The understanding of the connection between personality, social context and multiple psychological problems is that these are forms of intentionality connected together in more complex social ways to produce semi-fixed habits and abilities. The genuine way to understand human being is as biopsychosocial entities who live in a meaningful world. The devil is in the detail though, concerning precisely how individuals can be understood.

The term “intentionality” is taken in the German sense rather than the English one, of just meaning purposeful. Intentionality means the many ways in which people have meanings and conscious experiences of all kinds. Types of intentionality include the five senses of perception, the conceptual intentionality of internal dialogue and speech in language, the empathising of what others’ experiences might be. There are combinations of intentionality such as imagining what another person might be thinking or feeling through looking at their body, for instance. Being in a meeting, group or crowd concerns how types of intentionality get pooled together. The diagram gives an impression of the whole. The word “intentional” means that processes and relationships that are conscious, lived and about some object of attention.

The other key terms that need to be understood include the difference between an object of attention and the many senses that are possible about it. For instance, an object of attention could be another person, a thing, an abstract quantity, a general concept or a socially-maintained tradition of some sort. All such senses will be different according to the type of intentionality involved. It is possible to see another person in the flesh, to think about them in their absence, to draw them, or write a poem about them. All these are different experiences of the same object of attention. The sense conveyed could be the same if they are loved and held in high esteem. Or the senses being portrayed could be different according to how they are experienced. If the person is currently held in anger, then there may be more complex feelings of disappointment, anger and hate. And the sense of loving them is currently lost or not accessible, perhaps. Objects of attention are also called cultural objects. This is a very general term and a reminder of the social meanings that get added to objects of meaning: there was a first occurrence of sense. Sometimes that is strong enough to still be present many years later or perhaps that first-ever sense is only occasionally present.

The other key term to understand is that of context or horizon. All objects of attention and different types of intentionality that behold them occur in various contexts of sense, person and time. The diagram below brings these concepts together in order to show how they relate as a whole.

A figure to show how intentionality, sense, object and context occur together.

So to explain the diagram above, let me recap the very general terminology being used. Intentionalities are mental processes of all kinds, simple and compound sorts. These mental processes only appear through what they produce: conscious experience. All believed and dis-believed objects of attention are cultural objects. In this way, the entire contents of the human world are referred to. It is important to note that selves and others can attend to one and the same cultural object, although there is no guarantee that that any two persons will have the same description of their perspective on it. Indeed if they were to have the same experience, it would mean that they had become the same person, rather than remaining two different people. So what is being discussed are the ways in which meaning is social and socially-accessible rather than some entirely personal experience. The idea of context means that there are progressively larger contexts in which public cultural objects make sense. For children there is the great importance of what parents and the immediate family of known persons think and feel. As children grow and venture outside of the home there are then the increasing contexts of social meanings of culture, society and history and ultimately the sum total of experiences of the entire world.

What the above means for therapy is that psychological problems are attempts at solutions that are due to intentional processes that contribute a series of interconnected experiences: Specifically, emotions, behaviours, temporal experiences, social and personal experiences form a whole and are distributed across the lifespan. Specific problems like worry or avoidance are created through temporal connections and social ones.

What this means is that psychological change occurs through taking a new perspective on oneself and one’s problems. Psychological change is part of a greater whole including behavioural, social, emotional and linguistic changes. Altering a form of intentionality will change the sense of a problematic object, from a felt-sense to an intellectual sense, for instance. Cultural objects cannot be removed and the past cannot be changed in reality. But the senses of these objects of attention can be different according to changing the context of understanding - and the perspective taken towards ‘the same’ object or event. For instance, a traumatic memory can have a number of meanings associated with it. The memory means something about the cause of the trauma, about the self who was traumatised, it means something in terms of the emotional sense that co-occurs when the memory comes to mind, it means something else all together when it is described to another person. The factual existence of the memory can be in doubt if third parties dispute that the event remembered ever happened. If there are other parties who can explain the event in the traumatic memory then the circumstances of its occurrence might become clear and it could be better or more reliably understood. All of these experiences are intentional and about the same event but are experientially different and the mental processes involved are different.

Where psychodynamics and cognitive behavioural traditions converge is that they both are concordant as long as conscious events are attended to. Research shows that the quickest way to achieve change for many problems is through changing behaviour in order to change meaning. However, the way to engage clients is through speech and proving an explanation of their problems in ways that are fully understandable to them. Thus speech and understanding changes the meaning of their problems even prior to them doing exposure work.

