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The chief merit of phenomenological psychiatry, as garnered from Van Den Berg's introduction, lies in its encouragement of an artfully naive attitude. This ingenious posture instigates questions as to what actually occurs in those forms of behavior which the practitioner customarily labels in order to dispense with thinking about their nature. Remaining close to conscious experience, a phenomenological orientation succeeds in spotlighting those obvious preoccupations of mankind, so far conceptually ignored because they do not fit into theoretical schemes. The individual's usual engrossment with the future is an example. Since the constructs of phenomenology are little removed from the structure of the subject's perceived world, the quality and feeling tone adhering to the contents in his personal world are accurately conveyed.
Thus, the phenomenological approach supplies a discerning portrayal of the largely conscious experience of the world by the individual at a current moment. Gross similarities in the perception of his body, his fellow humans, and his external world are indicated. And then everything grinds to a halt; nothing more seems to happen in phenomenological psychiatry. We learn little of the energies underlying given ways of perception; of the fluctuations in figure and ground of phenomenal objects accompanying alterations in drives; of the conditions determining a particular way of seeing the world; of the beginning and end of the fantasy from which a single moment has been wrested for partial perusal; of deep-lying schemata which these surface perceptions may be designed to shield; of the actions that the individual directs towards the world as a consequence of his comprehension of it; and of the reciprocal data the world plentifully provides the individual. Take, for example, the Skid Row inhabitant who has suffered severe deprivation in his early childhood. Feelings of being damaged ensue. Intensely hostile fantasies are generated. But due to knowled