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Article Excerpt
Abstract
This article explores the nature of "the phenomenological attitude," which is understood as the process of retaining a wonder and openness to the world while reflexively restraining pre-understandings, as it applies to psychological research. A brief history identifies key philosphical ideas outlining Husserl's formulation of the reductions and subsequent existential-hermeneutic elaborations, and how these have been applied in empirical psychological research. Then three concrete descriptions of engaging the phenomenological attitude are offered, highlighting the way the epoche of the natural sciences, the psychological phenomenological reduction and the eidetic reduction can be applied during research interviews. Reflections on the impact and value of the researcher's stance show that these reductions can be intertwined with reflexivity and that, in this process, something of a dance occurs--a tango in which the researcher twists and glides through a series of improvised steps. In a context of tension and contradictory motions, the researcher slides between striving for reductive focus and reflexive self-awareness; between bracketing pre-understandings and exploiting them as a source of insight. Caught up in the dance, researchers must wage a continuous, iterative struggle to become aware of, and then manage, pre-understandings and habitualities that inevitably linger. Persistance will reward the researcher with special, if fleeting, moments of disclosure in which the phenomenon reveals something of itself in a fresh way.
Keywords
Phenomenological psychology, phenomenology, reduction, reflexivity, researcher subjectivity.[Phenomenological reflection] must suspend the faith in the world only so as to see it, only so as to read in it the route it has followed in becoming a world for us; it must seek in the world itself the secret of our perceptual bond with it ... It must question the world, it must enter into the forest of references that our interrogation arouses in it, it must make it say, finally, what in its silence it means to say. (Merleau-Ponty, 1964/1968, pp. 38-39)
The "phenomenological attitude" involves a radical transformation in our approach where we strive to suspend presuppositions and go beyond the natural attitude of taken-for-granted understanding. It involves the researcher engaging a certain sense of wonder and openness to the world while, at the same time, reflexively restraining pre-understandings. Most phenomenologists would agree that this stance--or perhaps more accurately process--is one of the more (if not the most) significant dimensions of phenomenological research.
In his foundational work, Husserl (1913/1962, 1936/1970) was the first to argue that a different--special--attitude is required for the phenomenological project. One of his greatest contributions was to articulate the reduction (1) as a radical self-meditative process where the philosopher "brackets" the natural world and world of interpretation in order to see the phenomenon in its essence. Over the course of his lifework, he made nuanced distinctions between various reductive processes including the epoches of the natural sciences and the natural attitude, the transcendental reduction and the eidetic reduction. Other philosophers, such as Heidegger (1927/1962), have since recast the phenomenological project, elaborating existential and hermeneutic dimensions and re-emphasising the embeddedness of the philosopher's historical/cultural context.
Following these philosophers, psychological researchers have been challenged by the problem of how to articulate and apply the phenomenological attitude in practice. While there is consensus that a change of attitude is required, how that change of attitude is to be effected has been the subject of prolonged debate. Debates abound about how to convert what isessentially a philosophical method into a practical, empirical one. No other process has generated more uncertainty and confusion in phenomenology; self-perpetuating misunderstandings abound. Novice researchers are particularly disadvantaged as they commonly mistake the bracketing process as a straightforward method of setting aside assumptions and as an initial step in research of acknowledging subjective bias towards establishing rigour and validity. The radicality, complexity and discipline of the phenom-enological attitude as a whole can be completely missed.
In this paper I describe my own way of operationalising the phenomenological attitude within empirical psychological research. I aim to show that the reduction(s) can be intertwined with reflexivity (2) and that, in this process, something of a dialectical dance occurs. Here I see the dance as one where the researcher glides through a series of improvised steps with their participant, involving sharp shifts of focus and rhythm, more reminiscent of a tango than a graceful waltz. There is tension as the researcher moves between striving for reductive focus and being reflexively self-aware; between bracketing pre-understandings and exploiting them as a source of insight; between naive openness and sophisticated criticality. The phenomenological attitude here does not simply involve suspending researcher pre-suppositions. It is a process in which the researcher opens themselves to being moved by an Other, where evolving understandings are managed in a relational context.
The phenomenological process, in this view, does not involve a researcher who is striving to be objectivistic, distanced or detached. Instead, the researcher is fully involved, interested and open to what may appear. Researcher subjectivity is prized and intersubjectivity is embraced. The challenge is for the researcher to simultaneously embody contradictory stances of being "scientifically removed from," "open to" and "aware of " while also interacting with research participants in the midst of their own experiencing. An additional challenge is for the researcher is to stay vigilant,both to avoid charges of self-indulgence and solipsism, and to ensure that the focus of the research does not shift away from the phenomenon, and/or participants' lived worlds, to the researcher.
