Phenomenology and psychotherapy: Introducing the phenomenological attitude to psychotherapy trainees

Abstract

Instead of focusing on the theoretical issues of phenomenology, the emphasis of the paper is more on the pedagogical aspects of and questions about how to introduce phenomenology into psychotherapy training. For this purpose, I have completed an overview of the existing presentations of phenomenology in introductory literature (books, textbooks and articles available in English). Additionally, I try to show the difficulties that trainees face and relate these to theoretical controversies. Finally, I propose a slightly changed theoretical ground as a general approach for introducing phenomenology and illustrate it with a practical/experiential way of working with trainees.