Qualitative psychology of the Brentano school and its inspirations (another look at empirical qualitative research)

Abstract

This article explores a psychological tradition inspired by or originating from Franz Brentano and which played a vital role in the development of qualitative empirical psychology. This was the psychology of acts with a focus on the analysis of mental phenomena and a first-person perspective. Brentano’s psychology directly influenced the emergence of the main schools of European psychology in the first half of the 20th century: the Würzburg School, Gestalt psychology, phenomenological psychology, the Dorpat School, and the Lvov–Warsaw School. These schools cultivated a psychology of mind and consciousness par excellence, the theoretical and methodological assumptions of which effectively inhibited reductionist tendencies. The aim of this article, however, is not so much to reconstruct the historical achievements but rather to indicate their relevance for contemporary qualitative psychology, which can be seen in a broader perspective than simply as an alternative to quantitative research.

Keywords

early-European psychology intentionality mind psychology of act reductionism

The growth of interest in qualitative psychology in recent years is probably due to a number of reasons, but personally, I consider this fact mainly as an expression of opposition to the deepening reductionism in contemporary psychology and also to the narrowing of methodological consciousness that has exchanged interpretative effort for the laws of statistics. The naturalisation of the mind has led to such profound changes that qualitative psychology—which has the longest pedigree of all branches of modern psychology—now needs to undertake intentional efforts to secure a credible position in the scientific community. In the history of psychology, the “early” Wilhelm Wundt of the Heidelberg period and his introspective research is usually pointed to as the forerunner of qualitative research (Pickren & Rutherford, 2010), and figures such as William James, Sigmund Freud, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Carl G. Jung, and others are also often cited (Wertz, 2014). Interestingly, however, the father of empirical psychology, Franz Brentano, is not mentioned in this group, yet it was mainly Brentano (more than Wundt) who laid the foundations of qualitative psychology par excellence. Wundt’s (1874/1896) dissertation, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie, published in 1874, although it refers to the notion of introspection, is of a completely different nature to Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, which Brentano (1874/1995b) published in 1874. As Danziger (1980), states, “Wundt’s advocacy and the use of introspection was extremely circumscribed and essentially limited to simple judgments tied to external stimulation” (p. 241). As a proponent of quantitative measurement in the spirit of, among others, Gustav Fechner, he did not attribute the status of scientific method to introspection whereas Brentano regarded it as a reliable tool for accessing empirical qualitative data and therefore mental contents and acts.

The history of European psychology at the turn of the 20th century reveals many original attempts to combine the Brentanian and the Wundtian traditions, which had a major influence on the development of further research worldwide. Such examples are primarily the Würzburg school, Gestalt psychology, phenomenological psychology, as well as the Lvov–Warsaw school and the Dorpat school (Hovhannisyan, 2022; Pickren & Rutherford, 2010; Schultz & Schultz, 2011). They represent a unique research tradition with high empirical achievements and an equally high reserve against the naturalisation of the mind and reductionist tendencies. European psychology was also much later than American psychology with regard to disposing of what Greenwood (2004) calls “the social dimensions of cognition, emotion and behaviour” (p. 19), and it also succumbed with more reluctance to the representational theory of measurement, which was objectionable not only to physicists or mathematicians but also to many psychologists (Michell, 1999, 2021). A strong inhibitor of these changes was, inter alia, the tradition of thought derived from Brentano’s psychology. Unfortunately, reductionist influences in psychology proved to be so strong that on the Old Continent, they also led to the marginalisation of the qualitative research tradition as less valuable and speculative. As a consequence, Brentano’s empirical psychology lost its strong position not only in mainstream psychology, but, even worse, in qualitative psychology itself. For example, by typing “Brentano” into a search engine, Qualitative Research in Psychology displays only three records, and only one article mentions the Viennese psychologist more extensively, while Qualitative Psychology affiliated with the American Psychological Association does not display any record at all. And yet it is not only about Franz Brentano but also about the Brentanian school, that is, the large theoretical and empirical tradition formed in European psychology that developed from his work. I refer to the influence of people such as Carl Stumpf (1848–1925), Christian von Ehrenfels (1859–1932), Kazimierz Twardowski (1866–1938), Oswald Külpe (1862–1915), and Edmund Husserl (1959–1938). Nowadays, however, both Brentano and the concept of the Brentano school are receiving more attention among philosophers and phenomenologists as the subject of numerous studies, published especially in The Brentano Studien, founded in 1989 as the official organ of the Internationale Franz Brentano Gesellschaft. For psychologists, by contrast, Brentano has a more historical value, and the Brentano School seems to be entirely missing (despite some recent publications: Citlak, 2022; Hackert & Weger, 2018; Hark, 2010; Meyer et al., 2018). Contrary to this, I am convinced that this philosophical–psychological school has left important achievements for psychology which, together with the development of qualitative psychology, now deserve not only to be recalled but, most importantly, to be indicated for their importance in theoretical and empirical practice. The need to refer to the Brentano school seems all the greater because, firstly, it is an organic source of qualitative research, and secondly, even contemporary analysis of its development in various European countries does not always recognise this connection. For instance, the now very important and much-needed special issue of Qualitative Research in Psychology from 2019 (del Rio Carral & Tseliou, 2019), despite interesting articles, does not expose these links convincingly and sufficiently.

