Analytical psychology prioritizes quantifiable research, sidelining subjective understanding.

Compassion relies more on understanding others' experiences than on explaining their actions.

Understanding others is noble, mostly; but there are risks.

Die Natur erklären wir, das Seelenleben verstehen wir [Nature we explain, but psychic life we understand] ― Wilhelm Dilthey, 1894

When I first started studying psychology, I noticed there were two very different ideas about what the field was supposed to achieve. One goal was to understand human experience, and the other was to explain behavior. This was back in the late 1970s at a provincial state university in what was then West Germany. At that time, academic psychology was being rebuilt along American lines. Many of the traditional paradigms had been forgotten or abandoned, partly because of the Nazi experience. American ideas and sensibilities now set the tone for how psychology was to be done.

The notion that understanding could be a critical goal of the psychological enterprise had once been prominent in Germany. The idea had been introduced by scholars such as Wilhelm Dilthey (1894; see epigraph) and further developed by the phenomenologists (e.g., Husserl, 1973; this work was published posthumously) and their students, the existentialists (e.g., Jaspers, 1913), but it had fallen out of favor by the late 20th century. In time, the aim to explain, control, and predict displaced the aim to understand (Krueger, 2020). The analytical aim vanquished the descriptive aim. On the American scene, Carl Rogers (e.g., 1942) was one of the few leading psychologists who remained interested in his clients’ inner worlds.

Balancing Analytical and Experiential Approaches

I was trained in experimental and quantitative (i.e., analytical) psychology. I loved this approach (I still do), but I never lost my interest in the fascinating if dimly lit world of intersubjectivity. One of the last oral exams I took in Germany was on Rogers’s (1969)........

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