Chapter Learning Outcomes

• Understand phenomenology and the phenomenological method
• Understand the interview assignment “screening” and your upcoming interview proposal requirements
  • Understand how to ask questions aimed at lived experience (instead of abstractions)
  • Understand how to ask questions that are truly open-ended (free of hidden presumptions)
• Appreciate the profound significance of listening and the stories all around us

Preliminary Questions

Consistent with the course learning outcome to "examine how research is conducted in adult development" let us consider the difference between psychological development and development broadly as well as ways of conducting research.

• What does it mean to develop?
• How do we define psychology and the psychological?
• What does it mean to psychologically develop?
• As a course offered by the psychology department, this is a course in psychological development. How might we conduct research on adult psychological development?
• What are some of the ways of conducting research in adult development and aging?   

Qualitative Methods

During your studies of psychology, you have probably heard about qualitative methods.  Qualitative methods in psychology generally refer to descriptive interview methods.  Most of your training in psychology, especially in research courses, will be based on numbers, statistics, and quantitative measurements of variables.  There is nothing necessarily wrong with this, but the philosopher Edmond Husserl was concerned that quantitative approaches aimed at understanding "the psychological" are missing something valuable.  

Qualitative methods in psychology aim at understanding the original subject matter of psychology- consciousness.  Consciousness from con for “with” and scious for “knowing” implies “with/shared knowing.”  The word consciousness depicts a relationship between self and other.  The prominent adult development psychologist Robert Kegan agrees that consciousness can be understood in terms of self and other distinctions that we will discuss in this course; the terms that he uses are subject and object for the understanding of self and other as humans evolve in meaning-making developments of consciousness throughout life.  The ending ness makes consciousness an abstract noun, but consciousness is not a thing. Likewise, darkness is not a thing but an experience of the absence of light. Consciousness is an active lived experience, a way of relating to the world, that might be better understood due to its active properties as a gerund with ing and consciousing.  Consciousness/consciousing as a process of meaning-making might be understood in terms of its embodied, temporal, spatial, and social dimensions of experience. Ultimately, as we are truly sensitive to the embodied, temporal, spatial, and social dimensions of how others are consciously experiencing the world we grow in remarkable ways.  This course will help you to do so.  

For Kegan, most adults have a consciousness depicted by a “socialized mind” (58% of the population). The next evolution in adult development (i.e., consciousness) involves a self-authoring mind (35% of the population). For Jordan Peterson, self-authoring involves taking responsibility for your life as an “individual” that bears the burden of responsibility (i.e., response-ability); it is key to moving one from a “citizen” who is prone to the kinds of pathological beliefs systems that were the worst things that happened in the 20th century as evidenced by unparalleled destruction and death.  So-called “rational” movements away from overtly religious belief systems to implicit religious belief systems, like Marxist, Alt-right, and other us-versus-them ideologies, have beliefs that are "religious-like" but presupposed as true (and not merely religious-like beliefs) and are being imposed with legislative and educational efforts in the United States; they are part of the citizen or socialized consciousness.  Self-authoring involves addressing the world more in ways that take responsibility for one's social self as an individual in order to live more authentically, courageously, and truthfully.  

My Heart Leaps Up

What are your thoughts about Wordsworth's poem?

Phenomenology 

“What we perceive are ‘first and foremost’ not impressions of taste, tone, smell or touch, not even things or object, but meanings.” (Binswanger, 1963, from Being in the World)

Qualitative methods in psychology are sometimes broadly described as "phenomenological methods".  Broadly, phenomenology involves a systematic study of lived experience. The philosopher Edmond Husserl sought to fashion psychology as a genuinely human science focused on understanding the meanings and organizations of experience (e.g., the experience of giving birth for the first time or of being diagnosed with terminal cancer).  There are meaningful patterns and reoccurring structures that tend to occur across experiences.  Husserl sought to shape a science suited to describe these patterns and structures.  He was concerned about the Western sciences, as "objective" sciences, with their strong focus on objective truth and objects.  He said that conventional scientific methods lose the meaning of life as it is lived and consciously experienced, and hoped for human science to better understand "the psychological" dimensions of human experience.  

Amadeo Giorgi followed Husserl and developed a descriptive phenomenological method designed to carefully reveal and describe the patterned structures of experience that tend to emerge across individuals.  Giorgi's descriptive phenomenological method involves five steps, which we will gradually progress through in this course: 

1. assume the phenomenological attitude
2. study the entire written interview for a sense of the whole
3. delineate meaning units
4. transform the meaning units into psychologically sensitive statements of their lived-meanings
5. synthesize a general psychological structure of the experience based on the constituents of the experience

The Phenomenological Attitude

The phenomenological attitude involves curiousness and naivete, a childlike, raw openness to the world.