If discussion is the main medium of therapy, then there can be spontaneous changes in sense that occur first of all through conceptual intentionality in combination with the whole of the senses of the client in that the meaning of memories, events, thoughts, actions and feelings are altered through creating new contexts for understanding the behaviour of self and others. The four key concepts above are intentionality, sense, object and context. Psychological problems have complex causes. Changes in sense are attainable through changing the type of intentionality involved, thus changing the sense of the same object and changing the context of meaning and changing the duration of time spent on attending to the object. Clearly, changing one object of attention for another will also change the subsequent senses gained. The worth of the intentionality model is having a simple system of concepts that are flexible yet provide a structure for thinking through the experiences of clients in order to think creatively about what can be helpful in creating change.

The argument for a qualitative psychology of conscious experience to guide interventions is against an excessive reliance on natural psychological science as a guide for practice. The formulation of intentionality is that it should help client and therapist agree the nature of the problem and the nature of the answer. When intentionality features as a central concept it is in the service of promoting accountability and the explanation of techniques to the public and to colleagues. Hermeneutics is a form of explanation for the approaches of each client and therapist.

The line of argument taken below notes the limits of quantitative psychology and answers the problem of the naturalistic attitude first. This understanding of intentionality forms the basis of the rapprochement between the talking and action therapies. The ability to choose, and choosing between intentionalities and objects of attention, occurs through free will. The naturalistic attitude ignores individual choice and the intentionality of consciousness in the social world. The view is that there is pseudoscience in therapy research. For the biopsychosocial perspective, what is required is basic understanding to interpret the qualitative experience of psychological problems. A biopsychosocial perspective has not yet been attained in the developmental psychology of psychopathology and so currently there is no consensus and that cannot guide practice.

The most all-embracing problem of therapy is an excessive reliance on justifications concerning the material, biological, neurological and physical substrate of human being. This is a problem because an over-emphasis on one aspect of the whole decreases, mistreats or ignores the other two aspects of human being. The naturalistic emphasis in therapy is a problem because the biopsychosocial whole is irreducible to any one of its parts. The problem is a hasty focus on one third of the causal factors involved. In philosophy, clear thinking prior to action, this is called the problem of the naturalistic attitude. In psychology, the same problem is known by a series of equivalent terms. It has been referred to as Scientism, physical reductivism, materialism, material reductionism and psychologism. Briefly, the problem of the naturalistic attitude is due to a philosophical position that believes that empirical psychology is a sufficient procedure for all justifications including ideal knowledge (like theory, mathematics and logic). Edmund Husserl countered this in the Logical Investigations (Husserl, 1970a), by pointing out that there are real and ideal types of knowledge. He furthered an appreciation of an ideal theory of meaning: This means that speech and writing work because people know in an ideal way, what the referents of speech are. The referents of speech are the same in metaphor and sarcasm, in Mandarin or French. Similarly for Husserl, ideals need to be found and understood in philosophy and psychology to create a preliminary theoretical overview to co-ordinate action. Husserl’s phenomenology exists to find the ideals of consciousness in relation to other consciousness, the world of meaning and the objects of attention in it. Phenomenology does not replace empiricism but is preparatory for it.

But the naturalistic attitude of natural psychological science acts as though understanding can only be gained through empirical means. If this were true, it would follow that people who have psychological problems are not good scientists and need to apply science to themselves. The problem of the natural attitude is that psychological science acts as though intellectual work is absent from the creation of its results. The consequence of the problem concerns how to create a justified position for understanding psychological life, specifically as psychological, and not the by-product of natural-material processes. “Psychological” here means emotional, relational and concerning intentionalities about conscious lived experiences such as thoughts, feelings and beliefs. This is a restatement of the purpose of theory and empiricism because an exclusive focus on natural being means that only natural-material cause is worthy of attention. Hence, the naturalistic attitude rules out the complex inter-connections between the three aspects of the biopsychosocial whole. It contradicts the as-yet-unknown overall inter-action between each aspect.

Furthermore, the manner of argument in psychological science is suspect. The problem is that the quantitative model is built on the following confusion between two forms of argument, modus tollens and modus ponens. Modus ponens is the argument that when a theory is true, observations from its perspective are held to be true. Modus tollens is the argument that if an observed finding is false with respect to a theoretical prediction, then the theoretical prediction is also false. Thus, quantitative psychology puts the cart before the horse. In quantitative psychology that uses statistics, the premises are always unsound because they are averages and not actual reflections of the highly complex inter-related factors under consideration.

On the contrary, the proper relation between theory and practice is that theory comes first, but it is not the sole measure of what is real. But rather theory serves its purpose determining what should be considered. One alternative to modus ponens is putting the pure before the applied. What this means is that theory serves a role in identifying what counts and this can inform practice. Accordingly, the use of statistics in large areas of the experimental approach to therapy is completely unjustified because the situation of measuring quality of life supplied by a specific input from the therapy is statistically indeterminate. When changes of meaning and lifestyle itself are the matters at hand, these subjects are not capable of supporting scientific evaluation in the proper sense of science. Furthermore, the quality of the experimental designs used and the size of the groups used are frequently far too small for the statistical packages used. Theory is refined by consideration of the applied to create a new pure: in an on-going inter-play between the pure and the applied.

