Human subjectivity and the law of the threshold
pp. 87-108
in: Ronald Valle (ed), Phenomenological inquiry in psychology, Berlin, Springer, 1998Abstract
One of the key assumptions of phenomenological psychology is that human consciousness is structured by an intentional relationship. Human consciousness is openness to a world, in the same sense that subjectivity is necessarily intersubjectivity and that personhood necessarily implies interpersonality. Our problems in understanding these psychological dimensions are attributable in part to our use of nouns to denote what are essentially actions that bridge the distance between one person and another or between a person and a thing. Consciousness is not something that can be found among things, not even among the thinglike bodies described by biology and medicine. Consciousness refers to a fundamental relationship between persons and things, and it is this relationship that forms the basis of our awareness of our world.