Journeying with Van den Berg

The author offers a description of how his earliest encounters with Van den Berg inspired him, gave him a vision, a way of seeing, and his vocation to phenomenology and psychology. He acknowledges his indebtedness to how Van den Berg’s style cultivates an aesthetic sensibility that has shaped his own efforts to find a poetic voice for psychological writing. Tracing out the path of a 40-year journey, and weaving in Van den Berg’s work, the author shows how he came to appreciate phenomenology as a work of homecoming, how such homecoming is a matter of the heart, how metaphor is the language of the heart and its ways of knowing, and how Van den Berg’s phenomenological metabletics guided his own metabletic studies on technology. At the end of the article he shows how he came to appreciate how metabletics is a cultural therapeutics and a foundation for an ethical epistemology. Meeting a Teacher I first met J.H. van den Berg in 1968 as I was nearing the completion of my doctoral studies in psychology at Duquesne University. He lectured on some of the work of Harry Stack Sullivan and while I was interested in Sullivan’s work, there was something else in van den Berg’s words that cap