Phenomenological Approaches To Personality_2009

Phenomenological Approaches to Personality (Ch. 5 & 6) Humanistic Psychology & Existential Psychology

Phenomenology at Samford

2006 Society of Continental Philosophy and Theology Conference: The Theological Turn in French Phenomenology March 31-April 1, 2006

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The Theological Turn in French Phenomenology Samford University — March 31-April 1, 2006 Register Today Through Mar 17, 2006: only $65 After Mar 17, 2006: only $85

What is Phenomenology? 

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In the broadest sense, phenomenology is the investigation or description of conscious experience. In psychology, it is an approach to the study of people that emphasizes their firstperson experience of the world. 

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Unlike psychoanalysis, where what is important psychologically is outside of conscious experience, i.e., unconscious. Also not prominent in trait theories, behavioral theories, biological theories, and social cognitive theories.

It is also a general qualitative research method found in nursing, communication, education, theology, and many other fields.

It started with philosophy…. 

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Phenomenology began as a school of philosophy originated by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). Psychologists and others who take a phenomenological position always justify their methods with an appeal to the philosophy. Phenomenology is presented as a solution to previous philosophical problems, namely  

Cartesian Dualism What this mean? We will start with a candle.

Michael Faraday (1791-1867) lectures to young children...

A candle as publicly observed.

Faraday taught students to carefully observe a variety of candles, to take measurements, record observations, conduct experiments. He demonstrated laws of chemistry and physics, showing how chemistry could explain relationships among flame size and color, quality of smoke, candle composition, etc. Masterful exposition of objective scientific method.

Beyond candles…to humans 

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Suppose you are a psychologist rather than a chemist. Your object of study is people, not candles. Shall we study human psychology just as we studied chemistry, using the same methods as Faraday? We might still use candles in our research, but only as stimuli. We might, for example, want to study how a person responds to a candle..... .

Observe…..

What can we observe objectively?

e can observe and measure the candle (as before).

We can observe, measure and record the person’s behavior, words, neurochemistry, and brain activity. Is that all we think is going on with the human? Are we missing some aspect of psychological reality?

What are we missing? 

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Most people’s intuitions scream out for something else: this something else is generally called consciousness or experience. But where does it go in our picture? How should we represent it? Cartoonists to the rescue….

The Rise of Thought Bubbles A “container”

A dualism: Two candles Where and what is this?

The public candle The publicly observable person

Audience

Descarte and Cartesian Dualism 

Rene Descartes (1596-1650; French philosopher and mathematician) is noted for formulating the “dualism” problem in its modern form. 

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Descarte argued that mind and body are separate substances (minds are not in space like physical bodies). Problem 1: How do mind and body influence each other? Problem 2: If we begin philosophy with thought bubbles, we can be lead to radical skepticism about knowledge. 

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From a first-person perspective, we each have access only to the contents of our conscious bubble. How can we know that what’s in the bubble reflects something real outside the bubble?

Descarte’s Demon 

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Descartes said we could imagine that a demon was deceiving us at all times about reality. The demon puts contents in our conscious bubble, but these contents are merely illusions with no reality behind them. Modern Version: How do you know you are not a brain in a vat? 

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You don’t have a body. You are a brain suspended in fluid, attended to by scientists. When scientists stimulate your brain, you experience a candle, you experience touching a candle, etc. But there is no candle, no body, etc. All is illusion, a mere appearance.

Descartes’ Solution 

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Descartes started with the thought bubble problem. He attempted to reason his way out of the bubble into certain knowledge.  

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He began by doubting everything he could. He wanted to find first principles, a proposition (or a few), that could not be doubted. On the basis of his first principles, he would use reason and logic to deduce other true propositions and provide universally valid knowledge about reality.

What Descartes could not doubt 

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After doubting all he could, Descartes concluded that the one thing he could not doubt was that he was doubting. If he doubted that he was doubting, he was doubting. Descartes then made a deduction: since I am doubting, I must exist. Doubting requires a doubter. Descartes’ famous conclusion: Cogito ergo sum. “I think, therefore I am.”

Was this a sure foundation? 

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No. All philosophers agree that Descartes did not succeed in reasoning his way out of the bubble. Nietzsche:   

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Descartes began with “I think.” This was already an assumption, not a necessity. The “I” in “I think” was forced by the structure of language (Nietzsche was a philologist—studied history of languages). Descartes could have begun with “there is thinking” or some other construction. Consider: “It is raining.” (What is raining?)

