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It is worth [[looking ]] at its use in these two spheres before examining its [[relationship ]] to [[psychoanalytic ]] [[thought]].

In [[philosophy]], the [[word ]] was introduced by the [[German ]] Johann Heinrich Lambert as a designation for an empirical description of [[human ]] [[experience ]] devoid of all metaphysical presuppositions.

This [[meaning ]] is still current. Borrowing somewhat from the study of [[perception ]] and from [[history]], [[Hegel ]] used the word in his <i>Phenomenology of [[Mind]]</i> (1931) to evoke the [[stages ]] ([[consciousness]], [[self]]-consciousness, [[reason]]) whereby human experience, after passing through the [[universal]], appeared first as the experience of [[concrete ]] singularity and then as the quest for the self-[[conscious ]] [[subject]]. This quest, destined to fail, led humanity through the forms of stoicism, skepticism, and finally phrenology, for which the mind's [[being ]] in the [[world ]] is literally a bone (the phrenologist Franz Joseph Gall claimed that bumps on the cranium corresponded to [[psychological ]] functions). The [[dialectic ]] of history, far from being imposed from without, manifested itself in and through this evolution of experience.These two senses of "phenomenology" coexisted until 1913, when Edmund [[Husserl]], in the first volume of his <i>[[Ideas]]: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology</i> (1931), used the term to designate whatever clearly manifests itself after the problem of the [[existence ]] of the world has been bracketed, in [[order ]] to describe how the transcendent elements of the world, including [[other ]] selves and [[cultural ]] beings, appear in perception, in [[imagination]], in [[memory]], and as essences. Consciousness in this perspective is always consciousness of something, that is, [[intentionality]]; phenomenological description excludes [[introspection]].Husserl's disciples were largely heterodox. In [[Germany]], his descriptive method helped Martin [[Heidegger ]] situate man's existence as being for [[death]], that is, as a derelict and inauthentic being in the world. Max Scheler, for his part, pressed Husserl's phenomenology into service for his account of "the man of resentment." In [[France]], Maurice [[Merleau-Ponty ]] used the term when discussing the incarnation of consciousness in the bodies of [[humans ]] acting in history. Jean-[[Paul ]] [[Sartre]], in <i>The [[Psychology ]] of Imagination</i> ([[1948]]), argued that consciousness does not [[present ]] the subject to himself, and that one's ego is an inhabitant of the world, on a par with the ego of the other.

In psychiatry, there is a similar dichotomy with respect to the use of "phenomenology." For [[Karl Jaspers]], the word meant the [[subjective ]] aspect of [[clinical ]] [[psychiatric ]] [[practice]], and he proposed a [[distinction ]] between [[knowing ]] (<i>erklären</i>) and [[understanding ]] (<i>verstehen</i>), according to which knowing implied an [[objective ]] and [[natural ]] [[knowledge]], whereas understanding referred to an intuitive [[feeling]]. Jaspers regarded the failure of such spontaneous understanding as the distinguishing mark of [[psychosis]], thus incorporating a [[notion ]] of process in his view of the disorder. Jaspers's usage was quickly and widely adopted in Anglo-American psychiatry, where "phenomenology" tends to mean simply the lived experience of [[patients]].[[Another ]] psychiatric acceptation, just as important, derives explicitly from Husserl and Heidegger. In German-[[language ]] psychiatry, Viktor von Gebsattel, Erwin Straus, especially Ludwig Binswanger, and later Roland Kuhn and Wolfgang Blankenburg, despite their considerable divergences, were all concerned to show how each basic type of [[psychopathology ]] corresponded to a [[particular ]] mode of being in the world (Heidegger), or a particular mode of the [[transcendental ]] ego (Husserl). <i>Daseinsanalyse</i> (being-in-the-world [[analysis]]) as a therapeutic [[technique ]] belonged to this tendency.Within [[French ]] psychiatry too there were distinct positions with respect to phenomenology. Eugène Minkowski meticulously showed how various basic pathological situations expressed specific alterations in the subject's relationships to [[time ]] and [[space]]. Minkowski also recognized the part played by subjective impressions of the clinician in arriving at a diagnosis. Henri Ey built on phenomenology and [[existentialism ]] in seeking to transcend clinical [[empiricism ]] and arrive at an [[organic]]-[[dynamic ]] [[synthesis ]] and a conception of psychiatry as a [[pathology ]] of [[freedom]].

It is arguable that phenomenology should be expected not to furnish psychiatry with yet one more [[theory]], but rather to describe the [[conditions ]] that make psychiatry possible and to clarify the [[place ]] and the roles of psychiatric knowledge without, however, reducing such knowledge to phenomenology."The relations between phenomenological attitudes and [[psychoanalysis]], which are neither simple nor schematic, may be viewed from various angles. To begin with, for phenomenology, the existence of the [[unconscious ]] is far from a central concern, as some in psychoanalysis have asserted. After all, as we have seen, consciousness for phenomenology is defined in [[terms ]] of intentionality, and introspection is [[barred ]] as a source of knowledge. Also, if, as Sartre contends, the subject truly [[exists ]] in the world in the phenomenological [[sense]], and if the ego is not immanent, the phenomenological view (though it cannot [[speak ]] of "the unconscious") can acknowledge that the subject escapes his own grasp—a postulate readily embraced as early as the [[work ]] of Hegel. The charge that the unconscious is reified in this context [[need ]] not be taken seriously.Phenomenological knowledge, being essentially descriptive, is hard put to achieve any clear standing within an [[economic ]] perspective, the perspective of [[metapsychology]]. This is a very significant divergence between phenomenology and psychoanalysis.Though they hail from cultural realms far removed from one another, psychoanalysis and phenomenology may be said to have at least one [[thing ]] in common: neither is a [[humanist ]] theory. Neither admits any assumptions prior to what is shown by clinical experience or phenomenological reduction; neither posits a priori that humanity is the measure, [[good ]] or bad, of all things; neither in advance gives humanity [[sovereignty ]] over itself; and both can acknowledge the [[role ]] of conflicts and of seeking to avoid conflicts.

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:

# Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. (1931). The phenomenology of mind (J. B. Baillie, Trans.). [[London]]: G. Allen and Unwin. (Original work published 1807.)