In this article, I confine myself to examining those forms of qualitative psychology that focus on a process, content, or mental act, usually (but not always) studied in the first-person perspective, and in such a way that captures the subject’s individual way of constructing their own experiences and their meanings. This is not so important if we are analysing an introspective report or cultural artefacts. What does matter, however, is the manner in which the data are analysed, which does not focus solely on the measurement but on the quality and specificity of the mental phenomenon or process. “Quantitative methods are employed together with approaches featuring interviews, participant observation, visual media, interpretation, introspection, personal and cultural artifacts, archives, focus groups, and conversation” (Wertz, 2014, p. 13). Each of these methods offers the potential to reconstruct the meaning and significance that the subject assigns to particular elements of their experience.

The Brentano school and its inspirations for psychology

By virtue of its historical setting (the moment when psychology separated from philosophy at the end of the 19th century), the Brentano school includes a number of figures involved in both psychology and philosophy. In addition to Brentano, the literature typically mentions six or seven individuals from his immediate circle of students who were strongly influenced by his psychology. Albertazzi et al. (1996) mention such individuals as Christian von Ehrenfels (1859–1932), Carl Stumpf (1848–1936), Anton Marty (1847–1914), Alexius Meinong (1853–1920), Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and Kazimierz Twardowski (1866–1938). The same group is referred to by Tănăsescu and Popescu (2003) and Huemer (2019a). In psychological literature, Sigmund Freud is sometimes indicated as a student of Brentano; in fact, the similarities of his psychology with that of Brentano are significant (Wertz, 1993). The situation becomes more complicated when considering the evolution of Brentano’s (1982/1995a) views and those of his students, and it should be remembered that this evolution involved important aspects of his thought, including implicit versus explicit consciousness, or the notion of intentionality, which is fundamental to the whole school (Moran, 2013). As Dewalque (2017) notes:

If one makes a distinction between the Intentionality Thesis in the strictest sense (“all and only mental phenomena are intentional”) and the Intentional Approach to the mind (“at least a significant group of mental phenomena are intentional”), one could say that endorsing the Intentionality Thesis is not a necessary condition for being a Brentanist, while supporting the Intentional Approach may hardly be considered a sufficient condition. (p. 237)

However, regardless of the internal diversity of the school, it is possible to claim a certain intellectual formation that had a far-reaching influence not only on the philosophy but also on the psychology of Europe at the time. “Brentano and his immediate students, notably Stumpf and Marty, started using the expression ‘Brentano School’ from about 1873,” and what unified “school intellectually is first of all . . . that the science all philosophy depends upon is descriptive psychology, so that, ultimately, inner perception of mental phenomena provides an empirical foundation for the philosophical sciences” (Kriegel, 2017, p. 8). Brentano made psychology the foundation of a credible philosophy of mind.¹ The research methodology stemmed directly from the nature of mental phenomena accessible only through introspection and had to be adapted to the nature of these phenomena (and not apodictically adopted from the natural sciences; see also Feest, 2014). It therefore included introspection, descriptive psychology, and phenomenological description. The philosophical “Brentano School is best seen not as a compact movement, but as a heterogenous group of scholars who approached, in a given historical and geographical period, similar topics in a very similar way” (Huemer, 2019b, p. 897).²

Brentano’s influence on psychology is profound, as can be seen in the achievements of both individuals and schools of psychology. One of his first and most influential students was Stumpf, lecturer at Göttingen, Würzburg, Prague, Munich, and Halle and supervisor of Husserl’s postdoctoral dissertation. For many years, he worked on deskriptive Psychologie, which he separated from physiological psychology; he dedicated a lot of attention to the psychology of music and aesthetics (Stumpf, 1883, 1890; Valentine, 2000); he recognised the intentionality of mental acts, although he focused more on the phenomenality of emotions and aesthetic experiences (Fisette, 2013). Stumpf founded the Berlin Institute of Psychology and was one of the forerunners of Gestalt psychology (Fisette, 2013). Von Ehrenfels,³ a student of Brentano and Meinong, played a similar role in the development of Gestalt (Wertheimer, 2014). He formulated the notion of Gestaltqualitäten (Ehrenfels, 1890), and based on Brentano’s concept of the unity of consciousness, created the “theory of higher order and cross-modal gestalts” (Macnamara & Boudewijnse, 1995, p. 403). It was thanks to them that Gestalt developed in Germany represented by Wolfgang Köhler, Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka (Greenwood, 2020; Smith, 1988),⁴ and also in Austria at the University of Graz, where Meinong founded the first experimental psychology laboratory in Austria–Hungary in 1894.

