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Expressing experience: the promise and perils of the phenomenological interview

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Abstract

This paper outlines several of the challenges that are inherent in any attempt to communicate subjective experience to others, particularly in the context of a clinical interview. It presents the phenomenological interview as a way of effectively responding to these challenges, which may be especially important when attempting to understand the profound experiential transformations that take place in schizophrenia. Features of language experience in schizophrenia—including changes in interpersonal orientation, a sense of the arbitrariness of language, and a desire for faithful communication of experience (including of ineffable transformations of experience)—are described, together with discussion of their relevance for the interview context. Furthermore, the interview presents a unique context in which both intersubjective and interpersonal aspects of experience will be described as well as evoked. It is proposed that phenomenological interviewers should not only be familiar with these and other experiences that can occur in schizophrenia, but also capable of applying the techniques of phenomenological and hermeneutic methods in order to understand the descriptions of interviewees with sensitivity and accuracy.

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Notes

  1. A number of alterations in cognition and stream of consciousness also manifest as disturbances of speech or language, including many that are considered emblematic of the schizophrenia spectrum, such as thought interference or thought pressure and first rank symptoms including thought insertion and thought withdrawal. We will not discuss these alterations here, however, but will focus solely on those that primarily involve the experience of language itself.

  2. The ability to talk about one’s experience in some degree of detail is often a pre-requisite for phenomenological interviews. Those who are unable or unwilling to do so, e.g. interviewees who are acutely psychotic or suffering from significant cognitive disorganization, may not be appropriate for such interviews until their symptoms have improved.

  3. Here we follow Sass’s (2019) distinction between the intersubjective and the interpersonal: in which “interpersonal [refers] to experience that is oriented toward another person or other people as a more or less direct target or object of one’s attention or awareness, and “intersubjective” [refers] to the presence of the human other as a kind of implicit participant in at least some of one’s own acts of awareness, especially perception” (p. 130).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Psychology Department, Clarkson University, Potsdam, NY, USA

    Elizabeth Pienkos

  2. University Psychiatric Clinic Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia

    Borut Škodlar

  3. Medical Faculty, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia

    Borut Škodlar

  4. Department of Clinical Psychology, Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, USA

    Louis Sass

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  1. Elizabeth Pienkos
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Correspondence to Elizabeth Pienkos.

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Pienkos, E., Škodlar, B. & Sass, L. Expressing experience: the promise and perils of the phenomenological interview. Phenom Cogn Sci 21, 53–71 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-021-09731-4

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