Psychology as a Phenomenological Science

The relationship between psychology and phenomenology is not one that is easily traceable (for a discussion on the difficulties of this see, e.g., Graumann 1991). One of the reasons for this opaque matter is that neither psychology nor phenomenology can be defined as one subject area. Both have developed over time with different persons representing varying approaches and others yet again further developing these new and hybrid versions of the former. The aim of this chapter is thus not to give a complete overview of psychology, in its general umbrella-like term, as a phenomenological science. But rather to trace some early relations between psychology and phenomenology and to depict a selection of classic studies conducted in Austria and Germany at the turn of the last century in order to show how the authors of these studies used phenomenological approaches to understand the mind (in the sense of the German term: Bewusstsein) and human behavior. Furthermore, in outlining some of the main tenants of where phenomenology and psychology have progressed on common grounds, we pay special attention to specific elements belonging to the person–environment relation with the aim of highlighting the need to reintegrate psychological processes and underlying functions of the personal living space in contemporary psychological analyses of every day actions. With this retrospective analysis, the present chapter intends to show that phenomenological approaches—while rare in today’s mainstream psychological research agenda—has a fruitful history in early psychology. We thus begin with a historical reconstruction. The storyline of this reconstruction, however, is told in reversed—we trace a few ending points back to their beginnings. In the second part of this chapter, we then present three case studies of different psychologists using phenomenological approaches for their investigations—namely Kurt Lewin, Martha Muchow, and Gustav Ichheiser—with which we show how phenomenological approaches have historically been implemented. In the last part, we con-