(PDF) Existential Phenomenological Research: A "Human Science" Alternative for Psychology (with Amy Fisher Smith, 2022)

24 EXISTENTIAL PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH A “Human Science” Alternative for Psychology Scott D. Churchill and Amy M. Fisher-Smith We cannot help but be intrigued by human behavior. This is in part what makes psychology so alluring—we want to know what motivates human behavior—particularly behavior that we fail to understand. For instance, between January and April of 2021, there have been at least six mass shootings in the United States, and in many of these cases, the motive of the attacker remains unclear (Atkins, 2021). While we do not intend to focus on such tragic incidents, these events nevertheless leave us saddened and confused, as well as determined to understand human motivation. Even the circumstances of our own lives are compelling for us. Consider the impact of the current pandemic and how Covid-19 has shaped our behaviors and mental health in ways that none of us could have predicted. For instance, the ongoing Stress in America survey conducted by the American Psychological Association (2021) indicates that many of us are continuing to struggle with the cascading impacts of the pandemic. The most recent survey findings indicate that a majority of adults are drinking more alcohol, gaining more weight, and sleeping more or less than they wanted since the pandemic (American Psychological Association, 2021, “Key Survey Findings” section). Of course, such survey data just tell us what we are doing—not necessarily the motivations behind our actions (other than a global behavioral response to the stress of the pandemic). In this era of misinformation and disinformation (Fisher, 2021), social media and its many iterations never seem to disappoint with example upon example of various hypotheses, theories, and explanations for such human behavior (even hyperbolic, inflammatory, and misleading explanations), whether this is an accounting of a horrific mass shooting or the reasons and causes behind our pandemic stress. The problem is that these “explanations” are often misleading or flat out wrong. Indeed, the New York Times recently reported that multiple popular social media posts continued to cite an unverified and invalid national health database as evidence for the claim that Covid-19 vaccines were responsible for as many deaths as the virus itself (Qiu, 2021). This is where psychology can step in to fill the gap. Applied psychology in the form of rigorous methodology is supposed to separate the wheat from the chaff, helping us to discern facts or knowledge and separate these from opinion and misinformation regarding human behavior and the motivations behind such behavior. Our question for psychology, then, is a question for its methods. Can its methods really separate the wheat from the chaff, or stated a 473 DOI: 10.4324/9781003036517-29 Scott D. Churchill and Amy M. Fisher-Smith bit more precisely, can the scientific methods on which we have come to rely in the behavioral sciences give us access to the kinds of facts and knowledge about human behavior that we are seeking? What are our methods really getting at when they are used to grasp at the meaning of human behavior and motivation? In large part, we recognize many of our most prominent methods are already structured from the outset for the purpose of accessing (and documenting) hypothesized causal relationships. This means that the post-investigatory explanations for human behavior and motivation are already pre-determined to be fashioned within a causal framework, because this is how the method itself is structured. While observing this primacy of causal explanation and its embeddedness within an empiricist/positivist methodology in the behavioral sciences, we also recognize that psychology has a broader methodological tradition with many scholars acknowledging and arguing for methodological pluralism (Churchill, 1991; Fisher Smith et al., 2020; Koch & Leary, 1985; Wertz, 1999)—that is, recognizing both quantitative and qualitative research traditions. However, the established methods in the behavioral sciences that are relied upon for building a reliable and valid evidentiary base continue to be those that are quantitative, grounded in a historical tradition of empiricism and the hypothetico-deductive causal framework (American Psychological Association, 2006; Cook, 2018; Cook et al., 2008; Giorgi, 1970; Robinson, 1995). Indeed, one such example of a quantitative design utilized for building such an evidentiary base of knowledge is the double-blind randomized controlled clinical trial used to establish an evidence-based practice in psychotherapy (Barlow, 2004; Chambless & Crits-Christoph, 2006; Deaton & Cartwright, 2018). These quantitative research designs are true experimental designs which are extolled primarily for their perceived capacity to isolate a hypothesized causal relationship between variables. The problem as we see it is that this emphasis on hypothesized causal relationships means that we are always explaining behavior in light of such presumed causes. In other words, we are always framing (and thus predisposing) human behavior and motivation to be revealed as an effect of an underlying cause within the situation or environment. For instance, our weight gain during Covid-19 quarantine is framed as the effect of an influence or cause (e.g., the heightened stress of loneliness) within the Covid-19 situation—resulting in the conclusion that quarantine loneliness causes weight gain. This type of explanation has become so ubiquitous, not only within psychology, but even outside the discipline, that such explanations have a kind of natural quality to them. In other words, we overlook such explanations and accept them as obvious when they are supported by quantitative scientific method, and we rarely pause to consider the consequences or the possible fallacious premises of the explanation itself. We think that part of the reason for this obviousness has to do with the public’s general belief in causality itself and the taken-for-granted meanings of causality, which we will address later. This epistemic as well as practical taken-for-granted-ness and failure to see the full weight of the explanations and causes for human behavior in the discipline of psychology is precisely what we see as problematic. What is rarely considered in mainstream psychology (particularly from the established methodological perspective) is an emphasis on understanding behavior through how individuals make choices in the face of their circumstances, which would help us grasp the meaningful motivational contexts of their behavior. In short, persons are rarely viewed as agents within their contexts and circumstances even when they have a role to play in crafting the meanings that undergird their behaviors and motivations. If we want to understand the meanings and intentionalities behind behavior and human motivation, we need an alternative paradigm. Rather than emphasizing the outside causal influences to which individuals are passively subjected, we need an alternative perspective; indeed, we also need a different methodological framework, one that is qualitative rather than quantitative. 474 Existential Phenomenological Research The current chapter seeks first to review the historical context of the received view of science and methodology in the behavioral sciences—that is, the more orthodox approach to research design that is described above—but within a comparison to the historical foundations for a “human science” approach. This distinction is really the historical beginning that differentiates between attempts to explain human behavior in light of cause/effect and attempts to understand human behavior in light of meaningful goals/intentions. Second, we offer a specific type of qualitative methodology, Existential Phenomenological Research (EPR), as an alternative qualitative approach, which is well suited to study human experience so that it can be empathically understood rather than causally explained. Third, we will elaborate EPR’s underlying existential framework, which makes it particularly well situated among qualitative methods to clarify individuals’ agency within concrete situations. In other words, the method grants the researcher access to what Sartre (1943/1956, pp. 217 ff) described as a “purifying reflection” that allows the researcher to discern the subject’s intentionality (or agentic orientation) within the context or situation such that the situation and its meanings appear as they do to the subject. Two Alternative “Theories of Science”: The Natural versus Human Science Approaches Over the course of the history of academic psychology a very peculiar thing has happened. In aspiring to be scientific, psychologists have adamantly based their theories upon observation; and yet they have restricted themselves to essentially one mode of observation: that which registers data upon the senses. Historically speaking, this is really not so peculiar at all, as “empiricism” in science has come to mean that one’s findings are based not upon armchair speculation or “sixth sense” intuition, but upon