In the following essay, I set out to rethink the concept of the empirical by following the phenomenological train of thought that the empirical is always tied to a mode of living and can therefore not be thought of as existing independently from subjective modes of engagement. This does not mean that every experience is henceforth to be understood as a subjective experience because the subject is just as much constituted by the object as vice versa. This dialectical interpretation of lived experience is best exemplified in Heidegger's interpretation of experience as a strife between earth and world. This concept is developed further and used to reanchor experience in a thirdness between subject and object. Finally, suggestions are made of what it will mean to adopt the concept of strife as the basis of a new kind of empirical psychology.
In this paper I make the argument that being phenomenologically faithful to human experience means broadening the scope of the phenomenological method to not only include subjective experiences. Instead of reducing the psychological study of phenomena to the subject who 'has' an experience and who makes sense of this experience according to his or her own goal-directed plans, I will introduce the idea of starting our research from an understanding of an experience that is more original than the subject who 'has' it, since it both happens to this subject and transforms this subject in the process of happening to it. This understanding of experience, which is based in part on insights from the later Heidegger and the work of Jean-Luc Marion, takes the phenomenological reduction beyond what this or that experience meant to a particular subject (a psychological reduction) and looks instead at how this particular subject came into being as part of an experiential event that allowed it to become the subject that it is. I will call this new phenomenology a 'phenomenology of the event' and will seek to develop the implications of situating the study of psychological phenomena within such a paradigm.
A popular model of psychotherapy as a rational, linear, and instrumental treatment that can be mastered and planned by the therapist is critiqued as an idealized fantasy. This model, which often underpins cognitive behavioral therapy and a medical approach to therapy, is contrasted with an alternative model based on attentiveness to the therapeutic process defined as an emergent and unpredictable thirdness between therapist and client. Three principles of a process-oriented therapy are described and illustrated through case vignettes. Each of these principles is shown to contradict the assumptions of a rational/planning approach to therapy and therefore to undermine the rational endeavor to "plan" treatment. A process-oriented model of therapy is argued to be a more ethical choice due to the fact that it avoids the moralism and authoritarianism of the rational/planning approach to therapy and has a more radical therapeutic aim that circumvents conventional definitions of what good outcome is or should be.
In this paper I seek to provide the theoretical basis and empirical evidence for an existential phenomenological understanding of memory. Through an explication of Heideggers's understanding of time as "world time," I offer a critique of memory as it is understood in the current cognitive-constructivist paradigm of psychology which understands memory within the framework of "clock time." Through examples from 51 drawings and descriptions of children's first memories, which I collected from Danish elementary school children, I demonstrate how the framework of "world time" opens up a less reductionistic and more meaningful way of understanding the phenomenon of memory.
In this paper, I attempt to explicate the fundamental ontology of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in order to think through the implications of his understanding of the logic of sense for a critique and reconstruction of the ethics and practice of contemporary psychotherapy. I shall argue that Deleuze's understanding of sense leads to a new intensive conceptualization of subjectivity, which radically deconstructs the common sense and good sense that has structured Western notions of the subject since Plato. This new understanding of subjectivity opens up the possibility of constructing a different psychotherapy: a psychotherapy of difference conceptualized in terms of an ontology of dual temporalities or variable speeds.
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