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The term '[[phenomenology]]' has been used in [[philosophy]] since the late eighteenth century and in [[psychiatry]] since the beginning of the twentieth.
<ref>phenomenology (297-8) CD</ref>
==more==
Phenomenology
The philosophical psychology of Brentano and Husserl (another of his pupils) was, at heart, Kantian and held that the contents of conscious thought are shaped by rule-governed judgments that engage the subject with objects in the world. The subject identifies certain general features of any object (shared with other objects of that type) in virtue of which it is a significant feature of the subject's experience. The judgments are potentially subject to critical scrutiny and reveal a reality that is thinkable.
Husserl realized that norms govern meaningful experience, which is produced when the subject applies cognitive skills to his interaction with the world. The norms embody validated ways of conceptualizing experience rooted in a natural language. On this reading, the contents of consciousness are subject to a reflective appraisal according to publicly endorsed criteria of "making things meaningful." Freud then argues that it is otherwise with the contents of the unconscious (as noted by Church).
The role of language recalls Frege's claim that the contents of a thought are given by a well-formed sentence and the (objective) meanings of the words comprising it (a thesis shared by Husserl). Conscious thoughts are clear and distinct in so far as their content can be expressed in language with its implicitly logical structure. Mental acts falling short of this standard are in the (logically messy) domain of association, imagination, poetry, or rhetoric. Philosophy (and therefore science), concerned as it is with objective truth and logical deduction, therefore is limited in the delineation of psychosemantics, particularly that which informs the unconscious (of vast interest to Freud, Wundt, Head, and the aphasiologists).
The Freudian theoretical framework for Lacan's theory is therefore as follows:
1. The contents of consciousness essentially concern objects in and features of the world (i.e., they are intentional—the phenomenological claim).
2. These things figure in conscious thought as they are classified according to publicly validated norms (a claim endorsed by Husserl and Frege).
3. The relevant norms are socioculturally determined through language (a thesis prominent in post-Freudian and post-Wittgensteinian analyses).
4. The contents of conscious thought and reflection are structured by discursive norms (common to phenomenology, Frege, and Kant).
5. The mind, to the extent it goes beyond the logic of language, shapes subjective psychic content unconstrained by these norms (a psychoanalytic claim).
6. The mind causally interacts with the world because its functions are realized by the workings of the central nervous system (a Darwinian thesis).
These foundations allow us to explore Lacan's version of psychoanalysis.
==See Also==
* [[Ludwig Binswanger]]
