Reflections in Personal Construct Theory

Reflections in Personal Construct Theory

Reflections in Personal Construct Theory Edited by Richard J. Butler Consultant Clinical Psychologist in Child Health, Leeds Primary Care Trust and Senior Associate Lecturer, University of Leeds

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

This edition first published 2009 © 2009 John Wiley & Sons Ltd, except for chapter 12, which is a revised and adapted version of an original chapter published by Psychosozial-Verlag, for which permission has been kindly granted. Wiley-Blackwell is an imprint of John Wiley & Sons, formed by the merger of Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business with Blackwell Publishing. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Offices The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell. The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reflections in personal construct theory / edited by Richard J Butler. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-470-98654-7 1. Personal construct theory. I. Butler, Richard J. BF698.9.P47R44 150.19'8–dc22

2009 2008052401

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Set in 10/12.5pt Sabon by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed in Singapore by Fabulous Printers Pte Ltd 1

2009

Dedication Few events profoundly change the course of the path we travel. On first reading Don Bannister’s take on psychology, then watching him singlehandedly dismantle a mass of behaviourists at a conference, and finally having the privilege of his astute and penetrating observations on my clinical and research practice while I was practising at High Royds Hospital, I encountered three such events. Don died far too early. As a staunch advocate of reflexivity I’d like unequivocally to dedicate this book to his memory. Lest we ever forget.

Contents

List of contributors Preface Acknowledgements

xi xv xxv

Section I Exploring Personal Construct Theory

1

Chapter 1

Coming to terms with personal construct theory Richard Butler

3

Chapter 2

The construct Harry Procter

21

Section II The Men behind the Theory

41

Chapter 3

The George Kelly I knew Jay S. Efran

43

Chapter 4

Don Bannister through the looking glass Fay Fransella

57

Section III Construct Theory as a Meaningful Alternative

77

Chapter 5

Individuality, community and criminal behaviour James Horley

79

Chapter 6

Shaking hands with a serial killer David A. Winter

95

Chapter 7

Encounters of the puzzling kind: the organisational corollary in relation to self-construing Richard Butler

111

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Chapter 8

Sauce for the gander Sally Robbins

Chapter 9

Griddled with angst: a roller-coaster ride on the repertory grid Richard Bell

Section IV

Construct Theory as an Elaborative Choice

Chapter 10

Living aggressively Jonathan D. Raskin

Chapter 11

The guilty choice: reflections on dislodgement, extension and definition Peter Cummins

Chapter 12

Different readings of personal construct theory Trevor Butt

Chapter 13

The teacher, the singer and the personal construct theorist: an unlikely but fruitful dialogue Vivien Burr

Chapter 14

Section V

Reflexivity: what in the ‘GAK’ is that? Desley Hennessy No One Need be a Victim of Their Biography

131

145

159 161

177 195

209 221

237

Chapter 15

Differentiating the I from the ME Jerald R. Forster

239

Chapter 16

Mirror man David Green

251

Chapter 17

Landmarks on a personal odyssey Finn Tschudi

263

Chapter 18

Reconstruing after a change in health status Jörn Scheer

279

Chapter 19

Constructions of death and loss: a personal and professional evolution Robert A. Neimeyer

Chapter 20

Reflections on the creation of a dissertation Dennis Hinkle

293 319

Contents Section VI The Client as an Active Participant Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

ix 329

Enculturing reflexivity across cultures: non-PC lessons from study abroad Naoimh O’Connor

331

The icing on the sausage: The emancipation of constructive alternativism Dina Pekkala

347

Theory, therapy and life: experiential personal construct psychology and the ‘desert places’ of a therapist Larry M. Leitner Reflexivity, research and practice: explorations in experiential personal construct psychology Alexandra L. Adame, Anthony J. Pavlo, Brendon M. Smith, Hugo J. Schielke & Larry M. Leitner

361

375

Chapter 25

The joint experiment of research supervision Beverly M. Walker

389

Section VII

And Finally . . . Reflections on Reflexivity

403

Chapter 26

Critical consciousness in action: reflections on reflection in, from and beyond personal construct psychology Bill Warren

Index

405

421

List of Contributors Alexandra L. Adame Doctoral Student Department of Psychology, Miami University, Oxford, OH45056, USA e-mail: [email protected] Richard Bell Associate Professor Department of Psychology, University of Melbourne, Victoria, 3010, Australia e-mail: [email protected] Vivien Burr Reader in Psychology School of Human & Health Sciences, University of Huddersfield, Queensgate, Huddersfield, HD1 3DH, UK e-mail: [email protected] Richard Butler Consultant Clinical Psychologist Crowtrees, 40 Station Road Baildon West Yorkshire, BD176NW, UK e-mail: [email protected] Trevor Butt Emeritus Reader in Psychology School of Human & Health Sciences, University of Huddersfield, Queensgate, Huddersfield, HD1 3DH, UK e-mail: [email protected] Peter Cummins Consultant Clinical Psychologist Head of Adult Psychological Services (Coventry), Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership Trust, Coventry Psychological Services, Second Floor, Coventry & Warwickshire Hospital, Stoney Stanton Road, Coventry, CV1 4FH, UK e-mail: [email protected]

xii List of Contributors Jay S. Efran Professor Emeritus of Psychology Temple University, 310 E. Gowen Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19119, USA e-mail: [email protected] Jerald R. Forster Professor Emeritus University of Washington, 1744 NE 62nd St., Seattle, WA, 98115, USA e-mail: [email protected] Fay Fransella Visiting Professor of Personal Construct Psychology, University of Hertfordshire; Consultant at the Centre for Personal Construct Psychology, University of Hertfordshire. c/o, Budock Cottage, 2 Lambs Lane, Falmouth, Cornwall, TR11 2JL, UK e-mail: [email protected] David Green Honorary Senior Lecturer in Clinical Psychology & Consultant Clinical Psychologist Leeds Institute of Health Sciences, University of Leeds, Charles Thackrah Building, 101 Clarendon Road, Woodhouse, Leeds, LS2 9JL, UK e-mail: [email protected] Desley Hennessy Research Psychologist School of Psychology, University of Wollongong, Northfields Avenue, Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia e-mail: [email protected] Dennis Hinkle Psychotherapist 7610 Kona Court, Placerville, California, USA 95667 e-mail: [email protected] James Horley Associate Professor of Psychology Augustana Faculty, University of Alberta, Camrose, Alberta, T4V 2R3, Canada e-mail: [email protected]

List of Contributors

xiii

Larry M. Leitner Professor Department of Psychology, Miami University, Oxford, OH 45056 USA e-mail: [email protected] Robert A. Neimeyer Professor Department of Psychology, University of Memphis, Memphis, TN 38152, USA e-mail: [email protected] Naoimh O’Connor Psychology support and group facilitation, Educational Consultancy The Umbria Institute, via di priori 87, 06123, Perugia, Italy e-mail: [email protected]

Research

Anthony J. Pavlo Doctoral Student Department of Psychology, Miami University, Oxford, OH, 45056, USA e-mail: [email protected] Dina Pekkala Clinical Psychologist Psychological Services, Coventry & Warwickshire Partnership Trust, Coventry & Warwickshire Hospital, Stoney Stanton Road, Coventry, CV1 4FH, UK e-mail: [email protected] Harry Procter Consultant Clinical Psychologist 70 Staplegrove Road, Taunton, Somerset, TA1 1DJ, UK e-mail: [email protected] Jonathan D. Raskin Professor, Department of Psychology State University of New York at New Paltz, 600 Hawk Drive New Paltz, NY 12561-2440 USA e-mail: [email protected]

xiv List of Contributors Sally Robbins Consultant Clinical Psychologist Psychological Services for Older People, 3rd Floor, River House, Gulson Hospital, Gulson Road, Coventry CV1 2HR, UK e-mail: [email protected] Jörn Scheer Emeritus Professor of Medical Psychology University of Giessen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] Hugo J. Schielke Doctoral Student Department of Psychology, Miami University, Oxford, OH, 45056, USA e-mail: [email protected] Brendon M. Smith Doctoral Student Department of Psychology, Miami University, Oxford, OH, 45056, USA e-mail: [email protected] Finn Tschudi Professor Emeritus Vallefaret 11, N – 0663, Oslo, Norway Or Institute of Psychology, University of Oslo, Box 1094, Blindern, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected] Beverly M. Walker Associate Professor School of Psychology, University of Wollongong, Northfields Avenue, Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia e-mail: [email protected] Bill Warren Conjoint Associate Professor School of Education, University of Newcastle, Australia e-mail: [email protected] David A. Winter Professor of Clinical Psychology School of Psychology, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield Campus, College Lane, Hatfield, Hertfordshire, AL10 9AB, UK and Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust e-mail: [email protected]

Preface

‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ (Socrates at his trial for heresy) It would not be out of kilter to suppose that psychology is primarily concerned with an understanding of the human condition. To this end psychologists have proffered many theories, and variations on those many theories, to help grapple with the mystery of why folk do what they do. From his early experiences in psychology George Alexander Kelly, undoubtedly an exceptional psychologist of his time, realised that what seemed to be true of himself psychologically was probably no less true of others, an understanding he sketched in the paper ‘The autobiography of a theory’ (1963/1969). This was to be a reflection with far-reaching implications. For adopting this notion as a central tenet, Kelly set about constructing a novel psychological abstraction – personal construct theory (PCT) – which committed him to a psychology of man1 rather than of his circumstances.

What is Reflexivity? Characteristically, and arguably uniquely, we are the only species with either the ability to reflect on the self (Andrews 1998) or actively create a theory of self (Kelly 1977; Harter 1999). Reflexivity may be understood as an act of self-reference whereby a person examines the nature of their own actions, beliefs, idiosyncrasies and emotions – an exploration, as it were, of one’s psychological stance. The manner of formulating a view of ourself compellingly implies a dualism, one William James (1961), regarded as the 1

‘man’ is used here, and throughout the book, in a kellyan tradition bearing no relationship to any particular gender.

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eminent founder of modern psychology, recognised well over a century ago. In order to account for our capacity to self-reflect, James proposed two features: the self as ‘I’ and the self as ‘me’. He advanced the view that the ‘I’ self, being the fundamental organiser and interpreter of experience, reflects a core sense of self. As the subjective centre of experience he proposed that the ‘I’ self relates to conscience and evaluation of the more public sense of ‘me’. It might be deemed to be the ‘I’ in a self-description such as ‘I am honest’. Mancuso (1986) called such a construction – that aspect of self which reflects – the narrative self. In contrast, James contended the self as ‘me’ (self as object) refers to the self as a doer or actor; the self as presented to others; the self in relation to ‘mine’. Epting & Prichard (1993) suggest the notion of ‘me’ is akin to the idea of selfconstruction or self-description. In essence, the ‘me’ self is the ‘honest’, in the statement ‘I am honest’. It is as if the ‘I’ self (that which reflects) allocates the ‘me’ self (that which is reflected on) along a construct. The ‘me’ self has traditionally been a focus of inquiry within applied psychology where the eagerness to capture an individual’s sense of self has fostered a proliferation of self-concept and self-esteem measures (Blascovich & Tomaka 1991; Butler & Gasson 2005). In contrast, the self as ‘I’ has tended to be marginalised in psychological debate but has generated considerable interest in philosophical circles. Epting & Prichard (1993) lament this apparent lack of psychological interest in the ‘I’, which they describe as the largely unknown and indescribable ‘active agent being present only at the time of the production of a construct dimension’.

The Model and the Theorist … A little over 50 years ago Kelly published The Psychology of Personal Constructs (1955; reprinted in 1991a; 1991b), a meta-theory about the theories people have about themselves.2 Epting, Leitner & Raskin (2006) argue that Kelly’s premise sits comfortably with humanistic theories such as Carl Rogers’ and Abraham Maslow’s. However, while both Rogers and Maslow may be fittingly understood as emphasising self-discovery, Kelly’s theory is fundamentally concerned with self-invention (Butt, Burr & Epting 1997). Folk, he contended, have the potential for endlessly reinventing themselves. 2 The Psychology of Personal Constructs (1955) was published in two volumes with page numbers running concurrently. In 1991 it was reprinted with each volume numbered from page 1. Reference to the work(s) in this volume cite either Kelly (1955) or Kelly (1991a; 1991b). Contributors taking direct quotes may thus cite page numbers from either the original or the reprints.

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The ideas Kelly offered continue to excite and embellish the work of many psychologists and others in their endeavours to understand the vagaries of human action. In concert with reflexivity, helpful psychological accounts ought to be able to explain the construing of the theorist as well as the people he or she is theorising about. The notion of reflexivity assumes that the models, ideas, methods and thinking that variously evolve should be able to subsume the thinking which led to them. In essence, the generalisations made about other people should be equally valid for the psychologist who makes such statements. As the creation of any theory is a facet of human behaviour, reflexivity demands that the theory account for its own construction. If it fails in this respect, as Dunnett & Miyaguchi (1993) astutely observe, then it fails to ‘account for all human behaviour’. Reflexivity can thus be understood as the ‘ability of a theory to account for the theorizing of the theorist’ (Dunnett & Miyaguchi 1993). In reflecting on how he arrived at the ideas which were to form the gist of the theory of personal constructs, Kelly (1963/1969) describes two occurrences of transcending the obvious. First, he realised that the way he approached scientific supervision with his graduates’ research interests – pinpointing the issue, observing, becoming intimate with the problem, forming hypotheses, making test runs, relating data to predictions and revising thinking in the light of experience – was pretty much indistinguishable from what he was attempting as a psychotherapist in seeking solutions with people in distress. Scientific enquiry, he mused, was akin to therapeutic endeavour. Both activities, he concluded, are fundamentally concerned with the search to make sense of the events with which we are confronted. Second, Kelly recognised the paradox of how, traditionally, psychologists tend to explain their self in terms of one type of theory yet employ ‘various concoctions to explain ordinary mortals’ on the other hand. What appeared good for the goose was anathema for the gander. What would happen, Kelly wondered, if we apply the same model – man-the-scientist – that psychologists use in their self-explanations, to try to understand other people? The theory of personal constructs was born. Crucially, as Don Bannister (1982/2003) suggested, reflexivity became a ‘bedrock assumption’ of PCT. The means by which we come to model or conceptualise other people should be equally valid for the psychologist who offers such a viewpoint. At the time reflexivity marked PCT out as unique among other psychological theories. Bannister (1982/2003) argued strongly that the notion of reflexivity enabled a sharp distinction to be made between Kelly’s theory and other contemporary psychological theories and viewpoints. Thus, he contended, PCT can be regarded as psychologically authentic.

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The notion of reflexivity carries important psychotherapeutic implications. If the search for meaning appears valid as a framework for understanding both ourselves and others and behaviour represents an experimental search for answers, then the proposal that a person’s behaviour makes sense in terms of their construction of the world, however perplexing it might seems to others, is readily born. Dunnett & Miyaguchi (1993) promptly articulate this issue in relation to those (often referred to as patients or clients) who struggle with their construing. Rather than squeeze people into diagnostic categories (which are undoubtedly constructions of mental health ‘experts’), PCT takes a position whereby personal troubles (symptoms) are framed as individually fashioned experiments constructed to make sense of the world. So although behaviour may often seem problematic, as where parents and teachers complain about the manner and conduct of the youngsters in their charge, from the protagonist’s perspective the ‘problem’ may be validly understood in terms of the questions the child poses in seeking solutions (Ravenette 1977; Butler & Green 1998; 2007).

Reflexivity in the Literature … Although regarded as theoretically fundamental and, as argued by Fransella (2005), essential ‘for anyone wanting to apply personal construct psychology in a professional capacity’, reflexivity has been broadly neglected. Dunnett & Miyaguchi (1993) playfully suggest the perennial failure of psychologists to include themselves as a ‘subject’ to which psychological models also apply, is similar to ‘young children who forget to include themselves when counting the number of people in a room’. Curiously, although there is widespread acceptance of reflexivity as a core feature in any application of PCT (Fransella 2005), it rarely provokes more than a fleeting reference in the literature. Only rarely did Kelly employ the written word to explore his musings on personal experiences, but in ‘Confusion and the clock’ (1978) Kelly reflected widely on an acute coronary attack. In reporting this experience he notes: ‘I have to align my perspective along various preconceived axes, else it would be practically impossible to have any sense of ever having been there at all.’ He desperately sought to construe this new and potentially devastating experience. It was the phenomenological ‘truths’ – the ‘tick-tock-ticktock truths that repeat themselves’ – that enabled him to grapple with what was happening. Typical of Kelly, the experience was characterised by anticipation. He reflected, at a micro level, that ‘each gasping pain was a preview of the next, telling me what to expect moment by moment’. In this paper

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he also mulls over the personal significance of anticipation in retaining meaning. He suggests that anticipation helps ‘bridge the chasm between past and future over which we always find ourselves suspended’. Incidentally, Kelly (1978) also drew a distinction between anticipation and prediction. The latter he considered as something which may be understood as ‘a probability statement about events’. He predicted, for example, that he would die (‘the odds were pretty much against me’). Anticipation, however, Kelly argued, is a ‘posture one assumes towards the future’, proposing that his experience of having a heart attack was ‘in some measure, anticipated’. As Kelly had in effect already anticipated such a state of affairs, anxiety was not as devastating as he might have expected. Yet despite his anticipations, as the title of his paper suggests, Kelly was also thrown into some disarray and confusion, wondering just how ‘adequate these terms of reference are’. He was suddenly faced with a number of unfamiliar implications, including the enactment of his role as a responsible person and his dynamic and delicately balanced status as a human being. He wondered if the confusion was anguish (‘a soul-shaking term for chaos’) but settled on guilt, resulting from a failure to live up to his own expectations in relation to those closest to him. So even during such a period of torment Kelly became reflexive. He sought to understand his experience in a manner similar to that with which he endeavoured to understand others.

The Aim of this Book Over 40 years ago Don Bannister (1966) suggested that psychologists had not faced up to the issue of reflexivity. Perhaps little has changed since. PCT has stimulated a wealth of diverse ideas and applications in clinical, educational, organisational and philosophical contexts. Folk have extended and elaborated the theory in contexts perhaps even Kelly might not have anticipated. However, it is rare for the vanguard of such developments to document how the processes they find useful in their day-to-day work foster an improved understanding of their self theory. It is thought that Kelly voiced frustration with the many people who live unexamined lives (Hinkle, personal communication). Kelly was thus very much an advocate of the Socratic tradition. The thrust of this book is to furnish reflexivity, not only as a theoretical cornerstone of PCT, but also as an applied concept. Reflections in Personal Construct Theory is a collection of chapters by well-known advocates of the theory, in which they explore a favoured aspect of the philosophy in relation to its personal significance.

