In March of 2001 Serge Hein of the department of education and Wendy Austin of the faculty of nursing for the University of Alberta published an article in Psychological Methods (vol. 6; no.1, p. 3-17, the American Psychological Association). In that article empirical and hermeneutic phenomenology, which those authors claimed were the two most common approaches to phenomenological research, were described, compared, and contrasted. Each was illustrated in a case study and the authors argued that convergent analysis, such as that displayed in their article, was possible due to the human capacities of "reflection and intuition in the presence of intersubjective meanings." In the following responses, Ari Cohen and Victor Daniels summarize and comment on their article.

Gstalt-L, An email discussion group devoted to Gestalt therapy and the community of its practitioners (www.g-gej.org/gstalt-l). Gstalt-J, An email discussion group devoted to research on Gestalt therapy, theory and practice (www.g-gej.org/gstalt-j). Supported by the Gestalt Research Consortium (GRC) (www.g-gej.org/grc). Gestalt Bookmarks, a place to begin researching the field of contemporary Gestalt therapy on the world wide web
(www.g-gej.org/gestaltbookmarks).

It will take place November 6-10, 2002 in St. Petersberg, Florida. Complete conference information, including presentation proposal forms and conference registration, can be found at the AAGT's web page (http://www.aagt.org)

The Somatics Interest Group is composed of AAGT members with special interests in attending to body process as an integral part of doing Gestalt therapy. We welcome therapists who specialize in this work as well as those who are curious and want to learn more about it. The Somatics Interest Group will evolve according to the needs and interests of its members.

Co-Chairs Gina Fitzmartin and Susan Gregory hope to facilitate communication between Interest Group members throughout the year. Here are some of our ideas:

1. If the group wishes it, we plan to establish a contact list of members, including addresses, e-mail information and a listing of specialties.
2. We will distribute a list of resources - books, journals, etc. - and will update it regularly with input from Interest Group members.
3. We will seek to facilitate ongoing discussion about our interests and excitements, either through a round-robin newsletter in which specific topics are taken up and then added to by group members as the newsletter circulates, or through an on-line discussion group, or through local meetings where groups of members demonstrate and experiment together, reporting on their experiences to the Interest Group as a whole.
4. We will coordinate any collective projects which may emerge from group activity, including planning an Interest Group workshop or writing a joint paper which expresses the conversations we undertake.
5. We will assist in organizing any other projects members want to undertake.

The form of the Somatics Interest Group will emerge according to what its members want and have energy to accomplish. We hope to become a resource for the Gestalt therapy community as a whole, encouraging ongoing engagement with somatic experience as an integral part of Gestalt therapy. We invite your participation.

Vol. 5; no. 3 Spirituality and Gestalt Therapy. Special Editor, Brian O'Neill (in collaboration with Behavior Online)

The purpose of the article was to describe two common approaches to phenomenological research in psychology - empirical phenomenology and hermeneutic phenomenology.

Phenomenological research in psychology aims towards disclosing the nature of structure as expressed through meaning, so that it provides us with a " deeper and fuller understanding of ourselves and others". This process requires bracketing - a process of rigorous self-reflection in which the researcher makes every effort to suspend his biases, knowledge and notions about the phenomenon under investigation. Through this process of "holding lightly" his knowledge, the researcher strives to move from natural existence to a "transcendental attitude". In this manner the researcher attempts to suspend her belief in the world as independent of each of us, and attend the phenomenon as it presents itself in awareness.

The first difference between empirical and hermeneutic phenomenology relates to the source of data and the method of obtaining the data. Empirical phenomenology focuses mainly on the researcher's self-reflection on experiences of the phenomenon under study, and to the participants' (the subjects) descriptions of their experiences. The hermeneutic phenomenology tend to focus more on accounts of the phenomenon obtained from literature, poetry etc. However, this difference is not as crucial as the second one, which relates to the methods for interpreting the data.

Some classical empirical phenomenological studies dealt with "experience of feeling understood by another person" or " what constitutes learning for ordinary people going about their everyday activities".