sensory contact with the object of study. What is unfortunate for the science of psychology is that we find ourselves today in a situation where, as researchers, we have forsaken some of the very modes of perception that might conceivably offer the most direct and faithful access to our subject matter. Indeed, for much of the history of psychology, we have taken humans and animals to be merely “objects” for “scientific examination, reducible to their material aspects, and governed by the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. But what about our nature as “subjects” or agents? How do subjective experiences and agentive behaviors come within the purview of psychology as a science? Do we not need more than one way of doing science in order for psychology to fulfill its mission? Brentano (1874/1995) was actually the first to distinguish the realms of the various sciences on the basis of access rather than content: that is, he subordinated the definition of the content or subject matter of one’s science according to the mode of access that one would utilize to make this content evident. Instead of distinguishing the physical sciences, life sciences, and social sciences according to the realms of material reality, living matter, and sentient beings (which was how both Husserl 1952/1989 and Merleau-Ponty 1942/1963 would later organize these “regional ontologies” for phenomenological investigation), Brentano divided the sciences according to their “approach” (Giorgi) to the “provinces of meaning” (Schütz) given to us methodologically: For Brentano, “external perception” gave us the realm of material nature (including life itself), accessible to us by means of our senses; whereas, “inner perception” (not to be confused with “introspection”) gave us the realm of the psychological, made available to us by means of a kind of “intuition” [anschauen, or ‘looking-at’] that would not be reducible to the senses. It was Dilthey (1894/1977, 1927/1977) who would clarify this “inner perception” as “Verstehen”—a term roughly translatable as “compassionate understanding.” With Brentano and Dilthey, the realm of the psychological became expanded from its 19th Century foundation in materialism and the physiological psychology that developed out of 475 Scott D. Churchill and Amy M. Fisher-Smith that tradition to what Dilthey called “the sciences of the human spirit.” What Brentano and Dilthey (and later, Giorgi) were developing was indeed an entirely new approach to psychology. As Heidegger (1921–1922/2009) would write in reference to his own emerging Lebensphilosophie: “At issue is not the acquisition of new concepts . . . within the old way of understanding; on the contrary, [we call upon ourselves] to be attentive . . . to an originally different mode of understanding . . .” (p. 139, emphasis added). It is interesting that almost a century after Brentano (1874/1995) had written his major treatise Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, Rollo May (1967) revived this distinction for American psychology in framing what he called the “human dilemma,” namely, that our subject matter (the human being) can be approached as both a “subject” and an “object.” And yet, even today (another 50+ years later), psychologists continue to approach human reality as though it were only an “object” for psychological science. As Keen (2001/2012) observed in his APA Rollo May Award address entitled “Keeping the Psyche in Psychology:” Science, the method that seeks answers instead of questions, that produces skills instead of sensitivities, may be the culprit. But it is hardly enough—and hardly sensible—to criticize science . . . [as] we do need to use science consciously in the service of our values, rather than pretend that, as psychologists, our values have no relation to our work. The psyche [has become] a shrunken head in American psychology. What is too rare in psychology is the call for sensitivity to society’s questions, history’s questions, life’s questions. (p. 225) What, indeed, has become of the psyche in psychology? History of the Problem: The Need for a New ‘Theory of Science’ Circling back to over a century ago, Dilthey (1894/1977) was contrasting two fundamentally different ways of actually doing science: for the order of nature, “explanation” (looking for cause-and-effect) would be the approach; for the order of the “human spirit” [Geist], “understanding” would be required. Each of these domains called for its own “theory of science” (Wissenschaftslehre)—a philosophical foundation that would serve to define both the “what” (ontological assumptions) and the “how” (epistemological orientation) of any discipline. In fact, Dilthey (1894/1977) was following Brentano’s (1874/1995) lead in furthering the work of Fichte’s (1794) Foundations of the Science of Knowledge, which first introduced “theory of science” into scientific and philosophical discourses a hundred years before Brentano and Dilthey came onto the scene. Proponents of the “human science” approach essentially argued that when the “what” of inquiry is the human person, the “how” of access needs to be adjusted accordingly. For example, if we believe that human beings are fundamentally different from minerals and molecules, then our approach needs to take that into account: If persons are understood to define themselves by the choices they make, then our scientific approach needs to be tailored to observing and even discovering human freedom within the lived situations that we study (Howard & Conway, 1987). By introducing the terms “Geist” and “Geistes” [“spirit” and “belonging to the spirit”] into the discussion of science, Dilthey was invoking a German tradition dating back to Goethe, one that was at once interested in the human “Spirit” as an object of study and in developing the “Spirit’s way of knowing.”1 One problem in translating this expression back into English is that the term “spirit” tends to have religious undertones that would be unwanted in a theory 476 Existential Phenomenological Research of science. In developing the Geisteswissenschaften or sciences of the human spirit, Dilthey was delimiting the very principles upon which the empirical sciences of persons could be based. For Dilthey, human beings were best understood as rooted within the context of their social, historical, and cultural lives (1894/1977), not artificially removed from those contexts. Hence, he disagreed with the empiricist/positivist contention that human beings were similar to other physical objects in the natural world, subject to the causal forces of natural laws. In other words, human persons were always persons in context and embedded in “life as a whole” (Heidegger, 1927/1962, p. 72). This emphasis on wholeness or on the overarching gestalt experience of social life is also why Dilthey rejected the positivist and empiricist emphasis on empirical sensation as the basis of knowing. Dilthey argued that our experience of events and others is itself holistic. When we encounter others and things within the environment, we do not encounter bits of sensation (e.g., bits of raw “sense data” such as blobs of color as the empiricists might contend). Rather, we encounter immediately meaningful wholes, what the Gestalt psychologists came to later describe as figures against grounds (Wertheimer, 1923/1938). This was really the beginning of Dilthey’s (1927/1977) irreducible “expressions of life,” the notion that we are already embedded in a rich and organized phenomenological experience that is not a chaos of disconnected sense impressions, but rather a meaningful and understandable gestalt. In attempting to clarify these distinctions between the natural and human science approaches, Dilthey (1894/1977) wrote, Those who represent explanatory psychology have the habit of invoking the example of the physical and natural sciences in order to legitimate such a large employment of [explanatory “cause and effect”] hypotheses. But we are going to establish here at the outset of our investigation that the human sciences have the right to determine their methods independently corresponding to their object. . . . The human studies [Geisteswissenschaften] are distinguished from the sciences of nature first of all in that the latter have for their objects facts which are presented to consciousness as from the outside . . . and given in isolation [from the observer], while the objects of the former are given originally from within as real and as a living continuum. . . . We explain nature; we understand psychic life. . . . hypotheses do not all play the same role in psychology as in the study of nature. In the latter, all connectedness is obtained by means of the formation of hypotheses; in psychology it is precisely the connectedness which is originally and continually given in lived experience: life exists everywhere only as a nexus or coherent whole. (p. 27) Just as the positivists or advocates of natural science tried to analyze the perceptual experience of physical objects, Dilthey proposed to analyze the meaning inherent in lived experience, in the “nexus” or “coherent whole” of human experience. This parallel process that characterized the human sciences Dilthey described as