Psychology as a Human Science:

A Phenomenologically-Based Approach, 2nd Edition

By

Amedeo P. Giorgi, PhD,

Rearange By Fahim Sakil with different data.
Graduated from North South University

Foreword

Amedeo P. Giorgi initiated a scientific phenomenological psychology as

a human science contra the mainstream schools that had adopted the natural
sciences values, methods, and procedures. It was the late 1960s that a young
experimentalist from Fordham University was invited by scholars at
Duquesne University in Pittsburgh to embark on the development of a new
psychology.
From that invitation to join the faculty, Giorgi embarked on a lifelong journey that
had its share of obstacles, conflicts, and some important achievements along the way.
Giorgi’s earliest interests in psychology came from reading the work of Harvard’s
William James. James was a pioneer in American psychology and had many
ideas that were an anticipation to phenomenology. When Giorgi left his initial
undergraduate major (English) to pursue psychology, he found that the
observation, measurement, and calculation of behavior was the modus operandi
dominating the discipline. For the remainder of his formal education, he followed
this stream of psychology and successfully earned a doctoral degree in
experimental psychology and went on to serve his nation as a governmental
contractor. But it was not long before young Giorgi was united with some
phenomenological thinkers that brought him full circle to his original interests in
psychology—understanding humanity from a psychological perspective.
Psychology as a Human Science: A Phenomenologically Based
Approach was originally published in 1970. The book was a series of Giorgi’s early
lectures at Duquesne University after having taken a faculty post there. James’s
early work in psychology and philosophy engaged human experience in a way that
the dominant behaviorism could not achieve. When Giorgi engaged in the
phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-
Ponty (and others), he suddenly found some consistencies with what had originally
attracted him to psychology. Moreover, he found a depth and density in Husserl’s
epistemology that motivated him to adopt a new vision for a scientific research
method for psychology. While James ultimately went a pragmatic direction in his
philosophy, Giorgi found Husserl’s work extremely strong as a potential eidetic
science for the human sciences; the human sciences as described by philosophers in
Europe such as Wilhelm Dilthey. Dilthey promoted the idea that human sciences
such as psychology, sociology, history, theology, and law involved human affairs
that could not be fully studied through natural science procedures. The natural
sciences studied the physical world with the aim of understanding
how it worked so that human beings could navigate it better. Engineering and
technology have drawn theoretical insights and guidance from the natural sciences
and the advancements have been seemingly miraculous. But the human sciences
were necessary due to the unique aspect of humanity that cannot be observed,
quantified, and predicted—meaning or Logos, which is the very etymological root
of the suffix of the names of sciences:-ology. Understanding human meanings and
meaning structures is vital to understand humanity.
Giorgi headed the call for a human science of psychology and adopted
Husserl’s philosophy as the basis for his scientific phenomenological method.
Giorgi points out that the natural sciences had achieved so much by applying the
developments and methods of Enlightenment thinkers. Galileo applied the eidetic
sciences of mathematics and geometry to make amazing discoveries about the
cosmos. Sir Isaac Newton advanced physics in ways that pushed mechanics and
engineering leaps and bounds ahead. Husserl desired to develop phenomenology
into an eidetic science for the human sciences—a science of consciousness as such.
Amedeo Giorgi came out of experimental psychology to emerge as a pioneer in
psychology as one who would apply Husserl’s phenomenological thought as an
epistemology for psychological research.
Moreover, Giorgi also adopted Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s non-
reductivephenomenological ontology that allowed psychologists to study the
psyche
without having to adopt naturalism as their cosmological framework. The
examination and analysis of lived-experiences of human beings does not
necessarily require the scientist to limit their cosmology to that which appears on
the Periodic Table of Elements or the various forms of energy as described by
Newtonian Physics. Rather, psychology as a scientific study of the mind can be
better approached through a non-reductive dualism that honors the unique
interiority of human conscious experience while acknowledging the importance of
human physicality and sociality. In short, the subject matter of psychology is
psychophysical-sociohistorical in context and cannot be fully understood when
reduced to thinking and behavior.
Psychology as a Human Science still has the potential to unify
contemporary psychology. That is not to say that an eclectic route can be taken to
make a theoretical composite that can be applied to clinical work. Rather, by
adopting a phenomenological approach in scientific and clinical practice, an
evidence-based practice might actually be realized. But Giorgi and his late wife
Barbro ran into some challenges with integrating scientific psychology with
professional psychology. The historical divide between the streams of behaviorism
and psychodynamic psychology are initially founded in their respective goals.
Watson sought to make psychology a science of behavior to predict and control
human behavior. His stimulus-response schema was useful
and now over 100 years later is still the basis for advanced retail marketing and