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Chapter Themes In naming his theory with personal as the substantive centre, Epting & Prichard (1993) suggest that Kelly heralded the importance of individuals’ search for meaning. PCT is rich in fresh insights and perspectives on the human condition. In reflecting Kelly’s unique and idiosyncratic approach to theory-making, it is also intentionally littered with a raft of lexical building blocks that many find off-putting. The book thus starts with a chapter examining many of the terms Kelly devised to lay the foundation for his theory. Harry Procter then takes one key building block – the construct – and in exploring its many facets validates the personal discrimination as key to understanding the theory. From his literature and through personal acquaintance Fay Fransella (1995) provides an astute and erudite profile of Kelly, and in chapter 3 Jay Efran, a former student of Kelly’s, adds an enlightening perspective on the man behind the theory. In the vanguard of PCT and universally regarded as the leading protagonist of its development was the British psychologist Don Bannister. In chapter 4 Fay Fransella, who closely worked and collaborated with Don, examines the personal importance of reflexivity for him. The chapters that follow are presented in four sections.

a. Construct theory as a meaningful alternative Kelly attended his undergraduate course in psychology keeping ‘one ear cocked for anything interesting that might turn up’ (Kelly 1963/1969). He was to be disappointed. In tune with Kelly’s exasperation, a similar theme of dissatisfaction with ‘taught’ psychology, the limitations of the applied psychology role and the tendency to categorise folk and their troubles into diagnostic structures are taken up by many contributors. For many, PCT has offered greater depth and breadth than other currently available psychological frameworks. Jim Horley and David Winter both discuss the limitations of current techniques in helping understand those incarcerated for criminal acts and how, in contrast, PCT, in taking the view of individuals’ having agency and choice seriously, has significantly more relevance. Richard Butler explores how PCT, particularly the organisation corollary, enabled him to make sense of both the troubles of others and the puzzlement of self. Sally Robbins describes the constraints of traditional training in clinical psychology and how the sociality corollary helps her work in understanding characters of an older age. Finally in this section, Richard Bell analyses that most ubiquitous of PCT methodology – the repertory grid

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– and describes how the psychological world of the other comes alive with such a technique.

b. Construct theory as an elaborative choice In the Kansas dust bowl where Kelly was initially to test his psychotherapeutic skills he was acutely aware that in seeking to help others figure out their troubles none of what he had studied or pursued in psychology seemed to have ‘any specific bearing on what confronted us’ (Kelly 1963/1969). In exploring the basic idea that people live in a world of meanings that they create themselves, Jonathan Raskin offers a discussion of how PCT meshes with social constructionism and radical constructivism. Peter Cummins explores the potential entrapment of an early identity and the personal and clinical ramifications, particularly guilt, in the face of elaborative choice. Trevor Butt discusses how the approach offered by PCT enabled him to make sense of resistance to change in those engaged in social skills training. Kelly described how he adopted what was later to be termed fixed-role therapy to offer alternative ‘experiments on living’ for his clients. Similarly, Viv Burr describes how she adopted fixed-role therapy to tackle a ‘crisis of confidence’ as a lecturer. Finally in this section, Desley Hennessy considers how construct theory helps explain the psychology of those with tattoos and ultimately how the process fostered a greater understanding of herself.

c. No one need be a victim of their biography In the compelling paper ‘The autobiography of a theory’, Kelly (1963/1969) unravelled some telling ‘happenings’ out of which his evolving theory helped make sense. A central theme of the paper is how, by critically examining events and considering alternatives, he was able to lay out the key premises for his theory. Peggy Dalton (1993) has explored the construct determinism vs. freedom in relation to Kelly’s view of choice. She suggests that we are determined to the extent that ‘we are governed by the nature of our own superordinate constructs; limited by the limitations of the construct system which we ourselves have created’, yet we have freedom to the extent that we are able to construe our circumstances and then reconstrue them. No one, to paraphrase Kelly, need be a victim of their biography. While many choices are made at a covert (low level of awareness) reflection and writing has for many authors raised the choices to a higher level. In this section Jerald Forster, Dave Green, Finn Tschudi, Jörn Scheer, Robert Neimeyer and Dennis Hinkle all explore how, in the course of reflection, connections

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become apparent which were not present beforehand. Reflection, as Karl Popper intimated, enables psychological growth and knowledge to emerge from problems and our attempts to solve those problems (Magee 1975).

d. The client as an active participant In working with the metaphor man-as-scientist, Kelly was keen to assist folk in looking for new solutions that emerge from disconfirming evidence. And he added, the psychological role should be very much that of a ‘fellow experimenter’. Naoimh O’Connor embraces such sentiments in exploring reflexivity across cultures. Dina Pekkala explores how the model of ‘manas-scientist’ makes such fundamental sense to her and the work she does with her patients, concluding that we essentially choose our own life-histories. The chapters by Larry Leitner and Alexandra Adame and her colleagues examine a new form of therapeutic alliance, ROLE therapy, a relationship drawn from Kelly’s sociality corollary. Beverly Walker rounds off this section by describing how PCT-influenced approaches have assisted in another relationship – that of supervisor–supervisee, where the latter takes the role of the client as active participant. In the final section Bill Warren provides a tour de force of philosophical angles on the process of reflection. An apposite conclusion for a book on reflexivity.

The Chapters are Personal Stories … Miller Mair (1988) has for some years set out a vision of an alternative psychology, one that relates to narrative or story-telling rather than the conventional limited and impoverished computational or fact-finding psychology. He presents Kelly as a story-teller extraordinaire. While Kelly certainly offered a conventional approach through his ‘man-as-scientist’ metaphor, encouraging experimentation and hypothesis testing, Mair (1988) astutely observes that he reported ‘no formal experimental results of any kind’. In suggesting that, in his many later essays, self-characterisation, fixed-role therapy (the invitation to live a different story), and so forth, Kelly (according to Mair 1988), ‘tells nothing but stories’. The contributions in this book are about how folk find PCT to be personally fruitful. A diverse range of facets and applications are explored by means of writers’ sharing their reflections on their self. The book is primarily about the stories folk tell about themselves … ‘When we tell our tales, we give away our souls.’ (William Doty (1975)

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References Andrews, B. (1998). Self esteem. The Psychologist, 10, 339–342 Bannister, D. (1966). Psychology as an exercise in paradox. Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, 19, 21–26 Bannister, D. (1982/2003). Kelly versus clockwork psychology. In F. Fransella (ed.) International Handbook of Personal Construct Psychology. Chichester: Wiley Blascovich, J. & Tomaka, J. (1991). Measures of self esteem. In J. Robinson, P. Shaver & L. Wrightson (eds.) Measures of Personality and Social Psychology. New York: Academic Press Butler, R. J. & Gasson, S. L. (2005). Self esteem / self concept scales for children and adolescents: a review. Child & Adolescent Mental Health, 10, 1–12 Butler, R. J. & Green, D. (1998). The Child Within: The Exploration of Personal Construct Theory with Young People. Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann Butler, R. J. & Green, D. (2007). The Child Within: Taking the Young Person’s Perspective by Applying Personal Construct Theory. Chichester: Wiley Butt, T. W., Burr, V. & Epting, F. (1997). Core construing: discovery or invention? In R. A. Neimeyer & G. J. Neimeyer (eds.) Advances in Personal Construct Theory, Volume 4. New York: Springer Dalton, P. (1993) The meaning of choice and the threat of change. In L. M. Leitner & N. G. M. Dunnett (eds.) Critical Issues in Personal Construct Psychotherapy. Malabar, FL: Krieger Doty, W. (1975) Stories of our times. In J. W. Wiggins (ed.) Religion as Story. New York: Harper & Row Dunnett, N. G. M. & Miyaguchi, R. (1993). Reflexivity in theory and practice. In L. M. Leitner & N. G. M. Dunnett (eds.) Critical Issues in Personal Construct Psychotherapy. Malabar, FL: Krieger Epting, F. R., Leitner, L. M. & Raskin, J. D. (2006) George Kelly and personal construct psychology. In R. Frager & J. Fadiman (eds.) Personality and Personal Growth, 6th edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall Epting, F. R. & Prichard, S. (1993). An experiential approach to personal meanings in counselling and psychotherapy. In L. M. Leitner & N. G. M. Dunnett (eds.) Critical Issues in Personal Construct Psychotherapy. Malabar, FL: Krieger Fransella, F. (1995). George Kelly. London: Sage Fransella, F. (2005) Some skills and tools for personal construct users. In F. Fransella (ed.) The Essential Practitioner’s Handbook of Personal Construct Theory. Chichester: Wiley Harter, S. (1999). The Construction of the Self: A Developmental Perspective. New York: Guildford Press James, W. (1961). Psychology: The Briefer Course. New York: Harper & Row Kelly, G. A. (1955) The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volumes 1 and 2. New York: Norton Kelly, G. A. (1963/1969). The autobiography of a theory. In B. Maher (ed.) Clinical Psychology and Personality: The Selected Papers of George Kelly. New York: John Wiley & Sons

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Kelly, G. A. (1977). The psychology of the unknown. In D. Bannister (ed.) New Perspectives in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press Kelly, G. A. (1978). Confusion and the clock. In F. Fransella (ed.) Personal Construct Psychology. London: Academic Press Kelly, G. A. (1991a). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volume 1. A Theory of Personality. London: Routledge Kelly, G. A. (1991b). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volume 2. Clinical Diagnosis and Psychotherapy. London: Routledge Magee, B. (1975). Popper. Glasgow: Fontana Mair, J. M. M. (1988) Psychology as story telling. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 1, 125–137 Mancuso, J. C. (1986) The acquisition and use of narrative grammar structure. In T. R. Sarbin (ed.) Narrative Psychology: The Storied Nature of Human Conduct. New York: Praeger Ravenette, A. T. (1977). Personal construct theory: an approach to the psychological investigation of children and young people. In D. Bannister (ed.) New Perspectives in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press

Acknowledgements

I was ambling along Whitby sands one breezy morning mulling over fine memories of times shared with Don Bannister. Of his many far-reaching and insightful views and ideas – endeavour to take the person’s search for meaning seriously; think not of how to help, but of why folk might want to be lent a hand; consider not what is complained about, but the intricacies of a person’s sense of self; wonder about how folk employ even supplied constructs in their own unique way. And so forth. I knew Don in many contexts. He was deeply compassionate, original and gloriously aggressive (in a Kellyan sense) in pretty much everything he did. Whether presenting construct theory to an audience of ‘behaviourists’, reciting the ‘Ancient Mariner’ at a Christmas party or sharing a beer after work, he remained consistently optimistic, unconventional and self-assured. Samuel Butler once suggested that ‘few radicals have good digestion’ and strangely it was with great sadness that Don’s life was cut short in 1986 from cancer of the duodenum. The only time I think I ever saw Don a little tentative and unsure of himself was on the sports field. After persuading him to be goalie for our departmental football side, Psykick Rovers, and at our weekly game of tennis, which he tackled with the eagerness of fresh elaboration, a certain vulnerability was evident. It was after one particularly strenuous game of tennis that Don, wet with perspiration, declined a customary beer in favour of a lecture at the university he had agreed to give on reflexivity. That got me thinking about the subject. I was wondering about how fascinating it would be to have captured Don’s self-reflections. Fay Fransella has now kindly written her thoughts about Don in chapter 4. Then I was led to wonder what it might be like to know how others enmeshed in the theory of personal constructs employed the theory to reflect on themselves. The idea of a book was born. So although Don died over 20 years ago, I am deeply indebted to him for sowing the seeds of an idea.

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Acknowledgements

I am also keen to acknowledge my wife, Sue, and my co-writer, mate and golfing partner, Dave Green, both of whom encouraged me to take the sketchy plan forward. Every contributor has responded to the various requests, plans and deadlines without question. I’d like to thank them all for their valued contributions. I’d also like to give particular thanks to the many students who commented on the terminology section and the unstinting efforts and encouragement of Gillian Leslie, Andy Peart, Karen Shield, Annie Rose and Sarah Tilley, at John Wiley, who have proved invaluable in keeping the project on track.

Section I

Exploring Personal Construct Theory

Chapter 1

Coming to Terms with Personal Construct Theory Richard Butler Background After much soul-searching, and in his fiftieth year, George Kelly had the two volumes of his book The Psychology of Personal Constructs published in 1955 (later reprinted as 1991a and 1991b). As a stark contrast to both the psychodynamic and behavioural theories which predominated at the time, Kelly’s writings presented personal construct theory (PCT) as a complete, innovative and elaborated abstraction of how people make sense of their world and themselves. Although offering a fresh and enlightening means of understanding human psychology, the challenge it invariably presented to the order of the day resulted in PCT being marginalised in both academic and clinical arenas. As Bannister (1977) suggests, the theory has been received rather than used. PCT was written intentionally content-free, in ‘abstract terms to avoid, as far as possible, the limitations of a particular time and culture’ (Bannister & Fransella 1986; Fransella & Neimeyer 2005). However, by adopting unfamiliar terminology it seems, in hindsight, that Kelly further alienated his theory from mainstream psychology. Although his constructivist ideas remain profoundly influential and far-reaching in many threads of psychology, folk continue to find his ideas and notions somewhat troublesome to ‘engage with’ because of the phraseology he adopted. As a lead-in to this book, the fundamental threads of the theory (in reverse order: theory, construct and personal) are described, with particular emphasis on the building blocks of PCT.

Reflections in Personal Construct Theory. Edited by Richard J. Butler © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Theory 1

The philosophical foundation

Fay Fransella (1995) explored a raft of potential influences on the way Kelly developed his theory of man. From his early leanings towards physics (thus the metaphor man-as-scientist) and mathematics (thus the grid as a technique for understanding) he sought actively to oppose the then dominant psychological approaches (behaviourism and psychodynamic). He felt such theories regarded the person respectively as either a passive recipient of the environment or a passive respondent to internal, unconscious forces. Both, argued Kelly, by denying the person’s involvement in the directions that they move in, are fundamentally flawed. By considering the person as if they were a scientist, the theory, rather than being judgemental, invites an exploration of their predicament and difficulties. As Trevor Butt (2006) enlarges: ‘no longer can we maintain the idea that a person is a simple victim of circumstances, struck down by neurosis. If they are the victim of anything, it is their theory.’ Some writers (notably Bill Warren 2003; and Trevor Butt 2003; 2006) have teased out some of the specific philosophical influences on Kelly’s writing. More generally Greg Neimeyer, Jocelyn Saferstein and Wade Arnold (2005) have clarified the epistemological (theory of knowledge) context for PCT, as outlined in Table 1.1. In contrast to both empiricism (with knowledge determined by verification) and rationalism (with knowledge acquired through reason), PCT is considered clearly within the constructivist tradition, where knowledge is understood to be constructed. From such an epistemological position, Kelly’s fundamental philosophical stance of constructive alternativism is clearly apparent. Broadly this suggests: • • •

2

We contact ‘reality’ not directly, but through our interpretations and assumptions of reality. Meaning and knowledge are derived by means of the way a person perceives, or construes, events. All our present assumptions and perceptions are open to question and reconsideration.

The psychological perspective

In suggesting that people come to understand events by how they construe them, Kelly was proposing that, in essence, they are theory-makers. Indi-

Coming to Terms with Personal Construct Theory

5

Table 1.1 Personal construct theory in the context of epistemological strands Origin (ancient Greeks)

Democritus

Plato

Belief

Surest path to knowledge is through the senses

The essence of phenomena is accessible only through the mind

Contemporary expression

Empiricism (emphasises the role of experience) Through experience based on sight, sound, smell, touch, taste

Rationalism (based on justification)

Knowledge accessed

Through the rational powers of the mind and the use of reason

Modern theorists Philosophy of science

Francis Bacon, John Locke Logical positivism espousal of verificationism and falsification (Karl Popper)

René Descartes

Psychological stance

Realism objects exist independent of our experience and understanding arises through experimentation and verification

Process

Perception and validating beliefs through observation

Logical conceptualisation using rational and analytical skills; testing for logical consistency

Psychological practice

Behaviourism, cognitive behaviourism

Psychotherapy: rational emotive therapy

Foundationalism there are fundamental facts from which knowledge can be inferred Realism objects have essences (essentialism), which can be deduced through reasoning

Pyrrho

Knowledge is uncertain – hence the notion of scepticism Constructivism (knowledge is constructed) Belief in something does not necessarily justify a knowledge of it Immanuel Kant, George Kelly Postmodernism the meaning of all things is coloured by subjectivity Constructive alternativism our understanding of events is subject to a variety of alternative constructions Metaphor and symbolisation, testing validity in terms of the pragmatic ability to generalise to other realms of experience Constructivist: e.g. personal construct psychotherapy

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viduals make sense by constructing theories of themselves, other people and the events before them. In a sense if PCT is a theory about the theories people have about themselves and the world they inhabit, then construct theory can be considered a meta-theory. Sean Brophy, Fay Fransella & Nick Reed (2005) set out the characteristics of a theory. If people are in the business of constructing theories, then the characteristics held to be true of a theory might also be held to be true of the person. Thus the person in PCT might be held able to: • • • • • • • •

bind events together so they mean more than any single event by itself; formalise a set of ideas into a system; use the framework to anticipate outcomes; address issues that were not thought about at the time the theory was constructed; test their assumptions and deductions; inform action; rely on their theory when in doubt; flourish, so long as the theory proves fertile and useful.

Kelly unreservedly presented his theory in terms of a psychological structure, which consists of a fundamental postulate and 11 corollaries (see Figure 1.1). The fundamental postulate suggests that a person’s processes are psychologically channelled by the ways in which they anticipate events. This core element of the theory attempts to explain a person’s psychology not so much in terms of past history – as if through a rear-view mirror (Shotter 2007) – but in terms of anticipatory choices. The fundamental postulate implies that: • we reach out to the future; • we discriminate (construe) the events before us; • such construing enables us to anticipate future events; • consequently, we are able to predict what may happen; • and we strive to make sense of the world and our self.

Construct The following section owes much to Don Bannister and Fay Fransella (1986), who sought succinctly to define the formal aspects of the theory, and to the work of David Winter (1992; 2003), who elaborated many

Coming to Terms with Personal Construct Theory Construction

Range

a search for repeated themes (replication)

a construct is applicable for a range of events

7

Dichotomy constructs are bipolar and finite in number

Individuality individuals differ from each other in terms of how they interpret events

Sociality relating to others is at its most successful where the person seeks to understanding the other person’s construing

Organisation

Striving for personal meaning

Fragmentation sub-systems of constructs may not be logically related

Choice movement in a direction which elaborates the construct system and leads to definition or extension

Commonality similarity with others is based on similarity of construing

constructs are interrelated and subsuming

Modulation permeability of constructs allows the assimilation of new events

Experience systems change through validation and invalidation

Adapted from Butler & Green (2007) with permission.

Figure 1.1 A diagrammatic summary of Kelly’s corollaries

of the clinical issues within the framework of the theory. Further elaboration of many terms within the rubric of the theory can be found in the alphabetical index of the internet encyclopaedia of personal construct psychology, edited by Jörn Scheer and Beverly Walker (www.pcp-net.org/ encyclopaedia).

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1

The properties of constructs

Kelly (1955/1991a; 1991b) wished to distinguish between a construct and a concept. The latter he saw as existing independently of any particular person’s psychological processes. A construct, he proposed, may be viewed as: •

•

•

•

•

•

•

An abstraction arising from an awareness of a similarity and a contrast between events (elements or objects), summarised in the construction corollary, which suggests a person anticipates events by construing their replications. Devised by the protagonist with no existence independent of the person whose thinking it characterises. Hence the distinction between a construct and a concept, the latter often being treated as existing independently of any one person’s psychological processes. Bipolar. The relationship between the two poles of a construct is considered to be one of contrast (defined in terms of the dichotomy corollary: a person’s construction system is composed of a finite number of dichotomous constructs). Thus ‘lazy’ may be contrasted to ‘hardworking’. It is through such discriminations that Kelly suggested a person derives meaning. Having an emergent pole, which is the pole that arises when an individual elicits a construct. Thus if asked to characterise themselves in three ways, a person’s self-descriptions of ‘loud’, ‘unconventional’ and ‘creative’ can be seen as emergent ends of three constructs. Necessarily having a contrast or implicit pole, which describes the contrast end of a construct. Thus ‘boring’ might be differentiated from ‘unconventional’. A portable axis of reference. Constructs are discriminations imposed on events and as such are successively ‘picked up and laid down over many, many different events in order to bring them into focus and clothe them with personal meaning’ (Kelly 1958/1969). Thus Huddersfield, a geographical element, may be construed as either ‘north’ or ‘south’, depending on whether we are respectively in Bristol or Inverness. Possibly having verbal markers, though constructs are foremost the discriminations we make, not the labels we attach to them. Kelly referred to ‘unlabelled’ constructs as preverbal, possibly emerging before a child has command of speech, and which continue to be employed even though the individual has no consistent word symbol. Viv Burr (2006) has wonderfully elaborated how our artistic ‘style’, gait, handwriting, gestures, posture, dance, and so forth express our identity without recourse to symbols or language.

Coming to Terms with Personal Construct Theory

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•

Arising out of an individual’s personal experience and therefore regarded as fundamentally their own. Kelly’s individuality corollary, which states that persons differ from each other in their constructions of events, stresses the uniqueness of each person’s construing, even where they may attach similar verbal labels to their discriminations. Two employees may both construe their boss as ‘generous’, yet their contrasts ‘tightfisted’ and ‘selfish’ suggest that each construes (understands) him in different ways. • Phenomenologically valid, in that even where a person takes another person’s verbal markers as a basis for a construct (such as with a supplied construct), they will invest it with their own personal meanings. • A means of simultaneously promoting an understanding of events (by bringing them within our grasp through one set of terms) whilst also restricting other meanings by blinding us to other aspects of the same configuration of events. Thus if we determinedly construe a pile of bricks as building material, we limit the possibility of construing them in artistic terms.

2 •

Construct elicitation

Traditionally, the Kellyan form of construct elicitation is by triadic elicitation. Here a person is asked to consider how two elements are alike (which gives an emergent pole) and therefore dissimilar to a third element (the contrast pole). Thus a brother and a friend might be construed as ‘fun to be with’ in contrast to a colleague, who might be construed as ‘boring’. • Other forms of construct elicitation have subsequently been advanced – either the similarity of two elements (e.g. two beers may both have a ‘nutty’ flavour) or the difference between two elements (e.g. free-flowing footballers vs. a set of cloggers). Further, the emergent end of constructs may be elicited through only one element (e.g. by asking a person to describe their self) • A self-characterisation directly invites a person to spell out what is important to them by writing a sketch of themselves in the third person, as if they are an observer of themselves. Their writings are awash with constructs (emergent poles at least) in relation to how they imagine others view themselves (Denicolo 2005). • Laddering (devised by Dennis Hinkle 1965) seeks to unearth superordinate constructs by asking a person why (‘how come?’) a preferred pole

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of a construct is important to them. Thus the importance of being ‘honest’ might be the need to ‘avoid criticism’ (a more superordinate construct). • Pyramiding is a contrast to laddering for it seeks to understand more subordinate constructs by asking a person to characterise, describe or detail what constitutes a preferred end of a construct. Pyramiding tends to reveal more behavioural constructs. Thus what characterises ‘honesty’ might be owning up to the mistakes we make (a more subordinate construct).