Verstehen or understanding (p. 52). In other words, the proper focus of a “human science” psychology would be the “expressions of life” as they are rendered meaningful through Verstehen; and furthermore, this compassionate understanding was viewed as the legitimate basis for knowledge in the human sciences. Dilthey remarked that in understanding we draw upon all of the powers of the psyche: sensing, judging, remembering, imagining, intuiting, feeling, and thinking (1894/1927, p. 55). How ironic, then, that when, as students of “scientific psychology,” we go to the encounter with our subject matter, we are often taught to bring a truncated cognitive approach whose claim to fame is its reliance upon sense data and rational explanation, excluding other modes of understanding such as feeling, 477 Scott D. Churchill and Amy M. Fisher-Smith intuiting, and imagining. In everyday life, when we observe the behavior of others around us, or when we attempt to observe our own behavior, we do more than simply rely upon our senses or invoke causation. We also draw upon our faculties of insight and wonder in approaching the human (as well as animal) realm. Indeed, for Dilthey (1927/1977), it was ultimately the “secret of the person” (p. 177) that this reflective method of understanding would reveal, through a confluence of all the powers of the psyche. Early psychologists like Wundt, Münsterberg, James, and Fechner had all along proposed that there be not only a science of psychology based upon experimentation, following the lead of the natural sciences, but also a human or “cultural” psychology (Wundt, 1912/1916). Münsterberg (1899/2004) developed two sciences of psychology—explanatory psychology, based on the causal determination of mental events, and a purposive psychology based on understanding of human intentions. William James (1901/2007) was likewise a proponent for the development of a non-naturalistic psychology, especially in his Varieties of Religious Experience. Perhaps most intriguing of all was Fechner (1861), who: distinguished a “day view” from a “night view,” which correspond to two sides of reality. In the day view, all things are ensouled, conscious, alive; in the night view, all things are material. The day view is the “inner standpoint,” the first-person standpoint; the night view is the “external standpoint,” the third-person point of view (in Heidelberger, 2004, p. 97). Fechner extended this day view, such that everything that exists has an inside. Hence Fechner’s (1860/1966) definition of psychophysics: “an exact theory of the functionally dependent relations of body and soul or, more generally, of the material and the mental, of the physical and psychological world. (Kugelmann, 2021, June) Indeed, Arnheim (1985) would refer to Fechner as, on the one hand, “an empiricist;” and, on the other hand, “a deeply religious pantheist to whom we owe the most poetical ecology ever written” (p. 857). What becomes clear when we look at these early figures in the history of psychology, is that the legacy of Descartes left no small footprint on the landscape of academic psychology. In the early parts of the 20th century, it was the psychoanalysts and Gestalt psychologists as well as German psychiatrists (which was how both Husserl 1952/1989 and Merleau-Ponty 1942/1963 would later organize these “regional ontologies” for phenomenological investigation), who continued in this effort to overcome Cartesian dualism by embracing Dilthey’s notion of empathic understanding in approaching the study of persons (and even apes—see Köhler, 1921), although once behaviorism took over the field of scientific psychology (Watson, 1913, 1924; Skinner, 1953, 1987), there appeared no longer to be room for these “obstacles” to a science of behavior (Skinner, 1975). So, what has become of Dilthey’s human science approach? Contemporary Psychology: Reducing the Human Subject to Efficient Causality Contemporary psychologists have tended to bypass the human science tradition with its emphasis on understanding and meaning, in preference for the natural science tradition with its emphasis on explanation and causation. In other words, we have tended to privilege naturalistic formulations (i.e., cause and effect explanations) and quantitative approaches, so much so that when we invoke “causation,” what we typically mean is what Aristotle described by the efficient cause (for a more elaborate examination of causality in the behavioral sciences, see Slife & Williams, 1995). 478 Existential Phenomenological Research In the behavioral sciences, efficient causation emphasizes antecedent/consequent, linear related links across time (see also Robinson, 1995; Rychlak, 1981). It is important to note, however, that Aristotle originally conceived of four causes as necessary for any effect. In spite of these multiple meanings of causation, we have, in both psychology and in contemporary culture, narrowed our immediate awareness of causation to one—that of efficient causation. We would argue that this meaning of causation—as antecedent/consequent efficient causation—is so ingrained in both the behavioral and social sciences and in culture—it is difficult for us to imagine a different type. Our immediate and tacit understanding of causality in antecedent/consequent terms follows what Schütz (1967) described as sedimented belief; that is, a belief that has sifted down into everyday discourse from the realm of science and become so ingrained that it has become taken-for-granted. We intimated earlier that this type of causal framework is built into the natural science (quantitative) methodology. For instance, the relationship that binds the independent variable (IV) to the dependent variable (DV) in true and quasi-experimental design is an efficient causal one, but rarely is this type of causal relationship explicitly identified in quantitative methods. Indeed, explicit identification would probably be viewed as redundant and unnecessary, but of course, the wide-ranging acceptance of the IV-DV causal relationship betrays that it has become a sedimented and takenfor-granted assumption within quantitative methodology. Radnitzky (1970) has even gone further in referring to a “calcification” of ideas in scientific practice. In this way, causation remains simultaneously present to us, but hidden from view. For instance, we assume both in our everyday cultural understanding of causation and from a traditional methodological perspective that early adverse events like abuse “cause” anxiety and depression (Caspi et al., 2010; Bradley et al., 2008). Given the predominance of efficient causation, what becomes of Aristotle’s other three causes—the causes that have been marginalized or forgotten by the behavioral and social sciences? In addition to the efficient cause, Aristotle introduced the material cause which refers to the material or substance of which something consists; the formal cause which refers to the form, style, pattern, or what Aristotle referred to as the “essence” of a thing; and lastly, the final cause, referring to the end, purpose, or goal to which something aims. For Aristotle, all of the four causes are necessary to account for any entity, behavior, or phenomenon, including human behavior (Robinson, 1995). In spite of Aristotle’s emphasis on these four causes, the most common explanations in the behavioral sciences have typically been reduced to the efficient and material causes (Slife & Williams, 1995). This reduction is in part a function of psychology’s emphasis on the natural science approach wherein empirical observation is often coupled with material and efficient causal explanation. Indeed, material causal explanations such as accounts of human behavior that appeal to neurobiological structure and/or chemistry are common in the behavioral sciences. While we are not suggesting these accounts are wrong, we are suggesting that they tend to flow out of natural science forms of explanation. In our view, what has been forgotten or pushed to the margins is studying the person as a whole from a “human science” perspective that values understanding and meaning. So we call upon the reader here to embark not on a psychology conceived as a “science of nature” but rather as a science of the spiritual or human order that shall be irreducible to physical reductionism and mathematical formulations. This human science approach is essentially a way of bringing free will back into the picture, rather than reducing human behavior and experience to efficient and material causation. Yes, we are influenced by our circumstances; but our experience and behavior are not reducible to them. Biological, environmental, and social influences are certainly taken into consideration, but without reducing our understanding of the individual to these collective “causes.” We think that the best approach for bringing the human science 479 Scott D. Churchill and Amy M. Fisher-Smith vision to fruition is through the existential phenomenological research method, which we introduce in the next section. Doing Psychology Phenomenologically: A “Human Science” Alternative to the Natural Science Tradition Around the time that Giorgi (1970) wrote his groundbreaking Psychology as a Human