It is hard to take off your current lens of experience and hold it to the side; Husserl used the term epoche to describe this process of putting your current lens to the side to try and see the world anew, bracketing your presumptions and assumptions about experiences.  One reason that we love children is that they help adults to see the world anew.  For this reason, parents need children as much as children need parents.

How does the phenomenological attitude relate to Wordsworth's poem My Heart Leaps Up?

Interview Guide Notes

• Understand how to ask questions aimed at lived experience (instead of abstractions, opinions, and ideas about why, how, for what reasons, and the impact, etc)...
  • They should start with the setting, what was happening around them… What were they experiencing, perceiving, feeling, thinking (in that order from broad to more specific)
• Understand how to ask questions that are truly open-ended (free of hidden presumptions)

Start with this... Tell me about an experience when you fulfilled one of the most important goals for your life?

When you actually fulfilled this goal do you remember where you were?... [You said… Tell me more about… ] Do you remember what you were experiencing?... Do you remember what you were perceiving?, Do you remember what you were feeling, Do you remember what you were thinking? etc. … [You said… Tell me more about…]

Can you tell me about when this became a goal for you? Do you remember what was going on at that time (when this became a goal for you)? Do you remember what you were experiencing?... Do you remember what you were perceiving?, Do you remember what you were feeling, Do you remember what you were thinking? etc. … [You said… Tell me more about…]

End with this… "Is there anything else that you can share with me that would help me better understand your experience?"

The Stories All Around Us

Every human life has a story. Most human lives involve stories that are absolutely amazing. Even tragic lives wrought with horrific experiences have meaning; they offer us a story in which something can be gained.

Yet, the splendor of the stories that life offers us is difficult to perceive. Some might suggest that this is because of our failure to pay attention and actually hear these stories. Others might suggest that we do not really listen with our hearts, the vital core of our being. While it is true that we do not pay attention, hear, and really listen in this way, a key issue seems to be a matter of perception. Although we can sometimes catch glimpses, we are largely unable to perceive the broader context, the bigger picture in which our lives and the lives around us unfold.

It is particularly difficult to sense the bigger picture during pain and suffering. The story of life has chapters full of adversity and sorrow, and it can take time and perspective for the stories all around us to emerge. It is often a gradual process to get to a place of strength and wisdom about a difficult event, but consider the dramatic difference between being unable to think about or talk about a difficult chapter of life and actually having a story to tell.

Dan McAdams (2001) highlights the difference between life stories that are wrought with contamination sequences (e.g., Things were alright until my father would come home) versus redemption sequences (e.g., My father was a drug addict, but I am a stronger person because of it). The former is associated with depression and negative outcomes, while the latter is associated with life satisfaction and a sense of life coherence. For McAdams, we provide our lives with unity and purpose by developing narratives of the self, but sometimes it is difficult to get to a place of coherence. Until we get there, we can only catch glimpses of the meaning(s) of our existence and the majesty of those around us by writing, sharing, and listening to the stories that are all around us.

Writing Our Story

James Pennebaker and his colleagues (YEAR) have demonstrated the remarkable benefits of writing our stories about traumatic personal experiences. Simple exercises like writing about a traumatic experience on three separate occasions¹ have been associated with varied physical benefits including reduced visits to physicians at two months, six months, and over a year after writing, improved immune system functioning, antibody, and natural killer cell levels, improved GPA, and reemployment following job loss (Pennebaker, 1997).

It is important to note that the positive effects of writing in these studies were not the result of “getting it off your chest” or “venting” strong emotions. Sigmund Freud’s popularized ideas about the benefits of catharsis, i.e., the process of releasing, and thereby obtaining relief from, strong or repressed emotions, have been proven false (Lilienfeld, 2011). The commonly held belief that it is better to express anger and aggression than to hold it in is largely a myth (Lilienfeld, 2011).

The health benefits that Pennebaker discovered were related to making sense of traumatic experiences through writing stories. In a subsequent study, Pennebaker (YEAR) demonstrated how merely expressing the emotion of a traumatic experience through dance without writing did not provide health benefits. Pennebaker (1997) found that it was the writing on three consecutive occasions which enabled participants to make sense of their stories; what were initially “poorly organized descriptions” developed into “coherent stories” (p. 165). Following Jonathan Haidt (YEAR), we might say, “Blessed are the sense makers, for they shall discover their stories.”²

You may be surprised that such a basic activity, like writing, even without sharing it with others, can offer such significant psychological and physical benefits, but there is something particularly powerful about a story. Nothing seems to grab and hold onto one’s attention as well as a story, and one can be thoroughly captivated/held captive in this way. Thus, story-telling may be the oldest, most effective form of teaching. Stories almost always have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They have a structure with a resolution or some kind of take-away, and they convey lessons and meaning in ways that can be absolutely profound. Moreover, stories have a quality of boundlessness, and every story-telling offers more to learn and gain.