3

Constructs in relation to events (elements)

•

A construct has a range of convenience which encompasses events for which it is applicable. An element such as a guitar which fails to be interpreted within the bounds of a construct (e.g. enthusiastic–apathetic) is said to lie outside the range of convenience. The range corollary states that a construct is convenient for the anticipation of a finite range of events only. Anxiety results from awareness that events with which one is confronted lie mostly outside the range of one’s construct system. You are in effect faced with (or anticipate) a situation that feels mostly unconstruable. ‘Mostly’ is the key word here, for as Bannister (1977) illustrates, someone who is anxious about an examination or test may readily construe much about the anticipated event but remain ‘at sea’ with respects to notions of ‘what will I (or others) think if I fail this exam?’ A construct has a focus of convenience which covers events for which it is particularly apposite or usefully predictable. Thus, for example, the construct ‘out of tune–in tune’ is of particular relevance in terms of a guitar. Slot rattling describes the (usually rapid) movement of an element (self, other person or event) from one end of a construct pole to its contrast. The resulting change is regarded as fairly unstable. When elements are freely allotted to a construct it is described as being permeable. This is refined in the modulation corollary, which states that the variation in a person’s construction system is limited by the permeability of the constructs within whose range of convenience lie. A construct is described as impermeable if it rejects elements on the basis of their novelty. The pole of a construct which is less well elaborated or available for application to events is called the submerged pole.

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Coming to Terms with Personal Construct Theory •

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Where a pole of a construct is relatively inaccessible and thus rarely tested (submerged), a person may sense being trapped, an experience familiar to those who suffer with problems such as agoraphobia. A construct which pre-empts its elements for membership in its own realm exclusively is known as a pre-emptive construct. It makes sense of an element in one, and only one, way. Such ‘nothing but …’ construing restricts elaborative potential. Diagnostic construing which labels people, say, as suffering from ‘schizophrenia’ may lead to perceptions of them as only schizophrenic. A constellatory construct fixes the other realm membership of its elements. As a type of stereotypical or prejudicial approach it leads to absolute linkages. For example, a person (element) construed as ‘artistic’ might also be construed as ‘self-obsessed’, ‘precious’ and ‘work-shy’. A propositional construct carries no implications regarding other realm membership of their elements. A person construed as ‘artistic’ may be construed in many other ways – ‘friendly’, ‘intense’, ‘tongue in cheek’. The repertory grid technique (grid) is an idiographic means of understanding a person’s psychological space in terms of the patterns between constructs and elements. The relationship tends to be expressed mathematically through principal components or cluster analysis. (For more information see Fransella, Bell & Bannister 2004.)

Particular types of construct

Kelly considered dependency in terms of the resources people rely on for support and validation. He contrasted undispersed dependency (reliance on a few people for most needs) with dispersed dependency (a more differentiated support network). • A dependency grid contains elements only and involves asking to whom, out of a list of people, a person would turn for help in various difficult situations. • The notion of self is constructed, and like other construing is regarded as a means by which a person makes sense of themselves. Don Bannister (1983) suggests that the self-picture and the world picture are painted on the same canvas and with the same pigments. • Folk may appear contradictory to others yet an understanding of that person’s construing may reveal different (even contrasting) construct sub-systems. Being a father and being the captain of a rugby team may consist of quite different sets of constructs. Miller Mair (1977) suggests that we may understand a person in terms of their community of selves.

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•

The Self Image Profile (Butler 2001; Butler & Gasson 2004) is an idiographic means of displaying and measuring both self-image and self-esteem by employing commonly elicited self-description constructs.

5

Constructs in relation to other constructs

•

Constructs relate to one another both ‘horizontally’ and hierarchically. In terms of horizontal relationships, constructs can be viewed as alike where they encompass similar elements and lead to similar anticipations. In grid work such constructs are highly interrelated (correlated) and cluster together. The implications grid (or Impgrid), devised by Dennis Hinkle (1965), contains no elements and explores construct relationships in terms of how each implies the other. Where constructs are closely correlated, the person might be understood as having a tight construct system. Tight construing leads to unvarying prediction and is particularly vulnerable to invalidation. Obsessionality may be perceived as the behavioural expression of excessive tightening. Loose construing, in contrast, leads to varying predictions. The relationship between two constructs might be said to be loose where mathematically there is a low correlation. Where constructs loosen to the point where predictions are vague, inconsistent and highly vulnerable to invalidation, schizophrenic thought disorder may result (Bannister 1962). Kelly describes the creativity cycle whereby a person shows inventiveness and resourcefulness by moving between construing in a loose fashion and then tightening to a point where predictions can be tested. Fixed-role therapy is one of Kelly’s original therapeutic techniques where a person is invited for a limited period to act an alternative role (set of constructs) based on an agreed sketch. This is a protected form of experimentation. The alternative sketch role is based on constructs that lie at an orthogonal angle to the person’s usual form of construing. Thus ‘good listener’ might provide the basis of a sketch where a person’s predominant construing orbits around ‘shy vs. confident’. Constructs are also organised hierarchically with constructs pertaining to physical characteristics, role and behaviour at the base, psychological

•

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Coming to Terms with Personal Construct Theory

•

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constructs in the middle and core, fundamental constructs at the apex. This is outlined as the organisation corollary, which states that each person characteristically evolves, for their convenience in anticipating events, a construction system embracing ordinal relationships between constructs. By referring to evolution, Kelly was emphasising the developmental nature of construct systems whereby the ‘hierarchy’ is elaborated with experience. A superordinate construct is relatively higher in the hierarchy, lying in a ‘dominant’ relationship vis-à-vis constructs. It is generally elucidated by laddering. The resistance to change grid, devised by Dennis Hinkle (1965) and free of elements, explores the hierarchical arrangement of constructs in terms of which constructs a person would resist changing. A core construct lies at the top of the hierarchy, relates to a person’s identity, is fundamental to the way they seek to impose meaning on events and governs what Kelly called their ‘maintenance processes’. A desire for approval, avoidance of criticism, search for achievement, wish for independence and need for nonconformity are typical examples of core constructs (Butler 2006). The core role structure is the core group of constructs by which we understand ourselves. Guilt arises from an awareness that we are acting in a way that we might not have expected. You have misread yourself – in Kellyan language, an awareness of dislodgement of the self from one’s core role structure. Guilt, like all emotions, is conceptualised in PCT terms as value-free. Thus guilt might arise where a laid-back, rebellious student hands in a piece of work on time much as a conscientious scholar does who misses the deadline. Threat arises when our fundamental (core) constructs are anticipated to be endangered or are indeed invalidated, leading to a feeling that our ‘known’ world appears on the brink of becoming chaotic. Kelly defined it as an awareness of an imminent comprehensive change in core structures. Although we are often aware of an ‘alternative self ’ to our current sense of self (core role structure) we may resist taking on even what might be viewed as a preferred self because of the threat of the unknown. Thus stutterers may resist fluency (Fransella 1972); impulsive children avoid being clever (Hartley 1986); and those with anorexia may resist normal weight (Button 1993) because the implications threaten the ‘known self ’. Sometimes people may experience conflict and dilemmas, particularly when constructs are at odds with one another over a particular

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event. Kelly explained such eventualities in the fragmentation corollary, which states that a person may successively employ a variety of construction systems which are inferentially incompatible with each other. • A subordinate construct lies in a subsidiary relationship with another construct at a relatively lower point in the person’s construct system hierarchy. It is generally discovered through pyramiding. At the most subordinate lie constructs relating to physical and behavioural discriminations. • Performance profiling (Butler 1996; 1999) is an idiographic display of a person’s view of their current behaviour, functioning or ability on constructs considered important in characterising a desired performance.

6

Constructs in operation

•

Constructs often operate at a low level of awareness. Individuals do not appeal to their construct system in order to act (thus much construing is undertaken outside of consciousness), but they nevertheless are their construct system. Reflection is a means whereby constructs may be brought into awareness. Folk test out their constructs (and revise them where necessary), as if they function like scientists – hence the metaphor man-as-scientist. Behaviour is thus seen as the person’s means of asking a question. Just as all questions are anticipatory, so too is behaviour (Kelly 1970). Kelly later termed this process the experience cycle, which in optimal functioning involves anticipation, investment, encounter with the event, assessment of anticipation and revision of construing if necessary. Kelly considered the process of decision-making in terms of the C-P-C cycle, which involves, in succession, circumspection, pre-emption and control (the last of these stages Kelly later changed to ‘choice’), which forms the direction of their movement. Ruminative behaviour may be understood as the result of prolonged dwelling on the circumspection phase of the cycle. Impulsiveness is the characteristic foreshortening of the C-P-C cycle. People, according to Kelly’s choice corollary, elect that alternative in a dichotomised construct through which they anticipate the greatest possibility for the elaboration of their system. Essentially, they move in directions that to them make most sense. Thus actions are always understandable from the protagonist’s perspective, no matter how bizarre, idiosyncratic or inconsistent it may seem to onlookers.

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Coming to Terms with Personal Construct Theory •

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15

Some people develop well-elaborated views of themselves in terms of a problem, e.g. stuttering (Fransella 1970) or nocturnal enuresis (Butler 1994) in which the problem becomes a ‘way of life’, and the contrasts (e.g. fluency, being dry at night, respectively) are poorly elaborated. Where the anticipated choice turns out as expected, the construct is described as strengthened or validated. Elaboration can take the form of extension, which is reaching out to increase the range of the construct system by exploring areas that are only partially understood, or definition, which is confirmation of experiences which are already well construed. However, where events unfold in a way the person had not expected, then the construct is described as being weakened or invalidated. Kelly described the process of validation and invalidation in the experience corollary, which states that a person’s construction system varies as they successively construe the replication of events. Hostility describes the way a person determinedly seeks to extort validational evidence to support a prediction (construction) which has already been recognised as a failure. Sometimes we cannot readily abandon a belief (Bannister 1977). A manager, sensing he has ‘lost the troops’, may resort to bullying in order to maintain his authority. Though not built on notions of psychopathology, Kelly sought to apply his theory in the clinical context and considered a disorder to be any personal construction which is used repeatedly in spite of consistent invalidation. Beverly Walker and David Winter (2005) have challenged the use of such a pejorative term, suggesting there are times when construing may fail to achieve its purpose (leading to psychological distress), but it can be regarded as the person’s best attempt to make sense of their world and themselves. Don Bannister (1963) suggested that repeated or serial invalidation may lead to schizophrenic thought disorder. Kelly described the process whereby a person broadens their ‘perceptual field’ in order to reorganise it on a more comprehensive level (though not necessarily reconstruing the elements) as dilation. Aggression is considered to be the active elaboration of one’s perceptual field. A person may broaden their perceptual field (dilate) to a point where exploration ‘outruns’ their organisation, possibly resulting in manic or paranoid behaviour. In contrast, when a person narrows their perceptual field in order to minimise apparent incompatibilities, Kelly employed the term constriction. Constriction is regarded as central to depression.

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7

Constructs in relation to other’s construing

•

Where two people construe an event in a similar way, they can be considered similar to one another. Thus similarity is based on the construing of the protagonist (not on an outsider’s view of the two people). Kelly described this in the commonality corollary, which states that to the extent that one person employs a construction of experience which is similar to that employed by another, their processes are psychologically similar to those of another person. People tend to make sense of others by employing their own construct system. Thus I might construe you as ‘erudite’ and ‘resilient’ having read through the chapter to this point. However, such construing is my construing, an observer’s perspective, and divorced from the protagonist’s (your) perspective. Construing others in our terms minimises the depth of a relationship with them. Kelly suggested we can only, as it were, truly understand another person when we seek to understand that person’s construing. He called this the sociality corollary, which states that to the extent that one person construes the construction process of another they may play a role in a social process involving the other person. In working with others, Kelly suggested we adopt a credulous approach. By attempting metaphorically to ‘stand in the other’s shoes’ and see the world through their eyes, the other person’s behaviour and stance possess an ‘intrinsic truth’. In order to fully understand another we have to subsume the construing system of the other – that is, trying to put our own construing on hold and ‘step into’ the construing world of the other. In clinical practice a desired aim is to subsume the client’s construing in terms of Kelly’s professional constructs – primarily understanding the structure of their construing in terms of tight vs. loose, constricted vs. dilated, and so forth, before focusing on content. Such a principle is crucial in psychotherapeutic work. Larry Leitner and colleagues (2005) have fully elaborated the sociality corollary and recoined the term a role relationship to distinguish it from other forms of role. Where folk have difficulty construing other people’s construction processes, their world is bereft of psychological understanding. In childhood it has been argued that those struggling with autism and Asperger’s syndrome have profound difficulty is construing the construction process of the other.

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Coming to Terms with Personal Construct Theory

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17

Constructs in transition

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Revision of the construct system may leave previously construed elements omitted from the person’s way of making sense. Such elements are described as suspended. • A peripheral construct is one that can be altered without serious modification of the core structure. • Emotion, in the Kellyan sense, is understood as arising when constructs are in transition. They are value-free. Kelly defined six emotions, which have subsequently been further elaborated and extended by Mildred McCoy (1977) and Butler & Green (2007). • Resistance is understood in the context of therapy where a person, behaving perfectly reasonably from their own perspective, makes a determined stance to avoid invalidation.

Personal The final facet of the theory’s triad – Personal – is an invitation to take the person (rather than unconscious drives, faulty thinking or behavioural reactions) seriously. Kelly offered a few handy reminders as to how we might do this: •

Acknowledge that each of us lives in what is ultimately a unique world where situations/events are perceived and understood through the ‘goggles’ of our personal construct system. This is formally stated in the individuality corollary as persons differ from each other in their constructions of events. What gives a person their stamp of individuality is the particular constructs they employ as a framework to make sense of their world and themselves. • Consider the person as the unit of enquiry. This contrasts markedly with traditional, ‘numbskull’ psychology where deconstructed and dissociated fragments of the person, such as learning, memory, perception, motivation, cognition and the like, are esteemed as the focus of interest. • Recognise that we differ from each other in how we perceive and interpret events, what we consider important and what we consider are the implications. • Accept that however perplexing a person’s actions may appear to be, the protagonist is, in line with the scientist metaphor, striving to make sense of their world and their self.

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Central to pretty much all of Kelly’s thinking is the notion of reflexivity. He was convinced that observers of the human condition (psychologists, researchers, counsellors, therapists, and the like) should be understood in the same way that their ‘subjects’ or ‘patients’ are. Both are testing out their respective construct systems. Kelly mused that if a theory-maker cannot apply that theory to their own functioning, then it is a useless theory. Thus the ‘black box’ notion was seriously flawed because it couldn’t account for the ‘thinking’ that went into conceptualising the black box. Kelly argued that PCT provides a way to understand the theorising of the theorist in addition to the theories people have about themselves, their world and others. ‘People’ here includes the football supporter trying to understand why his team lost, the child grappling with why she is excluded from a social network she wishes to be part of, a mechanic working on the possibilities as to why a car shudders to a halt, a student pondering her imminent and long-term future, and Kelly himself grappling with a theory as to why folk do the things they do. Hence the focus of this book.

References Bannister, D. (1962). The nature and measurement of schizophrenic thought disorder. Journal of Mental Science, 108, 825–842 Bannister, D. (1963). The genesis of schizophrenic thought disorder: a serial invalidation hypothesis. British Journal of Psychiatry, 109, 680–686 Bannister, D. (1977). The logic of passion. In D. Bannister (ed.) New Perspectives in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press Bannister, D. (1983). Self in personal construct theory. In J. R. Adams-Webber & J. C. Mancuso (eds.) Applications of Personal Construct Theory. Toronto: Academic Press Bannister, D. & Fransella, F. (1986). Inquiring Man, 3rd edition. London: Routledge Brophy, S., Fransella, F. & Reed, N. (2005). The power of a good theory. In F. Fransella (ed.) The Essential Practitioner’s Handbook of Personal Construct Theory. Chichester: Wiley Burr, V. (2006). The art of writing: embodiment and pre-verbal construing. In P. Caputi, H. Foster & L. L. Viney (eds.) Personal Construct Psychology: New Ideas. Chichester: Wiley Butler, R. J. (1994). Nocturnal Enuresis: the Child’s Experience. Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann Butler, R. J. (1996). Sports Psychology in Action. Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann

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Butler, R. J. (1999). Performance Profiling. Leeds: The National Coaching Foundation Press Butler, R. (2001). The Self Image Profiles for Children & Adolescents. London: The Psychological Corporation Butler, R. J. (2006). Investigating the content of core constructs. Personal Construct Theory & Practice, 3, 27–34 Butler, R. J. & Gasson, S. L. (2004). The Self Image Profile for Adults. London: Harcourt Assessment Butler, R. J. & Green, D. (2007). The Child Within: Taking the Young Person’s Perspective by Applying Personal Construct Theory. Chichester: Wiley Butt, T. (2003). The phenomenological context of personal construct psychology. In F. Fransella (ed.) International Handbook of Personal Construct Psychology. Chichester: Wiley Butt, T. (2006). Personal construct therapy and its history in pragmatism. In P. Caputi, H. Foster & L. L. Viney (eds.) Personal Construct Psychology: New Ideas. Chichester: Wiley Button, E. J. (1993). Eating Disorders: Personal Construct Therapy and Change. Chichester: Wiley Denicolo, P. (2005). A range of elicitation methods to suit client and purpose. In F. Fransella (ed.) The Essential Practitioner’s Handbook of Personal Construct Theory. Chichester: Wiley Fransella, F. (1970). Stuttering not a symptom but a way of life. British Journal of Communication Disorders, 5, 22 Fransella, F. (1972). Personal Change and Reconstruction: Research on a Treatment of Stuttering. London: Academic Press Fransella, F. (1995). George Kelly. London: Sage Fransella, F., Bell, R. & Bannister, D. (2004). A Manual for Repertory Grid Technique 2nd edition. Chichester: Wiley Fransella, F. & Neimeyer, R. A. (2005). George Alexander Kelly: the man and his theory. In F. Fransella (ed.) The Essential Practitioner’s Handbook of Personal Construct Theory. Chichester: Wiley Hartley, R. (1986). ‘Imagine you’re clever’. Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry, 27, 383–398 Hinkle, D. (1965). The change of personal constructs from the viewpoint of a theory of construct implications. Unpublished PhD thesis, Ohio State University Kelly, G. A. (1955) The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volumes 1 and 2. New York: Norton (reprinted London: Routledge, 1991) Kelly, G. A. (1958/1969). Man’s construction of his alternatives. In B. Maher (ed.) Clinical Psychology and Personality: The Selected Papers of George Kelly. New York: John Wiley & Sons Kelly, G. A. (1970). Behaviour is an experiment. In D. Bannister (ed.) Perspectives in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press Kelly, G. A. (1991a). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volume 1. A Theory of Personality. London: Routledge

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Kelly, G. A. (1991b). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volume 2. Clinical Diagnosis and Psychotherapy. London: Routledge Leitner, L. M., Faidley, A. J., Dominici, D., Humphreys, C., Loeffler, V., Schlutsmeyer, M. & Thomas, J. (2005). Encountering an other: experiential personal construct psychotherapy. In D. A. Winter & L. L. Viney (eds.) Personal Construct Psychotherapy: Advances in Theory, Practice and Research. London: Whurr McCoy, M. M. (1977). A reconstruction of emotion. In D. Bannister (ed.) New Perspectives in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press Mair, J. M. M. (1977). The community of self. In D. Bannister (ed.) New Perspectives in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press Neimeyer, G. J., Saferstein, J. & Arnold, W. (2005). Personal construct psychotherapy: epistemology and practice. In D. A. Winter & L. L. Viney (eds.) Personal Construct Psychotherapy: Advances in Theory, Practice and Research. London: Whurr Shotter, J. (2007). Re-visiting George Kelly: Social constructionism, social ecology, and social justice – all unfinished projects. Personal Construct Theory & Practice, 4, 68–82 Walker, B. M. & Winter, D. (2005) Psychological disorder and reconstruction. In D. A. Winter & L. L. Viney (eds.) Personal Construct Psychotherapy: Advances in Theory, Practice and Research. London: Whurr Warren, B. (2003). Pragmatism and religion: Dewey’s twin influences? In F. Fransella (ed.) International Handbook of Personal Construct Psychology. Chichester: Wiley Winter, D. A. (1992). Personal Construct Psychology in Clinical Practice: Theory, Research and Application. London: Routledge Winter, D. (2003). Psychological disorder as imbalance. In F. Fransella (ed.) International Handbook of Personal Construct Psychology. Chichester: Wiley

Chapter 2

The Construct Harry Procter Harry Procter did his doctoral research at the Department of Mental Health, University of Bristol, on applying personal construct psychology (PCP) to family processes. He then trained as a clinical psychologist in Nottingham and worked in Adult and Child and Adolescent Mental Health in Somerset before retiring from the NHS in 2004. Currently, he is involved in teaching and supervision, and is continuing to develop PCP applications to relational and organisational contexts. He has published 25 papers and chapters on various aspects of PCP and clinical psychology, and edited two volumes of the selected papers of Milton H. Erickson for Paidos Publications, Barcelona.

