The Phenomenological Perspective on the Study of the Self: A Critical Review

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to give an evaluative judgment on the theoretical and methodological contributions of the phenomenological approach to the study of the self. Because many scholars from different disciplines have adopted the phenomenological approach, and it is difficult to evaluate the contributions of all these as one and the same approach, the writer has chosen Rogers‟ personality theory (sometimes called a self-theory) for examination. For Rogers, unlike empiricists, the self is of paramount importance and deserves to be the center of psychological research. In his theoretical orientation, Rogers, differs from both psychoanalysts and behaviorists. Whereas psychoanalysts emphasize the role of unconscious motives, Rogers places the importance on conscious experience. While behaviorists discard the self as something that could not be objectively studied, Rogers believed that it could be studied using methods other than those adopted by empiricists. Methodologically, Rogers chose to study lived experience and he thought that this is more valuable than laboratory experiments, the results of which have little relevance to real life. Rogerian theory is not without shortcoming, however. Relying solely on self-reports and focusing only on conscious experience are among the limitations of this perspective. This paper concludes that though Rogers has challenged his predecessors and offered an alternative approach to studying the self, the theory is not comprehensive enough to answer all questions.