In this way, the act of describing and organizing a story involves psychological, meaning-making processes, which are central to the mental and physical benefits of discovering our story. This is evident in a study by Ullrich and Lutgendorf (2002) in which both groups wrote about the emotions associated with their traumatic experiences, but the second group was also instructed to find meaning and discover their stories. Instructions to the second group were as follows:

We would like you to keep a journal of your deepest thoughts and feelings about this topic over the next month. We are particularly interested in understanding how you have tried to make sense of this situation and what you tell yourself about it to help you deal with it. If the situation you're describing does not yet make sense to you, or it is difficult to deal with, describe how you are trying to understand it, make sense of it, and deal with it and how your feelings may change about it. (p. #)

The second group demonstrated the health benefits of discovering their stories; they reported less severe physical illnesses and visited their physicians less frequently. The other group, who merely expressed their emotions, did not obtain physical health benefits. Overall, these meaning-making discoveries and these glimpses of the stories around us (i.e., perhaps glimpses of who we really are) provide demonstrable benefits to our mental and physical health.

Dillon (2011) taught many years of graduate and undergraduate courses on the psychology of spiritual life-writing, which allowed him the opportunity to study countless spiritual autobiographies as well as many of his students’ written stories. He describes his observations this way:

Meaning of our life is not an idea or ethical principle we discover, but a dynamic force or image that has been hard at its integrative, deepening, and enlivening work over the course of our lives whether we have been aware of it or not. When we experience drift or meaninglessness in life, it is because we have lost experiential contact with this dynamic gestalt [or whole], this force that holds our existence together. In such moments or periods, life seems empty, not from a lack of particular sensations or experiences, or from any lack of thoughts or ideas, but from an absence of a deeply felt sense of coherence and integration. (p. 151)

He continues:

It is, indeed, a genuine psychological and therapeutic achievement for a person to bring this central image into conscious awareness and use it to gain a sense of the meaning of one’s life and the direction it is seeking to go in the future. One way of gaining more familiarity with this image at the heart of one’s life is by attempting to write a spiritual autobiography. (p. 151)

Overall, writing about our lives and struggles provides the opportunity for us to discover meaning as a dynamic force or image that brings our life together. We can sense the gestalt- or the bigger picture- in which our own life unfolds. The profound meanings and lessons of life, the great teacher, can become more conscious to us, and this relates to measurable psychological and physiological benefits.

Writing about our lives, even when we do not share it with others, is one way that we can begin to perceive ourselves. In a small way, who we really are becoming more apparent when we perceive our own story. We can begin to perceive ourselves and others with more depth and clarity, and although there are limits to our perception, we can also catch glimpses of the splendor of the stories that are all around us by sharing and listening.

Sharing Our Story

Our story can emerge as we share it with others, and one of the purposes of psychotherapy involves aspects of uncovering and discovering one’s story. Sometimes our story can be difficult to disclose to others. Uncovering our story in this way involves a risk and vulnerability³, which simultaneously opens us up to both positive and negative extremes: rejection/connection, shame⁴/love, stagnation/growth. There is no assurance that disclosure will result in connection, love, or growth, and it might be the opposite! It seems that “The fear of rejection, the fear that we do not belong, are not accepted, or have no meaningful relationships is the greatest fear and anxiety of all” (Slife, 2009, p. 1). Sometimes disclosure will benefit us, sometimes it will harm us, and we can never know for sure. Disclosure is an act of faith and hope. Yet, so it is when falling in love, starting a new career, and having a child; one must become vulnerable, exposed to the potential for suffering and heartache in order to grow. There seems to be a letting go, a shedding of one’s outer shell, an uncovering which can be the start of discovering.

During the Victorian era, which was marked by sexual repression, Sigmund Freud observed that mere disclosure itself was often therapeutic. Freud discovered “talking cures” for forms of neurological illness that would grow into modern-day psychotherapy, and now the therapist-client relationship is a sacred place for uncovering one’s story through privileged disclosure. The therapist-client relationship is prefigured by the priest-penitent relationship, which was structured for centuries to capitalize on the healing benefits of confession, disclosure, and the potential for ensuing discovery. The presence of another person, who is thoroughly present and listening, opens a new world of possibility.