infomatics. On the other hand, psychodynamic psychology has led to many
branches of depth psychology theories of human relations and functioning that help
people navigate their personal, social, and professional worlds. The highest and
most efficient form of psychotherapy that usually makes no promises of permanent
or long-term recovery is Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT). While CBT
tends to “work” or have sufficiently high utility, it still rests on the information
processing metaphor and operant conditioning principles as their foundation.
Basically, CBT at its inception took Watson’s stimulus-response schema and
added “thinking” or cognition between them so that psychological health became
defined as thinking and behaving in socially acceptable ways. But somehow, we lost
the human psyche in that narrative of psychology. Giorgi’s original position now
becomes a light shining in the darkness. When human beings are conceptualized in
the technocratic terms of information processors that guide the behavior of robotic
flesh, people become things to be controlled and directed. Not only does this put the
psychologist in a position of power, but it places the psychological research
participant or client in the position of an object to be manipulated. I do not mean
this in a malevolent sense, but it does strip away a vital dimension of human agency
based on a power differential that is not necessary to science or clinical praxis.
Giorgi elucidated this and maintains this
position today. The respect for human persons starts with a proper epistemologyand
ontology for human science research.
Giorgi’s work developed a qualitative method in psychology that employs a
descriptive phenomenological analysis for the purpose of understanding humanity.
While Giorgi is a psychologist and developed his method for psychology, many
applied human disciplines have employed his research design to study human
affairs in various situations. Giorgi never limited or directed his students’ research
topics when he directed theses and dissertations. In fact, the diversity of topics and
social situations studied with his method have only shown its ability to provide
important results. It is not merely understanding the practical procedures that he
has laid out in his analytic; rather, the methodological foundations of a modified
Husserl’s phenomenology have been developed and elucidated. This is why
Psychology as a Human Science is still so relevant today.
Giorgi has spent over 50 years developing, testing, and defending his
scientific phenomenology. Those who have studied and employed his method that
have gone into clinical practice or consulting have learned to “listen and hear”
people phenomenologically. They understand the human being and humancondition
from a non-reductive scientistic perspective. Those who have employed his method
and continued to conduct and teach research have made
important discoveries about human functioning and meaning-making. And it is
how people make meaning of their lives that is the phenomenological avenue toward
the study of the human mind. As Giorgi points out time and again, it is thehuman
psyche that is the subject matter of psychology. While we cannot observe
consciousness directly, the psychological project of phenomenology is to analyze
human meaning structures, situated and constituted in lived-experiences, to better
understand how we live, relate to one another, and ultimately thrive as a community.
While Giorgi’s initial project is still in development and process, the
contributions from his initial aim have been remarkable for psychology. It has not
come to final fruition, but has only just begun.
Some of the challenges for developing a Human Scientific Psychology
(and other human subject disciplines) is finding a human science somewhere
betweenthe natural sciences and humanities. Giorgi critiques positivism and shows
how it failed as an epistemology for psychology. But some anti-positivists have
also gone too literary in their epistemological positions. Giorgi would admit that
we can learn a lot from the humanities about humanity and the human condition,
but knowledge acquisition is not the goal of the humanities. Similarly, the goal of
clinical psychology is to help people navigate their worlds better, not necessarily
provide knowledge. A descriptive phenomenological approach to human research
can provide knowledge with utility while maintaining the poises of
human meaning, but it accomplishes this through a scientific
approach rather than mechanistic or aesthetic way. The rise and
focus on STEM (science, technology, engineering, &
mathematics) in higher education has set the human science goal
further way. Advanced and developed societies today are dealing
with mass populations, fast moving economies, and dynamic social
affairs. This draws many toward employing a technocratic
psychology in organizational applications and clinical work that is
developed toward utilizing technocratic procedures for short-term
solutions to long-term problems. Might understanding humanity
more deeply and more accurately help? Each reader who engages
this book will be served in their own way. It is not easy to understand
at first, but as promised by Giorgi, phenomenology is a horizon of
thought one steps into and comes to understand over time.
Psychology as a Human Science is the original point of departure
for Giorgi’s thought and methodology, and therefore is foundational
for understanding his later work and contributions to psychology.
Through this new edition, this vitally important contribution
to the field canserve another generation helping them deepen
their understanding of the foundations of psychology.
Rodger Broomé, PhD
- 2019
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