The ontological dualism of biological traits and chemical reasons for psychological problem can never going to be met by science but only by a psychosocial treatment that helps clients understand and change their own behaviour. What counts in therapy practice is the experience of practising. When practice is understood from the inside of what it feels like to provide and receive care, then the experiential basis can be understood and theorised. Intentionalities form part of helping clients re-assess how they make the end-products of their own conscious experience. How people have experience and the intentionalities involved is the concern of qualitative theories that attend to the lived experiences of meaning. The intentionality model exists to balance opposing forces between theory and practice, empirical research and ethics. In the qualitative view, nothing about therapy is factual or measurable in the scientific sense. The intentionality model supplies a simple structure and is flexible and designed for the individual delivery of care. The values that it upholds are the preferences for flexibility, immediate responsiveness in sessions and how to structure individual meetings and series of meetings towards specific agreed goals.

Briefly, natural science is a perfectly acceptable approach for understanding material being, inanimate matter and acting towards it. Natural science appears in psychology as psychophysics that, for instance, could never possibly grasp what it means to see. Natural science appears in therapy as ideas of natural cause and invariable, measurable effects. It uses statistics to measure psychological distress. Its purpose is not to understand distress. Nor can it understand those who do not sufficiently understand themselves or others.

Generally, in the natural view of attachment theory, a brief introduction on inter-responsiveness between child and carer, or between two adults, then leads into a discussion of neurological processes as the genuine representation of what empathy is, how child development occurs and how memory processes work. Typically in this type of research, psychological justification is begun but suddenly broken off to discuss the material substrate only, with no, or only the slightest, regard for personal choices and intersubjective influence. Thus, intersubjective influence is not treated as intersubjective but as neurological or physiological – anything but psychosocial. On the contrary, the task of a pure or theoretical psychology of secure attaching and its vicissitudes, discerns what is significant as opposed to what is peripheral.

In order to make a proper comparison between what a two-person theory of attachment should be capable of doing, as opposed to a one-person theory, I am going to make a comparison with behaviourism in order to emphasise this distinction. Behaviourism is a one-person model that only takes into account two major aspects (for all cases and psychological disorders). The behavioural model of any psychological disorder must have some accuracy because it does bring about psychological change in the case of over-coming conditioning and implicit beliefs. Furthermore, it does not jump from one foundation to another, as in the case of the naturalistic attitude justifications about attachment (even though it is a biopsychosocial occurrence overall). There is no point in discussing attachment in terms of the biological substrate (neurological development, changes in the cortex, limbic system or the functions of different types of neurones). In this sense, the behavioural understanding of attachment or any psychological disorder is more psychological than the neurological approach that only focuses on the naturalistic attitude. Behavioural theory believes that classical conditioning and operant conditioning will be present.

One way of stating the task for therapists is that they need to be able to understand and digest the distress and negativity that they might feel, as a result of listening to painful and distressing material. It is a limitation of therapists that they should only work with the level of distress with which they can cope. A person who specialises in particularly distressing material like rape, neglect, sexual abuse, suicide and self-harm may need to limit their exposure and monitor the way in which they deal with their feelings. Some negative and traumatic objects when brought to attention and communicated have the consequence of strong negative emotion that is passed on to the listener.

There are a number of consequences to understand how an excessive focus on the natural misconstrues the meaning-oriented changes that are the proper substrate of helping people changes their psychological lives by helping them change it themselves. The meaning of attachment relationships currently falls outside of the domain of what can be studied by natural psychological science. Attachment as a lived experience is psychologically meaningful.

Through thought alone it is clear that the material being of humans is not the same as meaning, values, intentions, beliefs and practices in the sociocultural world. This is not to state that the biopsychosocial perspective is currently impossible or over-ambitious. The concern is that natural psychological science lives or dies by its own precision. A day may come when it can be specified that the personalities and problems of a specific client can be explained because of the specific impact of their inherited traits, in relation to triggering social environments, in relation to their intentionality and choices. At some point in the future, it may well be possible to specify precisely how inherited material developments inter-act with culture and personal choice for an individual. Until then, there is uncertainty about the amount of natural cause in relation to the amount of psychosocial ‘cause’ in any given situation. Until that day, precise statements about cause cannot be made.

But the naturalistic attitude is not a focus on meaning nor can it be. A public phenomenon like meaning can only be approached properly by a view that accounts for lived experiences and relates them to the biopsychosocial whole. Natural psychological science finds out about the brain, genetics and the chemical substrate of being human. But such findings will never justify the psychosocial interventions of therapy. Similarly, measurement, statistics and methods of quantification cannot explain how consciousness works. The counter-argument is that meaning in everyday life should be the major focus for therapy before beginning quantification.