Listening to Others’ Stories

Sharing our story is tied with another person’s ability to listen and receive a new world of experience. The act of sharing our story goes beyond the mere act of writing, which brings benefits even if the story is not read by others. Rather, sharing requires listening, and giving is tied to receiving. Listening paradoxically involves giving and receiving; it is passive and active.

True listening is an act of love and generosity. Carl Rogers and Richard Farson (1987) describe how the act of listening communicates the following:

I’m interested in you as a person, and I think that what you feel is important. I respect your thoughts, and even if I don’t agree with them, I know that they are valid for you. I feel sure that you have a contribution to make. I’m not trying to change you or evaluate you. I just want to understand you. I think you’re worth listening to.

In this way listening speaks and conveys that the other is more than what we conceive of them to be.

There are those who more frequently appreciate the absolute uniqueness of another person’s life and story. These individuals tend to listen better than others, as they can put their own experience to the side. Rather than assimilate the meaning of another’s experience into their own, (e.g., I know what that is like! It is just like when I…), they are more likely to appreciate an opportunity to try and perceive the world from another person’s perspective. They tend to perceive that this person’s world is a fundamentally different world. They tend to ask wide-eyed, curious questions, like, “What did you think?” “How did you feel?”

Those who listen in this way demonstrate three qualities that Carl Rogers (YEAR) believed would inevitably lead to another’s psychological growth: unconditional positive regard, empathy, and authenticity. When Rogers embodied these qualities, he was able to listen in remarkable and effective ways. This seems to have emerged from his appreciation for moments when someone gave him the gift of active listening

When I have been listened to and when I have been heard, I am able to re-perceive my world in a new way and to go on. It is astonishing how elements that seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens, how confusions that seem irremediable turn into relatively clear flowing streams when one is heard. I have deeply appreciated the times that I have experienced this sensitive, empathic, concentrated listening.

Individuals like Rogers and those depicted above have personality profiles that tend to be high on openness to experience and are receptive to many varieties of experience (McCrae, 1994). Openness to experience is a superordinate trait related to six sub-facets: having wide interests and being intellectually curious, imaginative, artistic, attentive to feelings, and unconventional. Individuals who score high on openness to experience are not passive recipients of experiences that they cannot screen out, but they actively seek out new and original experiences. It is noteworthy that openness to experience reaches its heights in emerging and early adulthood and then gradually declines throughout life. True listening enables vicarious experiences that may help renew us and keep us young at heart as our individual tastes, preferences, and values become more solidified and we become less open to experience throughout life (SOURCE, YEAR).

Those who are inclined towards asking questions about human experience, which includes some psychologists, philosophers, and others, sometimes carefully examine the lived experience of human beings as they undergo certain kinds of experiences. This examination of the kinds of sensations and perceptions, thoughts and feelings, and meaning-making that are associated with human being is called phenomenology. Much more can be said about phenomenology, but phenomenology might simply be understood as a kind of careful, systematic, and even scientific listening.

Overall, the stories that are all around us are conduits that reveal the magnificence of others. Our stories should be written, they should be shared, and most of all we should listen as we have the capacity to change and transform our lives.

Stories of Change and Transformation

One type of story that sometimes rises above the rest and echoes many of the truths embodied in major religious and philosophical traditions is life-altering change and transformation. Stories about sudden realizations and deep, lasting changes showcase how we are more than we perceive ourselves to be. They also illustrate how the presence of another who is open, accepting, and listening can be vital for transformation.

I interviewed individuals that reported moments in their lives in which they had an insight and became a different person (Skalski, 2013). Each person had discovered a new story about themselves and their lives; as I asked questions, recorded and transcribed the interviews, and systematically studied their stories (i.e., phenomenology), I observed that these individuals were often suffering prior to emotionally-charged realizations that would serve to reconstruct understandings of themselves and their relationships to the world⁵.

Initially, I was somewhat surprised that these individuals were suffering so consistently, but I came to appreciate how their sorrow and hardships motivated powerful changes. As an example, one participant totally lost his business; he had to sell his home and he couldn’t sleep due to the financial stress. He was physically shaking due to stress and anxiety. He said, “I never felt worse than I had at that time… it was destroying me, mentally and emotionally. My psyche was just in a very dark place… well at the time, life felt like it was just going to end.” He would eventually realize that he could let go of thinking of himself as a successful business professional. He came to know that he was more than what he conceived of himself to be; he realized that his own self-perception and self-understanding was limited. There was a new direction in his storyline.

