Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences

Exploring phenomenological interviews

Vol. 21 (1)

Svetlana Sholokhova, Valeria Bizzari, Thomas Fuchs (ed)

This special issue focuses on a recently developed tool for collecting qualitative data about the patient’s experience and situation: the phenomenological interview. Usually, this is a semi-structured interview informed by phenomenological concepts (such as temporality, corporeality, intersubjectivity, etc.) that allow clinicians and researchers to grasp the experience of a person as it is actually lived through by her and to analyse it within the theoretical framework of phenomenological philosophy. The benefit of the phenomenological interview lies in the specific access that it gives to the subjective experience of persons involved in the clinical encounter (Nordgaard et al., 2012). This shift helps to overcome a mere biological perspective on psychiatric illness and to arrive at a more comprehensive view of psychiatric diagnosis and treatment: “any serious study of the mind, or ‘psyche’ must involve the consideration of consciousness, subjectivity, or the first-person point of view” (Parnas et al., 2012, p. 5).