriptive psychology” to characterize the study of mental phenomena. He distinguished this from “genetic psychology,” which seeks the causes (or genesis) of mental phenomena. Before we can get at causes, he argued, we first have to describe the subjective experience of that phenomena.

Take the experience of anger: Instead of asking after the neurological basis for anger, Brentano would argue that we should first explore what anger feels like, how it shows up in our consciousness — a radical shift in perspective for that time. This turns consciousness upon itself, consciousness becomes the object of it’s own attention. Husserl took himself to be working out a kind of philosophically rigorous “descriptive psychology” — more rigorous than what was understood as empirical psychology, which Husserl criticized as reductive.

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Both disciplines share the concept of intentionality, the idea that consciousness is always directed towards something — an object, a thought, a feeling. In other words, being conscious is being conscious of something. (For example, right now your consciousness is pointed at trying to understand consciousness — how very meta!) Psychology might be interested in the neural processes that underpin intentionality, or what happens in our brain when we focus our attention on something. Phenomenology would be more interested in the quality of that experience — what does it feel like to intend something, or to direct your consciousness. Moreover, it enlists consciousness itself to focus on the question of what is consciousness — Psychology would never!

Imagine a researcher asking someone to describe the experience of listening to music — the emotions it brings up, the memories it evokes, how it makes their body feel and where those feelings are located. These are all the things that matter to us, as humans. It’s about capturing the richness of that lived experience as the basis for knowledge.  Phenomenology says: forget for a moment whether this music is objectively good or bad, and instead explore how it appears to us, and our relationship to it. It’s the difference between description and (scientific) explanation.

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What about the unconscious, and the Freudian division of consciousness between the id, the ego and the superego? Phenomenology primarily focuses on conscious experience and its innards. While it acknowledges that certain aspects of experience may be pre-reflective or not immediately accessible, traditional phenomenology does not extensively engage with the concept of the unconscious or subconscious motives. I had a Phenomenology professor who used to say that he didn’t believe in the unconscious, rejecting the idea that our actions could be guided or influenced by invisible, irrational forces. For him, it was a matter of faith , like a belief in god, to believe in the unconscious.

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Psychology tends to adopt the third-person, objective perspective that is the normal register for scientific study. Phenomenology actually relies on the study of oneself, as we cannot really know the minds of Others, so it is our own consciousness that we are thinking about when we think in phenomenological terms. When we take our consciousness and point it at consciousness itself,  that is a phenomenological attitude. We bracket everything that we think we know about the world, to turn our attention to the knowing itself. What do we know and how do we know it?

What do you know — as you, given your experiences in the world — and how do you know it?

 Despite these different methods, different worldviews, different aims, Phenomenology and Psychology keep bumping into each other. Drawn together by that shared fascination with the human mind. There are a number of areas of study that attempt to bring together the best of both these worlds. One promising synthesis is Cognitive Phenomenology, which asks things like, “What does it feel like to think?”, a question we actually discussed and which became this piece.

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What does it feel like to understand a mathematical concept,  to make decisions, to have creative insight?  Cognitive phenomenologists argue that even our most complex cognitive processes have a subjective experiential dimension. So it's not just about the logical steps involved in thinking, it's about what it feels like to be doing that thinking. This, in recognition that  our thoughts, our feelings, our actions, they're all shaped by our bodies, our environments, our relationships with others.

P.S., I wrote this introduction to Phenomenology in case you want to read some more.

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