Experiential-researchers.org is a valuable resource. Much of its content reflects its mission: to grapple smartly with the conundrum of legitimizing methodologies aimed at improving ultimately subjective re-orderings of constitutive personality and personality’s (i.e. persons,) functioning.
This is, of course, a longstanding problem; psychology’s equivalent of philosophy’s mind/body problem. One can research the means and ends of improvement at the level of the “self-improving” individual, but, this does not then necessarily ramify any method in any general sense of all persons. (I’m a philosophical pragmatist, so it’s a non-problem to me, but it remains interesting from the viewpoint of other frames. It surely is so from the perspective of existential, humanist, psychotherapy, and, regardless, benefits from scientific framing in all cases.
Overview:
Exploring Psychotherapy Scientifically and Experientially
James R. Iberg, Ph.D.
The world before it is perceived is an infinite collection of qualities. It is up to the perceiver to use some of these qualities to differentiate one event from another. This process of differentiation is driven by desire (relevance, need, meaning…). Note that the perceiver does not “construct” reality itself; rather the perceiver constructs an understanding of reality, a model or theory which guides perception and behavior. Neither does reality alone determine perceptions and behaviors, but rather reality as experienced “through” our understanding.
