The private life of meaning - some implications for psychotherapy and psychotherapeutic research

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article outlines differences between phenomenology and method, with implications for psychotherapy and psychotherapeutic research. Drawing on a study exploring how mental health nurses are therapeutic, we focus on how taking experience seriously is encouraged through being phenomenological. We look at how research method and theory – and fixed beliefs or ideas – tend to constrict language, so that personal (sensual) meaning is lost or curtailed. Being phenomenological instead ‘opens up’ language and consequently meaning, in an act of truthfulness through speaking one’s experience, which we see as both psychotherapeutic and a valid form of research.