Amedeo Giorgi and Psychology as a Human Science

Over the course of the last fifty years Amedeo Giorgi has played a leading role in the movement to redirect psychological research from an imitation of the natural sciences toward a human science paradigm. He founded the first phenomenological psychological research program in the United Stated at Duquesne University, and continued his development of phenomenological psychology at Saybrook Graduate School. Giorgi’s descriptive phenomenological method is a rigorous approach to qualitative research that is founded in the philosophical phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The descriptive phenomenological method makes use of the phenomenological epoché, reduction, imaginative variation, and search for essential psychological structures. Giorgi’s approach to conveying phenomenology embodies a wide-ranging and incisive critique of empirical psychology’s limitations, and seeks to establish scientific criteria appropriate for the study of lived, human subjectivity