Elaborated aspects of theory: construct; emotion; family construct; narrative; position ‘To make a distinction, is to open a field of enquiry.’ (Edmund Husserl)

Introduction For me, the central notion in personal construct psychology (PCP) which keeps it alive and vibrant is that of the construct itself. In this chapter I want to show how the construct is at once perceptual, emotional, concerned with action, narrative and, of course, personal. The simultaneous presence of all these attributes gives Kelly’s psychology an extraordinary depth and breadth, which various other currently available psychological frameworks Reflections in Personal Construct Theory. Edited by Richard J. Butler © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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find hard to match. I then move on to show how the writer has sought to develop this conception of the construct even further by making it also social, interpersonal and relational, allowing an enhanced PCP to remain at the vanguard of contemporary psychological theory and practice. Figure 2.1 illustrates how the construct, as the hub of a ‘wheel’ or ‘clock’, unifies a surprising range of apparently unrelated psychological concepts or

Act

Binary

Choice

Pair of alternatives

Semantic Polarity

Difference Discrimination

Meaning

Sensation Belief

CONSTRUCT

Attitude

Perception

Concept

Agreed

Situation

View

Story

Value

Opinion Emotion Judgement

Figure 2.1 Meanings of the word ‘construct’

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aspects of human experience. This could be misconstrued, as if all these aspects could be reduced to a basic idea of the construct as simply a difference or discrimination. But the vision here is precisely the reverse of reductionist. Rather than seeing human experience as consisting of a lot of unrelated aspects, as taught in traditional psychology, the construct embodies the holistic nature of experience. It is all the things on the outside of the wheel. By linking them all and drawing them into itself, it becomes something that can reflect the extraordinary nature of human functioning. So, rather than reducing anything, this conception elevates our psychology to do justice to what we are.

The Construct as Perceptual The construct is normally seen as perceptual, and so it often is. These are the items on the right-hand side of Figure 2.1. Gregory Bateson (1970) nicely discusses how perceptual organs are structured to detect differences and send these ‘news of differences’ up the neurone. A baby is already clearly able to detect ‘light’ vs. ‘dark’, ‘warm’ vs. ‘cold’, ‘loud’ vs. ‘soft’, ‘pain’ vs. ‘comfort’, ‘hungry’ vs. ‘full’ and later, ‘present’ vs. ‘absent’. These gradually become differentiated and elaborated into more and more sophisticated systems of construing, enabling the child to understand and deal with the complexities of the world. Soon constructs for dealing with the social world will be in evidence: ‘known’ vs. ‘unknown’ voice, ‘smile’ vs. ‘frown’, ‘safe’ vs. ‘scary’. These examples also underline another very common misunderstanding. Constructs are not verbal. Words, or ‘signifiers’, later become attached to the semantic poles of a construct and we clearly later learn thousands of constructs via the language in which we are immersed, but a construct itself is an experienced semantic discrimination.

The Construct as Emotional Another common misunderstanding of PCP relates to emotion. It is ironic that the way emotions are treated in Kelly’s psychology (aspects of structure and transition), intriguing and illuminating as they are, may be responsible for the critique of PCP as being ‘too cognitive’, a comment that goes back to Rogers’ (1956) original review of Kelly’s two volumes. For me, the construct has always been as emotional as it is semantic or cognitive. For example, when a baby is scared by an unfamiliar face, the reactions and feeling of fear are just as much part of the construct ‘scary’ vs. ‘safe’ as any

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descriptive or dictionary definition. The bodily reactions, the tensing, the crying and scared feeling, are all part of a single human experience/reaction that is governed by the application of the construct. The same applies to the feeling of love and relief that a child experiences when she realises that her mother is present after all. An adolescent girl says, ‘my father is a bastard’, screws her face up, clenches her teeth and feels angry and furious. All these are part of a single experience governed by the construct ‘bastard’, which holds within it the semantic, behavioural and emotional aspects simultaneously. It is very hard to express this truth because language itself, as well as our cultural and scientific tradition, is so prone to splice and segment our experience. This view of the construct puts emotional life at the centre of PCP’s vision rather than emotion being ‘added’ to the theory as a secondary aspect. Of course, some constructs, let us say in the area of mathematics, do not seem to have a strong emotional feel. However, there will always be subtle emotional aspects to any construing, and one could argue that a neutral feeling, or a subtle aesthetic appreciation or indifference, are just as much emotions as the strong ones that we tend to use in our discussions of emotion.

The Construct as Concerned with Action Kelly’s choice corollary (we choose the alternative that we anticipate will lead to greater elaboration of our construct system) makes it clear that he intended the construct to be central to action as well as to perception and understanding. As stated, the corollary seems to apply to those decisions in life in which we consider pros and cons, for example in what career path to take, like a juror weighing up the evidence in arriving at a verdict. But it must apply to all the ongoing decisions that we are continuously making in our lives all the time. The tennis player is judging the speed and direction of the ball with constructs such as ‘left’ vs. ‘right’, ‘high’ vs. ‘low’ and constructs to do with speed, spin, bounce, not to mention those involving sociality for the opponent, anticipating his or her intention and weak points, positioning oneself accordingly and bluffing by pretending to aim a shot differently from the actual delivery. There are clearly many constructs involved, at many levels, from sensorimotor alternatives through to constructs involved in planning and strategy and in construing one’s own and the other’s performance. In social interaction we are continuously using many constructs to govern the communication of meaning and emotion via posture, gestures, facial expression and voice tone that research in PCP has barely touched on so far.

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Now most of these are not choices and decisions involving conscious thought. There would not be sufficient time. They are spontaneous and pre-reflective. We can have ‘cognitive awareness’ of them, but mostly they are made in a natural, effortless way without deliberation – perhaps all of them are, and we only think that our choices involve conscious planning! Are they then reflexes, the products of a sophisticated machine? No. A person is involved, making a choice with a particular intention. If we interrupt somebody in midstream, they can give us a detailed account of their actions and judgements and how they were construing the situation. Without conscious thought or planning the person chooses a pole of a bipolar construct because it seems elaborative, the right thing to do, justified. So this simple idea of a construct is proving to be quite rich and able to capture a lot of what it means to be a human being living life. It all gets even deeper when we remember that constructs are placed in a hierarchy. As well as choosing to act in certain ways, we are able to choose to use one construct rather than another if there is a superordinate construct subsuming them. Let us continue the example of a child construing an adult as ‘scary’ vs. ‘safe’ or ‘to be trusted’. At primary school, he goes up to the teacher in a trusting way and says ‘look at this drawing’, anticipating the pleased reaction that he is accustomed to receive from his mother. The teacher, however, criticises the drawing and throws it in the waste bin. He is mortified. Later, at secondary school, he has learned to approach teachers with a number of different construct dimensions, perhaps to do with their perceived strictness, level of interest in pupils, their mood or whether the teacher is busy. The original construct ‘scary vs. to be trusted’ is still there but has elaborated and obtained a subordinate substructure which allows the person to adopt different roles or positions towards others. We return to this area later.

The Construct as Narrative This construct hierarchy can also operate in a different way in subsuming or making sense of events across time. A construct carries a story and a story communicates one or more constructs. When somebody offers a construct, asking them to say more about it will result in a story about a set of experiences which exemplifies and validates the construct. In Figure 2.2, the stem at the top represents the construct, the branches represent episodes or descriptions in the story, and the twigs at the bottom represent particular events in the story which have been ordered into a meaningful narrative sequence. A construct is like the handle of a suitcase. Inside the case resides

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TIME

Figure 2.2 Construct as a narrative tree

one (or more) stories, which can be unwrapped and expanded to a lesser or greater extent. A story may describe a brief episode exemplifying an incidental construct or a grand narrative which communicates the person’s whole life, reflecting the richness of their core construing. When Kelly says we are a form of motion, this shows how our construing is never static but always evolving and changing. In addition, we can see here that the construct itself is diachronic: it reflects and tries to capture sequences of our lives that are forever ephemeral and on the move. We can use this as a good PCP model as well for our thinking, or stream of consciousness. The construct generates or selects a narrative. This is then open to reconstrual: perhaps we select a new construct to understand the narrative. Alternatively, one of the characters or elements in the story puts us in mind of another element, which is subsumed under the same pole, or a new construct, or a contrasting element under the contrast pole. We then invent or remember a new narrative concerning these elements or events, and so it goes on. This may constitute a different type of creativity from that described in Kelly’s creativity cycle, which involves loosening and tightening. Meditation particularly shows how our flow of thinking is normally a continuous and ceaseless internal activity, as our constructs generate an extraordinary wealth of narrative scenarios. Or it may not be creative at all. Sometimes our thinking is characterised, maddeningly, by repetitive re-presentation of the same narrative, stimulating the recurrence of the same construct again and again. This happens, for example, when we are worrying about a situation or trapped in depressing thoughts about our own failures. There is a dynamic relationship between the construct and the story or stories that it subsumes. When we tell a story we hear ourselves telling it

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and realise that there is a mismatch or tension between the newly created narrative and the way we had been construing it. The construct is thereby revised and elaborated. This is the principal way in which clinical supervision, and therapy in general, works. Of course, in practice more than this occurs – there is a dialogue in which the listener responds, seeks clarification, interjects or adds counterexamples or stories of their own. Stories are a principal way of helping another person revise or even add new constructs to their repertoire. For example (see Procter 2007), I used to enjoy telling Aesop’s fable about the Hare and the Tortoise to the children I was working with, altering it, often using humour and going off at tangents to enhance the experience. It was a valuable way of giving hope and encouragement, and so much more effective than simply exhorting the child to be patient and to persevere. The examples I have given so far have been positive and hopeful ones. Of course, stories can also be used to bolster constructs associated with being stuck and Kellyan hostility. And there is a lot of interest now in narrative coherence in relation to attachment (Dallos 2006) and loss (Neimeyer 2005). Dallos provides an excellent summary of the recent work on the development of narrative coherence in childhood. Our ability to construct coherent stories helps us to cope with even very painful and abusive early experiences. We are helped to do so by the adults who care for us in the early years having good reflective ability, being able at the time to understand and make sense of our own experiences and emotions. Failure to do so is associated with incoherent narratives which have been shown to predict the way the person later relates to their own children. Neimeyer (2005; 2006) considers in detail the way loss of a loved one, especially in traumatic or stigmatising circumstances, can disrupt the coherence of lifenarratives, and how we can go about helping such a person to address this as they grow through the loss. Narrative incoherence seems to tie in well with Kelly’s fragmentation corollary and this link could lead to fruitful further research.

The Construct as Personal And so to our fifth quality in this account of the construct – the personal. This should already be clear from the story we have told so far. The construct is a perception or view, it is emotional, it involves an action or choice and it contains a narrative. Although we will soon talk about social or group constructs, at the end of the day, in practice, any construct that we encounter in our lived world is being used by a particular person at a

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particular point in time. Any construct that I use has within it unique experiences in my biography from the point at which I learned it to the current point of use. My construct of grandparent contains a wealth of memories and associations from when I became aware of my grandparents when I was a child – their garden in the Lake District, their voices and wisdom – through to my becoming a grandparent and my current experiences with my two small grandchildren in south-east London. Although my construct is utterly imbued with the social and cultural discourses of my particular western and European context, and my English and German heritage, my version of this construct is unique and personal. Of course, it is not unchanging. We see below that its expression will vary tremendously according to the particular conversational context, with whom I am speaking (or thinking) and in what role I am in. A construct always belongs to someone. I remember, years ago, in supervising a clinical psychology trainee, that he described one of his clients as depressed, quite a private person and not very confident. I asked, ‘Whose constructs are these?’ He looked at me in a puzzled way. I then said, ‘Who says that she is depressed, private, etc., is it her own view, is it your view or did the doctor say so in his referral letter?’ Her husband had described her as lacking in confidence; the doctor had diagnosed depression; the trainee himself thought that she was quite a private person. We see here the radical role of PCP. These ‘attributes’ do not belong to a person (essentialism). Rather, constructs are used by key figures in a situation. It is problematic to forget this. The husband’s and the trainee’s descriptions and the doctor’s diagnosis are all personal constructs. It is very difficult to change and deconstruct a situation without recognising this fundamental distinction. But surely some constructs are not personal but universal? Earlier, we gave as examples the very discriminations built into our sense organs. For example, if we take ‘blue’ vs. ‘red’, there are cones in the retina that fire to these wavelengths of light. However, even here we are talking about a personal construct when we are referring to the occurrence of the construct in an actual situation. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1963) expresses this well when he says, ‘there are no isolated sensations; all sensations are already drawn up into a world of particular significance for us’ (cited in Moran 2000, p. 415, my emphasis). The phrase ‘drawn up’ perfectly clarifies this point. According to Kelly (1955), each person makes their own sense of a construct and integrates it into a system of construing that has evolved within their unique biographical path and circumstances. A construct is personal, however high or low it is in the hierarchy of the personal construct system.

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So far, my aim has been to give an up-to-date account of the construct as envisaged by Kelly himself. In my understanding I have been influenced by many writers within PCP, but perhaps by Don Bannister, Fay Fransella, Miller Mair, Phil Salmon and Tom Ravenette the most. But from the beginning I was also reading sociology (particularly symbolic interactionism), Marxism and the family systemic writers (originally through the writings of R. D. Laing). The main influences here were Gregory Bateson, Paul Watzlawick, Jay Haley and the Milan Group. These sources were presenting material that severely challenged PCP and indeed the basic individualist assumptions of the discipline of psychology itself. Do we therefore abandon PCT, as so many did, or rally to the challenge in order to preserve the insights and wisdom that I hope this first section reflects? We have now examined five attributes or qualities of the construct. We next look at further aspects which result from extending and elaborating the theory to cope better with our social and relational nature. These are the situational, the social, the interactional, the positional and the relational. The integration of all ten can be summarised as the interpersonal.

The Construct as Situational Kelly (1955) critiqued personality trait theory, with his objection to ‘pigeonholing’ people and pinning them down to particular points on so-called personality dimensions. When answering the questions on personality questionnaires, such as ‘do you enjoy parties?’, I always wanted to retort, ‘It depends on what is happening to me that day, who is at the party, what mood I am in – in a nutshell, what is the situation?’ To me, when first studying psychology, the whole edifice of the trait approach was questionable because it was based on highly unsatisfactory raw data. PCP came to the rescue because it moved dimensions from the ‘objective world’ back into the mind of the psychologist. Hans Eysenck, for example, could be said to be using two constructs, ‘extroversion–introversion’ and ‘neuroticism’, with which he made sense of the whole of human life! However, we need to be careful. PCP could easily repeat these errors with the use of a type of core construct becoming like a trait and a construct system like a ‘personality structure’. On the contrary, how I construe something varies according to what my situation is and particularly who I am with and in what role. If I am with an intimidating teacher, a friend or a client, the meaning of events and my repertory of constructs varies. Miller Mair (1977) captured this well in his paper ‘The community of self ’. In my clinical practice I worked with people who were apparently totally

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‘dissociated’, becoming like entirely different people at different times and ‘switching’ rapidly from one ‘personality’ to another. But this is an extreme example of what happens with all of us in our lives.

The Construct as Social The research on early social development shows that, from the beginning, the infant is in an active role in an interactional ‘dance’ or ‘inter-subjectivity’ with the parent or other carer. John Shotter (1969) writes: Constructs are invented when a child notices a difference, draws the attention of a fellow to it, and they agree upon a way of representing it … constructs are used when a child makes or expresses a distinction using agreed ways of representing it.

Although we saw earlier how some constructs are wired into our sense organs and nervous system, the meaning or sense that these gain, the way they are used, is co-constructed within a ‘conversation’ between two or more people well before language develops. In an early paper, Glenys Parry and I (Procter & Parry 1978) took PCP to task for positioning itself in too individualist a stance and underestimating the importance of the social and sociological in its account of human development and functioning. The implications of Kelly’s work and his personal scientist metaphor seemed to be that individuals single-handedly carve out a unique construct system primarily in their own struggles and interactions with the world. We wanted to emphasise the interpersonal in the process of construct system development; that carers, from the start, mark out and select aspects of the world through pointing, naming and explaining, and the child learns through imitation and identification. Lev Vygotsky had reversed Jean Piaget’s position on the origin of thinking by saying that it derives from the internalising of interactions and conversations. Language, and more generally culture, was the source of vast amounts of the individual’s construing. In many ways, this paper anticipated critiques of PCP based on discourse analysis and social constructionism.

The Construct as Interactional Family systems theory talked about how, when we are observing a family in interaction, we can choose to view it in terms of individuals, dyads or

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triads (Haley 1963). These different ‘units of analysis’ reveal their characteristic patterns of interaction. For example, dyads (pairs of people) tended to show symmetrical or complementary interactions or ‘schismogenesis’ (Bateson 1936; Watzlawick et al. 1967), ideas that have become part of the culture in terms of ‘arms races’ and ‘escalation’. With a unit of three people certain characteristic patterns were described such as the ‘coalition’ in which two people unite in criticism of the third. These analyses were useful in working with families, but tended to play down the role of the individual and the unique meanings he or she makes of situations. Haley went as far as to say that these were irrelevant and got in the way of therapy. One way forward seemed to be to extend the notion of construct and construct system, as described by Kelly, to the level of the group or family. In Procter (1981), I ‘introduced the notion of a Family Construct System (FCS) with properties similar to individual construct systems’ (Walker & Winter 2007). Sequences of interaction may reveal, for example, that two people consistently agree on a view of events to the extent that a third person disagrees and takes on a contrasting view. We can then say that a bipolar family construct is in operation that underlies or governs the interactions of the group of three. Family interaction can then be seen as being governed by the operation of a few key family constructs which have evolved and have their origins in the traditions and culture of the families of origin of the members, and more broadly the societal discourses surrounding them. In a recent paper (Procter & Procter 2008) my wife Jane and I used Byron’s play ‘Cain: A Mystery’ to illustrate a major family construct which operates between Cain, who is questioning his family’s faith and obedience to God and valuing instead knowledge, questioning and defiance (see Figure 2.3). The family construct, ‘faith’ vs. ‘knowledge’, is depicted at the top.

FAITH

KNOWLEDGE

(Adam, Eve, Abel)

(Cain)

Sinful (Cain) Faith (Us)

Defiant (How one should be) Tame (Them)

Figure 2.3 Family and personal constructs in Cain and Abel’s family

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This pair of polarised views underlies the argument and conflict between Adam, Eve and Abel vs. Cain. Adam, Eve and Abel all see themselves as having ‘faith’, in contrast to Cain, whom they see as ‘sinful’. These are personal constructs. Cain’s personal construct governs his choice to be ‘defiant’ in contrast to the others, whom he sees as ‘tame’. The ‘faith’ group’s sense of identity and togetherness is shored up by their being able to see all the bad in the external figure of Cain, allowing internal group differences to be avoided (for example, concerning lingering issues that Eve was the first to leave the path and taste the forbidden fruit).

The Construct as Positional In Procter (1985a), I introduced the notion of position. If we think of the FCS, or any group construct system, as providing an array of slots or positions on a series of dimensions or avenues of movement, the members can move around and take up different positions in the system. Cain, for example, could take up the ‘faith’ position and imagine what it is like to see the world with the construct ‘faith’ vs. ‘sinful’. We are able to imagine ourselves in an alternative position, and its constructs can then be used to generate narratives and conversations. This explains how playwrights and actors operate. This allows us to make a link with the literature on positioning in discursive and dialogical theory. I can choose to take up different positions and when I do, it has the tendency to position the other person with whom I am in conversation (Davies & Harré 1990). Who we are, then, is the mutual creation and responsibility of partners in conversation. ‘When someone acts, their activity cannot be accounted as wholly their own activity – for a person’s actions are partly shaped by being responsive to the actions of the others around them’ (Shotter 2005) In his paper ‘The dialogical self’, Hubert Hermans (2001) writes: The I has the possibility to move from one spatial position to another in accordance with change in situation and time. The I fluctuates among different and even opposed positions, and has the capacity imaginatively to endow each position with a voice … The voices function like interacting characters in a story … each of them has a story to tell about his or her experiences from his or her own stance. As different voices, these characters exchange information … I am able to construe another person or being as a position that I can occupy and as a position that creates an alternative perspective on the world and myself.