Gestalt psychology and the influence of Stumpf also contributed to the Dorpat school of psychology of religion, founded by Karl Girgensohn (Allik, 2006). Girgensohn, educated at the University of Dorpat (now Tartu, Estonia), received his doctorate in Berlin while he was provided with his psychological formation by the aforementioned Stumpf and also by the Würzburg School, founded by Oswald Külpe (Bitter, 2011). Thanks to Stumpf, he became interested in Brentano’s descriptive and phenomenological psychology, and from the Würzburg School he adopted the method of experimental systematic introspection (Wulff, 1985). The Dorpat school, although now forgotten, was the most important school of the psychology of religion in Europe at the time. Its achievements included introspective insights into religious and mystical experience, religious beliefs (the discovery of nonimaginative and intuitive thinking), religious development, empirical verification of the philosophy of Friedrich Schleiermacher (religion as a feeling of dependence), Rudolf Otto (religion as a misterium tremendum et fascinans), and other issues (Girgensohn, 1921; Gruehn, 1956). The research was conducted from 1919 in Dorpat, then in Berlin, Leipzig, and Geifswald and also in Denmark and Scandinavia (Wikstrom, 1993; Wulff, 1991).

The aforementioned Külpe, a student of Georg Miller and Wundt, eventually turned to Brentano’s psychology and, after moving from Leipzig to Würzburg in 1894, founded the Institute of Psychology there, initiating the establishment of the Würzburg school which “can be understood as the experimental branch of act psychology . . . Act psychology influenced the Würzburg School in that Brentano saw inner experience as a necessary and fundamental starting point from which to research thinking processes empirically” (Hackert & Weger, 2018, pp. 19–20). The representatives of the school—August Messer, Karl Bühler, Narziss Ach, Oswald Külpe—were advocates of descriptive psychology; they used introspection in an experimental setting and also drew on the phenomenological tradition. At the core of the research were intentional processes and states of consciousness and especially “higher-order cognitive functions” (Hackert & Weger, 2018, p. 219), for which naturalistic explanations had little relevance. The experimental investigation of higher cognitive processes and the revolutionary discovery of the nonimaginative character of thinking were possibly precisely because the Würzburg School consolidated the Brentanian tradition of the psychology of acts, Husserl’s phenomenological approach, and Wundt’s experimental approach (Baumgartner & Baumgartner, 1997; Hackert & Weger, 2018).

One of Brentano’s more influential students was Kazimierz Twardowski, who studied under him from 1885 to 1889. He moved to the University of Lvov after leaving Vienna, becoming the Chair of Philosophy there in 1895. His work led to the creation of the Lvov–Warsaw School, which was originally a philosophical–psychological school (Brożek et al., 2015; Citlak, 2022); however, following the publication of Logische Untersuchungen by Husserl in 1901, Twardowski and his students focused on philosophical and logical issues. The school’s activity was interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War and then by communist propaganda. The analysis of psychic phenomena using introspective insight, descriptive psychology, and the analytical tradition were at the core of the research problems. Twardowski and his students kept close contact with phenomenologists in Germany (Głombik, 2005) and other students of Brentano (Woleński, 2017).⁵ Twardowski also rejected the naturalisation of the mind, as can be noticed, inter alia, in his theory of actions and products that remained unused in psychology (Chrudzimski & Huemer, 2020; Twardowski, 1894/1977, 1912/1979). The theory of actions and products also offered an opening for the psychological study of cultural texts and the reconstruction of meaning in creative expressions (art, literature, etc.; Citlak, 2016). Through introspection, as early as the 1930s (so more than 20 years before Leon Festinger), one of Twardowski’s closest students, Witwicki (1939), identified the psychological mechanism of cognitive dissonance, as well as the suppositional nature of religious beliefs. This was the most active branch of the Brentanian tradition in Eastern–Central Europe in the early 20th century.

Undoubtedly, Brentano’s most famous student was Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, which led to the development of European and American phenomenological psychology (Giorgi, 1985, 2009). References to Brentano’s psychology appear in phenomenology much more often than in other schools. However, the awareness of the deep dependence of Husserl’s philosophy on Brentano is of greater significance than mere frequency. Mental acts and intentionality also became one of the central concepts of Husserl’s thought. The nature of acts is revealed in direct mental experience as an indisputable and reliable source of knowledge about the structure of consciousness and experience. However, he made the ability to reach them dependent on phenomenological reduction, which has also recently been applied in empirical–experimental psychology (the introduction of phenomenological analysis and eidetic reduction to research practice in phenomenological psychology is Husserl’s invaluable contribution—see Husserl, 1925).⁶ The use of reduction enables more reliable introspective material, provided that the subjects are properly prepared (Gallagher, 2003; Giorgi, 2009). There is no need to specifically justify the position of Husserl and phenomenology in the Brentano movement; his philosophy is the source not only of phenomenological psychology, currently experiencing a certain renaissance, but also of original qualitative research (Davidsen, 2013; Giorgi, 1985; Langdridge, 2007), neurophenomenology (Varela, 1996), and experimental phenomenology (Albertazzi, 2021).

