Towards The Real World

Comprehensively and systematically, this dissertation combs and expatiates phenomenological psychology in the view of human-science approach of psychology. It tries to define phenomenological psychology, clear up some relevant confusions and misconceptions, make clear its sources of ideas and articulate its evolutionary history. With these in mind, the theoretical approaches of phenomenological psychology are summarized, its research methods are disclosed, its research fields are summed up, and the similarities with and differences from other psychological orientations are illustrated. At the end part of this dissertation, the theoretical characters of phenomenological psychology are concluded, and its advantages and disadvantages are appraised and its future is anticipated.Phenomenological psychology is a strict human-science approach of psychology. With phenomenology as its philosophical foundation, phenomenological psychology opposes dualism and naturalism, seeks for general knowledge beginning with lifeworld and insisting that the essence of mind be intentionality. It's an important constitutional component of the "third force" in psychology, its original state is Husserl's phenomenological psychology and Gottingen's experimental phenomenology and includes European phenomenological psychology and American phenomenological psychology. It exhibits such six theoretical approaches as speculative and experimental phenomenological psychology, empirical and hermeneutical phenomenological psychology, existential and transpersonal phenomenological psychology according to different dimentions. And it develops such four research methods as speculative and experimental, empirical and hermeneutical methods, carrys on a great deal of researches in foundamental field. Its has at least four advantages in that it insists strict human-science view, drives psychology to face toward life itself, advocates working style of being back to things themselves, and facilitates the connection between psychology and philosophy. But it also has its disadvantages, for example, it lacks of integrative theory system and there are much differences in the development levels of its respective components, so it's difficult to be generalized, and it ignores the association between knowledge and society, etc. To summarize, phenomenological psychology will eventually develop toward a real world through a long and hard way of gaining knowledge steadily.