Natural psychological science cannot capture these meanings, particularly when it is the association between past history and context and the here and now events that are the meaningful link that needs to be studied. Natural psychological science can only focus on objects that fit its manner of inquiry and use of statistics. It is not qualified to attend to context-dependent interpretations and reactions to lived meaning.

What is upheld as a grounding principle in theorising is attending to conscious events that are capable of being discussed. The starting point agrees with Eugen Fink (Husserl, 1970b, App VIII, p 385). In relation to psychodynamics, if unconscious objects are permitted credibility, they can only be judged to exist with respect to what appears. What this necessitates is that care is required in being explicit to others and oneself, about justifications for practice with respect to unconscious objects. Overall, meaning is the product of consciousness and this is a cue to over-come a “naïve blindness to the horizons that join in determining the sense of being, and to the corresponding tasks of uncovering implicit intentionality”, (Husserl, 1977, §41, p 85). The sense of this phrase is that Husserl felt he could show the key facets of recollected, presentiated and other forms of meaning. The “naïve blindness” belongs to the naturalistic attitude of the natural scientific approaches that are not focused on understanding qualitative experience and explaining it by intentionality.

The appeal to understand and work with intentionality abandons an incoherent jumping back and forth between biology, neurology and the psychophysical view of cognition and affect - and the realm of helping clients altering their experiences through new understanding, choice and practice. What is argued for is a cohesive and sustained attention to interpreting intentionality in relation to the objects of awareness and their contexts in a way that identifies the most salient features. The need is for a means of creating justifications that pertain to the psychosocial medium of conscious communication about forms of intentionality, meaning, values, intentions and beliefs that are subject to free will.

Furthermore, for therapy or psychology to claim to know about emotions, thoughts, beliefs, human relations and the influence of past relationships on the present – but to justify such knowledge by recourse to naturalistic attitude claims - is to jump between foundations. This is a false answer that the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, called a “metabasis eis allo genos,” (Critique of Pure Reason, B 486). This Greek phrase could be translated as “jumping from one ground to another” or more colloquially as “moving the goal posts”. It is a problem of confusing different forms of justification that belong to different regions of being. Kant argued that a lack of a consensually-agreed conclusion in one area, does not permit argument from an entirely different area altogether. Specifically, it is a false answer to claim to have reliable knowledge by ignoring lived experience of the psychological and justify itself entirely in terms of neurological development, chemicals in the bloodstream or via the electrical activities of specific parts of the brain. Similarly, no matter what statistics tells us about what happens on average, it cannot specify what is happening in a specific case.

The psychological world only ever quasi-appears through the intentionalities empathising (and composite versions of imaginatively empathising, trying to reason how people are generally). For the phenomenological movement, human beings live in a conscious meaningful world of shared perspectives. The meanings and ‘causes’ pertinent to therapy are understood concerning how another feels and experiences the world in the unique way that they do. People do understand their relationships, feel love and hate, and act accordingly. There is no need to distrust these experiences and common sense.

As therapists have no means of diagnosing or providing material changes in the brain, for instance, they lack the means of providing physical remedies to psychological matters. Even if natural causes do predominate in any specific case, the certainty about that would not help the practitioners of the psychological therapies. This is because practice concerns how to create actual outcomes with real people (given their limitations, those of therapists and the situation as a whole). Practice employs social skills and encourages specific things happen for clients, the general public. Practice is not technical know-how by itself.

However, objects of attention appear within horizons of sense of various types. Horizons or contexts of sense can be remembered, or anticipated, to name a few basic types all of which appear in what is perceptually current. In a similar way, Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic concluded that truth can only exist “within its horizons,” by which he meant “we have continuously anew the living truth from the living source, which is our absolute life, and from the self-examination turned toward that life, in the constant spirit of self-responsibility. We have the truth then, not as falsely absolutized, but rather, in each case, as within its horizons”, (1969, §105, p 279). The sense of this comment is that views are concurrent and arguable, for and against one position or another.

It could be possible to make the areas of the applicability of science and hermeneutics clearer. For instance, most quantum physics is counter-intuitive. Late twentieth-century science explores uncertain ideas through grasping more certain ones and making their predicted consequences inter-act in order to measure predicted outcomes. Contemporary science moves from a consensus position, to explore its own fringe phenomena and explain more. However, since Werner Heisenberg, science has noted that the manner of investigation alters the phenomena investigated. In therapy and the everyday life, phenomena appear differently according to how they are viewed, and hence, believed to exist.

An excessive focus on material being and the problem of psychologism need to be tackled in proposing a qualitative psychology of conscious meaningful experience. The problem of psychologism is the belief that only empirical psychology can find what exists psychologically and understand how people know. The problem only of the consequences of naturalistic research so far is noted as an inability to help the real situation of multiple current psychological problems. An excessive preoccupation with natural science obscures the potential to embrace a greater clarity about how therapy works.