The Person at the Core of Psychological Science

Abstract

The paper has been written from aphilosophical perspective and triggered by the recurrent discussions in psychology about the most suitable methods to study our multifaceted subjectivity. Its main point is that aphenomenological understanding of the human person provides arobust and also flexible philosophical framework for psychology. The first part discusses three classical distinctions –individual/general; explaining/understanding; induction/interpretation– which, in spite of possible deficiencies, are useful to illustrate the specificity of the human sciences relative to the natural sciences. If not understood as an either-or dichotomy these distinctions represent the search of the right balance to reflect the complexity and richness of psychological science. The second part presents the phenomenological notions of ‘vital reduction’ and ‘personalist reduction’, where reductions does not take on an eliminativistic meaning, but of directing the mind’s gaze to attend to what is originally the case. The ‘vital reduction’ reveals asubject of experience at the center of the lifeworld, and the ‘personalist reduction’ sees in rationality –i.e., the power to grasp the meaning of things and to recognize other subjects of experience –adeeper dimension of the subject, who we can thus call aperson. Psychology and phenomenology converge in disclosing the person-centeredness of our lifeworld.