The Phenomenology of Erwin Straus and the Epistemology of Psychoanalysis

The contributions of Erwin Straus, a phenomenologist psychiatrist of reknown in Europe but little known in the United States are summarized. His emphasis on the wholeness of the world as it unfolds in its sensory splendor, as opposed to the traditional psychiatric efforts toward the reduction of psychic experience into quasi-mathematical and medical categories is explained.