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Even if you grant Descartes his “I think” (and his existence), he never provided a universally compelling argument for the existence of anything else. Many of his arguments were based on theological claims about God and His nature (e.g., God would not deceive anyone) that even some of his fellow Christians might not accept. No one has yet found an argument out of thought bubbles that convinces everyone. Even Husserl, as we will see, did not argue his way out of thought bubbles.

Enter Husserl…. 

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Husserl did not find a way out of thought bubbles. Instead, his approach did not begin with thought bubbles in the first place. In this sense, he did not solve the problems, but rather dissolved or bypassed them. (My false start.)

Edmund Husserl Edmund Husserl thought dualism was plague on Western society.

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He believed they were the source of too many philosophical, personal, and social perplexities.

Cartesian Dualism and the Western Soul In addition to the well-known philosophical problems, the contemplation of thought bubbles gives rise to alienation and a violation of our sense of reality. 

Alienation: We are no longer “at home” in the world. We are alienated from our surroundings and from other people (the reality of which we might doubt).

Husserl’s diagnosis: 

Thought bubbles are not a necessary starting place for doing philosophy.

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We have “thought ourselves into” our predicament by our assumptions and methods. We can change our assumptions and methods to avoid the problems.

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Thought bubbles arise (are postulated) only when we approach consciousness from a certain perspective: When we begin with the objective, third-person perspective.

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(as we did in the Faraday example; at some point we had to introduce the bubble because of our starting point: what can we see objectively)

The Naturalistic Attitude 

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It is the objective, third-person starting point—the objective scientific method applied to people—that gives rise to thought bubbles. H. called this starting point “the naturalistic attitude.” We don’t have to start from this perspective. If we start elsewhere, with our own consciousness, our Cartesian problems will disappear:  

Patient: Doc, it hurts when I do this. Doctor: Well, don’t do that.

Where to begin? 

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Husserl said we must begin by suspending, or “bracketing,” the naturalistic attitude. We must even “bracket” the question of the reality of what we experience, starting with no presuppositions. We must then describe our implicit, pretheoretical experience from our firstperson point of view. When we do so, thought bubbles are nowhere to be found in our experience.

Pre-theoretical Experience 

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Waking in the morning as the alarm clock goes off, before we are reflecting. Before thinking and conceptualizing, we simply experience “the world” (phenomena). But our experience of phenomena is always from a point of view The world-from-a-point-of-view is experienced as a whole.

Intentionality 

This is the first result of phenomenology: CSness is consciousness of something. 

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No experience of consciousness per se, an empty bubble, or a container. No experience of the world from nowhere or everywhere at once. No in-here vs. out-there in our immediate given experience. Only after our first cup of coffee do we think ourselves into bubbles and become Cartesians.

Intentionality: the world from a point of view

From a point of view

Pre-conceptual Experience

The world

No more bubbles….

archers and subjects are conscious of the same candle “in the world.” er researchers or subjects have thought bubbles.

Audience

The Naturalistic Attitude as Filter

Experience

Scientific Knowledge

+ Thought Bubbles Skepticism SubstanceDualisms Alienataion And other “Mind-Clots”

Phenomenology as Prism

Prism Experience Intentionality

Bracket naturalistic attitude; describe experience.

Piet Hutt on photography

No thought bubbles or their problems Many new experiences open up to us, which would have been

According to Husserl… 

The naturalistic attitude is a choice or act.

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“To split what is the case into the duality of subjective and objective is to make a distinction, very useful, even essential for many purposes. But believed, the world is a broken egg.” – R.D. Laing (The Voice of Experience)

Phenomenology does not want to do away with scientific naturalism; it wants to put it in its place, to view it as one perspective in a broader world of experience. We can acknowledge its usefulness, but we must recognize that we can always return home to our pre-scientific Lebenswelt (Life World).

One way of seeing… 

“There are scientists who are fond of repeating that they are not philosophers, theologians, ontologists, metaphysicians, moral philosophers or even humble psychologists. When this is a testament to their modesty it is becoming and appropriate, but more commonly it is a cursory dismissal of whatever they cannot see with their way of seeing. It is ironical that such scientists cannot see the way they see with their way of seeing.” -- Laing

Existential Phenomenology 

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Phenomenology can be used to describe your firstperson experiences of a candle, how it manifests itself in your experience. Some philosophers use phenomenology as a starting point for describing human existence. What is my conscious experience of my existence? What does experience reveal about what is fundamental about human being? c

Martin Heidegger German philosopher  Husserl’s research assistant  In Being and Time, Heidegger described the fundamental characteristic of the human way of being as 

Dasein: “being-there” (a fancy way of saying that humans are conscious and consciousness is intentional)

Human being is “being-in-the-world” c

Heidegger 

Thrownness: We find ourselves “in-theworld”   

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Not our choice to be Not a world of our choosing Don’t know where we are going

“Dasein must question its own existence: we are the beings for whom being is a question.” Humans seek meaning….