It is virtually impossible to determine the exact number of Brentano’s students—he had a very widespread and long-lasting influence and it did not end in the first years of the 20th century⁷ but continued later in both Europe and the USA. When referring to the term “the Brentano School” in psychology, one should keep in mind that its boundaries are relatively fluid territorially, personally, and ideologically. However, this fluidity does not prevent the term, just as in philosophy, from referring to a school of research in psychology.

The Brentano movement was characterised by a research approach that offered a wide field for introspective reports, demanding at the same time great psychological skills from the researcher that enabled their in-depth interpretation. For all the representatives of the school, introspection as inner perception (German: innere Wahrnehmung) was the only source of direct access to mental phenomena. Nonintrospectional empirical data was secondary, exceeding subjective, qualitative psychology and providing the basis for a genetic psychology⁸ including observation or measurement. This stance did not allow for methodological simplifications in the study of consciousness, the reconstruction of psychic experiences, and the laws governing them. This view was shared by all major psychological schools in Europe associated with Brentano’s psychology—Lvov–Warsaw School, Würzburg School, Gestalt, Dorpat School, and phenomenology. The latter, however, remained committed not to classical introspection but rather to relevant insights including phenomenological reduction (Gallagher, 2003; Gallagher & Zahavi, 2012). Phenomenological reduction was intended to provide access to pure data of consciousness with no disruptive content arising from either the subject’s biases or prior knowledge (Churchill, 2018; Varela, 1996; Zahavi, 2004). It was believed that the basic structure of self could be reached this way. Practically all of the aforementioned schools also favoured experimental introspection (Danziger, 1980, 2001; Rzepa & Stachowski, 1993; Weger et al., 2018; Wulff, 1985).

The theoretical and methodological assumptions formed the basis for a viable psychology of mind and consciousness, based on descriptive and phenomenological psychology. It was psychology par excellence, immersed in the consciousness and experience of the subject. Genetic psychology and cause-and-effect relations were of secondary importance; they were simply impossible without introspective data and descriptive psychology (Brandl, 2021; Danziger, 1980; Siewert, 2021). From this point, Wundt’s physiological psychology or that of the later Edward Titchener were at the other extreme, providing different data. The following section will focus on the specificity of mental phenomena in the Brentanian tradition, taking into account the most important achievements of the representatives of the abovementioned schools, which provide valuable implications for qualitative research.

Before proceeding further, however, it is important to note that the differences between Brentano and Wundt mainly concern the early Wundt (1874/1896) of the Heidelberg period and the abovementioned publication of 1874. It is very often forgotten that Wundt (1913) was convinced until the end of his life that psychology should not sever its links with philosophy, as he wrote 40 years later. Moreover, he was convinced that the chance to fully understand higher mental processes was offered by research in the stream of cultural–historical psychology (Völkerpsychologie) rather than by experimental research. This can be clearly noticed in his dispute with the psychologists of the Würzburg School (Hackert & Weger, 2018). According to Wundt (1912), the optimal development of psychology was also dependent on the development of cultural–historical psychology, which he predicted would become fully dominant over individualistic and experimental psychology. This was certainly greatly influenced by the very one-sided interpretation of Wundt’s work by American psychologists of the time, mainly Titchener,⁹ who completely abandoned cultural–historical psychology, using only one (and early) version of Wundt’s programme. Not only did European psychology derive from philosophy, but it was closely connected to it for many decades—a fact that can hardly be claimed for American psychology (Schultz & Schultz, 2011). Generally speaking, Brentano and Wundt created separate schools of thought, in which nonexperimental research was to play a key and priority role, as it allowed the essence of mental phenomena and also, in Wundt’s perspective, their sociocultural dimension to be captured. Brentano’s and Wundt’s vision of psychology demanded a broader perspective than the analysis typical of the natural sciences. Questions about the essence and meaning of mental phenomena opened ground for research bordering on phenomenology and/or hermeneutics.¹⁰

The declining influence of the Brentano school resulted from a variety of causes. There were major geopolitical changes, including the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire within the territory of which, for example, the Dorpat school and the Lvov–Warsaw school were located. Most of all, however, were the two world wars. Many psychologists lost their lives or were forced to become active in support of the war machine. This had disastrous consequences for the subsequent reception of the achievements of German psychologists from the 1930s and 1940s. Some emigrated to the USA or the UK, but their programmes clashed with structuralism, functionalism, and above all, with behaviourism and reductionism. After 1945, the Soviet policy in Eastern Europe also played a major role, including Leipzig, Berlin, Lvov, Warsaw, Dorpat (Ash, 2023; Citlak, 2022; Lück, 2002).

The nature of mental phenomena

Mental phenomena are at the core of research inspired by Brentano’s thought. Compared to contemporary psychology, this is an ennobling and distinguishing feature. Behaviourism focuses on behaviour, psychoanalysis on unconscious processes, cognitive psychology on cognitive processes often reduced to computational processes, and neuropsychology on neural processes correlating with mental experiences. In the Brentanian approach, the task of the psychologist is to reconstruct, describe, and classify the mental phenomena in their strictest sense that are revealed in the subjective experience, and only then to attempt to explain their interrelationships (Bayne & Montague, 2011).