Science: A Phenomenologically Based Approach, many psychologists interested in the development of qualitative methods (even before this expression was in common use) were beginning to look to phenomenology to provide the philosophical foundations for psychology conceived as a “human” rather than as a “natural” science. May et al. (1958) had already set the stage in clinical psychology for incorporating the work of the existential psychiatrists (Binswanger, Minkowski, Straus, von Gebsattel) into their foundational text Existence: A New Direction in Psychiatry and Psychology. But it was Giorgi and his colleagues and students at Duquesne during the 1970s who really focused upon the development of qualitative psychological methods grounded in the literature of existential phenomenology. Other centers for the development of phenomenologically based qualitative research would include University of Dallas, Seattle University, Saybrook University, and University of Tennessee (See Churchill, 2000a and Churchill, Aanstoos, & Morley, in submission, for elaboration of this history). Of the two co-authors for the current chapter, Churchill has spent the last 40 years and Fisher-Smith the last 20 teaching and developing the phenomenological method at the University of Dallas for application in senior thesis projects, insofar as every undergraduate psychology major since the department’s inception in 1972 has been required to produce a phenomenologically based senior thesis as their comprehensive examination in psychology. More recently, Churchill (2022) has written an introductory textbook Essentials of Existential Phenomenological Research for APA Books, based upon his working with students over the past four decades. The aim of this book was to consolidate what we have learned collectively from a half century of exploring the literature of existential phenomenology and attempting to apply phenomenology to empirical psychological research primarily at settings in the USA, Canada, and Europe. The basic steps of this method are all infused with an understanding of psychological science that is radically different from the conception of science as advanced by experimental psychology with its foundation in naturalism (See Koch & Leary, 1985 for further discussion of this history of naturalism in psychological science). Existential notions of freedom, choice, and transcendence are brought front and center in developing an ontological framework to help guide the researcher’s analysis of lived experience. Sartre’s (1939/1948, p. 91, 1943/1956, pp. 211–237) presentation of the phenomenological reduction as “purifying reflection” (in contrast to “impure reflection” which produces psychological determinism and self-deception) opens the door to the seeing of what Schütz (1967) referred to as “in-order-to motives” versus “because motives.” To sum it up using Aristotle’s terminology of the “four causes:” traditional experimental research methods are seeking the “material” and “efficient” causes of human behavior and experience, in the demand for operationalization or observability (i.e., material cause) and in the hypothesized efficient causal relationship between the treatment variable and dependent measure. Existential psychology, with its phenomenological foundation, is aimed more toward the “formal” and “final” causes of human behavior and experience. In this latter approach, there is interest both in arriving at the “essence” of various “kinds” of experiences (that is, “forms”), and in grasping the true “motives” of our behavior, as revealed to us in the immanent teleology 480 Existential Phenomenological Research Exhibit 1 Overview of the Process of Existential Phenomenological Research 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Formulating a research question: (a) finding a general topic area; (b) preliminary reflection and piloting; (c) operationalizing the topic: finding the situation to be interrogated—what is the lived experience that you wish to investigate? (d) what do you hope to discover there: identifying the “about which” of the study. And finally, (e) what will be the “for the sake of which” or relevance of such a study to the literature of psychology? Drawing upon Heidegger’s (1927/1962) threefold analysis of the structure of inquiry, as well as our many years of supervising undergraduate thesis projects, a distinction is introduced between the psychological research phenomenon and the situation or lived experience that reveals it. (Churchill, 2018a) To assist in formulating the research question, it is important to conduct a review of the pertinent literature. In some cases, this can be the starting point out of which the research question emerges. Look for dilemmas, areas of disagreement, uncertainty, premature closure. Use the literature review to further hone the initial formulation of the research question into what can now be called a “refined statement of the research interest.” An experiential approach to data collection, following von Eckartsberg’s (1971) discussion of the research interview as “cooperative dialogue,” opens the door to better understanding the role of empathy and deep listening in “grasping the meaning” of lived situations. “Phenomenological” research is defined not on the basis of its data consisting of self-reports, but rather on its special method of reflection upon self-report data. A phenomenological approach to data analysis requires us to ask how to discover the phenomenon through phenomenological “reduction” followed by “intuition of essences.” The question is, what are we doing when we are reading these descriptions? How are we attending to the words of our informants? What are our ontological assumptions, and how do we guard against unwanted preconceptions creeping into our findings? In approaching the task of data analysis, begin to think about the phenomenon that will emerge (like one of Michelangelo’s sculptures emerging from the marble found in the quarry). What is the eidos [essence] that lies buried in the data, in the lived experience—something common to all instances in varying situations? What is likely to remain invariant? Begin formulating your preliminary reflections at both individual and general levels of analysis. Communication of Findings: Writing the Research Report (see Churchill, 2022, pp. 73–77). of human behavior: We are ultimately asking about the (“final”) goals to be achieved by one or another behavior within a given situation. The Essential Role of Philosophy in Existential Phenomenological Research The whole research paradigm for EPR was first developed as a philosophical approach before it even became a method. And this was true for both philosophy and psychology: Dilthey (1894) was articulating the foundations for the human sciences around the same time that Husserl’s (1901) propaedeutic analysis of logic prepared the way for his first outlines (1907, 1913) of a 481 Scott D. Churchill and Amy M. Fisher-Smith philosophical phenomenological method. Giorgi (1970) was eventually the one who tried to bring Dilthey’s dream to fruition. Once Husserl (1901/1968, p. 6) had issued forth the so-called “battle cry” of phenomenology—auf den “Sachen selbst”—[to the “matters themselves”]—it then became a question of determining the very nature of the matters that would concern us, as well as the proper mode of access to those matters. For Husserl, the matters to which we should return were the “affairs of consciousness”—which he embraced collectively with the concept of intentionality (1913/1982). Even though this term means much more than simple intentions or aims within a situation, the reader can use this idea of there always being some purpose or “telos” to be achieved in human behavior (including acts of perceiving, imagining, remembering, feeling, willing, encountering) as a kind of placeholder. Husserl’s Husserl (1907/1964) famous series of “reductions” would “lead us back” (re-ducere) from the transcendent world of actuality (consisting of “things” or “facts” or “events” taking place in the “outer world”) to the immanent realm that makes up the “inner world” of human subjectivity, that is, of psychological reality. We employ this term reduction insofar as phenomenological research is a matter of leading ourselves back to the intentional acts that enable experience to be grasped as meaningful,2 as signifying something “deeper” or “latent” or “implicit” within the flow of everyday experience. It is worth noting here that the term “intentional” does not mean “deliberate;” rather, it is a concept borrowed from philosophy that suggests that in our psychological life we are always meaningfully oriented toward our world of experience. This orientation, or “intentionality,” is a way of acknowledging that even the simplest experiences always already bear the imprint of our meaning-facilitating presence. It is precisely the implicit intentionalities of behavior and experience that render our experience meaningful (Churchill, 2022, pp. 7–8). Observing and thematizing intentionality became the aim of phenomenology, as it also became one of the aims of psychoanalysis (insofar as Freud had also studied philosophy under Brentano). Indeed, in his infamous case