Jean-Paul Sartre   

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French Philosopher Being and Nothingness Sartre emphasized the radical freedom of human being. Phenomenologically, we are free. Scientific determinism, like thought bubbles, are constructions.

Sartre 

For humans, “Existence precedes essence.” 

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An essence is a defining characteristic of something.

Human beings define themselves; we choose our essence because we are radically free. With freedom comes responsibility and anxiety; people will therefore attempt to escape or deny their freedom. But: You are free; therefore choose.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty  

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French philosopher Main work: The Primacy of Perception Phenomenologically, human experience is always embodied. We experience the world from an embodied perspective: we feel our bodies from the inside. Our embodiment is experienced as boundary: we are not completely free.

The view from the inside… 

Thomas Nagel (1974): “What is it like to be a bat?” 

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When we ascribe consciousness to something, we are saying they have an experiential point of view. "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.“ 

A potato? A cat? A virus?

Clinical Phenomenology 

The detailed description of the subjective experience of people with psychological disorders (i.e., the “insider’s guide” to psychopathology).

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The DSM-IV is largely an “outsider’s” guide to disorders: emphasis on behavioral description, with a grudging mention of experience when necessary. c

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Clinical Phenomenology 

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In clinical phenomenology, we ask “What is it like to be X?” X is a mental disorder In the DSM-IV, there are over 400 mental disorders. In theory, we could have over 400 phenomenological descriptions to accompany these classifications. In fact, we have very few. Everyone talks about phenomenology, but no one seems to do it.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder  Obsessions are defined by: 

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Recurrent and persistent thoughts, impulses, or images that are experienced as intrusive and inappropriate and that cause anxiety or distress. Germs, dirt, smells, contamination, symmetry, sexual or violent impulses

Compulsions are defined by: 

Repetitive behaviors or mental acts that the person feels driven to perform in response to an obsession, or according to rules that must be applied rigidly.

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Washing, cleaning, checking, counting, organizing

What is it like to be Monk?

Ch.6. “The World of the Compulsive,” V.E. von Gebsattel

Phenomenology of OCD  

The common core experience in OCD: Anti-eidos (eidos=form): In OCD, the person feels the constant presence of a force acting on the world that destroys or disorders the form of the world.     

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Physical order: dirt, debris, clutter, asymmetry Biological order: decay, disease, germs, pollutants Moral order: dirty thoughts, nasty actions, destruction of purity Social order: breakdown of formality; broken rules Causal Order: actions don’t “take.” Must check, repeat. Order of time: Past haunts the present (as clutter haunts the perfect room). Persons with OCD are active, making up for lost time, ruminating about the past.

Phenomenology of OCD 

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A phenomenological description makes no causal claims. OCD might be based on brain dysfunction or anal fixation. Descriptions can still be helpful:  

Increased empathy Can help OCD person feel understood (they are often ashamed, feel like freaks)

Schizoid Personality Disorder 

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A pervasive pattern of detachment from social relationships and a restricted range of expression of emotions in interpersonal settings.  neither desires nor enjoys close relationships  almost always chooses solitary activities  lacks close friends or confidants other than firstdegree relatives  appears indifferent to the praise or criticism of others  shows emotional coldness, detachment, or flattened affectivity Do not confuse with shyness and normal introversion

What is it like to be a schizoid personality?

Schizoid from inside… (according to Laing) 

The basic experiential phenomenon: Ontological Insecurity 

Most people are ontologically secure: the self, others, and the world are experienced as substantial, real, enduring, and meaningful. 

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Self: feel real, with unique identity, feel embodied —in control of actions. Others: others same as yourself, real and alive, can share experiences, enrich each other, act together in the world. The world: natural processes are reliable and predictable; you are at-home in the world.

For Schizoids… 

Ontological insecurity (insecurity about existence) give rise to 3 forms of existential anxiety: 

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Engulfment: feeling that one’s selfhood, identity, and autonomy will be smothered, absorbed, engulfed by others. Petrification: fear of being turned into a thing, a tool, a function for others. Implosion: physical reality as such is experienced as threatening or hostile. (Winnicott: the “impingement of reality”) 

E.g., flu and fever: covering head: world is too much

In defense…

False self/ body (out there) Real Self (in here)

roles/unreal

Others