Mental act

Brentano’s analysis of consciousness led him to believe that mental phenomena consist of presentations, judgements, and feelings that arise in mental acts. For example, in the act of presenting something to oneself, a presentation is formed; in the act of judging, a judgement is formed (Brentano, 1874/1995b). Nevertheless, psychological research was not to focus solely on the contents of consciousness that appear in the mind, but on the analysis of the acts that lead to these contents. His students also followed this path, either by developing the central thesis, as was done by, for example, Meinong and Twardowski, or by applying it in empirical research, as was the case with Ehrenfels, and later, with Wertheimer and Köhler. Twardowski supplemented the act–object dyad with a third element, that is, content (act – object – content). The act of thinking about something creates content in the form of a thought, while the content refers to the object external to the mind and the act of judging creates the content in the form of a judgement about something (the object), and so on. Judgements, thoughts, and contents of consciousness should be examined in the light of acts and not as separate, independent entities. His theory of actions and products (Twardowski, 1894/1977, 1912/1979) precisely indicated the subject matter of psychological research and also the danger of reductionism when, instead of actions (acts), psychologists focus only on their products (content, expressions, reactions). However, Twardowski’s theory has appeared in global psychological literature relatively recently (e.g., Citlak, 2019, 2022) and its potential remains untapped. Meinong was also close to these claims when he introduced the concept of Aktivitäten, through which wholes (Einheiten, later Gestalten) are formed from single cognitive or perceptual contents. Better known in psychology though is Ehrenfels’ research on Gestaltqualitäten and the phenomenon of melody in music: auditory perception is not limited to the mapping of empirical data in the mind. It is governed by certain structural form qualities (Gestalten) which enable understanding of the fact that melody is not reduced to the sum of sounds (Ehrenfels, 1890). Similarly, Wertheimer’s (1912) research on the perception of apparent movement, which is registered by consciousness and which is not actually there. Köhler’s (1925) research on the phenomenon of insight (Einsicht) belongs to the same group: the solution of a problem situation requires noticing the relations and the connections between elements, rather than the elements themselves creating the situation. In other words, the Gestalt school of psychology—just as the Würzburg school of Külpe or Bühler had done earlier by referring to “Einheiten” in the process of thinking—provided the basis for claiming that it is not the analysis of the elements/contents of consciousness itself that is the key to understanding consciousness, but the analysis of the processes, specifically the mental acts that create these contents and give them their proper meaning and place in the structure of mental experience. Several decades later, in the pages of American Psychologist, Sussman (1962) wrote:

Brentano and the Würzburg School are one of the most influential systems of modern psychology, and if Brentano is right, the content of mind pointed to something outside itself, within the framework of the act (the concept of intentionality) and mind could never be reduced to content. (p. 506)

The atomistic or associationist stance does not explain the mentioned phenomena according to the principle that “the whole is more than the sum of the parts” (Koffka, 1935/2001, p. 176). This is, inter alia, why Külpe, initially an advocate of Wundt but later disillusioned by his simplistic and narrow understanding of psychology and introspection, became an advocate of Brentano’s views (Lück, 2002). The primary task of psychology was thus to identify the mental acts of the subject. Nor was this explained by behaviourism, which formulated the laws of classical or instrumental conditioning, because new cognitive content appeared in mental acts and not by chance associations. The psychology of the Würzburg school, the Gestalt school, and the Twardowski school was in this respect a continuation of Brentano’s psychology, according to which the mental act played a fundamental role in the organisation of perceptual and cognitive data in the construction and organisation of knowledge, problem solving, and even in the analysis of human cognitive development (Citlak, 2022; Lück, 2002). The act also played an important role in aesthetic experience, which was so important in the studies of Stumpf, Köhler, and Koffka, as well as for Władysław Witwicki, a representative of the Lvov–Warsaw school (Witwicki, 1962, used a notion analogous to Gestalt: “cohesive well-contained configurations” or “ein fundierter Inhalt”). For German psychologists, Gestalt determined the visual or auditory perception of a work (Koffka, 1935/2001; Wertheimer, 1912, 2014); for Witwicki, Gestalt was additionally a source of emotional experiences and even a sense of strength-power (Witwicki, 1962; cf. Citlak, 2016). It is worth adding that the question of the subject matter of psychological research (wholes and acts vs. their contents/parts) is not only a historical problem. Even with complex statistical calculations, correlational research is in danger of repeating the associationism of the Leipzig school if it is mainly limited to detecting associations between variables (e.g., mental contents) or determining the strength of a correlation. Moreover, the absence of the concept of a mental act tends to suspend empirical data in a psychological vacuum, disconnecting them from the active subject.