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For example, I may normally take a different position from my father on a particular value dimension. But if I hear criticism of his beliefs, I suddenly find myself, through loyalty, arguing for him: I have internalised his position in the FCS, his voice and beliefs, and the pattern of relationship that exists between him and me is now recreated between me and the person who is criticising him. The position I take on things tends to evoke a complementary position in another person. The social construct set up often mirrors a polarity residing in the family construct system. It can be a great shock to find someone you thought you knew well suddenly taking a position, for example when she or he is with a friend from the past, that seems to run counter to the constructs one held about them. These developments imply that the construct system that a person ‘carries around’ is a broader entity than that traditionally envisaged by Kelly and that which was tapped by the self-characterisation technique or the original forms of the repertory grid involving elements and constructs. I attempted to respond to this with a family grid which involved ‘meta-elements’ – for example, ‘as my mother sees me’, ‘as she sees herself’, ‘as she sees my brother’, and so forth (Procter 1985b). Another way is to use Qualitative Grids, in which a number of different people’s views are captured on a single grid (Procter 2007; Procter & Procter 2008). This broader conception allows us to give PCP access to better accounts in the area of power and ethics. The different members of a family or group have different amounts and types of power. The constructs of the powerful group tend to prevail. In entering a group, my views and very existence may be invalidated or rendered invisible by the dominant construing. But as Foucault (1975, cited in Dzinovic et al. 2006) has described, power and subjugation are always associated with resistance and subversiveness as people are determined to oppose constructions that are imposed on them if they do not accord with their experiences and views. Kelly (1955) argues correctly that ultimately we are not the victims of our circumstances. However, our position in a power hierarchy makes an enormous difference to extent to which we can engage in an active elaboration of our constructs. It also allows a more satisfactory account of ethics. Kelly’s choice corollary as it stands could be criticised as being too individualist, in that it argues that we choose an alternative in order to elaborate a personal construct system. However, by recognising that we are part of larger family and group construct systems it allows us to do justice to human altruism. We make choices in order to elaborate these wider systems of construing. Again, this is not thought out consciously but shows itself spontaneously, for example, in most people’s wish to help when coming upon someone in

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need (Giliberto 2006). Raymond Rambert, in Albert Camus’s The Plague, having wished to escape from the disease-ridden city, when finally granted permission to leave, decides to stay after all: ‘I know now that I belong here whether I want it or not. This business is everybody’s business’ (Camus 1960).

The Construct as Relational and Inter-Personal Perhaps we can pull all this together with the hyphenated word interpersonal. I expect to treat another and expect to be treated as a person (as opposed to an object or characterisation) who has a whole world of experiences, valid understandings and the ability to make choices. This is the realm of the sociality corollary. But, with this expanded view of the person as an element in an ongoing network of relational politics, I need not only construe the other’s construction processes, but construe the construction processes of those surrounding that other and construe the relationships between them. This is the realm of the group corollary (Procter 1981), or what I now prefer to call the relationality corollary: ‘To the extent that we can construe the relationships between members of a group, we can play a role in a group process with them.’ This involves construing not just their constructs but relational processes such as situational context, schismogenesis, positioning, power and ethical aspects of their group situation. Dusan Stojnov and Trevor Butt have written: The realm of mutual relations seems to precede the realm of personhood and acts as a social fabric of personal becoming (Stojnov & Butt 2002). How we feel and what we think cannot be separated from the social currents in which we swim. The meanings we bestow on things are not individual products, but are co-constructed with others both on a micro and a macro level. (Butt 2004, my emphasis)

I have wanted, however, to preserve the contribution of Kelly and PCP in this debate. It seems to me that much is lost to psychology by deemphasising the central importance of the person in constructing meanings and values. I have attempted, over the years, to revise and elaborate PCP in order to do justice to the sociological and relational processes with which one struggles in everyday life and in clinical practice and which have been written about so extensively in the postmodernist literature. I believe our meanings are social and personal and that our constructs

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derive from social entities but that we make them our own and clothe them in our unique biographical experiences. We need here to strike the right balance. Too much towards the personal gives too individualist a position. Too much towards the social results in the loss of the lived realities of the actual people we are attempting to understand. And how are we then to understand the creativity of artists and writers, who inject new ideas into the culture? Although the work of Mozart is thoroughly based in the developments of his historical context, his innovations were carved out in the privacy of his unique mind. PCP has always had the spirit that this applies to everyone, children and adults, not just a few ‘great’ people.

A Personal Example I now exemplify these dimensions of the construct from my own construing. I think (we can never know our construing completely) that I have a construct which governs the work aspect of my life and perhaps beyond to other areas, including music-making. Its focus of convenience is a performance, especially the performance of a lecture or teaching session, or conducting a family therapy session. The construct is something like ‘effective’ vs. ‘no use’. ‘Effective’ involves being insightful, creative, perceptive and having new things to say in my teaching or therapy. The contrast pole crops up from time to time, for example, when preparing teaching. Then I judge myself to have ‘nothing further of value to say, to be out-of-date and merely repeating old ideas’. The construct affects my perception of myself and the world and even my body. When feeling effective, life seems worthwhile, there is a spring in my step and the world appears more beautiful and interesting. When feeling of no use, my body itself seems heavier, with psychosomatic reactions including anxiety, heat and a pricking behind the eyes, as opposed to a feeling of happiness and satisfaction. The construct, of course, governs my action and choices in terms of both long-term decisions (for example, to continue writing and promoting PCP) and immediate choices, such as agreeing to participate in a project. In terms of narrative, these paragraphs themselves provide an example, as well as my own thinking and fantasy, in which scenarios of success or failure run through my mind. All these combine to characterise me as a person. No doubt the themes I am describing are part of most people’s experience, but there will be aspects and modes of expression that are unique to me and relatively persistent.

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The construct is, of course, thoroughly embedded in my social and cultural heritage, my system of relationships, and is supremely sensitive to, if not (re)created by, the situational and conversational environment that I am in at the time. The concern with achievement and reputation that this construct involves, despite a concurrent wish not to be so attached to these values, is very much a reflection of my family and cultural heritage, including standards absorbed in a Quaker education, growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, and the values and beliefs held on both sides of my family. If I am with people whom I construe as sympathetic and understanding, then I am much more likely to be construing myself and my work at the ‘effective’ end of the construct. If I am feeling of ‘no use’, there is no quicker cure than to encounter a psychologist or colleague whom I come to see as not having such a good grasp or insight into an aspect of life as I do. I am then able to retrieve a view of myself as valuable, by contrast, after all!

Reflexivity and Development My theoretical position has grown and developed as a direct reflection of my own experience in life. One’s own life is like a filter which allows useful and valid notions to pass whilst extracting and disposing of dross. The core of my experience and development resides in my own family’s construct system. Having an English father and a German mother gave me, from an early age, the opportunity to compare two different ways of life and to critique one with the other. The creativity of this dialectic proved, time and again, a rich methodology for investigating many areas of interest. I think I was attracted to the idea of bipolarity in construing long before I heard of a construct. The contrast pole is often just as important in providing the meaning of something as the emergent pole. I have tended to proceed in my learning by looking for the loopholes and exceptions in things. This was perhaps an early version of the ‘deconstructionist method’. When I was about nine years old I remember my English grandfather saying, ‘Stravinsky is awful; it’s not music at all but a horrible din’. I was intrigued: it must be good to make him have such a strong opinion! I still listen to Stravinsky with great pleasure 50 years later. And at Bristol, studying psychology, I overheard our psychometrics lecturer saying, ‘I can’t make head or tail of R. D. Laing, totally incomprehensible to me!’ ‘Well’, I thought, ‘that must be an interesting area to explore!’ I did the same with PCP, as

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this chapter shows. So, I would be interested, when exploring a new and promising area, in asking, ‘Who disagrees with this position? What are the limits of its range of convenience? What examples can’t it deal with?’ Then I can challenge the framework and either enrich and develop it or conclude that we have to move on to something new. Even as I have been writing this chapter, a thought has been occurring to me about a possible lack of reflexivity at the core of PCP. I have been recommending the use and extension of Kelly’s core notion of the construct, applying it more and more widely within personal and then social psychology. The whole idea of the theory is to elaborate a holistic approach to human life, integrating the traditional dichotomies between body and mind, internal and external, personal and social. But what is the contrast pole to this construct of ‘construct’? If there is no such contrast, are we not in danger of saying ‘everything in psychology is a construct’ and therefore of saying nothing? Is Kelly’s central construct not bipolar? In a thoughtful paper, Martha Husain (1983) quotes Kelly: ‘The system is composed entirely of constructs. It consists of nothing but constructs. … We are ascribing a dichotomous quality to all human thinking’ (1955, Vol. 1, pp. 61 and 109). Husain is concerned that PCP could thereby become self-contained and all-encompassing. Kelly, of course, contrasts constructs and concepts, but only to clarify his conception. A construct is not a representation or a schema, a misunderstanding that lies at the base of Goodrich’s (1993) dismissive critique of PCP. Constructs are used to construct representations or images of the world. This does not yet answer the question: to what in human life does the functioning of constructs not apply? We could contrast constructs to events or elements, but it is clear that, once construed, these become in themselves constructs, even when an element is a construed person, which then becomes what Kelly calls a whole-figure construct, such as ‘like’ vs. ‘unlike my mother’. Perhaps pure awareness is an experience that does not involve constructs. Kelly says, ‘The personal construct we talk about bears no essential relation to grammatical structure, syntax, words, language or even communication; nor does it imply consciousness’ (Kelly 1958/1969, my emphasis). Constructs do not require awareness or consciousness, but do consciousness and awareness necessarily require constructs? This seems to take us into the region of Buddhist attempts to get beyond dualistic thinking. But the moment we begin to construe or reflect on some kind of pure state then clearly a construct is invoked. This question has set me thinking broadly and deeply, but I do not yet feel we have a satisfactory resolution of the issue.

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Conclusion I see a construct as being a microcosm of a person’s world, a little aspect of the experience which is theirs. It provides us with a gateway into their life and values. In working with children (Procter 2007), this is a useful way to proceed. One listens out for the spontaneous remarks or reactions that indicate the young person’s choice or preference on a construct that means something to them. One remembers the actual words the child used, allowing one to go back to it later and learn more from the child about what they meant, how it felt, what they did, what story they have to tell, who was there, what the others thought, and so on. Gathering this material helps to develop the child’s sense of personhood and helps other members of the family to take the child more seriously as a person. One parent sitting in the session said, ‘I didn’t know she thought all that!’ We can generalise from this to erect a standard of good communication in any context. By carefully and respectfully listening to each other’s meanings we can achieve a much higher level of interpersonal (and inter-group) understanding. This is likely to be important in promoting good communication and preventing and reducing human conflict and communication breakdown. We can develop theories in order to give us either a picture of human life or provide us with a method with which to proceed in personal and professional arenas. This enhanced PCP provides us with a rich picture or model of the human person and of social life which can be tested in research. But its strongest capacity is, heuristically, to generate a host of methods which can be used in research and professional work as well as in one’s own life. The ten attributes of the construct covered in this chapter each lead to fruitful new areas of research which can test the hypotheses being presented, for example, in investigating the emotions or narratives associated with particular constructs in particular situations. And each of the attributes can help us generate a series of questions that can be asked when we are investigating a situation, a point of view or an area of interest.

References Bateson, G. (1936). Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Bateson, G. (1970). Form, Substance and Difference: Steps to an Ecology of Mind. San Francisco: Chandler Press

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Butt, T. (2004). Understanding People. New York: Palgrave Camus, A. (1960). The Plague. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Dallos, R. (2006). Attachment Narrative Therapy: Integrating Narrative, Systemic and Attachment Therapies. Milton Keynes: Open University Press Davies, B. & Harré, R. (1990). Positioning: the discursive production of selves. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 20, 1, 43–63 Dzinovic, V., Pavlovic, J. & Stojnov, D. (2006). Kelly meets Foucault: understanding school underachievement. Paper presented to the 8th Conference of the European Personal Construct Association, Kristianstat, Sweden Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books Giliberto, M. (2006). A journey between constructivism and phenomenology concerning ethics: going beyond relativism avoiding the temptation of truth. Paper presented to the 8th Conference of the European Personal Construct Association, Kristianstat, Sweden Goodrich, R. A. (1993). Deconstructing constructs: pitfalls in personal construct theory. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 25, 71–82 Haley, J. (1963). Strategies of Psychotherapy. New York: Grune & Stratton Hermans, H. J. M. (2001). The dialogical self: toward a theory of personal and cultural positioning. Culture and Psychology, 7, 243–281 Husain, M. (1983). To what can one apply a construct? In J. R. Adams-Webber & J. C. Mancuso (eds.) Applications of Personal Construct Theory. Toronto: Academic Press Kelly, G. A. (1955). The Psychology of Personal Constructs, Volumes 1 and 2. New York: Norton (reprinted London: Routledge, 1991) Kelly, G. A. (1958/1969). Man’s construction of his alternatives. In B. Maher (ed.) Clinical Psychology and Personality: The Selected Papers of George Kelly. New York: John Wiley & Sons Mair, J. M. M. (1977). The community of self. In D. Bannister (ed.) New Perspectives in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press Merleau-Ponty, M. (1963). The Structure of Behavior. Trans. A. L. Fisher. Boston, MA: Beacon Press Moran, D. (2000). Introduction to Phenomenology. London: Routledge Neimeyer, R. A. (2005). Growing through grief: constructing coherence in narratives of loss. In D. Winter & L. Viney (eds.) Personal Construct Psychotherapy: Advances in Theory, Practice and Research. London: Whurr Neimeyer, R. A. (2006). Lessons of Loss: A Guide to Coping. Memphis, TN: Center for the Study of Loss and Transition Procter, H. G. (1981). Family construct psychology: an approach to understanding and treating families. In S. Walrond-Skinner (ed.) Developments in Family Therapy. London: Routledge Procter, H. G. (1985a). A construct approach to family therapy and systems intervention. In E. Button (ed.) Personal Construct Theory and Mental Health, Beckenham: Croom Helm

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Procter, H. G. (1985b). Repertory grid techniques in family therapy and research. In N. Beail (ed.) Repertory Grid Technique: Application in Clinical and Educational Settings. Beckenham: Croom Helm Procter, H. G. (2007). Construing within the family. In R. Butler & D. Green, The Child Within: Taking the Young Person’s Perspective by Applying Personal Construct Theory, 2nd edition. Chichester: Wiley Procter, H. G. & Parry, G. (1978). Constraint and freedom: the social origin of personal constructs. In F. Fransella (ed.) Personal Construct Psychology 1977, London: Academic Press Procter, H. G. & Procter, M. J. (2008). The use of Qualitative Grids to explore the development of the construct of Good and Evil in Byron’s play ‘Cain: A Mystery’. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 21, 343–354 Rogers, C. (1956). Intellectualised psychotherapy. Contemporary Psychology, 1, 357–358 Shotter, J. (1969). Prolegomena to a theory of play. Journal of the Theory of Social Behaviour, 3, 141–156 Shotter, J. (2005). Persons: points of condensation in a sea of living interactions. Paper for XIth Plenary Session of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, Rome, 7–12 April, Conceptualization of the Human Person in the Social Sciences. http://pubpages.unh.edu/∼jds/Rome.htm Stojnov, D. & Butt, T. (2002). The relational basis of personal construct psychology. In R. A. Neimeyer & G. J. Neimeyer (eds.) Advances in Personal Construct Psychology: New Directions and Perspectives, Volume 5. New York: Praeger Walker, B. & Winter, D. (2007). The elaboration of personal construct psychology. Annual Review of Psychology, 58, 453–477 Watzlawick, P., Beavin, J. & Jackson, D. D. (1967). Pragmatics of Human Communication. New York: Norton

Section II

The Men behind the Theory

Chapter 3

The George Kelly I Knew Jay S. Efran Jay S. Efran received his PhD from Ohio State University in 1963. He is currently Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Temple University, Philadelphia and a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Group Psychotherapy Society. He co-authored Language, Structure and Change: Frameworks of Meaning in Psychotherapy and The Tao of Sobriety: Helping You Recover from Alcohol and Drug Addiction. Jay Efran holds teaching awards from the University of Rochester, New York, and Temple University, and received the Constructivist Psychology Network’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006.

Introduction In 1964, I attended the American Psychological Association’s 72nd Annual Convention in Los Angeles. One of the focal events was a Division 8 Symposium on ‘Human Ecology’ featuring a panel of luminaries that included the social psychologist Muzafer Sherif and measurement guru Charles E. Osgood (the inventor of the semantic differential). However, what really caught my eye was that George Kelly was listed as a discussant. Having received my PhD at Ohio State University the year before, this seemed the ideal opportunity to say hello and bring him up to date with how things were going for me at the University of Rochester. The day of the symposium was filled with surprises – not the least of which was Kelly’s ‘performance’ at the meeting. When it was his turn to speak, Kelly stood up and promptly announced that he would, in fact, have ‘nothing to say’. Pregnant pause; stunned silence. He went on to explain that a few weeks before, when advance copies of the symposium papers Reflections in Personal Construct Theory. Edited by Richard J. Butler © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

44 Jay S. Efran arrived in the mail, he did a quick calculation; for each paper, he multiplied the average number of words per page by the number of pages. His computations convinced him that even if they were to read their papers at breakneck speed, the presenters would run well over their time limits, leaving no time for discussant comments. That being the case, he reasoned, why bother to prepare any? More audience astonishment. Kelly then went on to describe his growing panic as he realised that the presenters were not, in fact, sticking to the manuscripts they had sent. ‘Why, the first presenter skipped more than half of what he had written!’ Kelly grumbled. ‘Worse yet, the second panelist spoke entirely off the cuff, without even consulting his notes.’ Kelly proceeded to describe how he felt his heart rate increase as it dawned on him that there would, in fact, be plenty of time for his nonexistent discussant remarks. ‘Perhaps,’ he admitted with a characteristically Kellyan chuckle, ‘cutting corners wasn’t such a good idea after all!’ As Kelly described his plight, the initial hush in the audience began to be punctuated by little giggles here and there – and, finally, full laughter. Evidently, Kelly’s ‘confession’ struck a familiar chord with everyone who had ever scrambled to finish a paper en route to an important meeting or forgotten to pack their lecture notes. Of course, very few of us confess to such sins as publicly and cheerfully as Kelly seemed to be doing. As he spoke, the mood in the room shifted palpably from something stodgy and academic to more light-hearted and intimate. The audience had begun to enjoy themselves, and they were now hanging on Kelly’s every word, wondering what he might say next. Kelly then proposed that since he had nothing prepared, he might as well talk about personal construct theory (PCT) – a topic he could discuss in his sleep. However, in deference to his role as discussant, he would do his best to connect what he was saying to the issues the symposium participants had raised. Kelly then proceeded to sketch in a few PCT basics, followed by a brilliant analysis of how these principles might help resolve some of the dilemmas with which the presenters had been struggling. This part of his talk was so adroit that many in the audience – me included – began to wonder if Kelly’s initial mea culpa was merely a ploy to capture the audience’s attention. For Kelly, such a cheeky gambit would not be out of character. His talks were rarely ‘plain vanilla’, and he frequently began with a quirky anecdote or oblique premise that kept everyone guessing about where he was headed. In any event, whether genuine or contrived, his presentation at that symposium certainly made an indelible impression on me. I still have vivid memories of it more than four decades later. There were a few other surprises that day, but before discussing them, I want to mention a little-known manuscript called ‘Feelings for and feelings

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of’ which Kelly wrote in 1959. In that essay, Kelly begins by counselling his readers to steer clear of all of footnotes: ‘You have been duly warned in the Preface, if you read it as you were supposed to, against paying attention to any of these footnotes. They are bound to confuse you, just as they do me. Most certainly they will take a lot of the fun out of reading what otherwise I had hoped might be a rather congenial and amusing visit between us’ (Kelly 1959). Later, in that same footnote, he adds: ‘Confusing, isn’t it? Now you see why you were urged to leave these footnotes alone. If you must know, they are written solely for those constitutionally anxious flibbertigibbets who cannot sit down and enjoy a book without everlastingly puzzling over what the book is supposed to be about. Now you aren’t that kind of a person, are you?’ A later footnote reiterates the point: ‘Don’t look at these footnotes; they only dampen your interest in what you are about to read!’ Of course, these teasing asides guaranteed that every footnote would have the reader’s undivided attention. So, here we have two examples – one oral and one written – of Kelly’s penchant for toying with his audience’s expectations. By announcing that he was caught unprepared, he quickly humanised an otherwise stuffy symposium (and provided a perfect excuse for talking about PCT), and by belittling his own footnotes, he ensured that his readers would pay keen attention to them. Kelly seemed to delight in such whimsy. Perhaps that is why former students so regularly described him as having a ‘mischievous smile and glint in (the) eye’ (Fransella 1995). Of course, there was a method to his madness – he clearly understood that it is the unexpected twist that rivets attention.

