Owen - Phenomenology in action in psychotherapy : on pure psychology and its applications in psychotherapy and mental health Care

Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

Ian Rory Owen 1

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Keywords

This chapter introduces the basics of what it is to be aware and notes that there are a number of traditions that interpret the consciousness-biology or consciousness and natural being relationship in ways that refuse to acknowledge the abundant evidence of how the world is represented in consciousness. This chapter focuses on the problems of their positions and their consequences in general as a false problem and in brief offers a genuine solution to the being of consciousness. The first section comments on the problems of the natural attitude and the limits of the naturalistic attitude of natural science that refuses the existence of the consciousness that gives it its methods and meaning. The dominant natural psychological scientific paradigm is sketched and absurd consequences of Scientism are noted. Second, the problem of naturalistic approaches that cannot grasp meaning for consciousness is because they mis-interpret the consciousness-being relationship and forever remain in an unclear position with respect to consciousness, so that they cannot or will not represent it, while asserting that natural being is the only being worthy of consideration: a version of a doubly negative dualism. Third, some brief comments are made about Husserls type of answer. The starting point for understanding consciousness is phenomenology, a methodical qualitative cognitivism that identifies the contours of its territory before any empirical approach to ensure that the empirical methods properly refer to conscious experiences. A taxonomy of the types of intentionality has consequences that helps understand the infinite set of instances of conscious experience involving processes that are implicit, tacit , preconscious or unconscious and highly variable. The fundamental territory to be understood are emotions, moods, thoughts, behaviours, mental habits and relationships between people and are evident in how persons treat themselves. The reflective phenomenological attitude provides helpful insights about consciousness and its processes of intentionality . There is consciousness of what it is like to be you or me, to be a child or adult, to be someone in history or merely a person in general who thinks and feels and struggles to understand. The project is to identify consciousness in general from its evidence. Being conscious is evidently discussible through speech and is certainly not the type of being of an inanimate thing. Indeed, some phenomena of being consciousness are undeniable and can be used to structure qualitative and quantitative reasoning in psychology and psychotherapy for instance .

Understandings at explicit and implicit levels form worlds with others where there are common objects of attention. People have unique personalities and inhabit social contexts and culture , in larger contexts of society and history, through being aware of meaningful cultural objects (although such conscious awareness is influenced by implicit and biological forces). Therefore, a special attention is provided for what it means to relate in a context, in a wide sense of the word relate. This includes the consideration of meaning within an attention to the therapeutic relationship in psychotherapy. For two centuries, the split between the qualitative Geisteswissenschaften , human studies, and the quantitative Naturwissenschaften , natural sciences , and psychological sciences, in this mould, has produced a battleground and a stalemate between incommensurable positions. Natural psychological science refers to the scientific types of psychology, biology, genetics, neuroscience, quantitative social science and physical anthropology. Studying sense-making itself shows how psychological empiricism is shaped by its theories in making its conclusions in meaningful terms. The consequences are multiple standards and manners of justification within these areas and that means that these disciplines proliferate rather than coalesce around a single set of shared justifications and methods. There are a large number of sub-disciplines within cognate, natural psychological science which include genetics and neuroscientific developments in the biological register. The tension is between claims about natural facts versus the aporia within meaningfulness and rationality concerning the openness of meaning to re-interpretation . Human studies refers to qualitatively-focused psychological, sociological and anthropological cultural sciences.