Intentionality

Just as important as the embedding of mental content in acts is the nature of the acts themselves and consciousness in general. The Brentano school is distinguished by the concept of intentionality, which the school’s founder reintroduced into psychology by referring to the scholastic and Aristotelian traditions. Intentionality is a central conceptual category both in Psychology From Empirical Standpoint (Brentano, 1874/1995b) and in his later work from 1887–1891 (Brentano, 1982/1995a). It is also a fundamental feature of mental acts amongst his students, albeit modified to varying degrees (Chrudzimski, 2005; Moran, 2013). However, I will not focus on the variation in these views, nor on the change in Brentano’s own view (Chrudzimski, 2005), because ultimately, the category of intentionality has remained one of the most distinctive for this strand of psychological research. As the founder of the school wrote:

Every mental phenomenon is characterised by . . . reference to a content, direction toward an object . . . Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself . . . This intentional inexistence is exclusively characteristic of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon manifests anything similar. (Brentano, 1874/1995b, p. 89)

Thus, reality exists only intentionally in the mind and, most importantly, it is through intentionality that the relation between the mind and the object of cognition is possible at all. The mind relates to reality in intentional acts and it is only through these acts that cognition of the world is possible. Intentionality determines perceptual, cognitive processes and determines the specificity of all mental phenomena. In practice, this means that mental acts are always directed “towards” objects and are therefore dynamic in nature.

Intentionality perceived in this sense is fundamental to the conceptualisation of determinism and causality in psychological research. Mental acts as well as their contents should be studied not so much (and not exclusively) according to classical cause–effect relations, in which mental phenomena are treated as the effect of interacting stimuli or brain functions, but rather with regard to purpose. John Searle (1984, 1990) uses the concept of “intentional causality” in this case, which prompts the researcher to invert cause–effect relations and view intentionality as cause rather than effect. The representatives of the Würzburg school shared a similar view, especially Narziss Ach, who introduced the concept of determining the tendency (die determinierende Tendenzen) of the thought and cognitive process. This process is goal-directed and the content of consciousness becomes subordinated to intention (Ach, 1905). Intentionality entails thinking of determination in terms of a teleological process in which the causal scheme is of secondary importance (Juarrero, 1999). The same stimuli may elicit completely different reactions or none at all depending on the psychological (subjective) location of intentional causality. In such a perspective, the subject regains a kind of autonomy and becomes the author of their own actions. There is no necessity to explain that reaching this type of psychic process mainly requires a qualitative perspective, open to a certain kind of unpredictability and variability of psychic phenomenon, revealed in introspective experience. Unfortunately, for many years now, mainstream psychology has hardly referred to the concept of intentionality. It has retained its original status (with some modifications) in the thought of Husserl, Meinong (1904/1960), the Lvov–Warsaw school and also later in Merleau-Ponty and Searle (Bobryk, 2014; Citlak, 2019).¹¹ In contemporary psychology, however, it has lost its value as a result of far-reaching theoretical simplifications and methodological shifts. The subject matter of psychology has been almost entirely subjected to a methodology derived from the natural sciences, in which subjective psychology has had to surrender to genetic psychology (Michell, 1999; Uher, 2019). Behaviour, brain, neuronal, computational processes isolated from the subject were suspended in a vacuum. Briefly, intentionality without the subject has ceased to exist, as is now clearly evident in many psychology textbooks. And if it appears in the literature at all, it appears in a distorted sense, for example, only as referring to something, pointing to something (in this sense, even a graphic symbol or a road sign becomes intentional; Horst, 1996; Jakob, 2006).

Qualitative nature

Adopting the old Cartesian mindset, mental phenomena would have to be treated as inextensible in contrast to the objects of the physical world. In practice, this means that they do not undergo measurement or direct observation. The absence of any dimension other than the temporal dimension of psychic phenomena, for example, led Kant to claim that psychology would never become a true science since there is no basis for applying mathematics to it (Kant, 1786). This difficulty was perceived differently by Wundt (1874/1896) who, in addition to the temporal aspect, also attributed the aspect of intensity to mental phenomena, which allowed him to apply measurement and to do so under experimental conditions. The year 1879 (the opening of the laboratory in Leipzig) proved to be a breakthrough for psychology, not because of the actual birth of psychology but because of changes in the perception of mental phenomena and the introduction of a new methodology. The opening of the experimental laboratory implied the primacy of measurement and observation, while introspective reports played a subservient role to them. Brentano (1874/1995b) regarded the matter quite differently: although mental phenomena “appear to us as inextensible and devoid of spatial position” (p. 122), their key distinguishing feature from the physical world is first and foremost their intentionality, the “intentional inexistence of the object” (p. 126), and their availability only in “inner perception” (p. 130). Intentionality requires a broader perspective than a quantitative, measurable account of these phenomena, which incidentally (in the form of Weber-Fechner’s law) Brentano himself criticised. To some extent, Wundt was also aware of the qualitative nature of these phenomena, restricting the study of higher mental processes (e.g., thinking) to nonexperimental, that is, historical–cultural psychology. And although he was ultimately wrong in his dispute with the representatives of the Würzburg School (who subjected the thinking process to experimental research), the qualitative nature of mental phenomena was not negated in this dispute. Moreover, it was then possible to discover and describe qualities such as the imageless nature of thinking, goal-directedness, task-determination, and creative thinking (Hackert & Weger, 2018; Wettersten, 2019).

