54 Counselling Psychology Review, Vol. 29, No. 2, June 2014 54 Counselling Psychology Review, Vol. 29, No. 2, June 2014 © The British Psychological Society – ISSN 0269-6975 Y FIRST INTRODUCTION to phenomenology was as a philosophy student in France in the early 1970s when I learnt phenomenology the hard way by reading Husserl’s seminal work (Husserl 1900, 1913, 1925, 1927). My subsequent training as a psychologist helped me to make the links between the philosophical method and the practice of projective testing. As a psychotherapist I greatly valued the phenomenological methods I had learnt in recording, formulating and writing up case studies, and I have demonstrated this practice in my published casework for many years (van Deurzen, 1988, 1998, 2010, 2012). When I began training and supervising therapists and counsellors at the end of the 1970s, I shared these methods, expecting students to come to grips with the principles of phenomenology by reading Husserl’s work. Phenomenology is not just a technique to rival with statistical analysis. It is a way of life and you cannot practice it unless you under- stand its spirit and adopt its philosophy. Prac- tising phenomenology teaches you to sharpen your capacity for observation and self-obser- vation. It demands that you immerse yourself in your sensory experience and become reflective about your affective life. We have to learn to master the way in which we experi- ence and perceive the world and our own consciousness more and more clearly. What is phenomenology? People often accurately define phenome- nology as ‘the study of phenomena as they appear to us’. Sometimes they will wrongly describe phenomenology as the study of subjectivity, forgetting that it sets out to study subjectivity objectively and objectivity subjec- tively, whilst addressing the whole of human conscious experience in all its complexity. The concept of intentionality is key to grasping the idea of phenomenology. It was Franz Brentano, Husserl’s (as well as Freud’s) teacher, who first described this concept (Moran, 2000). The main point to hold on to is that human consciousness is always and inevitably related to and directed towards something beyond itself. This is the arc of intentionality, which is the process of meaning making. In Husserl’s words: ‘…in perception something is perceived, in imagination something is imag- ined, in a statement something is stated, in love something is loved, in hate something is hated, in desire something is desired, etc. (Husserl, 1900/1970, p.554) Invited Paper Structural Existential Analysis (SEA): A phenomenological research method for counselling psychology Emmy van Deurzen Content & Focus: This paper discusses the foundation of phenomenological research in Husserl’s original ideas. A specific form of phenomenological research, called Structural Existential Analysis (SEA) is then introduced and outlined. The paper details various components of SEA, such as use of the three reductions, dialogical and hermeneutic interviewing, working with bias, the four worlds’ model and its paradoxes, working with the timeline and making us of the emotional compass. Keywords: Phenomenology; structural existential analysis; hermeneutic interviewing; dialogue; bias; four worlds’ model; paradox; timeline; emotional compass. M