of Dora, Freud (1905/1963) used the terms “meaning” (p. 34), “motive” (p. 35), and “intention” (p. 37) almost synonymously to teach us how to grasp at the meaning of clinical symptoms—just as he had already done with the meaning of dreams (Freud, 1899/2010; see also Bettelheim, 1982, pp. 69–70). What makes psychoanalysis and phenomenology kindred disciplines is their common interest in the latent content revealed in the expressions of psychological life. It is this “cross validation” (p. 86) of the two fields that led Merleau-Ponty (1960/1969) to famously remark, “phenomenology and psychoanalysis are not parallel; much better, they are both aiming toward the same latency” (p. 87). What this means for EPR is that what we are grasping at is often something that does not lie at the surface of our descriptions, but rather at their depths. (Churchill, 2022, pp. 8–9) Consider the following excerpt from a protocol description (raw, un-analyzed data) of the experience of aloneness: During Summer Break 2019, I was a rising Senior in college, and I was staying at my parents’ house for the entire summer. When I go home for school breaks, I stay in the guest room at my house since my sister, with whom I had shared a room from when we were toddlers until I left for college, had claimed the entire room for herself, rearranging it so that my bed was not even in the room anymore. This was something that I was definitely okay with, and towards the end of my senior year of high school, I had actually started sleeping in the guest room sometimes when I was up late working on homework so I did not bother my sister if I went to sleep significantly later than she did . . . I did start to withdraw a bit from social interaction, and I spent a lot 482 Existential Phenomenological Research of time in my room trying to occupy myself with projects and half-forgotten hobbies that I had found around the house from previous years. I got into a routine of falling asleep around 3am and waking up around 1pm every day, mostly because I could stay up late after everyone else in my house had gone to sleep and not be asked to go anywhere or interact with anyone or participate in anything. I was not trying to intentionally isolate myself, but I had started feeling somewhat uncomfortable being home. What was important for Haynes’ (2020) approach to this study of aloneness was to capture the latent intentionality in the participant’s description. That is, the analysis had to go a step further than what was directly revealed in the participant’s language. Meaning and understanding in psychological research are often contingent upon what is not given explicitly in the participant’s speech or data, given the polysemy of language and the possibility of contradiction. Sometimes a participant tells us what is actually not the case, in the form of a “denial” or absence (Angel, 2013). When Hayne’s participant noted that she was “not trying to intentionally isolate” herself, the researcher is able to hear the negation or reversal in the participant’s speech—and thereby to “see” (or understand) that the participant is, in the end, the agent who is isolating herself, even if not deliberately. The researcher’s being able to hear and see the participant’s reversal is of course contingent on taking account of the data as a whole, which means to look at the excerpt from the point of view of the entire description. In the following analysis, Haynes’ (2020) is able to capture the participant’s latent intentionality while remaining faithful to the experience as lived: The participant’s experience of aloneness emerges in the context of her displacement to the guest room in her family home. While this is a familiar context where she previously felt comfortable almost all her life, it is also a context which calls attention to the participant’s “unsettling and out of place” feelings and to the surprising (paradoxical?) relational distance between her and her close family in a way which has never presented itself before. Hence, the participant’s experience of aloneness is lived as an increasing physical and psychological distance from her interpersonal relationships with others, particularly her close family. Her loneliness and lived distance from others are accompanied by feelings of lethargy and a lack of motivation, all of which she feels overtaken by. In the face of these inexorable emotions and a relentless sense of loneliness, the participant experiences a felt loss of a sense of belonging. The heart of the participant’s experience of aloneness is this loss of a sense of belongingness and place even among her family members. Hence, in the face of this loss, she is socially exhausted and retreats into her “own company.” While the participant’s aloneness increases the distance between her and others, it also buffers her and protects her from others, creating a “safe zone” of security and comfort. This “safe zone” is seductive for the participant and keeps her locked in a bubble of social isolation rather than attempting to bridge the divide between herself and others, a task that seems insurmountable. Particularly in the last two sentences of this analysis, we can observe the researcher’s attunement to the participant’s intentionality. What had been presented in a more “matter of fact” way by the participant (e.g., “I did start to withdraw a bit . . .”), is elucidated by the researcher in such a way as to bring to light the deeper meaning of the “safe zone” as a place where the participant was purposefully but implicitly seeking an isolating protection from others. 483 Scott D. Churchill and Amy M. Fisher-Smith Ontological Foundations: The “Existential” Approach to the Person For Heidegger, Husserl’s student and protégé, it was our free (and yet always situated) projection of ourselves into possibilities that defines us. This is the philosophy that gave birth to Viktor Frankl’s (1959) famous assertion that the greatest of human freedoms is the freedom to choose our attitude in any given set of circumstances. The entire key to the reading of data by psychologists using EPR can be found in this principle: How does this moment within the data (written or transcribed descriptions of experience) reveal both the circumstances that situate and the projects that animate this person in this very moment of their life? As we shall see below, this principle of existential inquiry is drawn right out of the pages of Heidegger and Sartre. THE ORIGIN OF THE TERM “EXISTENTIAL” At the beginning of Heidegger’s (1927/1962) masterwork Being and Time, he proclaims: “The essence of [the human being] lies in its existence [Existenz].” This term existence pertains to the “how” of our comporting ourselves toward our Being, toward our “to be” [Zu-sein], that is, a state of affairs that is “not yet.” For Heidegger, we are always in a process of becoming. When we use the term “existential” in reference to our method, we are referring to our general modes of relatedness to the world, to each other, through our bodily being, and through time. In contrast to Hegel’s famous play on words, “Wesen ist was gewesen ist” (essence is what has been), Heidegger has effectively reoriented our understanding of our “essence” to be something we can only find in our future (even if only in the very next moment), that is, in our “to be.” And that “to be” is something that is inextricably bound to how we find ourselves situated. Heidegger’s focus throughout the remainder of his magnum opus was to identify and clarify what he called the existential “characters of Being” (p. 70) or “existentials” for short, that make up this “comporting” of ourselves toward our being (p. 67). For Heidegger, it is in the “not yet”— rather than in what has “already been”—that we shall truly find ourselves (See Churchill, 2013, for elaboration and illustration). For Heidegger, the more important aspect of our “being in the throw” of life is not so much how we “find ourselves thrown” as it is our “throwing ourselves forward” into possibilities, which he calls “projection” [Entwurf]. Human existence is thus always understood to be a “thrown projection” (Heidegger) or a “situated freedom” (Sartre). In data analysis, the descriptions we collect tend to be focused more on how the participant finds themself “thrown” into a life situation; our challenge as EP researchers is to discern how, within that thrownness, the participant manages to find possible avenues of choice. APPLICATION OF HEIDEGGER’S EXISTENTIAL FRAMEWORK In one of our recent student’s thesis research on worry, Lombardozzi’s (2021) relays the idiographic findings of a participant (whom she calls “Max,” a pseudonym), who describes the experience of paralyzing worry after relocating across the country without friends, family, or new employment. Lombardozzi describes the participant’s struggle with his thrownness in new and foreign surroundings and his seeming constriction of possibilities: For Max, worry cannot be understood without the context in which it made itself manifest. Max’s story begins as he finds himself in a completely new world where the things which he once had (a job, friends, and financial security) are now taken away from him and are replaced by unemployment, no friends, and increased cost of living. 