The Method of Eidetic Analysis for Psychology

Amedeo Giorgi has asserted that the two key procedures that make psychological research genuinely phenomenological are: 1) the epochés: and 2) the intuition of essence. Giorgi’s insistence on this point is reviewed and the often-misunderstood method of grasping essences is explored. Attention is given to Husserl’s ideas about free imaginative variation and the procedures of eidetic analysis. Examination is made of how Husserl used his method to determine the essence of "psychological phenomena", and of the demands the essential characteristics of psychological subject matter place on the discipline. Implications for the sciences, especially for psychology’s use of the phenomenological method, are spelled out. Basic practices in phenomenological psychological research are addressed, including the roles played by the investigator’s imagination, by descriptions of others’ real lives, and by literary and artistic works in eidetic research. Post-modern critiques of essentialism and of skepticism concerning "essences" are challenged in light of a clarification of the procedure. Finally, it is argued with Giorgi that eidetic analysis is crucial for a genuine science of psychology. As post-positivist and post-modernist thought has emerged and taken hold, the idea of "essence" has lost favor. Critiques of foundationalism and essentialism are common in both mainstream and avant-garde approaches to human science. Attempting to know the essential qualities of psychological subject matter is thought to involve a false sense of certainty and infallibility, an insensitivity to context and differences among diverse peoples, an ossification of the fluid and dynamic, an intolerance of ambiguity, an assumption of rigid predetermination in human life, and a detachment from existence. Claims about essences are thought to involve problems of dogmatism, universalism, reductionism, idealism, and even biological determinism. On account of inevitable limits of sampling data and of researcher biases and fallibility, assertions of essence are viewed as ignoring such important contexts as gender, culture, and age. Does not essentialism open the door to sexism, racism, ethnocentrism, and ageism? Do not assertions of essence, missing the multiform and changeable character of psychological life, translate politically into totalitarianism and a denial of human freedom? 282 The Method of Eidetic Analysis for Psychology Les Collectifs du Cirp Volume 1 (édition spéciale), pp. 281-300. © 2010 – Cirp (Cercle interdisciplinaire de recherches phénoménologiques) ISBN 978-0-9866654-1-7 Giorgi (1989, 2008) has consistently insisted that the intuition of essences is one of the two defining procedures of phenomenological psychological research. It is ironic that a necessary procedure of phenomenology, indeed its methodological sine qua non, would be thought to entail the problems of the very isms that this approach has so strenuously attempted to resolve. Are the principles and procedures designed to guide the intuition of essences, the method of eidetic analysis, self-deluded or at least naïve and passé? Some psychologists who are sympathetic with phenomenology have responded by identifying it as a movement and by taking the existential and hermeneutic turn with Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre; the ethical turn with Lévinas; the narrative turn with Ricoeur, or even a constructionist turn, which make the study of essences a footnote to history. As interest in qualitative research methods grows in the human sciences, fundamental analytic procedures are of great concern. Some contemporary research that presents itself as phenomenological neither mentions nor makes use of the method of eidetic analysis. Is the intuition of essences, as Giorgi suggests, truly necessary for human science? This chapter addresses the topic of the intuition of essences, which has not been well understood in the qualitative research movement. Here, I will reaffirm Husserl’s view that in order to proceed soundly from a scientific, social and ethical standpoint, human scientists must understand and employ the procedure of eidetic analysis throughout their research and theorizing. I will focus on the nature of this procedure and the general importance of eidetic psychology rather than offer an account of the ways that eidetic analysis has been and can be employed in specific psychological research. Another limit of this chapter is that although I will touch on the link between eidetic and empirical research in psychology, the complexities of this relationship and the details of an eidetically grounded empirical psychology will not be elaborated.