Human Beings Make Sense of Things

In the early-1900s, Edmund Husserl sought to provide psychology with a truly scientific basis, not by copying the physical sciences but through the description of conscious experiences. This would be a truly humanistic psychology, grounded in human life and experience rather than materialistic and mechanistic theories like functionalism and behaviorism. Karl Jaspers called for a psychology that would describe phenomena such as "hallucinations, delusions, dreams, expressions, motor activity, and gestures" for the "person as a whole" (Churchill and Wertz, 2001, p. 247). This holistic or Gestalt psychology is dedicated to the search for the authentic self, and to heal the "hollow' men and women of our time who have lost touch with themselves" (Churchill and Wertz, p. 248). Intentionality is one of the key assumptions of phenomenological psychology in which "experience must be grasped holistically and a relationship in which the subject relates to...
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