The steps of analysis involve in this approaches are:

1. Immersion in the data which requires reading the transcript several times.
2. The statements that are relevant to the phenomenon are identified and thematized.
3. These excerpts and themes are used to develop an exhaustive description of the participant experience of the phenomenon. This description is often referred to as " situated structural description" (SSD). If there are more than one participant, then additional SSDs are made for each participant, and they are compared in order to identify shared themes and a synthetic general structural description.

The characteristics of the empirical phenomenology are:

1. Emphasis on commonality that is present in the many diverse appearances of the phenomenon.
2. Reliance on the actual words of the participants
3. Explicitness about the design and the steps taken to obtain the findings.
4. These characteristics leads to verifiability and ability to be replicable.
5. Stressing more on rigor of the approach than on its creative aspects.
6. Acceptance that hermeneutic activity (interpretation) is intrinsic process of research

In contrast, hermeneutic phenomenology is concerned with understanding texts. In this approach the researcher aims to create rich and deep account of a phenomenon through intuition, while focusing on uncovering rather than accuracy, and amplification with avoidance of prior knowledge. In using this approach we accept the difficulty of bracketing. To overcome this difficulty we acknowledge our implicit assumptions and attempt to make them explicit. In addition, we accept the notion that there may be many possible perspectives on a phenomenon, like when we turn a prism, one part becomes hidden and another part opens. Hermeneutic avoids method for method' s sake and does not have a step by step method or analytic requirements. The only guidelines are the recommendation for a dynamic interplay among six research activities: commitment to an abiding concern, oriented stance toward the question, investigating the experience as it is lived, describing the phenomenon through writing and rewriting, and consideration of parts and whole.

This approach objects to the "meaning-diminishing methodologies" and for inclusion of concepts such as passion, ecstasy, birth, and death as open for research. Studies by this approach were done on issues such as "theoretical effort," "experiencing" or "on falling asleep."

As a demonstration of the two approaches, two researchers analyzed a transcribed interview on a woman's experience of work-family role conflict.

A comparison of the report based on the two different methods indicated a considerable degree of similarity. Thus the description based on the two approaches related to high stress, feeling of overload and strain, loss of quality of life, conflict between various roles, marital difficulties and unequal role sharing, striving to prove oneself, and the need to compromise standards and goals.

The article as a whole is well written, although it is somewhat lengthy. It may stimulate a novice in qualitative research to explore this kind of research. At the same time, for those who are more familiar with qualitative research, it sharpens the distinction between the different approaches of phenomenological investigation. On the other hand, the article is not a manual on " how to do" phenomenological research, although it includes some references for readers who look for this kind of resource.

As a teacher of qualitative research at the graduate level I plan to use the two analyses as an assignment for my students.

I like the hermeneutical interpretation of the word "research," composed of "re" (again) and search which comes from the Latin "circare" which means "to go around." As the authors noted, the image of the researcher as one who is encircling seems particularly apt in hermeneutically oriented research.

Prof. Arie Cohen (ariecohen40@hotmail.com) obtained his M.A. in clinical psychology from Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and his Ph.D. in Educational Psychology and Counseling from the University of Wisconsin- Madison. He has been trained in cognitive therapy at the Center for Cognitive Therapy at the University of Pennsylvania and in gestalt therapy at Gestalt Associates Training of Los Angeles, the Israeli branch of Gestalt Institute of Cleveland and the Gestalt Education Network International. He is a founding member of the Academy of Cognitive Therapy, and he has passed the certification exam for gestalt therapy at GATLA. He teaches the Ph.D. colloquium and gestalt therapy at the School of Education at Bar-Ilan University and methodological courses at the Psychology and Marriage and Family Therapy departments at Loma Linda University, California. Prof. Cohen has made many research presentations in scientific conferences and published about 50 articles in professional books and journals.

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Abstract: Hein and Austin do an excellent job of describing the philosophical roots of phenomenology and the procedures of empirical and hermeneutical phenomenology as applied in psychology. They do not discuss the methods of dialogical phenomenology or individual phenomenology. The review of their article goes on to discuss parallels between the process of "bracketing" and elements of Gestalt therapy and Person-Centered therapies, and examines how these two clinical epistemologies are themselves both phenomenological and existential in their approach.

