The “things themselves”: challenging heuristics and inciting empathy via Husserlian phenomenology

Abstract

I propose that the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl provides a meaningful mode of access to the patient experience. By reflecting on a real-life encounter with grief, my own medical training, and two works of literature, Nausea and Love in the Time of Cholera, I illustrate the application of philosophy and specifically phenomenology to clinical education. Phenomenology allows clinicians to strip away assumptions, habits of thinking, and normative ideas within the clinical encounter in order to enter the descriptive world of the patient. In suspending presuppositions and heuristics, the clinician can better empathize with the vivid, embodied stories that the patient is describing. Finally, the practice of phenomenology makes tangible the complexities of medical illnesses, emotions, and lived experiences.