Subtextual Phenomenology: A Methodology for Valid, First-Person Research

This paper presents a methodology for first-person, intuitive research. It argues that it is possible to do rigorous research using subjective, first-person data. The methodology, which I call Subtextual Phenomenology (sometimes shortened to Subphenomenology), provides a theoretical framework, as follows: Epistemology Theoretical Perspective Methodology Methods Objectivism Transcendental Phenomenology Subtextual Phenomenology The First-Person Experience The Transcendental Epoche The Epiphany Of The Collective Unconscious The Rational Examination The Inspired, Creative Explication Subtextual Phenomenology evolved out of research into theatre and the phenomena of play directing (Vallack, 2005). It remains a methodology to identify and process as research the everyday, subjective ways of knowing what we know, and to formalise this knowledge in a theoretical framework for rigorous, intersubjective insight. It identifies and articulates what we do intuitively, whether that be in a business or workplace, academic research or in our personal lives. Based on the previously maligned and often misunderstood philosophy of Edmund Husserl, who was known popularly as the father of phenomenology, it embraces an epistemology of Objectivism, which (arguably) is essential to pure phenomenology. Husserl's thinking was beyond the limitations of its modernist context. Now, one hundred years later, scholars are able to appreciate Husserl's insight that the most universal knowledge comes from the most intensely personal data. Intersubjectivity springs from subjectivism.