484 Existential Phenomenological Research For Max, this shift in his world occasions his worry. Max finds himself not only in this worrying new world, but also finds himself at a lost for solutions to face what he views as his problems. For Max, worry signifies his inability to adjust to the new world in which he finds himself. His relation to the environment, to others, and thus to himself has changed overnight and while he finds himself in a situation which allows for worry to manifest itself, he also finds the worry spreading to “everything and anything.” Lombardozzi (2021) finds in her evolving analysis of worry that Max can only break out of the cycle of worry and find his possibilities when he confronts, not the worry itself, but the situation that occasioned the worry—that is, his world: Max identifies the first step in overcoming the worry as initiating a “grieving process for everything that had just changed.” Worry, therefore, for Max is not simply a discomfort that comes and goes but is rather an experience deeply rooted in his world and his relationship with others. The worry signifies a change in existence and the need to mourn a lost way of being situated and accept and adjust to a new way of being situated. Max’s lack of control is directed at the worry, but he regains control when he attempts to address not the worry itself, but the bigger issue of his new world, when he makes an effort to “deliberately identify things and process things.” Worry then, is not the source of Max’s constrained agency, but rather in a way Max has constrained his own agency by refusing to accept and adjust to a new world and a new way of being. You can see how this researcher’s findings and intuitions about Max’s experience of worry were already informed by Heidegger’s existential scheme—that we exist as “thrown projection.” In other words, Lombardozzi’s (2021) analysis emphasizes how it is not worry itself that “constrains” Max’s agency or “causes” him to stop functioning. This would be a typical psychological explanation for clinical worry. Rather, according to the EP analysis, Max has worked against himself, unwittingly finding a way to keep himself locked in his world of worry. This world of worry was only escapable when Max “accepted” his “new world,” a new context and new set of circumstances and possibilities, indeed a new “way of Being.” In the analysis, the emphasis is not on causal explanations, but rather on the existentially informed meanings of worry as lived by the participant and understood by the researcher. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE RESEARCHER’S “FORE-HAVING” Since we cannot be without a point of view when reading data, it is important to be selective with regard to which concepts we allow to guide our analyses. Our intuitions of our phenomena are always already filtered through what Heidegger (1927/1962, pp. 191–192) called the “fore-structure” of understanding, consisting of (a) our fore-having, or our “having been there before” in our familiarity with some of our research issues in our own lives; (b) our fore-sight, which refers to our way of attending to the data, and (c) our fore-conceptions, which are the more formal ideas that we bring to the encounter with our subject matter (and which, therefore, need to be critically assessed beforehand).3 Through these “fore-structures” of understanding, Heidegger emphasized the importance of the phenomenologist acknowledging and making explicit what we bring to the table when grasping at the meaning of the experience of others. For Heidegger, it is only natural to filter one’s understanding of “the given” through the nexus of meaning that comprises the experiential knowledge that we carry with us (which he referred to as our “fore-having”). From 485 Scott D. Churchill and Amy M. Fisher-Smith here, Heidegger went a step further in developing a more formal conceptual scheme to serve as guideposts in our analysis of human experience. To this end, Heidegger began articulating his “existentials” as far back as his 1921 lecture course on Aristotle, which would serve as portals into various dimensions of the individual’s “factical life.” Each existential “character of our Being” pertains to a generic “horizon” of human experience (worldhood, being-with, attunement, temporality, etc.) and for Heidegger, the very reason for even developing his “existentials” was in order to be able to turn around and use them as lenses through which to filter our understanding of the individual person in their particular way of being-in-the-world.4 As “lenses” or “guiding lights,” they assist our “seeing of meaning” in our data. In other words, as EP researchers, we follow Heidegger in acknowledging the irrefutable role of a conceptual framework through which we approach the task of understanding individual lives—and eventually, as qualitative researchers, to approaching the task of understanding our data. This is an important contrast to the oft-stated imperative to “bracket all of one’s presuppositions” in the conduct of phenomenological research. So far, we have only scratched the surface of Heidegger’s rich conceptual scheme presented in Being and Time, referring implicitly in the above to what has been called the “care-structure” of human existence, namely, our embeddedness in our own peculiar “factical life” while at the same time “reckoning” with our situated possibilities and ultimately with our freedom. There is actually much more to Heidegger’s constellation of “existentials” as presented in his various lecture courses as well as in his magnum opus. In Being and Time alone, he identified twenty distinct but “equiprimordial” existentials, though van den Berg (1972) found a way of distilling them all down to just four themes: the relationship of person to world, body, others, and time. In presenting the phenomenological tradition to our own students, we have found that beginning with this text by van den Berg is a very helpful starting point for communicating the ontological foundations of EPR as well as demonstrating in a poignant and compelling way the applicability of these “existential” concepts as guiding lights in the qualitative research enterprise. EXISTENTIAL TRANSCENDENCE AND “CIRCULAR” CAUSALITY In the EP approach, if there is going to be any talk of causality in human psychology, it is going to be a “circular” causality (to be presented below), and not the linear determinism expressed by efficient causality. For example, when we meet each other on a train in Europe, we are more likely to talk about where we are going than where we just came from. It is the destinations that give us the journey, and not the other way around. “If anything, there is a “circular causality” by means of which my projection of a self that I want to be constitutes the basis for my choices in the present moment, which then take up and transform my “past.” . . . The alarm that rings in the morning is not the “reason” that I get out of bed to start my day; if the alarm has any significance, it is the meaning that is has for my “project-to-be—in” this case, to be the kind of person who gets to work on time. Thus, to get up at the sound of the alarm is to realize the possibility of becoming this self that I choose to be. This would be the structure of all our “agentic” actions. Furthermore, we are responsible for all of our actions; there are no excuses. Do I stay off the grass in the public park “because” of the sign that says, “Keep off the Grass”? Or does the sign, like the alarm that rings in the morning, only have the weight that my free project and the self to be realized confers upon it?” (Churchill, 2022, pp. 13-14) Sartre (1943/1956) summarizes the existential perspective thusly: “Any way you look at it, it is a matter of choice (p. 708) . . . the peculiar character of human-reality is that it is without excuse” (p. 709). I perceive in retrospect this act I have committed, and apprehend certain features (past projects, circumstances) of 486 Existential Phenomenological Research myself which, in light of my act, can be understood to have served as “motives” for my act. In this sense, where one is going determines the meaning of where one has been. For Sartre (1943/1956), every action must be intentional; each action must, in fact, have an end, and the end in turn is referred to a cause . . . that is, it points toward my past, and the present is the upsurge of the act (p 563). . . . Just as the future turns back upon the present and the past in order to elucidate them, so it is the complex of my projects which turns back in order to confer upon the motive its structure as a motive. (p, 564) Thus, as Husserl (1913/1962) has stated, the willing of an end is what motivates the willing of the means. Every act to be sure has a motive, but the motive is a part of the structure of the act itself rather than a “cause” of the act. Schütz (1967) has elaborated the phenomenological understanding of motivation with his distinction between two kinds of motives: “because” motives and “in-order-to” motives, each of which is the correlative of a different kind of reflection. It is to Sartre’s methodology for phenomenological