Book Review: The Interpreted World: An Introduction to Phenomenological Psychology

THE INTERPRETED WORLD: AN INTRODUCTION TO PHENOMENOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY by Ernesto Spinelli. Sage Publications, London, 1989. 210pp. £9.95 hb, £9.95 pb.

In Dillon's bookstore the other week, I bemused the staff in the psychology department by requesting references on phenomenological psychology. They couldn't help me. That is to say, they didn't appear to know what I was talking about. This, I'm afraid, sadly reflects the irony in mainstream psychology: it still does not live up to what it purports to be about.

As far as I remember, I originally came to psychology with high hopes of studying the richness of human behaviour and experience. I found out it got no more of this on a course on twentieth century literature. It took me a long time to realise that much of the content of the courses in which I enrolled laundered and trivialised human experience, reducing it to straitjackets of theory, such that the resultant hotchpotch seemed totally remote and alien to my life and concerns.

I began to think there must be something wrong with me, but from time to time discovered the occasional book that restored my faith in people within the discipline (or allied to it) who seemed genuinely interested in what others were experiencing. To those gems, from authors like Laing, Coffman, Berger and Luckmann, I would add Spinelli's The Interpreted World.

Chapter one succeeds as an accessible and lively overview of phenomenological theory. Using everyday examples, the author draws the reader into the text to question the Western assumption of a non-problematic objective reality, separate from the subjective experience – a notion that has long befevilled scientific and common sense. The nature of the ultimate reality of matter must remain unknown. This is because it is bound up with social and biologically-derived interpretive sensory, cognitive and affective apparatus, which serve, also, to limit and confound the extent of human investigation into reality. This makes a nonsense of the supposed mind-matter dichotomy.

Spinelli asserts, however, that the phenomenological system of enquiry can provide a solution to this subjective-object fallacy, in proposing human experience as mediated by a 'plastic' interaction between raw matter and human mental operations.

The transcendental phenomenology of Husserl is drawn on to back up this proposition. Whereas intentionality accords human beings agency in interpreting reality, its experiential aspects – noema and noesis – distinguish between what is experienced and how it is experienced. Clearly, not all 'how' experiences are shareable through the inadequate medium of language. Is this at least a partial explanation for psychology's perennial obsession with trivial data? And in psychology the meaning of the experience may be a far more significant factor than the 'raw' experience itself in, for example, understanding a client's interpreted reality, thereby avoiding the danger of psychotherapy becoming (remaining?) a normative enterprise.

After describing the phenomenological method of analysis, Spinelli goes on to demonstrate its values in clarifying and enriching psychological studies in perception. The first half of the book culminates in an examination of various studies in the perception of the self. Spinelli presents a convincing argument against the notion of the self as a unitary, unchanging construct. It is subsequently phenomenologically redefined as a set of infinite possibilities.

This serves as an appropriate platform for an examination of existential phenomenology. After discussing the historical role of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Husserl's intentionality construct is extended to relate to the freedom of choice inherent in the significance and meaning we give to events, beyond bio-social constraints, deriving from Heidegger's description of authentic living.

The difficulties of being are then explored, in terms of some of the ultimate concerns of existential phenomenology – meaninglessness, isolation, nothingness, angst… From this platform, the complementary work of Sartre is discussed.

Chapter Seven draws key issues from the preceding discussion into a comprehensive and thorough description of the aims and emphases of phenomenological psychotherapy, concluding with more specific focus on the contributions of Laing and Rogers. Spinelli highlights the fact of Rogers' 'dual allegiance' to both Phenomenological and Humanistic Psychologies as a justification for the phenomenological-existential underpinnings of Rogers' work. In addition, his clarifying the similarities and contrasts between them. This seems a particularly necessary historical and conceptual task, given the often woolly and non-critical conflation of the two.

The text concludes with a critical over view of phenomenological psychology, beginning with a summary of the main issues within the phenomenological orientation and ending with the various extant philosophical and psychological criticisms. This is done in order to raise doubts in the reader as to the validity of those criticisms.

Spinelli ends on a personal and moving note. Recognising the fact that mainstream psychology, as yet, is largely unsympathetic to a phenomenological orientation, he exhorts the reader to start to do phenomenology, by bracketing out individual assumptions and beliefs in order to be with people in a spirit of respectful openness. This should better enable all of us to enter sympathetically into each other's experiential worlds, which will take us a little nearer toward global co-operation as opposed to competition.

This, for me, is a beautiful book. I was moved by the concern the author demonstrates in communicating with his readership. In contrast to the continental originals, there are no difficult passages Spinelli has taken great care to explain very clearly the key issues and to give examples that all of us (in terms of our noematic focus) can share.

It succeeds as an excellent and comprehensive introductory source text for the scholar new to the phenomenological orientation, as well as for those more experienced readers who need to return to, and clarify, central arguments and concepts.

Alec Duncan-Grant