The article analyzes various meanings of the term “lived experience” (Erlebnis), that are primarily associated with the cognitive aspects of mental life. The first examples of the use of the concept date back to the period of German Romanticism and are based on an understanding of the nature of poetic creativity. Since the creator (a “genius”) is capable of expressing the immediacy of life given in experience in the most complete and undistorted way, German Romanticism prepares the use of the “lived experience” as a basic category of human sciences. Dilthey uses this concept to mark the initial non-separation of the content of the perceived, as well as the subject who perceives this content. The category of “experience” allows us to propose a dynamic concept of consciousness, as well as to propose a solution to a traditional problem of the theory of knowledge as belief in the reality of the external world. It also offers new models of connection between the emotional and intellectual sides of our psychic life. The article shows that modern psychology lacks of a developed concept of experience, and that this term is used primarily to designate a method of repeated given mental states or processes, which is predominantly emotional in nature.