Book Review: Husserl

* Husserl by David Bell, Routledge, London (1990), £12.99 PB.

Moustakas is claiming to provide psychological researchers with a humanistic, experiential and phenomenological method in what he calls heuristic research: a form that has much in common with the phenomenological 'pure' psychology of Edmund Husserl. Despite Moustakas' claim that his work is based on phenomenology, there are no references to Husserl or the early writings of Heidegger.

Moustakas presents a form of research that includes various descriptive processes for finding and discussing essences that include informal interviewing of any length, sending the researchers' reports back to interviewees for their comments, and could include group discussions, a journal, poetry, or other forms of producing descriptive data with interviewees included as co-researchers. Moustakas even claims that his heuristic research is broader than phenomenology because it "retains the essence of the person in experience".

This brings me to comment that, of course, it is good to develop phenomenological psychology, but any such development can only be based on a full understanding of Husserl's phenomenology, before a critique and development could start. The procedures that Moustakas advocates include the themes of Husserl's 'pure psychology', in that they promote descriptions of essences, are about a priori conditions and their possible interrelations. The procedures include turning the interviewees consciousness inwards towards themselves, so that meanings and experiences are the subject matter. However, there is also the absence of co-felt empathy, temporality and signification from heuristic research, which are major topics for Husserl and Heidegger.

What is missing from heuristic research to make it pure psychology, is that intersubjectivity is missing from the main procedure, there is no epoché or any discussion of its absence, there is insufficient attention to essences and the grounding of descriptions. Like Heidegger, Moustakas also believes that we "restrict the potential for new awareness and understanding. We reduce the range and depth of meanings that are inherent in every significant human experience". Indeed, Moustakas concentrates on what Polanyi called "tacit knowledge", which could easily be called preconscious and unconscious knowledge, skills and abilities. This roughly equates to a similar emphasis in Husserl's pure psychology and Heidegger's Being and Time. But again the whole idea and possibility of transcendental verification, the possibility of discerning between the natural attitudes of acceptance - and understandings which are truer - are omitted.

Moustakas must be commended for providing a clear and readable text, with much worthy material to challenge the utterly inappropriate methods of conventional scientific psychology. However, only Moustakas could answer the question whether he intends his heuristic research to be a phenomenology or a phenomenologically-influenced 'new' qualitative psychology. For my taste, Moustakas is too humanistic. For instance, Heidegger commented that the aim of a pure psychology, a daseinsanalysis in his terminology, should aim to be wholistic, but it is not possible to grasp the whole of an individual. One of the problems for pure psychologists is to reconcile how people are both unique and share characteristics, how single experiences are unique and yet repetitious, how anything comes to mean that which it does and not something else, how people choose to be the same or different, and how certain aspects of our behaviour seem to lie outside of conscious control...this list continues.

Moustakas and other new qualitative psychologists could learn a great deal from a truer understanding of the old phenomenological pure psychology. For Husserl, psychology proper has not yet begun. An analysis of dasein/pure psyche should consider all the topics above, whilst remaining true to its rigorous, philosophical, acausal, inductive understanding of immanent psyche, as it appears in itself; and keep away from causality, biology, physiology, neurology and natural science.

As an adjunct to Moustakas, I recommend David Bell's excellent Husserl. This text gives an overview of Brentano's descriptive psychology, then moves into a slow chapter on Husserl's mathematical grounding. But after the chapter on the Logical Investigations, the book provides a sound overview of Husserl's later output. Unfortunately, there is little on pure psychology as Bell focuses on phenomenological philosophy and the work is too short and lacking in examples, but overall it provides an excellent clarification of the main thrust of Husserl's founding points. Its main implication is that pure psychology is in need of critique and development, but it could form the basis for psychological research and as a guide for psychotherapeutic practice. Each therapist's work is grounded on essences of intersubjectivity, empathy, insight, choice and change, and take into account the client's trust, she therapist's caring, and the power balance between the two. These understandings exist tacitly and consciously, in varying amounts of clarity.

For instance, the roots of pure psychology lie in Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Kant. Any proposed psychological essence can supposedly be disputed or verified by transcendental philosophy as a final test in perhaps overcoming relativity and find intersubjective agreement based on the method of Descartes process of doubt and the possibility of finding indubitable truths. Also, transcendental phenomenology, an experiential method of philosophy, seeks to do 'violence' and 'destroy' traditional philosophy (Heidegger) by a process of reflecting "on the necessary conditions for the possibility of any objective knowledge whatsoever" (Bell), as attempts to characterise the relation between meaningful lived experience and the natural world, as it assumed and found to be, and described/interpreted to exist. This project aims to "reconcile the subjectivity of knowing and the objectivity of the content known" and so aims to delineate the relation between knowledge and the real object. This is just one point by which the psychological research of pure psyche, the study of the relations between the I and the objects in its world, can be backed up by philosophy as 'rigorous science'. This is a direct parallel to Heidegger's existential analysis of being-in-the world.

As a final word, any discussion of pure psychological research must be put in the context of what we can know of Husserl's total output of 45,000 pages, only 7,000 of which have so far appeared in the 28 volumes of the Husserliana. Of these only 13 have appeared in English translation, and only four of these are currently in print. Of the 28 German volumes, all of them deal with the connection between psychological phenomena and philosophical analysis. What is most obviously missing from English translation are the three volumes on intersubjectivity which cover the period 1905 to 1935. The importance of Husserl and Heidegger, for qualitative research and therapeutic practice, is second to none. For instance, with a reading of Husserl's time book and Ideas, volumes 1-3, an understanding of Nietzsche's overman concept, an overview of Kierkegaard, particularly The Concept of Dread, and an overview of Wilhelm Dilthey, it is possible to read off the major themes of Being and Time at a glance. Existential-phenomenological research and practice can properly be based on the work of Husserl and the early Heidegger, and so overthrow the tyranny of mediocrity that currently exists. Ian Rory Owen

Ian Rory Owen