Contributions of Jean-Paul Sartre and Paul Ricoeur to the field of Phenomenological Social Psychology

Phenomenological social psychology is an approach that seeks to apply some of the principles of the phenomenological perspective to social psychology, focusing on people's lived experiences. Taking a critical perspective to mainstream psychology, phenomenologists seek to create qualitative methodologies in order to achieve rich descriptions of individual human experiences. Being part of the phenomenological movement, the contemporary French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Paul Ricoeur developed their own perspectives, with their primary concern being to emphasize the human capacity to create meaning for temporal experience, constituting various types of narratives. From a survey of literature, this paper seeks to develop a discussion on the relationship between subjectivity, temporality, and narrativity in the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Paul Ricoeur, pointing out these authors’ contributions to the field of phenomenological social psychology.