Although there was dramatic suffering before such insights could really take hold and revolutionize self-understandings, these individuals were not alone. Miller and C’de Baca’s (1994, 2001) investigations of sudden change revealed two types of transformation; the insightful type was characterized by a sudden, sometimes surprising, realization about life challenges, identity, and/or reality. The mystical type, was similar to the insightful type, but was also accompanied by the presence of an outside source. For Miller and C’de Baca, the presence of a perceived other often related to dramatic change. In my research, even insightful experiences were marked by the consistent presence of another. For example, the participant who lost his business did not have a mystical experience, and experienced the presence of his wife this way, “She gave me words of affirmation and tried to help me, you know, through this hard time or whatever. She was just, you know, always there... Kind of like oxygen.”

Even though the participants experienced supportive others in their lives, whether through a spouse or through a loving and accepting Presence, the participants also paradoxically experienced a kind of isolation. They realized that they, alone, were responsible for creating/recreating themselves, and Irvin Yallom (YEAR) explains that “to the extent that one is responsible for one's life, one is alone. Responsibility implies authorship.” and, “Deep loneliness is inherent in the act of self-creation.” (p. #). For Yallom there is a kind of unbridgeable gulf between our life and another life in this way; the choices that we make are ours alone. The sense that one, alone, wields the power to shape the meaning and significance of one’s life is often overwhelming, and the presence of an accepting other can be central in accepting the otherness inherent in change.

Overall, dramatic forms of life-altering change are often initially characterized by psychological disintegration and emotional suffering, and the presence of an accepting other serves a vital role in psychological growth and development. Calhoun and Tedeschi’s (2004) work on posttraumatic growth describes both the psychological disintegration and the importance of social support. They compare trauma to an earthquake that can severely shake, threaten, or reduce to rubble one’s schematic structures for understanding, decision making, and meaningfulness (p. 5). One’s fundamental assumptions, especially those about benevolence, predictability, and controllability, as they relate to one’s safety, identity, and future can be challenged (p. 5). They extend the seismic metaphor by comparing cognitive processing and restructuring to the physical rebuilding after an earthquake:

The physical structures can be designed to be more resistant to shocks in the future, as the community learns from the earthquake what has withstood the shaking and what has not. Cognitive rebuilding that takes into account the changed reality of one's life after trauma produces schemas that incorporate the trauma and possible events in the future, and that are more resistant to being shattered. These results are experienced as growth. (p. 5)

They describe the role of stable social support as vital in this process of psychological rebuilding.

These experiences of transformation are a testament to the reality that human beings can change in significant ways. Even the more dramatic examples of transformation which are experienced in terms of before and after an event, often gradually unfold as a process of meaning-making. In this way, stories of transformation collectively convey the freedom we have to change and to shape our lives, they convey the essential support that others can provide us, and they have much to show us if we write, share, and really listen.

Active Learning Activities

Write a few sentences elaborating on what phenomenology means in your own words.

Tried InterViews- It can be very effective to practice listening/interviewing skills in triads that allow the third person to be an observer and provide feedback.  Decide who will interview, who will talk about one of the best experiences they have had being a student, and who will be the observer.  Then rotate from observer to interviewer, interviewer to the interviewee, and interviewee to the observer.  

Consider a time when you were able to tell a story about some aspect of your life differently, and it shaped the world differently

Footnotes

1. Pennebaker’s studies often used the following prompt: “For the next 3 days, I would like for you to write about your very deepest thoughts and feelings about the most traumatic experience of your entire life. In your writing, I’d like you to really let go and explore your very deepest emotions and thoughts. You might tie this trauma to your childhood, your relationships with others, including parents, lovers, friends or relatives. You may also link this event to your past, your present or your future, or to who you have been, who you would like to be, or who you are now. You may write about the same general issues or experiences on all days of writing or about different topics each day. Not everyone has had a single trauma but all of us have had major conflicts or stressors—and you can write about these as well. All of your writing will be completely confidential. Don’t worry about spelling, sentence structure, or grammar. The only rule is that once you begin writing, continue to do so until your time is up.”
2. Here I add to the words of Haidt (YEAR) “Blessed Are the Sense Makers” from his chapter on the Uses of Adversity in the Happiness Hypothesis.
3.  I draw from the work of Brene Brown and recommend her TED Talk The Power of Vulnerability, which is one of the most-viewed TED Talks of all time.
4. Shame is debilitating psychologically and will be considered in more detail as it relates to our attributions and misattributions about ourselves and others in Chapter 5.
5. Suffering is a consistent theme in what is referred to as second-wave positive psychology.  The field of positive psychology developed in the 1990s as Martin Seligman and others built on humanism’s emphasis on growth and development, but distinctively embraced methods of study that were more strongly scientific.  Initially, positive psychology focused on topics like gratitude and optimism, but has more recently investigated suffering and the “dark-side” of growth and development.