A Tense Moment I remember sitting in one of Kelly’s classes when he startled everyone by suddenly whirling in the direction of a classmate – we’ll call him Joe. ‘What’s the matter with Joe?’ Kelly asked loudly. We all turned to Joe, who had been dreamily minding his own business but who now nearly fell out of his chair. Kelly then continued, softly and sweetly, ‘Well, the trouble with Joe is that he doesn’t realise who he could be other than Joe.’ Kelly went on to explain how each of us tends to get stuck performing the same life ‘act’ day in and day out, hardly aware that there are alternatives. As Richard Bach (1977) puts it, ‘Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.’ Later that day, Kelly’s comment about Joe got me thinking about the habitual roles I played in my own family. For instance, as the ‘dutiful son’,

46 Jay S. Efran I was usually the one who remembered to send a birthday or anniversary card. My brother, who was much more rebellious, rarely bothered with such family niceties. The irony is that, after a while, a card from me tended to be taken for granted whereas one from him was hailed as a minor miracle. Neither my brother nor I know exactly how or when we were ‘assigned’ these roles. We don’t remember having signed any contracts promising to behave in a certain way. In any event, Kelly’s lecture was a useful reminder that such family roles persist because we are generally oblivious to our power to change them. By the way, for Kelly, it didn’t matter whether Joe considered his usual persona good or bad, right or wrong, successful or unsuccessful. He thought we could all profit from an occasional shift in our grounding premises. Of course, this theme of playing with alternatives is basic to PCT and is also the heart of Kelly’s most innovative treatment format – fixed-role therapy (Kelly 1955; 1963/1969). In a nutshell, the fixed-role format invites clients to try out a specially designed role for a predetermined period of time. Usually, the role does not entail drastic modifications of outward behaviour. Instead, it involves a shift in the way the person defines him- or herself. For instance, an individual who is quiet and considers himself painfully shy might be asked to play the role of a ‘thoughtful’ person who doesn’t speak much unless he has something important to say. The casual observer might not notice much of a difference, but the person would be thinking differently about why and when he enters a conversation. The fixed-role exercise does not assume that the new role is necessarily superior to the old, nor does it imply that the fixed role ought to be adopted permanently. This is not an extreme makeover. When the exercise ends, the person returns to being who he or she was before, but is free to make use of any insights garnered from viewing the world through a different set of lenses. A few years ago, I again found myself thinking about what Kelly had told Joe that day. Because of a minor poison ivy rash, I switched my wristwatch from my left arm to my right. Although this may not seem like such a big deal, it took me a few days to get comfortable with the transition. During the process, I found myself noticing all sorts of other semi-automatic and habitual patterns that defined how I lived. Because this was such an eye-opening experience, I decided to ask some of my clients to try out a few minor life changes. For example, I asked one individual to get off the bus two blocks before her usual stop and walk the rest of the way home. I asked another to sit on a designated park bench for an hour, being alert to the surroundings rather than reading a newspaper, listening to a Walkman or making cell-phone calls. At the time, I had two clients who rarely read

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for pleasure. For both of them, I recommended A Kiss before Dying – Ira Levin’s (1953) classic page-turner. Both reported profiting from the experience, but in completely different ways. The first, identifying strongly with the main character, decided that his selfishness was ruining his relationships. The second, surprised at how much he enjoyed the book, concluded that he should develop more outside pursuits. Reading mystery novels became one of his new passions. As with fixed-role therapy, these mini-assignments were not designed to solve any particular problems. In fact, I avoided suggesting tasks that seemed to have a direct connection to a client’s issues. Yet, these modest exercises proved to be unexpectedly powerful catalysts for change, possibly because they seemed innocuous and sidestepped the client’s expectations.

Reinventing Assessment Psychological assessment was another arena in which Kelly had an avid interest and made substantial contributions. It was well known that he had little use for psychology’s traditional assessment instruments. He complained that these usually required participants to guess at the answers the psychologist had already decided were correct. Kelly thought it should be the other way around. His goal was to give people the opportunity to teach the psychologist how they thought about their world and to indicate which answers, from their perspective, ought to be considered correct. Kelly’s (1955) Role Construct Repertory Test (REP) is a good example of this approach. As the reader may know, the test invites people to list important individuals in their life and then show how they would make comparisons among them. The REP test uses a triadic format in which three people are compared at a time. Kelly was so enamoured of the technique that he incorporated it into his classroom exams. Answering these questions was a little bit like playing the ‘Sesame Street’ game of deciding ‘which of these things is not like the others’. Each question listed three terms, and the task was to show how any two were alike and different from the third. However, unlike on ‘Sesame Street’, there was no single correct answer, and the format permitted considerable creative latitude. For instance, a psychopathology item might consist of the following terms: (a) schizoaffective disorder, (b) bipolar disorder and (c) anorexia nervosa. A concrete student could point out that only the first two include the word ‘disorder’. A slightly more abstract response might note that only two of the items are classified as ‘psychoses’. Still more inventive responses could involve comparing (a) the dietary and nutritional implications of each

48 Jay S. Efran disorder, (b) the role each played in the history of psychiatry, (c) the differences among them in terms of recommended treatment approaches, or (d) the way a psychoanalyst might construe the aetiology of each. When Kelly was less interested in our conceptual agility and more concerned about whether we had read the assignments, he used ordinary matching questions rather than something fancier. However, even these involved a Kellyan twist. Instead of the answers just being labelled ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’, Kelly used letters from anywhere in the alphabet. Therefore, the correct match might be tagged ‘i’, ‘o’, ‘r’ or ‘x’. Any letter could be used more than once and some were not needed at all. Furthermore, if you happened to get everything right, your choices would spell a word or phrase down the side of the page. On one exam, for instance, the letters for the correct choices spelled ‘icing the cake’. Of course, the fact that the answers formed a recognisable pattern made grading a snap but cheating a likelihood. After all, a student who knew a couple of the items could simply fill in the rest by guessing the relevant key phrase. In fact, we were puzzled about Kelly’s apparent lack of concern about this possibility. So one day we asked him about it. ‘Not a problem’, he said, smiling broadly, ‘you see, I often misspell the words I use as a key.’ Sure enough, on our very next test, the correct answers spelled ‘pemsonal’ rather than ‘personal’. Because Kelly so often criticised the medical model and the disease-entity approach, we were also puzzled by why he was so insistent that we study Henderson & Gillespie’s classic Textbook of Psychiatry (1950) and why he included so much DSM terminology in his tests. His reply was that he considered becoming fluent in ‘the language of psychiatry’ an essential step to becoming a competent researcher and effective critic. Although he delighted in having students challenge conventional wisdom, he also insisted that we know what we were talking about! Because he loved a touch of rebelliousness and had so many reservations about traditional testing procedures, Kelly was bound to respond positively to a project that a classmate and I did for one of his classes. Instead of handing in a paper, we tape-recorded a role-play of a teacher-psychologist conference. We had written the script, persuaded some friends to play leading roles and got Kelly’s permission to play the final product for him and the rest of our class. We knew that with his background as a dramatics coach and his interest in role-playing, Kelly was sure to like the idea. Moreover, our skit was a humorous look at the dangers of reifying test concepts, an issue to which Kelly was quite sympathetic. For instance, he used to argue that discussions about the immutability of IQ tended to be vacuous. Intelligence scales, by design, contained only items that were rela-

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tively insensitive to changes in performance conditions. Items that produced more variable results were automatically discarded. Therefore, it is mere tautology to assert that intelligence – or at least what the intelligence scales measure – is difficult to modify. This tells us something about the suppositions of the test-makers, but virtually nothing about human nature. In any event, our role-play was a tongue-in-cheek portrayal of how a teacher’s reification of the IQ concept distracted her attention from what she might do to understand her pupil and improve his classroom work. Because the skit was funny and irreverent it earned both of us a solid ‘A’.

Bon Voyage Kelly’s interest in novel assessment methods, always strong, intensified in 1958, just before he left Ohio State University for a sabbatical year abroad. He had planned to interview psychologists in foreign countries in order to learn more about how they conceptualised the field. Therefore, he was interested in inquiry methods that were basically open-ended but would still permit cross-cultural comparisons. As part of his plan, Kelly intended to conduct informal discussions with small groups of psychologists in each of the countries he visited. He wanted to avoid asking stock questions, knowing that these would inevitably reflect his own biases and make it harder for the European psychologists to reveal their own conceptual templates. As the date for his trip approached, Kelly used every opportunity to pretest the methods he was exploring. One result of this experimentation was a rather disastrous essay question that popped up in one of our class exams. He gave out blank sheets of paper, with the instruction that we draw a picture of a homunculus looking up at us. Then, we were supposed to write an essay about what that homunculus saw, particularly with regard to our purview as budding psychologists. Unfortunately, many of us had no idea what a ‘homunculus’ was. We racked our brains trying to remember whether we had come across such a term in the readings. In desperation, most of us drew a face with prominent eyes. Mine looked like one of the ‘Kilroy Was Here’ cartoons of the Second World War. The essay I wrote was basically some drivel about my future career plans. The results from our class were so dull that Kelly ultimately decided to scrap the question altogether, and the so-called homunculus exercise died a quiet death. More successful were some of the formats Kelly pre-tested with our research team. I should explain that, for me, being on Kelly’s team was a magical experience. In fact, I found this element of the Ohio State

50 Jay S. Efran curriculum so valuable that I made a point of ‘importing’ it into Temple University’s clinical programme when I became director there in 1971. At Ohio State, each faculty member’s team met weekly and was composed of students at different year levels. Initially, students were randomly assigned to the various teams and would typically rotate to a different team each quarter. (Ohio State was on the quarter rather than the semester system.) However, once a student began work on a project with a particular advisor, he or she remained on that person’s team until the project was completed. Team meetings served multiple purposes. It was the place to brainstorm ideas, seek help devising questionnaire items, pre-test experimental instructions, solicit volunteers for rating tasks, and so on. It was also a great vehicle for learning how to present in front of a group and field tough questions. Kelly’s team meetings were always held in the evening and at his home. His wife, Gladys, usually pitched in with refreshments, which were often quite creative. When the weather was cold, for example, she might serve hot chocolate or warmed cider with cinnamon-stick stirrers as well as the usual tea and coffee. As a new graduate student in an era of somewhat formal faculty–student relationships, I felt privileged to be welcomed into an esteemed faculty member’s home for these cosy fireside gatherings. On Kelly’s team, there was an admirable openness to new, even whacky, ideas. In fact, I don’t think I ever heard Kelly pooh-pooh anyone’s initial attempts at a research proposal. He seemed infinitely patient and encouraging – much more than I would have been. Although we laughed a lot at these meetings, it also felt like we were participating in something important – a grand intellectual venture. Perhaps that feeling derived from knowing that it was in just such a setting, only a few years earlier, that Kelly previewed drafts of his book chapters, reading them aloud and soliciting feedback from the group.

Duelling Tape Recorders As I indicated, Kelly used some of our meetings to pre-test materials for his European trip. One of our jobs was to help him decide what kind of tape recorder to take on the trip. In those days, the reel-to-reel Wollensak was the workhorse to be found in most clinics and psychology departments. However, Kelly needed something much lighter and more portable. Unfortunately, the technology for handheld recorders was in its infancy, and few machines had sufficient fidelity to allow group discussions to be recorded and reliably transcribed. Kelly had convinced various local vendors to let

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him try out their machines, and our weekly meetings became the testing site. While we were ‘auditioning’ tape recorders, we were also piloting Kelly’s discussion formats. The one I remember most clearly, and found the most intriguing, was called ‘the ice floe problem’. The setup was roughly as follows. Three individuals are stranded on an ice floe. Unfortunately, the rescue helicopter that arrives only has enough room to take two of them to safety. Moreover, because the ice floe is breaking up rather rapidly, there will not be time for a second trip. The group’s task is to decide who stays and who goes. In presenting this problem, Kelly explained that he was prepared to answer the group’s questions about the three people on the floe. However, the questioner would have to be specific about what he or she wanted to know. In the developing discussion, members of our team asked about the ages of the three individuals, their family background, their religious beliefs, their professions, their aspirations, their criminal records, their health, and so on. Kelly seemed to be having a marvellous time responding to our questions and gradually divulging more and more details about the individuals on the floe. Of course, he also took careful notes about the questions we were asking and the way the debate developed. Frankly, I have no recollection about whom we saved that night or which brand of tape recorder won our endorsement. However, I can report that the ice floe problem, which was a big hit with our group, made the final cut for Kelly’s European excursion, as can be verified by reading Kelly’s ‘Nebraska symposium on motivation’ paper (Kelly 1962).

A Fateful Meal I am now finally ready to return to my description of the other events that transpired on the day of that symposium in 1964. As the session was breaking up, Kelly was quickly surrounded by a throng of well-wishers. I decided to hang back a while in order to let the crowd thin. By the time I got close to where Kelly was standing, he was holding an appointment book in his hand and scheduling meetings with panel members and various other dignitaries. At that time, he was a well-known figure in APA circles, and people were clamouring to have a word with him. As we made eye contact, he seemed to assume that I too wanted to set up an appointment. Before I had a chance to clarify that I was just waving hello, he had already apologised for having no slots left open and proposed that, instead, we meet for

52 Jay S. Efran breakfast the following morning. In that awkward moment, all I could think to do was to agree. I should point out that although Kelly and I were on good terms – after all, he loved our teacher-psychologist role-play – we did not have anything like a close relationship. We were not, for example, on a first-name basis, and I would never have suggested that we dine together, especially without having some important business to transact. Yet, I had just somehow agreed to meet him for breakfast, almost undoubtedly having created the false impression that we had some valid reason for getting together. As I walked along the hotel corridor, I was struck by a terrible irony. Just as Kelly didn’t have any discussant remarks to present at the symposium, I had no agenda items for our imminent rendezvous. On the other hand, whereas he had confessed to his lack of preparation, I was not at all sure I had the courage to do the same. I spent a rather sleepless night, concocting presumably weighty matters for us to discuss. One ploy I considered was to ask lots of questions about PCT. I even invented a bogus research design that I hoped might give us something to discuss. However, as morning arrived, all such ideas began to seem increasingly feeble. At the appointed hour, I made my way towards the hotel’s coffee shop with the slow gait of a condemned man mounting the steps of the gallows. I had no idea what would happen, and I had just about given up caring. The truth is, the moment we met, all of my trepidations about our breakfast disappeared. In fact, we had an absolutely wonderful time, our conversation rolled along effortlessly, and I never felt the least impulse to trot out any of my contrived questions or to outline my fictional research plan. Eating together seemed like the most natural arrangement in the world, and I suddenly felt like a colleague and friend rather than just an advisee. One aspect of our meeting made it truly memorable – a turning point in my career. Kelly had asked about my year at the University of Rochester, and he seemed genuinely interested in hearing about the experiences I had had. After giving him a synopsis of the year’s highlights, I had to mention, in all candour, that I was both puzzled and shocked by the department’s relentless pressure to ‘publish or perish’. For instance, soon after I arrived on campus, I was advised by several members of the senior faculty that I should mount only short-term research projects and be certain that these would have sure-fire outcomes. If I were wise, I would postpone anything more adventurous until later in my career. Similarly, I was warned that I was spending altogether too much time with students and in preparing my courses. Time in the classroom was time away from the lab! Some of the other junior faculty members seemed to be operating in a state of near-

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panic, worrying that their publications wouldn’t impress the tenure committee. The work of one earnest, bright, industrious chap was constantly being disparaged as ‘second-rate’. In fact, that individual went on to become a major figure in the field, with a very exemplary publication record indeed. I admitted to Kelly that this was a far cry from how I had naively envisaged joining a ‘community of scholars’. Kelly was very sympathetic. Later, I learned that he had turned down a lucrative chairmanship at a major university because he felt that its emphasis on premature productivity was oppressive. He thought that it was of utmost importance that a junior faculty member have sufficient time to develop and to find his or her voice. In our discussion, Kelly pointed out that it wasn’t until late in his own career that he had compiled much of a publication record. I think his exact words were, ‘Until my two volumes came out, most people didn’t think that George Kelly had a single psychological thought in his brain.’ I responded with a ‘yes, but’, suggesting that in his era the field was far less regimented than it is now. Besides, I noted, he had already established himself as a resourceful mental health administrator. In addition, he had played an important role in the historic Boulder Conference on Clinical Psychology and was a ground-floor participant in APA’s clinical division. Looking back on that conversation, I marvel at my audacity in telling Kelly that his experience was no longer relevant! I was accusing him of being old-fashioned, but he either didn’t mind or I was too insensitive to notice. In any event, he responded by making me an offer I could barely believe and had no right to expect. First, he indicated that he had great faith in my abilities: ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ he said, ‘you have a good head on your shoulders and you need to feel free to use it.’ Therefore, he advised against caving in to any of the pressures for hasty publication. Instead, I should continue to pursue the work I found challenging and meaningful. He said that if, because I followed that advice, I was fired or denied tenure, I should simply pick up the phone and give him a call. He would see to it that I got another, equivalent position. I knew that his offer was sincere and that, in those days, he had the clout to back it up. As it turned out, I never had to make that call. However, just the fact that he made the offer altered the way I functioned as a faculty member, teacher, mentor and clinician. I returned to campus with a greater feeling of security and a renewed sense of purpose. In the following years, I certainly kept one eye on the department’s tenure clock. On the other hand, I tackled some risky projects that I would otherwise have put aside, and I continued to devote as much time to students as I knew they deserved.

54 Jay S. Efran Of course, even in 1964 only a few individuals could have adopted Kelly’s academic godfather stance. However, the values he was championing about the importance of unfettered inquiry are still worth endorsing. For that reason, I have often shared the story of that breakfast with graduate students and younger faculty members who were grappling with career decisions. Until that morning, I had not fully appreciated Kelly’s warmth and compassion. Also, I underestimated how much he cared about the welfare of his students. I had had a previous glimpse of his concern one day at Ohio State when he stopped me in the hallway to announce that he had submitted my name for a faculty opening at Stanford University. Apparently, he was working on my behalf even before I had given much thought to what I might do after graduation – and prior to my having discussed any career plans with him. ‘However,’ he added with a grin, ‘it’s too soon to pack your bags – Stanford often asks for names and then doesn’t do a darn thing with them’ (at least in the halls of academia, he typically said ‘darn’ and not ‘damn’).

A Final Communication For the two years after our 1964 meeting, Kelly and I had very little direct contact. Then, in 1966, a year before his death, I was surprised to find a letter from him in my mailbox. Somehow, he had got wind of the fact that I had been given an outstanding teaching award by the university. His letter was brief, but one of the nicest I have ever received. He first congratulated me heartily on the accomplishment. Then, in typical Kellyan fashion, he wondered aloud whether I might have received the award by handing out too many ‘A’s’ and pandering to students. He then concluded that, no, given his knowledge of me, I must have earned it ‘honestly’. I pictured him grinning broadly while writing that line.

Acknowledgement The author wishes to thank Elsa R. Efran for her help in preparing this chapter.

References Bach, R. (1977). Illusions: Confessions of a Reluctant Messiah. New York: Delacorte Press

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Fransella, F. (1995). George Kelly. London: Sage Henderson, D. K. & Gillespie, R. D. (1950). A Textbook of Psychiatry, 7th edition. London: Oxford University Press Kelly, G. A. (1955). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volumes 1 and 2. New York: Norton (reprinted London: Routledge, 1991) Kelly, G. A. (1959). Feelings for and Feelings of. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Kelly, G. A. (1962). Europe’s matrix of decision. In M. R. Jones (ed.) Nebraska Symposium on Motivation 1962. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press Kelly, G. A. (1963/1969). The autobiography of a theory. In B. Maher (ed.), Clinical Psychology and Personality: The Selected Papers of George Kelly. New York: John Wiley & Sons Levin, I. (1953). A Kiss before Dying. New York: Simon & Schuster

Chapter 4

Don Bannister Through the Looking Glass Fay Fransella Fay Fransella became entranced by Kelly’s ideas in the mid-1960s. She was one of a small group of people who formed the ‘Kelly Club’ set up by Don Bannister. Her early work with those who stutter was based on the idea that each person who stutters needs to elaborate a notion of themselves in relation to other people. Since then, she has written and edited several books on personal construct psychology, the most recent being the edited International Handbook of Personal Construct Psychology (2003) and A Manual for Repertory Grid Technique (second edition, with Richard Bell and Don Bannister, 2004) (the inclusion of Don’s name in that book was to acknowledge his authorship in the first edition).

