Guest Post: The Notebook I Found Again

By Somayeh McKian

Certified Psychotherapist, In-Training Logotherapist, Gender Studies Scholar, & Published Author

I found an old notebook recently, in my office in Tehran. It had been sitting among other papers for years, carrying the traces of a course I attended in Tehran when phenomenology was still something I was trying to understand. The handwriting was mine, but the person who had written those pages felt strangely distant.       

Across the pages were words I had once carefully written down: intentionality. noesis, noema, intersubjectivity, experience, reality, possibility, tradition, meaning.

There were definitions, questions, fragments, arrows connecting one idea to another. Some sentences were underlined. Others were crossed out. There were questions in the margins that had never received an answer.

At the time, I thought I was taking notes about phenomenology.

Looking at them now, I wonder whether I was actually taking notes about a question that would take much longer to return to me. Years later, while beginning a new stage of my training in Logotherapy, I encountered phenomenology again. I was reading Frankl's The Feeling of Meaninglessness, and suddenly the subject that had occupied those old pages was in front of me again. I stopped reading. I remembered the notebook. And I found myself wondering about the distance between those two moments: the woman sitting in a workshop in Tehran, carefully writing down unfamiliar philosophical concepts, and the person I am now, reading them again after years of experience, study, writing, migration, psychotherapy, and searching for meaning in very different circumstances.

What happens when an old idea returns to us?

Perhaps it doesn't return unchanged, we are the ones who have changed.

Experience before explanation

What has stayed with me most from my old notes is not a particular philosophical definition. It is the attention to experience. Phenomenology asks us, in its own way, to stay close to what is lived before rushing to explain it. That sounds simple. In practice, it is not. We are constantly interpreting, explaining or even when we are silent, we try to explain. We give names to things. We classify them. We look for causes. We place experiences inside familiar categories. This is especially true in psychotherapy. A person comes to us with an experience, and almost immediately there is a temptation to understand it through what we already know.

A person says, “I don't know why I am doing any of this anymore.”

We may hear depression. Burnout. Loss. an old wound. A relational pattern. A crisis of identity. Perhaps some of those interpretations will eventually be useful.

But before them there is another question:

What is it like for this person to experience their life this way?

What has become empty? What has lost its significance? What possibilities have disappeared?

What is still present, even if the person cannot yet recognize it?

The older I become as a psychotherapist, the more I appreciate the importance of that pause before interpretation. Perhaps this is one reason my old notes have become meaningful to me again. They remind me that before we explain a person's experience, we have to be willing to encounter it.

What is the person oriented toward?

One word in my notebook appears again: intentionality.

At the time, I was trying to understand it as a philosophical concept, the idea that consciousness is always directed toward something. But reading Frankl now made me see another dimension in it. A human being is not simply experiencing .We are oriented. Toward someone. Toward something. Toward a relationship. Toward a task. Toward a possibility. Toward a future we cannot yet see. And sometimes, toward meaning.

This does not mean that phenomenology and Logotherapy are the same thing. But reading Frankl through the lens of phenomenology made me notice something I might not otherwise have noticed: the human being cannot be understood simply by looking inward. We are always in relation to a world. Other people matter. Our history matters. The culture and traditions we inherit matter. The circumstances in which we find ourselves matter. And yet, within those circumstances, there may still be possibilities that have not been exhausted. That tension interests me deeply. We inherit a world, but we are not necessarily condemned to repeat it.

We receive a history, but we are not only our history. We encounter circumstances we did not choose, and yet we may still have something to say about how we stand within them. Perhaps this is where phenomenological attention and existential thinking become particularly meaningful to me now. They bring me back to the concrete person. Not an abstract human being or diagnosis or a theory. This person, in this situation, at this particular moment of their life.

The notebook has not changed

The strangest part of finding those pages was realizing that nothing had changed in the handwriting. The ink was the same. The words were the same. The questions were still there.

But I was not the same person who had written them. The notebook had remained still while I had moved through time. And perhaps this is why returning to an old intellectual notebook can be such a strange experience. We think we are remembering our past. But sometimes we are doing something else. I think we are reinterpreting our past from the position of the person we have become. The words have not changed. Their meaning and their connections  have. Or perhaps more precisely, our relationship to their meaning has changed.

I hear in it an invitation to slow down before explanation. To pay attention to how experience is lived. To remember that the person sitting in front of me is always more than the explanation I might give for their suffering. And through my present encounter with Logotherapy, I also hear another question: What is this person still capable of becoming? What possibilities remain? What is life asking of them? What meaning might still be waiting to be encountered not prescribed, not imposed, but discovered within the particular circumstances of their life?

Perhaps this is why the old notebook returned to me now. It did not bring me a new answer.

It brought me back to an old question. And maybe some questions need years before we are ready to understand what they were asking of us. I closed the notebook. The pages went back into the place where I had found them. But this time, I did not feel that I had simply recovered something from my past. I felt that I had met it again. And perhaps that is what happens with some ideas. They do not disappear. They wait.