In order to explicate the phenomenological attitude, I begin by laying out the philosophical and theoretical foundations of the phenomenological attitude and describe how it has been operationalized in psychological research practice. I then offer three examples of moments from the interviewing phase in my own phenomenological research. These examples illustrate how I attempted to be open and to reflexively interrogate my previous understandings, highlighting how this process enabled me to bracket and see with fresh eyes which, in turn, extended my access to phenomena and deepened my analysis.
Philosophical Foundations
The term "reduction" was first articulated by Husserl as a radical self-meditative process where the philosopher puts aside the natural world and world of interpretation in order to see the phenomenon in its essence. The process, he explains, involves a personal transformation and "reorientation of the natural mundane attitude" (1936/1970,p. 258) where objectivity is constituted out of subjectivity. For Husserl, the reduction helps us to free ourselves from our prejudices and previous understandings, securing a level of detachment such that we can encounter the things themselves in their appearing. Prior assumptions about the nature of the phenomenon being studied are set aside.
We can do nothing but reflect, engross ourselves in the still not unfolded sense of our task, and thus secure, with the utmost care, freedom from prejudice, keeping our undertaking free of alien interferences ... and this ... must supply us with our method. (Husserl, 1936/1970, p. 134).
Engaging this attitude involves a preparedness to be open to whatever may emerge rather than prejudging or prestructuring one's findings. The aim is to connect directly and immediately with the world as we (and, through empathy, as our research participants) experience it--as opposed to conceptualising it, by "suspending prejudgements, bracketing assumptions, deconstructing claims, and restoring openness" (van Manen, 2002a). Morethan simply involving some mechanical bracketing or "purification" (Husserl, 1936/1970, p. 248) technique, Husserl stresses the "vocational" character of this phenomenological attitude, suggesting a sustained and focused stance or "habitual direction of interest" (1936/1970, p. 136).
Following Husserl, a number of philosophers, Heidegger, Gadamer and Merleau-Ponty among them, have elaborated the nature of this phenomenological attitude. While there has been general agreement on the need to rein in the influence of pre-understandings in order to see phenomenon in fresh, new ways, Husserl's view of reduction has been challenged, or at least nudged to go in different directions. For Husserl the focus of the phenomenological project is on managing pre-understandings (such as scientific theories) by bracketing (abstaining from, suspending) them. In contrast, Heidegger, Gadamer and Merleau-Ponty, in line with their view that we cannot escape our historicity and our own personal 'take' on the world, extend the scope of presuppositions to include "foreunderstandings" and suggest the possibility of exploring their meaning, content and impact. Drawing on these developments after Husserl, phenomenological psychologists suggest the possible value of exploiting these horizons of experience and understanding.
The Reductions
For Husserl, the reduction delivers the philosopher to the "groping entrance into this unknown realm of subjective phenomena" (1936/1970, p. 161). A number steps or procedures are involved including: 1) the epoche of the natural sciences; 2) the epoche of the natural attitude; 3) the transcendental reduction; and 4) eidetic reduction.(3) Each of these results in something being put in "brackets" and in a "reduction" of the field which commands one's special focus of attention.
The first "epoche of the natural sciences" (Husserl, 1936/1970) brackets scientific theory and knowledge and "reduces" the field of investigation to the lifeworld from the standpoint of the natural attitude. This involves areturn to phenomena as they are lived and experienced instead of beginning with scientific preconceptions.
All sciences which relate to this natural world, though they ... fill me with wondering admiration, though I am far from any thought of objecting to them in the least degree, I disconnect them all, I make absolutely no use of their standards, I do not appropriate a single one of the propositions that enter into their systems ... I may accept it only after I have placed it in the bracket. [italics in the original] (Husserl, 1913/1962, p. 111).
The second "epoche of the natural attitude" (referred to by Husserl as the phenomenological epoche) brackets the "reality" of the natural, taken-for-granted lifeworld. The task, as Husserl points out, is to go beyond the natural attitude paradoxically in order to discover it (Husserl, 1936/1970). This epoche leads first to the phenomenological psychological reduction. Here Husserl wants to examine the phenomenon as a "presence" without attributing existence to it, that is, reducing the field to the psychological. Specifically, the focus is on subjective meanings, i.e. the meaningful ways the lifeworld presents itself and the subjective processes that constitute these presentations (e.g., through perceptions, emotions, beliefs, kinestheses, intersubjective communalizations). "We put out of action the general positing which belongs to the essence of the natural attitude; we parenthesize everything which that positing encompasses with respect to being" (Husserl, 1913/1983, p. 60). This process, according to Husserl, involves more than simply critically purifying oneself of bias and prejudices, instead it involves entering a new way of being. "The gaze made free by the epoche must likewise be ... an experiencing gaze" (1936/1970, p. 153).
In the third "transcendental reduction," Husserl proposes an even more radical epoche which involves standing aside...
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