[7] Following Husserl's battle-cry "back to the things themselves", a phenomenological approach seeks to avoid speculation about underlying causes, and instead emphasizes direct descriptions of phenomena, whether by means of introspection or by attentive observation of another person.
"[10] While it is difficult to answer such a question in any concrete way, the concept of intersubjectivity is often used as a mechanism for understanding how it is that humans are able to empathize with one another's experiences, and indeed to engage in meaningful communication about them.
The speculations concerning the mind based on those observations were criticized by the pioneering advocates of a more scientific and objective approach to psychology, such as William James and the behaviorists Edward Thorndike, Clark Hull, John B. Watson, and B. F. Skinner.
He sought to overcome certain problems he perceived from his work in psychophysics by approaching subjective phenomena from the traditional hypothetical-deductive framework of the natural sciences.
[15] As a result, many qualitative psychologists have claimed phenomenological inquiry to be essentially a matter of "meaning-making" and thus a question to be addressed by interpretive approaches.
“At the core of phenomenology lies the attempt to describe and understand phenomena such as caring, healing, and wholeness as experienced by individuals who have lived through them".
In 2021 a study on the experiences of individuals who attended a coexistence center (CECO) was conducted using phenomenological interviews to understand the lives of the participants.
This process led the researchers to understand that "the CECO is a propitious space for the development of individual and collective potentialities and the valuation of constructive social relationships that facilitate and preserve the inherent tendency of people towards growth, autonomy and psychological maturation.
[23] In a 2015 article written for the Partially Examined Life blog, Michael Burgess argues that "...the foundational problem here is that consciousness is not a container for objects; this assertion mostly derives from another: that the world itself seems to be one way but is another, thus in its initial state of “seeming to be” it cannot be itself real (that illusion is metaphysical).