First and foremost I think phenomenological
social psychology
is about lived experience.
Experience as people live it in their day
to day lives.
It’s about focusing in on what it, what
it means
to be human and, and that, that I just find very
exciting.
Very often in psychology
people focus in on
smaller aspects
of people’s behaviour, whether
it’s in their brain or whatever, and you
lose
the sense of what it means to be human.
Immediately I encountered the phenomenological
approach
and the philosophy of the kind of phenomenological philosophers,
did I merely
kind of think:
hello, this is, this is something that
resonates with me and
my understanding of the world,
and what I’d learnt and studied
so far.
My path into this really came from practising
as a mental health
therapist,
because there I
used all sorts of theoretical perspectives in my work,
but the one I favoured was the
humanistic approach,
where you’re trying to look at,
kind of taking a holistic view
of the person, the individual,
trying to understand
their, their feelings, their needs, their potential.
Trying to empower. And these are the kinds
of messages that also phenomenologists pick up on.
And so it was a very short jump for me
really as,
as a therapist to then move into phenomenology .
What I discovered with phenomenology was an
alternative psychoanalysis that had that vast scope,
that actually sought to kind of
deal with human existence kind of as we live it,
in its
entirety.
It asks: well what is that experience like
for you?
So for example, if you were a depressed person
and you had a whole room of psychologists
here,
every single psychologist would probably
look at you differently and understand
you differently.
And you’d have some psychologists perhaps would be
very focused
on why is it that you’ve become depressed.
Whereas the phenomenologist simply says well,
I want to know what is it like for you to be
depressed?
What is your world? You know, who
are you and how are you handling it?
What’s your pain?
What’s … what are your needs, what are your feelings? What is it
that gives you meaning in your life?
And for me
those are the important questions.
And of course
there a link there then into
how one would then help you with your depression.