This article contained one of the clearest descriptions of "empirical phenomenology," and the clearest single description of "hermaneutical phenomenology," that I have seen. I was disappointed to find that two other important approaches, "dialogical phenomenology" and "individual phenomenology" were not mentioned at all.

I found the demonstration (by a practitioner of each) of the two methods discussed, using an interview transcript of one woman's experience of work-family conflict, particularly interesting. It was reassuring to find that there was a high degree of commonality between the insights and conclusions obtained through the two rather different approaches. There were, however, also some insights expressed in each of the written summaries by the two practitioners that were not present in the other one.

For those not familiar with the phenomenological approach, the term refers to a particular group of perspectives and methodologies for carrying out qualitative investigation. These perspectives existed for some time in philosophy before psychological investigators developed a set of methods to go with them. Amodeo Giorgi has termed these methods a "human science" approach, in contrast with the dominantly behavioral and analytically cognitive "natural science" approaches favored by academic psycholology. These two sets of attitudes and methods in regard to psychological investigation, one oriented toward "predicting and controlling behavior," in John B. Watson's words, and the other toward studying consciousness as it is experienced, in oneself or in someone else, are quite different epistemologies.

Clinical epistemologies are another different matter yet, and themselves differ sharply from one another. Dominant on the American scene is the analytic/diagnostic epistemology that represents a mixture of Freud and the medical tradition, while another quite different approach is the existential-phenomenological epistemology represented by such figures as Rollo May, James Bugenthal, R.D. Laing, Thomas Szasz, and William Glasser.

As we will see below, Gestalt therapy and person-centered therapy fall into this latter class of existential-phenomenological approaches. In short, these epistemologies present several fundamentally different ways of going about the matter of comprehending human behavior and exprience.

Early on, Helm & Austin briefly summarize the views of the philosophers who pioneered the phenomenological approach. They begin their concise, valuable summary with Edmund Husserl, generally considered the founder of phenomenology, who argued that we can study experience "rigorously and systematically on the basis of how it appeared to consciousness." Husserl began with "the phenomenon itself." A later phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, spoke of a "first opening" on things, before any intervening screen of concepts and ideas appears. Developing this ability to let go of our mental chatter, our conceptual categories, and all else that is spinning around in the vortexes of our minds is the goal at which Zen Buddhist training aims—a direct encounter with reality, and nothing more, such as:

"The frog jumps from the lily pad into the pond. Plop."

"But what does it mean?" someone asks.

"Don't you see? The frog jumped. The water splashed, making a sound. Ripples radiated outward from the spot. The frog disappeared. Period."

A misunderstanding that has been a source of criticism of both Zen and Gestalt therapy is the accusation that they are anti-intellectual. What they are saying is not actually an indictment of intellectualizing and theorizing per se, but rather that they are just one dimension of our cognitive capacity. They assert that direct awareness is equally important and sometimes even more important, and that getting lost in any one part of ourselves to the exclusion of the rest of our power and potential is not so good. They help us develop the choice and disciplined ability to focus our attention either intellectually or in direct awareness, rather than being lost in our intellect without realizing it.

Socrates took a different approach toward a similar end. He used the intellect to deconstruct our intellectual storehouse of misconceptions. He would ask a series of questions that forced the person questioned to realize that he had no direct evidence or personal experience in support of his presuppositions, until his whole secondhand conceptual superstructure about a matter was in tatters. Then Socrates would ask what he truly knew about the matter from his direct experience. In this he was similar to Buddha, who admonished his followers to believe nothing until they had tested it through their own experience and found it to be true.

Husserl also included another element in his phenomenology. In his view, experience includes both those concrete particulars of this situation here now, experienced as naievely as we can experience them, and the categories of meaning to which its things and events belong. A Red Delicious and a Fuji, for example, share the category of meaning that we might call "appleness." (Shades of Plato's pure forms!) These categories of meaning are "structures" in consciousness that are invariant and essential. Husserl used the term "essence," for them, setting the stage for Jean-Paul Sartre's famous existential dictum that "existence precedes essence." Apparently unknown to Husserl, Tibetan Buddhists for hundreds of years had been observing and recording such operations of the mind in a rather sophisticated fashion. In Open Secrets, Walter Truett Anderson (1979) has provided a marvelous summary of this work.