Background It is not possible for me to write about Don Bannister in the context of reflexivity without acknowledging at the outset that I am also involved in that reflexivity. I have changed my views on how this chapter should be written as I looked in greater depth at his work. I want also to acknowledge the very helpful comments Max Farrar made on a draft of this chapter, particularly in relation to Don’s novels. There were some things I was absolutely sure of before starting this chapter. I am certain that without Don Bannister in the early 1960s psychology would not have got its first taste of an alternative to its existing focus on ‘non-reflexive science’, for it was Don who flamboyantly stated that ‘reflexivity is here to stay whether you [psychologists] like it or not’. Reflections in Personal Construct Theory. Edited by Richard J. Butler © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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However, Neimeyer (1985) says that ‘it would be misleading to assume that Bannister’s efforts have been solely responsible for the development of PCT in the UK’. He points out that the Zeitgeist was for alternatives to ‘psychology is a science’ offered by such people as Polanyi (1958) and Kuhn (1962), who were making waves, as were people like R. D. Laing (1960) with his book The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness followed by many others. Don came across Kelly’s ideas by sheer chance. Neimeyer (1985) interviewed him in 1979 and Don describes what happened. He was working for his PhD at the Institute of Psychiatry, London in 1957 and was reading all the textbooks he could find on personality in alphabetical order to find one that related to him personally and – lo and behold – there were Kelly’s two volumes. He sat down and read solidly for many hours and returned home exhausted. While watching the television that night he found that he was making sense of what was happening on the screen in personal construct terms. He realised it was making sense to him in personal terms: ‘And this really did sort of seize hold of me, because one of the part-articulated demands I’d been taught or read about was a sort of personal demand, that they somehow make sense of me and my personal life’ (Neimeyer 1985). He was hooked. But that story tells us more. I think it fair to say that Don was a ‘reflexive psychologist’ before he even came across Kelly! In his chapter on personal construct theory (PCT) and politics he has a whole section on reflexivity and there talks about his own thinking. In adolescence he saw himself and others ‘as essentially “individuals” whose actions were wholly determined by their individual nature’ (Bannister 1979a). His personal construct was ‘individual’ vs. ‘society’, where society was something to be rebelled against. He spent his time looking for a psychological theory that would provide a framework for his existing ideas. And along came Kelly.

Don Battles for a Reflexive Psychology thus we might set about enlarging science. Perhaps from the starting point that when the natural scientist says of a changing object ‘what does this change signify’, he is not asking the same question as when we ask of a changing person ‘what does this change signify for him’ – for this latter is truly a psychological question. (Bannister 1970)

I think it is fair to say that it was Don who forced British psychologists to become aware that something new was appearing in their discipline. In

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the mid-1960s he tackled psychologists head-on with a paper published in the Bulletin of the British Psychological Society entitled ‘Psychology as an exercise in paradox’ (Bannister 1966). I am very surprised that it was accepted for publication and cannot but admire the assessors involved. It is Don at his most quotable. Much has indeed been cited from it and I have to refrain from doing too much of it here, but some I cannot resist. His opening sentence is: ‘This paper was originally entitled “Was psychology ever a good idea?” On reflection such a title seemed both undignified and doom-laden, and was discarded’ (Bannister 1966), but he goes on to say that the subject matter still relates to that original title. He then describes the ‘model of man’ at the core of current theories. Many will remember his description of the man within psychoanalytic theories as being a battlefield: ‘He is a dark cellar in which a well-bred spinster lady and a sex-crazed monkey are forever engaged in mortal combat, the struggle being refereed by a rather nervous bank clerk’ (Bannister 1966). And then in a nutshell he describes learning theory man as ‘basically a ping-pong ball with a memory’. The point he was making, of course, is that there is a paradox in that psychologists see themselves as being quite different from the ‘organism’ or the ‘subject’. He then (still on the first page) comes to the central issue: ‘In short, we have not yet faced up to the issue of reflexivity and the need for reflexivity in psychological thinking’ (Bannister 1966). He points out that it is really only psychologists who insist on being ‘scientists’ in the traditional sense of the word, whereas people like politicians, mothers, bartenders and conmen have pondered about ‘the interesting problem of what is man’. He sums up the nature of ‘psychology as a science’ with: ‘It may be that psychology is the only science which has been able to produce concepts of its subject which are clearly more mean, more miserable, and more limited than lay concepts.’ At the time Don was writing that paper he must also have been deeply into writing the first book on repertory grids with Miller Mair, entitled The Evaluation of Personal Constructs. The first paragraph of chapter 1 makes their point clear: Psychology is often described, especially in introductory textbooks, as the science of behaviour. This phrase claims for psychologists the status and dignity of scientists, engaged in predicting and controlling the behaviours of subjects who are submitted to tasks designed by the experimenter. It simultaneously claims that the important thing to study in their subjects – other human beings – is agreed units of observable behaviour, agreed between experimenters, not between subject and experimenter. There seems to be relatively little concern with the possibility that the subject, in his own way, may

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Fay Fransella be experimenting, even in the experimenter’s experiment, and seeking to do some predicting, controlling and even understanding, on his own account. (Bannister & Mair 1968)

Followed by: Psychologists in general have been rather slow to admit that their human subjects may be in the same league as themselves in this business of prediction, control and understanding, and some still refuse to regard them as being interested in the game at all.

From his ‘Psychology as an exercise in paradox’ article (Bannister 1966) and his book with Miller Mair (Bannister & Mair 1968) Don moved on to ‘Science through the looking glass’ (Bannister 1970). In this he turns to the subject of what psychologists need to do to encompass the fact that we are not using ‘subjects’ in our scientific experiments but people like ourselves, who are trying to make sense of what we are asking them to do. He spells his idea out thus: What does not seem to be commonly envisaged is that rather than traditional science moulding psychology, psychology might be the new venture which will remould science. When Gods have been thought to frown upon new undertakings, men have been known to alter their theology rather than abandon their undertakings. (Bannister 1970)

He suggests that psychology should be able to find common ground among its differing psychological approaches. In such a situation he acknowledges that Kelly made sure it was a frontrunner with its ‘man-as-scientist’ as its model of the person. But he points out: such a notion cannot explain science. It can only assure us that construct theory will see science as no Godlike, unique or freakish undertaking, but will depict it as an extension of ordinary human questing, as a formalization of sloppy human curiosity, as a Sunday best version of man in an everyday mood. (Bannister 1970)

Don thought science should become a sub-system like music or chess, having its own language and usage. He suggests that being a clearly defined sub-system gives its members a certain freedom of movement: The astronomer hovering between steady state and big bang theories does not have to feel responsible for the biologist who is polishing up evolutionary theory, any more than the composer dabbling in diatonic scales has to footnote implications for strong centre theory in chess. Thus, individual sciences

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and scientists have the kind of freedom which we grant ourselves in our personal life when we keep a degree of separation in our construing of our working life, our loving life, our political life. (Bannister 1970)

Later, he might have added ‘the novel’ to this analogy. He goes on in that chapter to spell out exactly what he thought the changes in psychology should be for it to become a ‘reflexive psychological science’. Throughout the 1960s and thereafter Don was tireless in accepting invitations to talk at university students’ Psychological Societies, for it was students who liked this alternative approach to psychology. As the load got heavier I was glad to be involved in travelling the country to ‘spread the word’. It had been my intention to package this chapter in neat parcels such as ‘Don the psychotherapist’, ‘Don the politician’, ‘Don the teacher’, ‘Don the novel writer’ and ‘Don the person’. But I decided it is not possible or even desirable to attempt to package a person. All our roles keep spilling into each other. But now I have seen so clearly that he was essentially a ‘reflexive psychologist’ long before he came across Kelly, and looked at how he tried to convince other psychologists how essential being reflexive is to developing a psychology of the living, moving person, two areas of his life stand out to me. These are ‘Don as researcher’ and ‘Don the storyteller’. However, before moving on, there is one story that Don recounts (Bannister 1979a) that exemplifies the reflexivity in Kelly’s theory that all of us are personal construers. This was to do with B. F. Skinner and his ‘token economies’, which were popular at the time for use in psychiatric hospitals. Tokens were given to ‘long-stay’ patients for doing up their flies, making their bed, using a knife and fork, and so forth. In this example, all was going well. But there was one patient who twigged what it was all about and became very adept at earning tokens. He then set up his own economy system and gave out tokens to fellow patients for not doing up flies, not making the beds, and so forth. The outcome of the two competing token economies was ‘no change’. Those running the token economy system were nonplussed. I do not think that Skinner would have been amused either. But I think that Don would be saddened by the evidence that mainstream psychology has not given up the non-reflexive ‘old science’ game. In his President’s Column in the British Psychological Society’s journal The Psychologist Ray Miller starts his May 2006 column by saying: ‘The marriage of science and practice in psychology remains the bedrock on which both the discipline and the profession are firmly founded’. Then in June 2007, the new President of the BPS, Pam Maras, says in the President’s Column: ‘Psychology is a science-based discipline; research is the foundation of and central to psychology.’

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Don as Researcher Kelly (1955) integrated notions of appropriate research design into his theory, from the very beginning. He did this by creating an essentially reflexive theory: that is a theory which accounts for its own construction. … Research is seen as simply one formalized version of ordinary human inquiry. (Bannister 1981a)

With this deep belief that psychologists must work with other construing beings, it is no surprise that Don automatically took this approach to those who were diagnosed as schizophrenic and who exhibited ‘thought disorder’. Don had worked for some years in a psychiatric hospital with so-called long-stay patients, so it was perhaps not surprising that he chose to work with these seriously handicapped people. But I think we can also find a possible reason in Don himself. There is a commonly held idea that we choose to work with certain groups of people because they have some personal meaning for us. Most would agree that Don was brilliant with words in both speech and writing. How different from him were those who use a private language which is incomprehensible to others much of the time. He says that, as personal construct psychologists: ‘We accept that they are probably saying something very meaningful and that it is we who lack the necessary construct subsystem to enable us to understand them. The shortcoming is ours not theirs’ (Bannister & Fransella 1986; 2003). There is perhaps another reason. Don was a ‘tight’ construer. I do not believe in ‘trait theory’, but I do think that we have a preference towards being a ‘tight’ or a ‘looser’ construer. Don was very clear about what he believed in, what his views were. Kelly is said to have commented something along the lines that Don was the only dogmatic personal construct theorist he knew. As an example of Don’s tendency towards tight construing, we once explored Denny Hinkle’s implications grid (1965). Don was not pleased to discover that his impgrid was filled with ‘reciprocal implications’. That is, to be ‘generous’ means you are a ‘good friend’ and someone who is a ‘good friend’ is also someone who is ‘generous’. A large number of reciprocal implications suggests a tightly-knit system of personal constructs of the sort used in that particular grid. I sensed that Don found that quite threatening. I wonder if there was, deep inside, the angry man depicted in his novels and Don found possible evidence of his tight construing unwelcome. In my view we worked well together because my favoured mode is towards ‘loose’ construing. I might be good at first and second drafts and Don was better at pulling together the final draft.

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He first published an account of his research on the construing of those who were ‘thought-disordered’ in 1960 (Bannister 1960). He was directly testing Kelly’s view that those with ‘thought disorder’ were best understood using the ‘tight’ vs. ’loose’ construct dimension. Don showed, using a repertory grid, that those diagnosed as having ‘thought disorder’ were indeed construing in a very loose way and were also inconsistent in their construing over time. Not only was he being reflexive in trying to understand the construing of those he was working with, but his work was all totally within the framework of PCT. Salmon, Bramley & Presley (1967), using the ‘Word-in-Context Test’, showed that thought-disordered schizophrenic people were no different from ‘normal people’ when construing objects. The obvious suggestion was that those with very loose construing had great difficulty with interpersonal construing, but were no different from anyone else when construing more concrete things. It was at this time that Don produced one of his great eye-catching phrases: if it is interpersonal construing that has been specifically affected in thought disorder, then any theory about its origins would have to take account of this. Theories of the ‘schizococcus’ would perhaps have to postulate an unlikely bug that bites ‘person-thinking’ rather than ‘object-thinking’ brain cells. (Bannister & Fransella 1986; 2003)

He then went on to theorise that these people had been subjected to ‘serial invalidation’, that is, their predictions about people have been proved wrong too many times: ‘What is being argued is that thought-disordered schizophrenics have been driven to loosen beyond the point at which there are enough workable lines of implication between their constructs for them to re-tighten their system.’ They have, as it were ‘sawn off the psychological branch on which they were sitting’ (Bannister & Fransella 1986; 2003). Naturally, being Don, he went on to ‘test’ this idea by working with non-thought disordered people. These ‘serial invalidation’ experiments consisted of having a number of individuals each making judgements about photographs of people. One group would consistently be told they were right and the other that they were wrong. The ‘right’ group tightened their construing as they became more and more confident. The ‘wrong’ group did not at first ‘loosen’ their construing, but first changed the pattern of relationships. However, eventually, looking at single clusters of constructs rather than a whole sub-system, loosening did take place. Then came the obvious question of whether it was possible to help a thought-disordered person to become ‘thought-ordered’. With a research

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team he sought to set up a ward of those diagnosed as being ‘thoughtdisordered’ and to have staff trained in ‘validating’ any residual construct sub-systems that an individual had been shown to have. However, there were problems with this research. For one thing, it was not possible to have a whole ward made over to the research and to have nursing staff specially trained in recognising when a person was construing in a way that repays specific validation. The conclusion from the research (Bannister et al. 1975) was that it ‘produced no startling “cure” for thought disorder but did suggest that a “journey back” is possible, long and arduous thought that journey may be’ (Bannister & Fransella 1986; 2003). Some people have wondered why he worked with me to produce the ‘Test for Schizophrenic Thought Disorder’ (Bannister & Fransella 1971). At the time I was still contaminated by the teachings at the Institute of Psychiatry, where I was doing my clinical training. That was the kingdom of Hans Eysenck and, at that time, behaviour therapy. I thought that Don’s work was so useful that we should try to put it in a form that the psychiatrists there might pay attention to. Don agreed because he said he could see that, if an early diagnosis were made, it would be easier to help that person tighten his or her construing. I was wrong. It did not work out like that of course, and became a ‘diagnostic test’ which rarely led to psychological help in those days. I have described this research in some detail to show how completely Don was true to Kelly’s theory and its reflexivity. While the main thrust of his research work was on the subject of ‘thought disorder’, he carried out much other insightful work. For instance, on the development of construing in children there was research on ‘the child’s construing of self’ with Joyce Agnew (Bannister & Agnew 1976) and then ‘growing into self ’ with Sharon Jackson (Jackson & Bannister 1985). He also looked at how newly admitted people to psychiatric hospitals see their own problems, what theory they have about those problems and how those complaints are psychiatrically construed. On this he concludes: ‘The discrepancy between the patients’ construing of their own problems and the official, medical subsuming of patients’ complaints by psychiatric hospital staff seriously limits both groups in their capacity to react imaginatively and effectively to psychological distress’ (Bannister 1985a).

Don and His Novels In the final analysis, perhaps our genius for standing in angled relationships to aspects of ourselves and others is such that the novelist is construing his

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or her own construction processes and representing this construction through the figures in the novel. The reader, it is, who provides sociality by construing the construction processes of the author. (Bannister 2006)

Before going into his novels in detail I want to say how grateful I am to Harry Procter for telling me about Camille Paglia’s work, in which she says: The English language was created by poets, a five hundred-year enterprise of emotion and metaphor, the richest internal dialogue in world literature. French rhetorical models are too narrow for the English tradition. Most pernicious of French imports is the notion that there is no person behind a text … Behind every book is a certain person with a certain history. I can never know too much about that person and that history. (Paglia 1990)

I think that she would see Don’s writings as living up to that English tradition. We are lucky to have two sources to delve into to try to see the man behind the novels. One is that of Don himself who wrote about ‘A PCP view of novel writing and reading’ (Bannister 2006) and the other from Max Farrar (2006): ‘People, poetry and politics – the novels of Don Bannister’ (Farrar is a sociologist and so views Don’s novels from a different angle). My assumption here is that Don’s novels do, in fact, reflect his own construing. Taking up Don’s metaphor of ‘Science through the looking glass’ I see four of Don’s novels as clearly reflecting Don the person. Don’s second novel, Shiloh, is so different from his other four. Shiloh is about the American Civil War, whereas, as Farrar (2006) points out, the others are about ‘what happens to a working class northern English man when his fierce, critical and political intellect pushes against the limits imposed on his situation’. Long Day at Shiloh is a product of his life-long study of the American Civil War. Richard Butler believes he even went to the battlegrounds to see them for himself before writing Shiloh. Yet even in this book there are reflections of the author, particularly in General Grant, who is said by Miller Mair to have been Don’s hero. I think Don’s apparent rush to write five novels in eight years could be seen as a need to write his autobiography. As we shall see, the novels directly or indirectly demonstrate Don’s belief in reflexivity. I have been quite lavish with reviews of his novels because I think it is important to know that however autobiographical they are, they are also seen by critics as ‘good stories’ and ‘very well written’. I start with Shiloh because the other four tell a story taken together.

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Long Day at Shiloh (Bannister 1981b) The reviews of Long Day at Shiloh were very good. The cover of the book quotes one review as saying: An extraordinary novel – the stirring recreation, in the sharpest human and historical detail, of the first twenty-four hours of one of the crucial battles of the American Civil war. Here – in the voices, in the actions, in the minds of the men who fought it – is the tumultuous first day of the Battle of Shiloh.

Max Hastings in the Evening Standard said: ‘Bannister’s earthy dialogue is superb, his feel for the confusion, dirt, exhaustion and fear of war cannot be faulted.’ John Nickolson, writing in The Times, said: ‘His command of historical detail and uncanny ability to get inside his characters make this an unforgettable if sometimes harrowing book.’ In true personal construct style Don put on the fly-leaf: ‘Shiloh is a biblical word meaning place of peace’ – a nice bit of bipolarity. Is there any other reflection of Don the person in this book? A psychotherapist once commented to me that Don must have a great deal of aggression in him. I think that was probably so, but I do not know it was ever physical. His aggression manifested itself verbally, as many people know to their cost. He does talk about his anger though, as will be mentioned later. The person behind the book can be seen from Trevor Butt’s account of what Don told him while writing Shiloh. I remember him saying that what was important was the point of view – it was entirely from the men on the ground, whereas most descriptions of battles have a commander’s point of view. In Shiloh there are no maps and no hint of strategy and what is happening is on a grand scale. It’s the common soldiers’ confusion and fear and courage he was interested in. The men all have one thing in common he said: up until that day, nothing like this (or as terrible as this) had happened to them before. And they have to make some sense of it. (Butt, personal communication)

The last page of Shiloh links to another theme in all Don’s books – sex. General Grant, Don’s ‘personal hero’, was wounded, exhausted and alone at midnight on that first day at Shiloh. As his mind wandered, he remembered a party and a woman there and how his eyes were dragged to look at her breasts. In the porch after the dinner and in the moonlight she said he could touch her breasts if he liked. The last two sentences of the book are: ‘He had stood stiffly, hesitating, then put out his hand and lightly touched her breasts. His head lolled forward and his lips loosened into a

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half smile. The cigar dropped from his mouth and hissed onto the wet earth as he fell into a doze’ (Bannister 1981b). Don himself was a cigar smoker.

Sam Chard (Bannister 1979b) Sam Chard was Don’s first novel. It got excellent reviews, many cited on the back of my edition of Shiloh. The New Yorker says: ‘A brilliant piece of storytelling, alternating between dialogue rendered in dark and bitter dialect and a cool, measured narrative, that is as vivid as Zola’s Germinal but without Zola’s hyperbole.’ The Publishers Weekly says: ‘His vignettes of people and their hopelessness are strong, terrible, ultimately moving. Bannister is a man of few words, but he makes his bits and pieces of talk, often in dialect, and his brief moments of lives count. Their sum becomes a mirror image of a particular place at a particular time.’ Don explicitly tells us that this is also a story about himself: I had already written a substantial part of the novel (Sam Chard) convinced that its sole theme concerned the nature of the pit village community before I realised that the specific events adumbrated an alternative autobiography – a super-ordinate which then I consciously articulated into yet further narrative. (Bannister 2006)

He emphasises that his was a class-ridden world and the class of his origin he never forgot. All the explicit descriptions of sex and other bodily functions, the swearing and racist and homosexual comments, are telling us that that was the way it was when he was brought up – all this, of course, written in so brilliant a way. The main impact of Sam Chard on me was that here was Don shouting ‘here I am’, ‘this is how I was brought up’, ‘this is where I belong’, ‘this is ME’. It was as if he was proclaiming that the person most people saw in real life was not the ‘real person’. He acknowledges the novel’s autobiographical nature in his chapter ‘A PCP view of novel writing and reading’ (2006).

Burning Leaves (Bannister 1982) In this novel Paul, the main protagonist, has moved away from his workingclass background and is now a university teacher, just like Don . Of that novel The Times says: ‘We still understand precious little about where and

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why madness strikes and what ought to be done when it does … there is plenty to relish in this funny and beautifully written exploration of life beyond the end of the tether’; The Times Literary Supplement says: ‘A fresh and disturbing energy, written with care. Bannister knows that renewal can be as mysterious as decline and his hero has much to endure before a frail stability sets in. To describe the shattering impact may not be all that difficult but Bannister goes on to explore the aftermath. A smoother more elegant tale would surely be less disquieting’; and John Mellors in The Listener says: ‘There is an uncomfortable, almost painful, clarity about Bannister’s prose and the way he uses it to describe a man’s decline and fall and subsequent rehabilitation.’

