Maria Gyemant and Françoise Dastur, “Editors’ Introduction: Phenomenology and Psychopathology”, Studia Phaenomenologica, Volume 26 / 2026
Phenomenology was conceived by Edmund Husserl as the rigorous and objective science of subjectivity. Its aim is to explore subjectivity in a way far more complete than empirical psychology could ever do, since it describes not simply the experience of an empirical (individual) subject, but the exhaustive sum of psychical potentialities belonging to the transcendental ego (Husserl 1976). Phenomenology can indeed be conceived as Husserl’s answer to his own criticism of the philosophical psychology of his time, against which he bran- dished the accusation of psychologism. While the philosophical psychology, supported by the students of Franz Brentano and Wilhelm Wundt, considered that psychological laws govern all mental phenomena, including those implied in the use of the laws of logic, Husserl’s critique in the Prolegomena points out that this way of considering the cognitive activity of the subject leads to the worst form of relativism and makes universal truths dependent on empir- ical experience (Husserl 1975). Yet, once this critique is established, how can phenomenology address the themes of psychology, such as the classification of mental acts, the foundational relations between these acts, the dynamics related to intentionality, including its temporal dimension, the capacity that the subject has to reflect on her own representations, judgements and emotions, as well as the passive synthesis underlying these acts, without succumbing once again to psychologism?