The key statement here is the conviction that the basis of psychology is inner experience, which is not subject to observation but to inner perception, in which judgements, perceptions, and emotions are revealed. This experience is not also subject to exact replication, although its repetition enables reaching the universal structure and the laws that govern it (Brandl, 2021; Seron, 2017; Taieb, 2021). The introspective report provides a description in the form of personal narratives, from which the researcher reconstructs the experience and its meaning as the participant conceives it. Thus, the psychologist can analyse the phenomenon and the patterns it contains, as revealed in the introspective experience, but can also focus on pure empirical data provided by the examined person. The way in which this data is treated depends mainly on the aim of the study. In the current of Husserl’s phenomenology, the latter approach will predominate (Gallagher, 1997, 2003). The reconstruction of a mental phenomenon in a quantitative form is meaningful with regard to the underlying basic characteristics (duration, intensity, number, reactions, etc.), but contributes little to establishing the meaning the subject attributes to it. Although the method of conducting research in the form of experimental systematic introspection (Citlak, 2016; Danziger, 2001; Hackert & Weger, 2018; Wulff, 1985) was at the time largely dictated by the state of development of psychology, the certainty of the qualitative nature of these phenomena was fundamental.

These achievements already enabled the question of the nature of many other psychological variables to be raised. The point is that mental phenomena par excellence are qualitative in nature, and this applies not only to such complex experiences as aesthetic or religious experience but also to anxiety, depression, and so forth. Although they are measured in psychology, the rationale behind this practice is the assumption of an isomorphic similarity between empirical data and numerical sets. According to this assumption, the magnitude of a variable can be reflected by the means of numbers, which express, firstly, the respective intensity of the variable, and secondly, the relations between its different magnitudes as given by numerical values. This is a foundational assumption of quantitative psychology, which had already settled in the 1940s and 1950s (Stevens, 1951), although it is worth mentioning that it had the greatest advocates and promoters among American psychologists with fewer among European researchers. Moreover, it was criticised from the very beginning by mathematicians, physicists, and many psychologists (Michell, 1999). However, assigning numerical values to psychological variables is not a purely technical or neutral operation as it introduces a new conceptualisation of them, directing the researcher’s attention quite arbitrarily or creating content that does not derive from empirical data but from computational operations. The measurement brings new qualities to the description of variables, which are not always compatible with them. However, the need for reliable measurement in psychology has proven to be so strong that, despite reservations, quantitative measurement and representational measurement theory have completely dominated psychological science.

Annette Davidsen (2013) writes in her article that “a whole family of qualitative methods are informed by phenomenological philosophy” (p. 318), citing, inter alia, interpretative phenomenological analysis and critical narrative analysis. While I believe that this article broadens the theoretical perspective of qualitative psychology, at the same time it provokes the question: what exactly has (or should have) significant impact on the methodology of qualitative psychology? Is it phenomenological philosophy or mental phenomena? I am fully aware that phenomenology offers a theoretical and methodological justification for qualitative psychology. Phenomenological analysis is always the second (rather than the first) step. After all, methodology should derive from and be adapted to the nature of mental phenomena. I would like to emphasise this because qualitative methodology is very often identified in literature as an idea that broadens research possibilities, but this does not stem from a conviction about the nature of the subject matter of psychology (Horst, 1996; Uher, 2019). If the choice of methodology is not dictated by the subject of the study, its credibility will remain low and one of the most obvious symptoms of this is the problem of reductionism. Qualitative research does not and cannot have the status of merely complementary research. This is due to the nature of mental phenomena, which are the unquestionable basis of any empirical research that provides the necessary data for the definition of variables and making appropriate methodological choices.

It is not my intention to negate the representational theory of measurement in psychology, but I would like to emphasise that its widespread and uncritical acceptance is not at all optimistic, as shown in recent years particularly by the replication crisis (Jamieson & Pexman, 2020) and critical opinions (Michell, 2021). The results of studies surprisingly prove to be nonreplicable even under similar conditions and with the same methodology (between 30% and 55%; Nosek et al., 2018). The answer to this problem is supposedly greater precision in statistical analyses and accuracy in measurement (Jamieson & Pexman, 2020). However, given the qualitative nature of many psychological variables—especially those concerning cognitive and social processes and thus involving subjective and intersubjective dimensions—the solution to the problem through statistics seems unconvincing according to the Brentano school. Brentano and most of his students would probably suggest to first create a plausible description of a psychic phenomenon, thus subjecting it to descriptive and phenomenological analysis and creating a plausible and reliable theoretical basis, and only then to decide which research tools would be adequate.¹² For example, phenomenological psychology now offers an interesting methodology with the use of phenomenological reduction in introspective research and also the formalisation (even mathematisation) of the language of introspective reports (Gallagher, 2003; Varela, 1996), and the Twardowski school developed an impressive tradition of conceptual analysis (Brożek, 2022; Gradzka, 2021).

