Husserl developed the phenomenological method to make possible “a descriptive account of the essential structures of the directly given.” Phenomenology emphasizes the immediacy of experience, the attempt to isolate it and set it off from all assumptions of existence or causal influence and lay bare its essential structure.

Husserl's phenomenology seeks to understand the essence of consciousness and our direct experiences. He believed that by focusing on these experiences and suspending any preconceived notions or assumptions, we can uncover the fundamental structures and meanings that underlie our subjective reality.

Again, phenomenology for Husserl is a discipline that attempts to describe (or understand) what is given to us in experience. In other words, phenomenology for Husserl provides an account of how things (phenomena) appear to our awareness or, ultimately, how the world appears to us in terms of our subjective experience of it.

The central doctrine of Husserl's phenomenology is the thesis that consciousness is intentional, a doctrine that is borrowed from Franz Brentano. That is, every act of consciousness is directed at some object or other, perhaps a material object, perhaps an "ideal" object—as in mathematics.