intuition that we shall now turn. Methodological Foundations: Impure Reflection (Linear Determinism) versus Purifying Reflection (Circular Causality) In order to access and differentiate between the circular causality of the EP approach and the linear determinism embedded in efficient causal formulations, Sartre (1939/1948, 1943/1956) identified two ways of conceptualizing human events: The first (and most ordinary) is through “impure reflection” which gives us “psychological determinism” (that is, a conception of time that assigns the meaning of our actions to the past—that is, to antecedent causes—and reduces our future being to the result of probabilistic trajectories); and, alternatively we can conceptualize human behavior through what he calls the “purifying reflection of the phenomenological reduction” (1939/1948, p. 91) that reestablishes the foundation for human action in our “projects” (Sartre, 1960/1963, pp. 91ff, 150ff)—that is, in the “to be” for which we are striving in all of our momentary actions. To quote Sartre, “For us man is characterized above all by his going beyond a situation, and by what he succeeds in making of what he has been made. . . . This is what we call the project” (p. 91). THE SELF-DECEPTION OF ACQUIESCING TO CAUSAL EXPLANATIONS OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR In what Sartre has called “impure reflection” or “bad faith,” we tend to perceive existing states of affairs as the (efficient) cause or motive of my present act. What is “bad” or “impure” about such a view is that it amounts to a refusal of freedom and a negation of our “nature” as free beings. Much of the field of psychology serves this human tendency toward self-deception whereby we strive to find reasons and causes for our acts rather than assume responsibility for them. Psychological determinism, before being a theoretical conception, is first an attitude of excuse, or if you prefer, the basis of all attitudes of excuse. . . . it asserts that there are within us antagonistic forces whose type of existence is comparable to that of things. It attempts to fill the void [of uncertainty] which encircles us, to re-establish the links between past and present, between present and future. (p. 78) 487 Scott D. Churchill and Amy M. Fisher-Smith According to psychic determinism, the past produces the present: For example, my present feeling of anger is “caused” by the entrance of a hateful person in the scene. Schütz (1967) would refer to this as a “because motive.” Alternatively, it can be argued that it is my project to flee from my own apprehension of myself as being without worth that motivates me to perceive the other who has hurt me as hateful. Seeing the other as hateful, which in impure reflection I experience as a simple given is in fact the correlate of a choice made by my consciousness. It is precisely my wish to flee from the hurt occasioned by the other that motivates me to see the other as hateful. Schütz would describe my fleeing from hurt as the “in order to” motive that helps make sense of my seeing the other as hateful. To unpack this: the “self that awaits me in the future” is what motivates my present acts, rather than the other way around. My “future self ” is not determined by my present self, any more than my present self is determined by my past acts. There is no linear determinism in psychological life. So why do we succumb to such explanations? For Sartre, we succumb to such explanations in “bad faith,” because it is often easier to hide from our responsibility in the language of excuse and externalized blame. Thus, in our emotional experiences such as the example of anger above, what is often overlooked is our culpability in co-constituting the other in the mode in which our emotion reveals them (e.g., as hateful). Notice that for Sartre, whether we are trying to hide from our responsibility (i.e., our freedom) or not, we have agency. Hence, in applying EPR, our focus is on uncovering how participants manifest their freedom and intentionality in any situation, whether participants are aware of this or not (see Churchill, 2000b). PURIFYING REFLECTION: ‘SEEING-THROUGH’ THE PARTICIPANT’S SELF-DECEPTIONS Consider for example, Diaz’s (2021) study of performance anxiety. Diaz (2021) analyzed the description of a participant who narrated the experience of performance anxiety before and during a competitive collegiate basketball game. That the game was important to the participant already revealed, in part, what was at stake for her in terms of her future self—being an accomplished athlete on the basketball court and leading her teammates to victory. In this analysis, Diaz (2021) utilizes the Sartrean framework of an impure and purifying reflection as a “forehaving” or interpretive conceptual framework through which the participant’s motivations are revealed. Consider, first, the participant’s raw description: I started to overthink about why she [the coach] wouldn’t want me to be nervous and how I wanted to avoid any physical responses that would affect my performance. Physiologically I felt my heart rate increase the more I thought about avoiding mistakes that could be caused from me being nervous. I think if she [the coach] would have told me more in advance, I would have had time to prepare and be ready for game time. I had played in games before, but I always had time to see the speed of the game first. Since I usually came off of the bench, I had time to prepare to match the speed of the game and see players’ tendencies. And Diaz’s (2021) idiographic analysis: The participant feels out of time as the starting time for the game is approaching. She laments that had she been told about the game in advance, she would have had time to face her performance anxiety and come to terms with it before it was time to start the game. Hence, the participant attempts to create excuses for her performance anxiety by setting up scenarios that could have prevented her anxiety to begin with. The participant continues to create excuses by blaming her anxiety on the way she was coached. 488 Existential Phenomenological Research Had she been coached differently her anxiety may not have been present. Hence, being socially anxious means deflecting the anxiety of the high-stakes situation and its resultant responsibility away from herself. Her performance anxiety grows in the face of feeling unprepared for the game. The desire to deflect her anxiety continues as the participant uses her coach as a scapegoat for her performance anxiety rather than owning it as her own. The participant rationalizes her anxiety by emphasizing to herself that her coach did not give her enough time to prepare for the “speed” of the game by asking the participant to play at the “start” of the game, something she usually does not do. By taking an EP approach, Diaz (2021) shows how the participant’s future self and “project” (i.e., being an accomplished athlete) culminate in what Sartre would describe as “bad faith” (or “self-deception”) as the participant lapses into the narrative of blame and excuse or what Schutz would describe as “because motives.” Rather than taking responsibility for the co-constitution of her performance anxiety, the participant makes excuses for the eruption of her anxiety and for her poor athletic performance. She also blames her coach (lamenting for instance that had her coach given her enough time to prepare for starting in the game, she might not have experienced such anxiety). All of this is in the attitude of excuse and “because motive,” at least from a Sartrean point of view, and demonstrates the participant’s tacit unwillingness to confront her “project(s),” and their consequences including her own responsibility, directly. Rather than fleeing from our choices, Sartre encourages us to confront them head on. This would extend to how we approach our work as researchers. The attitude of “purifying reflection” is one that removes us from thinking in terms of linear determinism. If this determinism is the correlate of impure reflection, then circular causality and the possibility of intentionality and freedom are the correlates of Sartre’s own purifying (that is, phenomenological) reflection. The excuses and self-deceptions of impure theorizing are abandoned in favor of leading ourselves back to an “original temporality” (or circular causality) by means of the phenomenological “reduction” (from the Latin re-ducere, “leading-back”). Phenomenology involves a return to the “original” or “primordial” temporality described above. This ultimately reveals to us how it is “the coefficient of freedom” that best defines human action: looking not for the effects of circumstances on us, but rather for the choices that we make in the face of our circumstances. It is thus in our movement toward the future that we define our present and past, and not the other way around. Consider as another example, Spall’s (2021) study of social anxiety in which a participant describes the overwhelming and paralyzing experience of anxiety as she attempts to deliver a Spanish presentation to a cohort of other students. Similarly to Diaz (2021), Spall (2021) utilizes the Sartrean purifying reflection to uncover the