The importance of phenomenology for psychologies, psychotherapies and other empirical disciplines that involve understanding behaviour and meaningful experience is that their referents can be formulated by phenomenology’s grounded manner of interpreting. It’s not the case that pure psychology prevents interpretation from novel stances but there can be a collegiate approach to interpretation, which to a degree, standardises the interpretative process. For instance, the psychological is co-extensive with meaning for consciousness, intentionality in intersubjectivity , lifeworld, culture, society and history . Within the whole there is the co-existence of thought, emotion, memory , anticipation , apperception , empathy and all else besides. Terminology and hermeneutic stances are important because they represent processes that are otherwise implicit and embodied in people’s lives and cannot be expressed or understood in any other way. The pure psychological attitude is a development from the natural one in a way parallel to how mathematicians map natural being . The pure psychological attitude is a way of making a professional discourse about thoughts, feelings, behaviours and relationships and all else that comes to consciousness. Besides the focus on the conscious, there are implicit processes of the unconscious aspect of intentional implication that make themselves known in consciousness, because neurological and biological endowments contribute to manifest behaviour and felt-experience also. The difference between the natural and the psychological attitude is that for the latter, experiences are understood against an ideal framework that understands how human beings are simultaneously self-reflexive in being aware. To engage with another human being in any way can also be represented ideally through understanding the triangular intersubjective being of self, other and cultural object senses. Without the phenomenological methods that ground theory and practice in the psychologies, therapies and mental health practices, including the biological and neurological sorts, then there will be a reduced ability to communicate and collaborate.

Husserl’s methods are championed because they identifying the relevant qualitative evidence and state how to make sense of it. The point of intentional analysis , a qualitative cognitivism, is for future projects of empiricism and the empirical application of psychological knowledge. Despite the variation in noematic sense, some parts of the consciousness-being relationship are constant. With the understanding of noemata about an object made explicit, it becomes obvious how therapy works and what lived experience is really about. When a “thought is just a thought” and a “feeling is just a feeling”, it is understood that both noematic thoughts and feelings can be about the same object and yet do not depict it in its entirety in the way that a still photography from a film does not represent the whole of the film. Similarly, philosophical and scientific discussions are intersubjective consideration of noemata about the same objects in the attempt to agree the most accurate representation of them and relationships between them. The universality is that for any observing ego who reflects, he or she can identify specific sorts of noemata that appear in specific noetic ways. The sum total of noemata can be identified as belonging to specific objects understood in a number of contexts or horizons .

Given that permanent self-managed change is the desired outcome of successful therapy, then those clients who maintain their changes well-after the therapy has ceased, are those who have truly benefitted. This distinction means that truly effective therapy is only that which promotes long-lasting change through imparting some type of better understanding for the self-management of the emotional life of clients and their others. Changes should not be limited to only happening during the current series of sessions. The influence of therapy and mental health work needs to become part of the on-going lifestyle of its clientele long after the meetings have ended. The aim of therapy is to help people stay in balance and know how to be resilient concerning the knocks and falls that happen. But if a cohesive understanding of the world has never been attained, apart from a rudimentary one, then the result for the more complex types of damaged maps and map-reading abilities will tend to provide persistent chaos rather than order. This is inaccurate learning in overload. The consequences of the accuracy of resolution of the map are many and as a lived experience they are taken forward through time in an overall way of making a world and knowing one’s place in it and using, or indeed, over-using a narrow area of a map uncritically without further reflection . In a different but equivalent wording, if the map of beliefs of the future is inaccurate, the self creates its own ontological experience of the world in the here and now, with the consequence that personal functioning and living are cast in the mould of inaccurate beliefs, and not with respect to the actual potential of the person to be able to cope with their situation. It is well-established how contact with others is good for the mood, self esteem and for the immune system and lifespan, it follows that social contact is an important protective factor in creating quality of life (Heckhausen 2001). On closer inspection, there is the overall set of meanings which is the result of the individual biopsychosocial multifactorial mix of influences across time.