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Phenomenology is a philosophical movement that holds that the only proper foundation for understanding is gained through the study of structures of experience: of the ways we experience things, how they appear to us, and hence the meanings they have in our experience. It eschews any claims or inferences concerning existence, such as unconscious motivation, except what emerges from that study of experience. One of the classic modes of phenomenological practice, developed especially by Heidegger and his followers, is to interpret experience by relating it to relevant features of context, in particular social (being-with-others) and linguistic (language as “the house of being”) context. By this method, phenomenology becomes a practice of letting things disclose themselves.
Even those uninterested in philosophy in itself will notice the correspondences with the contemporary turn in American psychoanalysis in relational, intersubjective, and “experience-near” directions. There is actually a long history of combining phenomenology or existentialism (a variant of phenomenology) with psychoanalysis. Ludwig Binswanger (1963) and Medard Boss (1963) were the pioneers. Boss hosted the Zollikon seminars where from 1959 to 1969 Heidegger lectured psychiatrists and students in Zurich, and he tried unsuccessfully to engineer a meeting between Lacan and Heidegger. More recently, Donnel Stern's (1997) influential work in interpersonal psychoanalysis has been strongly influenced by Hans Gadamer, a follower of Heidegger; most recently, we have a book by Robert Stolorow (2011), reviewed not long ago in the pages of this journal (Greenberg, 2012).
Pearl's book can be seen as part of this tradition but with a particular focus and thesis: that psychoanalysis could and should be transformed by replacing Freud's adherence to our everyday notion of time, that is, to linear empirical scientific Aristotelian clock-time—time as an infinite series of self-contained nows laid out in an ordering o