Drawing on Husserl's work, Martin Heidegger shifted his focus from the use of critical reflection to study universal structuring processes of consciousness, using our experience to study the character of human existence. That is, while Husserl was interested in our experience of being, Heidegger was interested in our experience of being-in-the-world. A second big difference is that Heidegger's phenomenology took a hermaneutical turn. In a sense, he denied the possibility of a naive "direct grasp" of the phenomena themselves, arguing that we necessarily interpret everything in terms of our language and experience. And so, in trying to understand another person, I need to look at my own preconceptions and be as explicit about them as I can. I may move back and forth between someone's description of her experience and my own, and refer to literature and what others have written about similar experiences. This dialectical interplay of sets of experiences is what is called "hermaneutical."

Hein and Austin then move to psychological research methodologies. They do a lucid job of describing the essence of "empirical phenomenology," in which the researchers "bracket" or set aside all preconceptions and assumptions about a matter and read a transcript of an interview. Any time a preconception or personal reaction surfaces, the researcher brackets it, sets it aside, and tries to comprehend the person's experience as it is for that person. In this process of "phenomenological reduction," the researcher tries to suspend his or her conceptions of any world other than the subjective world of the person who is being studied. Afterward, the researcher goes through and extracts major themes that are repeated again and again. Then the researcher may or may not discuss these themes with the "co-researcher" for verification or amplification. ("Co-researcher" is a term often used instead of "subject" in phenomenological research.) Finally, the researchers look to see what common themes occur among the various participants in the study, or whether there are clusters of one kind of theme in one group and another kind of theme in another group.

Hein and Austin's discussion of the processes of bracketing, phenomenological reduction, and the arguments about whether bracketing is really possible is well worth reading. At one point, however, it was not entirely clear to me whether they were simply presenting the argument that bracketing is ultimately impossible, because of unrecognized hidden assumptions that underlie our surface assumptions, or whether they were affirming agreement with that stance. In this connection, they do not refer to the substantial Yogic and Zen literature that describes methods for increasing our ability to pull aside the screen of socially conditioned conceptions of reality that colors our interpretation of the world. In short, whether or not we can totally bracket, most of us can certainly learn to do so to a much greater extent than we usually do—an extent that makes it a useful and usable skill.

There is a direct parallel between the process of bracketing and the "no interpretation" rule in Gestalt therapy. When the facilitator has a guess about what may be going on, she may use any of a variety of techniques in asking the client to try it on for size—like, "Try this line, and see if it works for you." In so doing, she's trying to grasp the client's world of experience as it is for that person, which is precisely the phenomenological stance, and help the client open up and see into that personal world. But if the client says, "no, that's not right," she lets go of that possibility and follows what comes up next. So in the working process, instead of interpretations to which we are committed, the Gestalt practitioner has a series of hypotheses which emerge one after another, are tried out, and are dropped (which is akin to bracketing them after mentioning them rather than beforehand) if they do not prove useful.

Carl Rogers did something similar, in a different way. When he reflected back the meanings or underlying feelings in what a person was saying, often he deepened or expanded them to include what he thought he heard the person was saying. Often the client would reply, "Yes, and furthermore. . . ." But if the client said "not exactly," then Carl dropped (bracketed) his hypothesis and stayed with the client's world of experience as it was for him or her. Although both were primarily clinicians rather than researchers, Perls and Rogers appear closer to the conceptions of empirical phenomenology than those of hermaneutical phenomenology.

For the latter we can turn to Milton Erikson, who used a great deal of storytelling in his therapy, and to recent initiatives in narrative psychology. The counselor's tales of his own experience which was similar to the client's may be valuable, as may be reading a story or watching a movie that deals with similar issues. Thereby the person learns, in Rogers' words, that "what is most personal is most universal." Hein and Austin's description of hermaneutical psychology is "must reading" for anyone seriously interested in the process but not well versed in it, and sufficiently detailed that I will not try to summarize it here. They do an excellent job of elucidating the point that "method for method's sake is resisted," and of pointing out that creativity and innovation in methodology is a hallmark of the hermaneutic approach.