participant’s “project” or intentionality. In other words, as Spall engages in data analysis, she asks, what was at stake for the participant in the socially anxious situation? Unlike Diaz’s participant, who ultimately lapsed into “self-deception,” employing a “because motive” by deflecting her responsibility in the situation, Spall’s participant does not move to the language of excuse. As researchers of EPR, we rely upon the existential Heideggerian concepts of projected thrownness and the Sartrean concept of purifying reflection as an interpretive stance towards the data in order to uncover what we might describe as the participants’ intentionalities (“projects”)—indeed even latent intentionalities—within the data. This is all in the service of uncovering the meaning of the human phenomenon under investigation (in this case social anxiety). Rather than trying to explain social anxiety with reference to antecedent causation, Spall (2021) attempts to understand social anxiety by uncovering the intentionalities that animate it: The participant’s social anxiety emerges in a context in which she has high performative expectations with regard to speaking Spanish, but low estimation of her ability 489 Scott D. Churchill and Amy M. Fisher-Smith to do so fluidly in front of her peers. Prior to performing, she already puts herself in a position of inferiority with regard to others in the class, recognizing and emphasizing that there is a mismatch between her ability to fluidly vocalize and her intentions to speak . . . The mismatch between the participant’s aimed-at-self (the self of high performative expectations) and present self (the self who doubts her abilities) in the socially anxious situation, is expressed both temporally and bodily. The socially anxious situation “dragged on forever” and time slows given the participant’s anticipatory anxiety about the possibility of speaking Spanish in front of her classmates. As the socially anxious situation continues, her anxiety is realized bodily. In the face of her classmates’ scrutiny, her body fails her: her “chest tightens,” her “legs shake” and she drops her pointer . . . Her panicking body takes over and betrays her anxiety, revealing a self that she does not recognize—one with a shaking voice and shaking body, paralyzed by the gaze of others . . . Throughout the socially anxious situation, the participant maintains an excessive focus on the self as she appears to others. She perceives the gaze of others as penetrating, as she becomes the object of scrutiny. In this process, she feels more and more an object before others. She feels pinned by this scrutinizing gaze. Spall’s data analysis reveals the participant’s “project” or future self—what Spall (2021) describes as the participant’s “aimed-at-self.” Indeed, it is this “aimed-at-self,” the self of “high performative expectations” and the participant’s perceived mismatch between her aimed-atself and her current self, the self “who doubts her abilities,” which allows for social anxiety to emerge. In other words, a crucial finding in Spall’s (2021) analysis is how the participant has positioned herself existentially—as a person thrown into a situation who doubts her abilities but who also projects high expectations for herself. It is this existential position which in part co-constitutes the experience of social anxiety. The analysis also shows how the participant feels increasingly objectified and scrutinized by the gaze of others. Indeed, the participant feels “paralyzed” by this gaze. Hence, the participant’s “aimed-at-self,” “current self,” and her relation to others is revelatory of her intentional stance toward the world of her concern. This is really the strength of the EPR approach. It provides researchers the ability to access participants’ intentional “projects” and stances toward the world and others within situations, and these very situated contexts are what allow various phenomena to emerge. The EPR approach also emphasizes meaning and understanding. Rather than focusing on the antecedent triggers or efficient causes of social anxiety, Spall’s (2021) analysis accentuates the meaning of the socially anxious situation for the participant which “dragged on forever” and in which her “panicking body takes over.” In other words, the EPR approach elaborates the temporality and embodied parameters of the meaning of social anxiety, and as such, our understanding of the lived experience is deepened. Conclusion Twenty years ago, Ernest Keen (2001/2012) challenged the field of psychology with a call to action: The vehicle of natural science has been important in integrating psychology into American society—in appealing to sources of legitimacy and opportunity and support. . . . But it has also been a straitjacket, distancing psychology from poetry, novels, art, and music, making more difficult and more marginal the insights and approaches of these fields for the logos of the psyche. Phenomenology offers psychology a method 490 Existential Phenomenological Research to expand our scope beyond science and to create an opening in American culture, where we can become a truly human science instead of a natural science. In developing a sophisticated alternative to psychology conceived as a natural science, it is not simply a matter of avoiding explanations and cause-and-effect thinking. We also have to develop our ability to see, understand, and articulate intentionalities. That is, it is not enough to develop a plethora of qualitative methods as alternatives to quantitative methods, especially when the former do not always escape the positivist leanings of the latter. In order to succeed in developing a genuine science of human persons, we need to develop qualitative methods that are grounded in an alternative “theory of science,” or what Giorgi (1970) referred to simply as an approach. Philosophically informed qualitative research—especially when grounded in the EPR tradition—opens up new horizons for the student of human behavior. These new horizons are made possible by the ontological foundations of psychology conceived as a human science, that is, a psychology that directs itself to human meanings, motives, intentions, and values. We can say on the basis of our experience of having taught this method together for many years that our students really seem to revel in discovering these otherwise invisible dimensions of human experience. The real challenge comes when we try to teach them how to actually produce these kinds of findings on their own. This is where pedagogy meets science, and where we begin to shift our own attention as well as that of our students from reading the methodological literature to actually doing psychology phenomenologically. Notes 1. It is interesting to ponder the ambiguous “double meaning” of the German Geisteswissenschaft, with its genitive Geistes- that can either be read in the conventional way, as the “objective genitive” where Geist is taken as the “object” of study; or, in a more unconventional (but distinctively Heideggerian) way, as the “subjective” or possessive genitive, that is, where the science belongs to and is being carried out by the spirit (that is, where the spirit is taken as a subject, possessing the ability to understand itself). See Churchill (2018b, pp. 70–73) for further discussion; see also Heidegger (1923/1999, p. 102). It is also interesting to note the ambivalent way that the term Wissenschaft has been translated: When used in connection with nature, it becomes “natural science;” but in connection with Geist, it gets demoted to “human studies.” It was Giorgi (1970) who reclaimed the term “science” for the human sciences. 2. Even if psychologists do not go “all the way” to the transcendental realm (see Merleau-Ponty 1945/1962, p. xiv regarding “the impossibility of a complete reduction”), we can still learn from Husserl’s basic approach, which for us amounts to bracketing the naturalistic attitude (that is, the belief that explanatory psychology holds all the answers to understanding psychological life) and leading ourselves back from the obvious to the more latent meanings contained in human experiencing. R.D. Laing (1967) suggested that we call these meanings “capta” instead of “data,” since they are not simple givens but must be ‘taken’ or ‘captured’ from “an elusive matrix of happenings” p.62). 3. The foundations for Gadamer’s (1960/1975, pp. 235–240) “theory of hermeneutical experience” is to be found in these very concepts of Heidegger. 4. Indeed, in his seminars held in Switzerland at the invitation of existential analyst Medard Boss over the course of 17 years, Heidegger always returned to the existentials as presented originally in Sein und Zeit to assist in training psychiatrists, physicians, and other health care professionals in the existential approach to understanding persons (Heidegger, 1987/2001b). References American Psychological Association. (2021, March 11). One year later, a new wave of pandemic health concerns. www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2021/one-year-pandemic-stress American Psychological Association Presidential Task Force on Evidence-Based Practice. 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