Psychology and Phenomenology

studphaen« La psychologie et le « chemin de croix » de la phénoménologie transcendantale » (“Psychology as the ‘Via Dolorosa’ of transcendental phenomenology”)
in Studia Phaenomenologica, X, 2010, p. 163-192

Edmund Husserl
Edmund Husserl

Abstract: The highly problematic question of the status that phenomenology should grant to psychology runs through out the whole of Husserl’s work, from its beginning to its last ending, and represents one of the most fundamental problems of phenomenology. From this point of view, the analysis of the relationships between psychology and phenomenology given in Husserl’s last writing, the Crisis of European sciences, seems particularly interesting, as it affords a different perspective on the history of psychology, and allows us to reconsider the criticisms addressed to descriptive psychology since the breakthrough of phenomenology in the Logical Investigations. In the Crisis, Husserl not only tries to bring psychology back into the phenomenological field by describing it as a privileged “way to reduction”, but he more fundamentally shows that the closest examination of the crisis-structure of psychology is essential to the understanding of subjectivity and its phenomenological meaning. The psychological dimension of subjectivity is neither a mere difficulty of transcendental philosophy, nor an accident in history of subjectivity, but it discloses the problem upon which lays the transcendental signification of subjectivity. To that extent, psychology seems absolutely necessary to transcendental phenomenology, insofar as it has to deliver its fullness of content and its empirical richness to subjectivity, and to give phenomenology back its descriptive dimension.