A major phenomenological method which their article leaves out, dialogical phenomenology (Daniels, 2001), is of particular interest here for two reasons. One is that it is the easiest to incorporate into a class or training program, and the other is that it is closer to clinical or counseling intervention than either empirical or hermaneutical phenomenology. One person interviews the other while bracketing his or her own personal reactions as fully as possible, and then after the interview, goes back over the interview notes and involves the co-researcher in the thematizing process. I have found that this usually works marvellously, and often has a profound effect on participants, even when done as a class exercise. The minimim practical time is an hour, although longer is better. The researcher interviews the co-researcher about some matter important to the latter, while bracketing her own feelings and trains of personal association, for twenty minutes. Then the researcher involves the co-researcher in the thematizing process, right there on the spot. After that they reverse roles. (It can also be done as an outside-class task with no time pressure.) In their subsequent writeup, each person describes the co-researcher's experiential world as it was articulated, identifies the major themes, and describes how the process was for him or her, including any difficulties encountered.

This is not so far removed from a therapeutic, counseling, or coaching process. Rogers found that the mere fact of feeling truly heard, truly listened to, could be profoundly helpful to his clients. After this exercise, people have said such things as "I've never felt heard so well before," or "I've never listened to anyone so well before. I had no idea that my own thoughts and feelings were getting in the way of hearing the other person so much."

This process can include borrowing "paying attention to the obvious" from Gestalt therapy, including noticing the other person's body language, gestures, and manner of speaking, and including them in the material that is discussed during the thematizing process.

Gestalt therapy is of course much more than a phenomenology. There is a spectrum of conceptual material and methods of intervention to help clients work through the blocks, anxieties, and inhibitions they identify, and develop new capacities that will lead to a transformation of their experience. There is also an enactive dimension, a somatic dimension, and a bringing of what is "talked about" into the realm of being directly experienced. But it is also, in a very basic sense, an existential phenomenology in the sense of helping each person achieve a direct, personal sense of her own experience, and to distinguish between that and what others have told her is her exprience.

Also outside the scope of the methods addressed by Hein and Austin is "individual phenomenology," which is applied by a researcher in endeavoring to understand his or her own experience rather than that of another person. In this approach, researchers use their own real and imaginary experiences and others' written accounts and theories about similar phenomena to develop a thematic description of a phenomenon. This involves introspective observation in which the researcher assumes an external viewpoint toward oneself, stating the facts about oneself as others might if they could observe what the introspector observes. In her M.A. thesis, one of my students carried out such a study in regard to the experience of being a victim of violent assault; another did so in regard to the experience of living with chronic pain, and yet another to an obsession with physical appearance, which ran the gamut from compulsive cosmetic purchases to plastic surgery, including interviews with plastic surgeons and those who had undergone such surgery. This approach has some overlap with hermeneutical phenomenology, but the focus is on exploring one's own experience rather than that of someone else. In a sense it is a kind of sharply-focused autobiography which emphasizes the interior psychological world more than life's external events.

In the context of research studies of therapeutic and counseling methods, it could prove useful to use the research-oriented phenomenological approaches of identifying themes in the transcripts of various people who are dealing with a common issue, or various people with whom a given working approach is used, to see what kinds of commonalities and differences emerge.

It could also be fruitful to apply a phenomenological research process to people's experience of going through the process of Gestalt Therapy.

References

Anderson, Walter Truett. Open Secrets: A Western Guide to Tibetan Buddhism. New York: Viking, 1979.

Daniels, Victor. "Lecture on Phenomenology." Spring 2001. <http://www.sonoma.edu/people/daniels/phenomlect.html>

Giorgi, Amodeo. Psychology as a Human Science: A Phenomenologically Based Approach. Also, Psychology and Phenomenological Research.

References for all others cited are included in the very extensive liste included with Hein and Austin's article.