A man and a woman are sitting on a sofa; the work day is behind them, and the evening is beginning to run into night. They have eaten. They have turned the television off, and each is reading. Suddenly, he looks up to see what she is doing, and he notices that she is staring out the window into the growing darkness.

He feels restless. He is curious. He feels uneasy and he focuses on her eyes. They seem trancelike. He must say something, and so he asks, "What are you thinking about?"

Phenomenology is the science and philosophy of experience. It began as a discernible movement with Edmund Husserl's insistence that philosophy ought to take as its primary task the description of the structures of experience as they present themselves to consciousness.

Phenomenology can be defined as the study of the experience of embedded, or situated subjects, in spheres of overlapping person-environment relationships.

Writing from the perspective of phenomenological philosophy, Maurice Merlaeu-Ponty asserted: All my knowledge of the world, even my scientific knowledge, is gained from my own particular point of view, or from some experience of the world without which the symbols of science would be meaningless.

The whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced, and if we want to subject science itself to rigorous scrutiny and arrive at a precise assessment of its meaning scope, we must begin by reawakening the basic experience of the world of which science is the second-order expression.

When I say, "Ball" something comes to mind, doesn't it? That could be a baseball, a soccer ball, or a basketball.

Perhaps you even see it in your mind's eye. Perhaps you recall a specific ball you either currently have in your possession or used to play with at some time in your past. Maybe the ball is currently right in front of you, or maybe it's absent physically, not present to your perception but only present to you because you can remember and call it back to your awareness.

If you think of one, you think of a specific and real ball, you do not think of something that is only an "imaginary ball'', or a "fictional ball''. If, on the other hand, after reading that something like an imaginary ball is an option, then you might be thinking now about that, so that you could have had at least two, perhaps three or four such kinds of balls come to mind.

When we experience things, generally speaking, we can do that in one of two ways. We can either have a direct interaction with something through our senses, and we call that a perception, or something appears to us through our use of language and our ability to imagine and to conceptualise.

Thus, we can see a tree and relate to it as a matter of perceptual experience in a very naturalistic way. We can also form a construct, for example of "the tree of life" and think of something in the Garden of Eden that would have made it possible for people to live forever in their sinful state.

While one can see the physical tree, the "tree of life" is a concept that has substance but cannot be seen. It can only be comprehended and held in the mind. Phenomenologically, the object that is given to us in either case is known as an intentional object.

Gestalt therapists call this "aboutness'', this intentional object, a figure of interest. Many gestalt therapists also adhere to what they call "the cycle of experience" in which a person moves through various stages in the forming and satisfying of such a figure.

A simple illustration: if you have an itch in the middle of your back, what will you do about that? Scratch it, of course. Slow down the experience. At first you become vaguely aware of some kind of sensation, and it becomes clear that it's in the middle of your back. Then that forms more clearly into an awareness that you itch.

Then comes a plan for satisfying that itch, and you choose from among several options for reaching that hard-to-reach spot. Very quickly, you put your plan into action and scratch yourself where you itch. Ah. Relief!

Finally, you reflect on the hassle of reaching the middle of your back for such things, and you settle back into a somewhat neutral, even disinterested stream of consciousness. If intimacy is sharing one's interior world in an authentic way, then inquiry into the intentionality, the figures of interest, of another can often lead to closer contact. Sometimes it only takes asking, "What are you thinking about?"