Transcendental Phenomenological Psychology

About the Book

A phenomenological explanation of human consciousness has long been sought in regions of psychology since the discipline was first carved out of philosophical concepts and theories about the human condition. In its earliest years, Western psychology was faced with two possible directions for this explanation: an empirical naturalistic approach along with physics and biology, or a non-empirical eidetic approach along with logic and mathematics. Edmund Husserl took up the latter. His phenomenological tradition of inquiry successfully spanned nearly forty years until suddenly stopped and largely suppressed during the Second World War. This book recovers Husserl's revolutionary approach toward the human sciences, just as it was developed, and just as it is presented for further study.

Here, the author systematically gathers what Husserl calls the "leading clues" in the phenomenological method proper for a psychology of affective inner experience, and then for the first time applies Husserl's own methodology for introducing a phenomenological psychology in the transcendental register of human consciousness. Unlike contemporary phenomenological psychology in the existential register, transcendental phenomenological psychology is presented as an eidetic non-empirical "act psychology" in Husserl's mature genetic phenomenology. This novel approach takes in the full range of solipsistic and transcendental subjectivity in Husserl's theories of human consciousness, and follows Husserl's lead in presenting phenomenological psychology as an "applied geometry" of intentional experience within a step-wise theory of inquiry. This book is unique in human science today, not only in its presentation of the development and applications of Husserl's key concepts for the discipline of psychology, but also for introducing a psychology that could be intuitively grasped as self-evidently valid wherever one's interest might lie.

About the Author

Jon L. James was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and raised in Topeka, Kansas. He earned a BA in sociology and East Asian Studies, from the University of Kansas, and MA's from both The Johns Hopkins University in social relations and Duquesne University in psychology. He received a Ph.D. in psychology from the Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center. Dr. James is a former President and CEO of The Legacy Corporation, and is currently the founding member of Three Rivers Consultancy in Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He can be contacted at pghphenom@aol.com.