The Meeting Between Phenomenology and Psychology

Abstract

Merleau-Ponty’s statement applies exactly to the divergence between psychological science as it currently exists and any phenomenologically based human study. Even in circles in which it has become the vogue to employ “qualitative methods” there is often an underlying scientism of the kind Merleau-Ponty indicated. Human experience, or discursive action, is seen as part of a causal nexus, a set of variables within the “world.” The chapters in this volume explore the meaning of the “other point of view, that of consciousness.”