Descriptive and analytical psychology of Wilhelm Dilthey as theoretical source of phenomenological psychology of Edmund Husserl

Abstract

The article contains the critical reconstruction of descriptive and analytical psychology of Wilhelm Dilthey and its influence on the phenomenological psychology of Edmund Husserl. Dilthey describes three fundamental features of intrinsic psychic life, which make it different from external physical world: 1. Immediacy — psychic life is directly perceived as intrinsic process; physical world is indirectly perceived as external reality. 2. Connection — psychic life is organic connection of interrelated experiences, physical world is conglomeration of the separate facts. 3. Value — psychic experiences use to have the value to us, physical facts can be irrelevant to us. According to Dilthey descriptive and analytic psychology is possible since the psychic life is directly given as organic connection of experiences, which have a special value. The main method of psychology should be description of the psychic experience. Dilthey sketches out three main direction of this description: 1. Description of the main types of the psychic processes. 2. Description of the main connections of the human experiences. 3. Description of the special parts of the human experiences. On one hand, the phenomenological psychology of Edmund Husserl is grounded on the descriptive and analytic psychology of Wilhelm Dilthey. On another hand, Husserl criticizes some crucial points of Dilthey’s conception. First of all the founder of phenomenology and phenomenological psychology points out the connection of the notions “understanding” and “induction” in the psychological conception of Wilhelm Dilthey. On the contrary, according to Husserl the method of understanding should be based on the concept of intuition, which plays an important role in his phenomenological project.