Edmund Husserl Encyclopedia of Psychology Jennings, Jerry L. (2000). Edmund Husserl. In A. Kazdin, (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of Psychology. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association and Oxford University Press. HUSSERL, EDMUND (1859-1987), German philosopher, critiqued the “new psychology” at the turn of the 20 th century and founded phenomenology as an alternative for studying mental phenomena. Historically, Husserl’s primary motivation was to restore philosophy as an important discipline – then threatened by two ascending forces. First, world view philosophy (“Weltanschauung”) asserted that all knowledge is relative to its historic period and culture. For Husserl, philosophy could not surrender the Greek ideal of pursuing “essential” knowledge. “Essences,” such as mathematical axioms, are universal, eternal, and absolute, independent of any historical age or individual experience. Husserl’s famous “intentionality” is another essence. Every act of consciousness is intentional – directed toward something. Consciousness is always “consciousness of” something; It always “intends” something, even itself sometimes. Since essences are always revealed through reflection, Husserl argued that consciousness (hence, philosophy) must command the preeminent position among the disciplines of knowledge. The second threat to philosophy was the “new scientific psychology,” epitomized in the psychophysical research of Wundt and other pioneering experimental psychologists. By adopting the experimental method of the physical sciences, psychology hoped to claim the same authoritative knowledge. Hence, direct “seeing” of mental events was disallowed as unscientific “introspection.” The fundamental problem, Husserl recognized, is that subjective mental events cannot be relegated to the status of physical events (e.g, reaction time, finger motion), which can be manipulated and measured using the experimental method. As an alternative, Husserl developed phenomenology to apprehend the essential forms of consciousness – prior to conducting empirical research. Thus, phenomenology would ground psychology by first clarifying the implicit preconceptions of mental phenomena that (unknowingly) guide its empirical investigations. Husserl’s basic method was the phenomenological reduction. Though shrouded in jargon, the reduction is simply a methodological move to temporarily strip the world of implicit presumptions about its existence to allow aspects to recur as “pure phenomena”(essences) for consciousness. The reduction is an open “attitude” (free from preconceptions and categories) which allows phenomenon to be beheld in their most immediate, direct manifestation. By comparison, Freud’s free association requires verbalization of everything that springs to mind, suspending any shame, guilt, or logical sense. Husserl’s method requires unbiased contemplation, suspending all intellectual considerations (e.g., judgements, opinions, concepts, etc.). For Husserl, the crucial distinction between phenomenology and psychology is the nature of what is studied – essence vs. empirics. The phenomenologist seeks the essential character of various psychological acts – not the empirical particulars of actual individuals engaging in such acts. The phenomenologist, for example, might study the universal, “essential” capacity of any human(caveman, ancient Greek, Medieval monk, or modern student) to attend to an inner-sensed