Frank asked:

I am a psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst (plain vanilla Freudian) I have recently been studying
Phenomenology (Jaspers) but am confused by several matters.

(1) Just what constitutes a Phenomenological "analysis", and just what is it's aim and method?

If the answer is "to appreciate or understand another's "BEING", then what is that? I think I
understand this but I am not certain.

If this is merely to elucidate this "being", then what is the purpose in doing that? Since Jaspers was a
Psychiatrist like myself, was there a therapeutic aim...or was it merely something of a voyeuristic
activity on the part of the analyst.. and maybe even for the "patient" (?) To know just to know, like
some of "hollywood analysands", a fashion or fad.

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This is difficult to answer because I would not like to lead a professional astray on the basis of only
having read Jaspers' paper "The Phenomenological Approach in Psychopathology" which, however,
seems very clear. It is in the British Journal of Psychoanalysis(1968) 114, 1313-1323.

The aim of Jaspers' phenomenology is to acquire knowledge of the subjective experiential world of a
patient, where the phenomena which it aims to describe, in furtherance of this understanding, is
conscious and individualistic, since no two patients will be alike in all experiential respects. "Being" is
a difficult, vague, general term and should be abandoned in favour of the notion of subjectivity or the
inner mental life of a patient. Phenomenology aims to describe the qualitative nature of specific
experiences such as pseudo-hallucination with reference to other qualitative experiential states, an
example being the connection between pseudo-hallucination and normal voluntary formation of
images. Whilst the former is clear cut and involuntary, the latter is incomplete and voluntary. The
point of this investigation, defining psychic phenomena in relation to other elements of such
phenomena, is that it describes the mind itself rather than reducing the psychic to alien states such as
the firing of brain fibres and tries to understand what the mental is like, free of psychological theory.
Each individual will have a variety of phenomenological states which it may not be possible to pick out
and define as easily as hallucination, which is common, but this is the initial approach.

Phenomenological knowledge will then be a body of knowledge about mental experiences which will
help the psychiatrist to understand his patients, or will "enrich" his understanding. It does not mean
you need to abandon psychiatric treatment.

However, the method of phenomenology is not compatible with taking a Freudian attitude to a patient
since to achieve an understanding of another's inner experience the psychiatrist must empathise,
which is "self-immersion in other people's self-description". To listen to someone as having a form of
neurosis described by Freudian theory, for instance, is to adopt a theoretical stance, which is to
impose your ideas onto a patient rather than to try to understand what things are like for him.

This may be a fashion, but it is not voyeuristic unless it is to satisfy some warped pleasure of the
patient and analyst which is unlikely.

Rachel Browne