According to Brentano, psychology thus focuses primarily on subjective acts embedded in a subjective space in which the identification not only of certain psychological qualities but of the mental act/process is of great importance. It was significant that the research spectrum did not exclude the experimental approach, although it was dominated by experimental introspection. While this was the position taken by all schools, the Würzburgian, Dorpatian, and Gestalt schools were undoubtedly at the forefront. However, Brentano’s work also prompted a broader view of mental phenomena, which can be observed later, especially in the work of phenomenologists and psychologists with a phenomenological orientation as well as in the Lvov–Warsaw school, mainly in Twardowski’s theory of actions and products. Specifically, the notion of meaning together with the notion of intentional acts exceeds the individual construction of the meaning of personal experiences and is closely related to the sphere of intersubjective communicative space. Due to the length of this article, it is not possible to describe the relationship between the subjective and the intersubjective more extensively, but it is important to mention that Brentano’s project of psychology implicitly suggested a discussion of the contextual location of the self. This was mainly approached by Husserl (1973), partly by Twardowski (1912/1979), and later by Searle (1990, 2011) in his analysis of intentionality and mind. Their works place mental phenomena in the structure of subjective experience and reconstruct the appropriate context belonging to them with a close connection to the concept of the act and the artefacts. I’m not sure whether we can equate intersubjectivity with the social dimension of mental phenomena; however, it is close to the social representations theory, social-symbolic interactionism, and above all, the classic principles of empirical psychology (Citlak, 2022). Definitely, the problem of cross-analogies or relations should be discussed more in psychology. Following the development of qualitative psychology in the 20th and 21st centuries, it seems a bit of a paradox that, despite important achievements, when focusing on the process of constructing meaning by the subject, its representatives firstly do not usually refer to the notion of intentionality or intentional acts and secondly, do not pay much attention to the intersubjective aspect of mental phenomena. Perhaps this is a kind of discontinuation or narrow understanding of Brentano’s qualitative psychology by contemporary qualitative psychologists. Personally, however, I tend to think that this is more a manifestation of qualitative psychology’s entanglement with an overly individualistic conceptualisation of the research subject that has been isolated from the space of sociocultural artefacts/signs and the intersubjective (Greenwood, 2004).

Conclusions

“Brentano came much closer than modern psychologists to a true understanding of cognition” (Macnamara, 1993, p. 117). In analysing the developments in psychology over the last 30 years, there is no indication that Macnamara’s words have lost their meaning. The replacement of Wundt’s measurements of physiological reactions with neuronal processes from the point of view of the problem in question still confines us to the other side of what is actually mental. Reductionism in psychology is doing well and this is primarily due to the move away from the realm of subjective experience. The Brentanian tradition represents a clear objection to methodological and conceptual oversimplifications resulting from the apodictic imposition of a methodology adequate to the natural world. The empirical achievements of this school and its continuations have introduced new qualities into psychology, which in some cases are revolutionary and groundbreaking. Its special feature remains to this day the focus on the first-person perspective, on the subjectively experiencing psychic acts through and in which new mental contents are revealed. It is in these contents (and not beyond them) that new laws governing the human psyche have most often been discovered. The connection with the philosophical tradition, which in virtually every school of psychology of this trend broadened the theoretical and conceptual perspective, also proved to be an asset rather than a weakness. Priority was given here to a psychology par excellence centred on subject experience, not excluding genetic psychology.¹³ Qualitative research of the 21st century devotes much space to phenomenological psychology, in which Brentano enjoys relative interest. However, many of Brentano’s fundamental theses, such as intentionality or the concept of an act, still need to be considered. Perhaps the main reason for this is a certain difference in the qualitative research conducted in these schools compared to qualitative research conducted today. I believe, however, that the example of European psychology of the first half of the 20th century allows us to understand qualitative psychology more broadly than simply as something that stands in opposition to quantitative and experimental psychology.

The Brentano movement emphasises the notion of the intentionality of acts, which is usually neglected in research but calls for a different, complementary research methodology, that is, going beyond the deterministic model of cause–effect relations and focusing on intentional determination. The Brentano school exposes the actual nature of psychological phenomena, which do not so easily yield to the representational theory of measurement introduced in the 1940s and 1950s. The question of whether strictly psychological variables can be of any other nature than purely qualitative is still relevant from the perspective of the school’s psychology. According to the psychology of acts and their content/products, the act and mental phenomena should be treated quite differently from its products. However, the qualitative psychology of the 21st century, despite its close connection to Husserl, reaches somewhat further and has a somewhat broader theoretical background.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Amadeusz Citlak

Notes

Author biography

Amadeusz Citlak is a psychologist who graduated from Warsaw University (MA); and obtained his PhD in psychology at the Institute of Psychology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The Institute of Psychology is his place of scientific work and activity. Research interests include early European psychology, the philosophical–psychological Twardowski school, and cultural–historical psychology. However, his first passion is the ancient manuscripts and the Mediterranean way of life. Recent publications include “Brentano’s Psychology and Kazimierz Twardowski School: Implications for the Empirical Study of Psychological Phenomena Today,” in Psychological Research (2023) and “Psychology of the Lvov–Warsaw School and the Shape of Contemporary Polish Psychology (Unfinished Dialog with Brentanian Tradition),” in Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (2023).

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