The Summer Boy (Bannister 1984) At the start Don quotes from Dylan Thomas’s ‘I see the boys of summer’ as follows: In spring we cross our foreheads with the holly, Heigh ho the blood and berry, And nail the merry squires to the trees, Here love’s damp muscle dries and dies, Here break a kiss in no love’s quarry. O see the poles of promise in the boys.

Gay Firth of The Times says of this book: ‘Remarkable … a good strong plot, interesting action, and vivid characterisation matched with dialogue wonderfully audible, not just readable’; and the Kirkus Reviews says: ‘A strong and loving portrait of a not-so-angry-young-man trying to make his way in a modern-day Great Britain. For once, the reader hopes for a sequel.’ The Summer Boy was a book that Don was particularly keen on. He was saddened because it was not as well received as the others, although many of us would not have been disappointed with some of the reviews. I have always thought that the last line about ‘poles of promise’ was a clear reference to Don’s view of sex, as well as a personal desire for fame and fortune. Max Farrar (personal communication) suggests that it also reflects Don’s own political yearning for society, although I doubt if he would really want to ‘nail the merry squires to the trees’. It sees Martin Morley moving away from his familiar early environment into a different world. The book ends with him having learned how powerless one can be as an individual against an existing political system – in his case, the local council.

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Hard Walls of Ego (Bannister 1987) This book was published posthumously and I have only found one review of it. That appears in the Notes on the History of Anarchism in Literature: ‘Downbeat novel of anarchist activity and interpersonal relationships, where Joe Telford, an anarcho-syndicalist veteran, returns to activism and emotional involvement.’ Hard Walls of Ego reads almost as if Don had written a ‘Fixed Role Sketch’ for himself to see how far he might be able to change. In the end he came up against those hard walls, those treasured, superordinate construings which simply refused to budge. Perhaps he found that there are limits to the changes in ourselves that we can bring about.

Some Common Themes in the Novels 1

Gender

One major point that comes across to me from these novels is that the main characters, always male, seem to think that they cannot have a relationship with a woman without having sex with her. Once that is achieved, the relationship can blossom. He is then at pains to ‘support’ the woman on whatever is her current interest. I found it interesting how there was a connection between the main female character in his novels and the colour of her hair. In Sam Chard there is Cissie standing there with a bruised face ‘and Sam brushed her heavy black hair to one side …’ (p. 28). In Burning Leaves Paul’s wife ‘sat down on the sofa across from him, pulled off her woollen bobble hat and shook out her long black hair’ (p. 7). Then, in Hard Walls of Ego ‘The woman, standing huddled in the rain, clutching a briefcase and a big torch to her chest, was short, with strings of jet black hair hanging lankly from under a soaked headscarf’ (p. 4). In real life Don had a number of relationships with women. In most he may have been the dominant partner, but I imagine also a most caring and supportive one. It sometimes seemed as if he were playing the role of PCP counsellor, wanting the woman to develop both personally and professionally. That is reflected in his novels. Farrar focuses on what he calls Don’s ‘aggressive heterosexuality’. He suggests that Don’s sexist language may have been a specific provocation to feminists. Don had no quarrel with feminism itself but may have been against feminists’ actions such as ‘braburning’. I once said that I felt I should be doing something to support the

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‘movement’. He told me that I should not think that because I was doing more than most by becoming a Reader in a large university. Farrar (2006) then raises the point about whether Don was racist and/or homophobic. I do not know about either. But Farrar adds (personal communication) that it is a genuine question, arising from the disturbance he feels as a reader of some of the more extreme statements made by some of Don’s characters. But I do know that he had several very strongly held views, for instance, on religion. One of the few times I ever saw him explode with violent anger had something to do with religion. I think it was his view that people get ‘trapped’ by religion and are swayed by that rather than by their personal, logical and, perhaps, political views.

2

Social class

Farrar points to social class being a major feature of the novels. Don makes it clear that he saw himself in Sam Chard as a fully-fledged working-class man. Sam is very conscious of social class. Down the mine as an electrician, Sam talks of the social class rankings which placed him a few steps up the social ladder. Don too was once employed as an electrician in a mine. Farrar points out that the period about which Don writes was when the ‘industrial working class was in its death-throes, and he was writing about the first generation of working class people, mainly men, who had access to free state education of a high standard, the grammar school and the university’. He suggests that this resulted in these men moving into an environment ‘when they find themselves face-to-face with representatives of the class that has an excess of both cultural and economic capital’. In Don’s novels the main characters always move up the class structure. Martin Morley in The Summer Boy works as a reporter on a local newspaper; and Paul Killick in Burning Leaves makes the move between classes and became so estranged from all around him that he spends time in a psychiatric hospital. Farrar asks the important question: ‘How heavily does this class differentiation bear down on the man?’ Don moved into a new society himself as his intelligence took him to university and then onwards and upwards. But at that time it was not unusual for miners to move away from their village and on to other things. So I think perhaps what made class such an important construct for him in his novels and, I believe, in his own life, were his politics.

3

Politics

Politics is a major issue in the novels. Don was a very political being. He was a member of The Common Wealth Party, which was founded in 1945

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and came to reject the state-dominated form of socialism adopted by the Labour Party, increasingly aligning itself instead with the co-operative, syndicalist and guild socialist traditions. I do not know much about this, but I do know that Don saw himself as very active politically and that this was extremely important to him. In Hard Walls of Ego Joe Telford becomes involved in political action and travels round the country setting up radio stations and moving on quickly to avoid detection. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of my memory, but Don told me that he and friends once carried out or thought of carrying out a very similar action themselves. I find that the anarcho-syndicalism of Joe Telford is defined as being a branch of anarchism which focuses on the labour movement. Syndicalisme is a French word meaning ‘trade unionism‘. Anarcho-syndicalists view labour unions, not the ones we see today, but genuinely democratic, autonomous, unions of working people, as a potential force for revolutionary social change, replacing capitalism and the state with a new society democratically selfmanaged by workers. Farrar sees that view cropping up in several of Don’s novels, particularly the last one, Hard Walls of Ego. It was something that Don felt very strongly about. Was he describing his own political leanings in Hard Walls? Was that his driving force?

The Man in the Books Before talking more specifically about Don himself in his books there is just one more general point that Farrar makes. He comments on the fact that Don rarely used adjectives in his novels and suggests that Don relied on dialogue to get his point across. I have noticed that he hardly ever ends a question with a question mark. Again, that is unusual. Did he not want to conform to ‘standard practice’? Interestingly, Kelly took the opposite view and suggested we should put the question mark at the beginning as well as at the end of the question, to signal that what follows is a question. Kelly was for helping the reader whereas Don seems to be saying that readers have to look after themselves. No reflexivity there it seems. Farrar (personal communication) suggests that this reflects ‘Don the Dogmatist’ or ‘Don the Old Man’, saying ‘To hell with reflexivity’! For me, the absence of question marks was disconcerting. I found myself repeatedly stopping at that point and it interrupted the flow of what I was reading. But that may say as much about me as it does about Don. How was it that he started writing novels? I think, perhaps, he might have been seeking fame and, perhaps, fortune. So, what do I read into these novels? Don was a saddened man. Starting with Sam Chard and taking Don’s

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comment that it was partly at least an autobiographical account, he is telling readers what a northern British working-class man is like. At the end Sam is not happy. He gets the sack from his job in the mine and on the last page of the book takes his rucksack and thumbs a lift in a lorry. The conversation goes like this: The driver ‘where you after’ Sam ‘Nowt special. Where you goin’. Driver ‘Brum’. Sam ‘That’ll do me fine’.

Young Martin Morley in The Summer Boy does not achieve what he set out to do. He is beaten by the politics of the local council. Paul Killick in Burning Leaves ends up alone, moving away from his loving wife. Perhaps the saddest man of all is Joe Telford in Hard Walls of Ego. After experiencing a seemingly happy relationship with Janis, he walks away from her and returns to his old home to live alone once more. Don too ‘returned home’ to Yorkshire where he was cared for by Sharon Jackson during his last months. Don dedicates this book to ‘Sharon Ruth Jackson – without walls’. I think it is worth dwelling on this return to his homeland as it relates to Hard Walls. Here is part of the quotation Don gives at the start of the novel. It comes from Bernard Russell’s Marriage and Morals: Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse, it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives … Passionate mutual love while it lasts puts an end to this feeling; it breaks down the hard walls of the ego …

Joe Telford gave up his seemingly deep involvement with Janis to return to where he was ‘at home’. He had moved away with Janis and become involved in much political activity, which resulted in him going to prison. Then those hard walls of ego had reappeared. I got a great feeling of despondency reading of his departure: Jan stood back from the front bay window so that she could see out but not be seen from the outside. She watched Joe walk slowly down the estate road. Twice he turned and half-raised his hand but she stood unmoving, until he had disappeared from sight.

But you could see how he warmed to being ‘at home’ once again, among so many familiar things – and people – and a very construable world:

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Joe shut the window, steered his television stand to a position opposite the armchair, pushed the plug into its socket and switched the set on. He moved behind it to put a few lumps of coal on the fire and brushed his hands on his trousers. From the kitchen, he fetched the slice of fruit cake that Nelly had given him. Lowering himself into the armchair, he picked up his glass of wine and checked that the screen showed football. Propping his feet on the stretchers of the stand, he sipped at his wine and smiled as the Liverpool back line shook itself straight and began to flow forward.

Farrer wonders if Don was pessimistic about the political future for the anarcho-syndicalism movement he was so involved with. In view of the role politics played in his life, Farrar may well be right. But I am led to wonder if there was more to it than that. Was this ‘middle-class world’ he had left Yorkshire to enter also in some way failing him? He had found fame in the small world of personal construct psychology and was ‘professionally visible’ in the larger world of psychology itself, yet he did not get as much recognition from that as he hoped for. His work on thought disorder was not taken up by other psychologists let alone psychiatrists as he would have wished – it did not make waves. His last main work was to write all these novels in just eight years. Here, I really do think he wanted to tell us about his life in a truly reflexive fashion.

Don the Psychotherapist I said at the beginning of this chapter that I would not have a section on Don the person or Don the psychotherapist because they would merge with Don the reflexive psychologist and Don the novel writer, but I was wrong. Don spent a great deal of time in a psychotherapeutic relationship with individuals. At an extreme level it is said that at one point in his career he spent one hour each day sitting with a catatonic woman. She would/ could not speak, so he would talk to her, muse out loud or read to her. After several weeks she began to talk and steadily made her way to become a fully functioning person outside the hospital. Another example of his work comes in an interview with Windy Dryden on ‘Therapists’ Dilemmas’. Don chose as his dilemma the person with delusions. He says he tried several ways to approach such a person – humouring or using rational argument – but they failed. However, he found one that seemed to be effective: The simplest way of putting it is to say that what I did was to start dealing with the theme of the delusion without dealing with its content … A distinction that is made in the theory is between superordinate and subordinate

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He gives the example of a man who thought there was a conspiracy by the hospital doctors to assassinate him. He talked of lorries being ordered by doctors to run him down. So Don did not talk about the lorries and being run down but focused on the relationship between him and the doctors. That eventually worked and they were able to agree that a particular doctor was not involved in the conspiracy. Here Don’s basic point was that it is wrong to say that psychotherapy cannot help ‘psychotic’ people. It can, but the time-scale is sometimes years rather than months. When asked what his own dilemma was in working with someone with delusions, Don said he could still get angry with delusional talk: ‘However much I convince myself that there is a way through it … I still cannot easily or readily accept delusional talk … there is something about delusional talk which I still find disturbing, anger-provoking, or at least irritating’ (p. 178). He concludes: It still feels as if the psychotic has broken part of the contract we had between us. I think there is an unwritten contract between people, an agreement to try to explain their feelings and desires to each other and to try to do that to the best of their ability. The psychotic has secretly torn up that contract. It is when that contract is not fulfilled that I am faced with my own limitations. (p. 178)

Don the Reflexive Person This quality of reflexivity, the capacity to reflect upon, is a defining characteristic of self as understood in personal construct theory, distinguishing the self that screams from the self that ponders why it screamed. (Bannister 1985c)

Farrar (personal communication) makes the following point about that quotation: I think it is significant that he postulates here a ‘screaming’ self. He could have said ‘the self that laughs’ or ‘the self that shouts’ … My impression (after reading your essay) is that it’s Don’s sense of himself as ‘screaming’, and pondering incessantly on why he is screaming. One part of his answer, I think, would be political: rage against this oppressive, class-ridden society of

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ours; the other: I have come so far, but those bastards don’t recognise my achievements and I’m screaming in painful anger. So in this sentence perhaps Don is telling us both about the quality of reflexivity AND about Don – as a truly reflexive writer always is!

A great deal of Don’s later writings were about ‘the self ’. And there is much contained in all his writings as well as in previous sections of this chapter. As a person, he believed profoundly in the importance of reflexivity both in reflecting back onto oneself and reflecting the idea that you are also a construer and in both personal and professional roles. Actually, I think that Don did not differ much in those two roles. In both he was at pains to understand what was going on inside the individual he was in contact with. In both roles he was always kind, supportive, generous with his time, concerned and all those other things that make a person feel important and understood. I would like to make a personal statement here that Don the person enriched the lives of hundreds of individuals on a personal basis and as a professional psychotherapist. Many will never forget the part he played in their lives whether as teacher, therapist or friend. I have wondered how Don would have responded to this chapter. I hear him say: ‘Go to it girlie!’

References Bannister, D. (1960). Conceptual structure in thought-disordered schizophrenics. Journal of Mental Science, 106, 1230–1249 Bannister, D. (1966). Psychology as an exercise in paradox. Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, 19, 21–26 Bannister, D. (1970). Science through the looking glass. In D. Bannister (ed.) Perspectives in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press Bannister, D. (1979a). Personal construct theory and politics. In P. Stringer and D. Bannister (eds.) Constructs of Sociality and Individuality. London: Academic Press Bannister, D. (1979b). Sam Chard. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Bannister, D. (1981a). Personal construct theory and research method. In P. Reason & J. Rowan (eds.) Human Inquiry. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Bannister, D. (1981b). Long Day at Shiloh. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Bannister, D. (1982). Burning Leaves. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Bannister, D. (1984). The Summer Boy. London: Heinemann Bannister, D. (1985a). The patient’s point of view. In D. Bannister (ed.) Issues and Approaches in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press Bannister, D. (1985b). The psychotic disguise. In W. Dryden (ed.) Therapists’ Dilemmas. London: Harper & Row

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Bannister, D. (1985c). The experience of self. In F. Epting & A. W. Landfield (eds.) Anticipating Personal Construct Psychology. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press Bannister, D. (1987). Hard Walls of Ego. London; Secker & Warburg Bannister, D. (2006). A PCT view of novel writing and reading. In J. Scheer & K Sewell (eds.) Creative Construing Personal Constructions in the Arts. Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag Bannister, D., Adams-Webber, J. R., Penn, W. I., and Radley, P. L. (1975). Reversing the process of thought disorder: A serial validation experiment. British Journal of Social & Clinical Psychology, 14, 169–180 Bannister, D. & Agnew, J. (1976). The child’s construing of self. In J. K. Cole & A. W. Landfield (eds.) Nebraska Symposium on Motivation. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press Bannister, D. & Fransella, F. (1971). A grid test of schizophrenic thought disorder. British Journal of Social & Clinical Psychology, 5, 95–102 Bannister, D. & Fransella, F. (1986). Inquiring Man, 3rd edition. London: Routledge Bannister, D. & Fransella, F. (2003). Inquiring Man, 3rd edition (e-book). London: Taylor & Francis Bannister, D. & Mair, J. M. M. (1968). The Evaluation of Personal Constructs. London: Academic Press Farrar, M. (2006). People, poetry and politics – the novels of Don Bannister. In J. Scheer & K Sewell (eds.) Creative Construing Personal Constructions in the Arts. Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag Fransella, F. (2003). International Handbook of Personal Construct Psychology. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd Fransella, F., Bell, R. & Bannister, D. (2004). A manual for Repertory Grid Technique, 2nd edition. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd Hinkle, D. (1965). The change of personal constructs from the viewpoint of a theory of construct implications. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Ohio State University Jackson, S. R. & Bannister, D. (1985). Growing into self. In D. Bannister (ed.) Issues and Approaches in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press Kelly, G. A. (1955). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volumes 1 and 2. New York: Norton (reprinted London: Routledge, 1991) Kuhn, T. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Laing, R. D. (1960). The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Miller, R. (2006). President’s column. The Psychologist, 19, 259 Neimeyer, R. A. (1985). The Development of Personal Construct Psychology. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press Paglia, C. (1990). Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. New York: Vintage Books Polanyi, M. (1958). Personal Knowledge. New York: Harper Salmon, P., Bramley, J. & Presly, A. S. (1967). The word-in-context test as a measure of conceptualization in schizophrenics with and without thought disorder. British Journal of Medical Psychology, 40, 235–239

Section III

Construct Theory as a Meaningful Alternative

Chapter 5

Individuality, Community and Criminal Behaviour James Horley Jim Horley is an associate professor at the University of Alberta, where he teaches in psychology and in the Crime and Community Programme. His main area of research and clinical-consulting work is forensic psychology. He is the author of more than 30 professional articles and book chapters, the author of Sexual Offenders: Personal Construct Theory and Deviant Sexual Behaviour (2008), and editor of Personal Construct Perspectives on Forensic Psychology (2003).

Elaborated aspects of theory: choice; credulous approach; individuality; sociality

If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. (Isaac Newton 1676, letter to Robert Hooke)

Introduction One giant within psychology is George Alexander Kelly. Without question, Kelly does not receive the attention he deserves. If nothing else, his contributions to the so-called ‘cognitive revolution’ (really more of a ‘cognitive rediscovery’) that occurred in western psychology during the mid-1960s are important enough to warrant wider consideration. Kelly (1955; 1958a) taught psychologists to look beyond the traditional techniques when Reflections in Personal Construct Theory. Edited by Richard J. Butler © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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performing psychological assessments. Kelly (1955) was an innovator too with respect to clinical interventions (Landfield & Epting 1987; Winter 1992). I have no doubt that if I can see anything psychological, it is due largely to Kelly (especially 1955; 1963) and his personal construct theory (PCT). One specific point that Kelly (1955) deserves credit for is recognising the importance of reflexivity in psychology. Although reflexivity is not a straightforward or easily defined notion (Morawski 2005), it refers in its most general sense to a need to engage in any form of self-regard or selfreflection. A reflexive stance appears required in most, if not all, of the human or social sciences. Within psychology, for example, the formal incorporation of a reflexive aspect into psychotherapy has been suggested as key to effective work with many clients, especially criminal offenders (Frost & Connolly 2004). It must be acknowledged, however, that reflexivity has been ignored if not resisted actively by most experimental psychologists over the past century (Morawski 2005). In the spirit of Kelly’s concern with reflexivity, I shall consider the role that PCT has played in my professional and personal development. Since my first exposure to PCT as a second-year university undergraduate, the theory has played a foundational role in my thought and practice as a psychologist, especially my work as a forensic psychologist. I think, however, the theory has affected me in a much broader sense, even though it is more difficult to assess the full extent of the influence of a theory on a life. I will attempt to sketch a picture, however brief and incomplete, of the effect of PCT on my ideas and affairs within the profession of psychology and beyond in this chapter.

Reconciling Individual and Community After four years of work and world travel following secondary education, I decided that I had a serious interest in university and decided to pursue a bachelor’s degree. My intent was not necessarily to learn a profession, but to ‘figure things out’. What needed figuring was not just me as an individual but the broader world of human affairs, so I set out as a psychology major, to understand individuals, and a religious studies minor, to work on the relationships between people and their fellows, things and the universe. I had very lofty goals in those days! My first year of training in the field of psychology, however, was not a very satisfying one. In part, the problem was a lack of consistency, if not outright conflict, between psychology and religious studies. After hearing about rats and conditioned behav-

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iours in introductory psychology, the next class in western religious traditions would involve discussion of people and free will, followed by a consideration of Yogacaran idealism in an eastern religion class. Religious studies were far more interesting and, for me, religion was far more relevant to understanding people. I was beginning to think that I should reverse my major and minor disciplines. Fortunately, I decided to give psychology another chance during a second year as a major to see what the discipline had to offer. If Skinnerian learning principles and Freudian intrapsychic biologism were all that psychology had to offer, psychology would be history for me; indeed, social history, even general history, seemed more relevant to understanding people than psychology. The doors of psychology opened for me during a personality theory course that went well beyond learning theories and psychoanalysis. Brian Little, a new faculty member at Carleton University, presented a theory developed by someone he had spent a summer working with in the United States, a psychologist by the name of George Kelly. He introduced the theory via the work of Adams-Webber (1979), especially his research on the golden section. This was clearly neither a narrow clinical theory nor one simply concerned with principles of learning. Although enthusiastic about the sophistication and contributions of Kelly and PCT, which he remains to this day (Little & Grant 2006), Little ultimately rejected PCT for a number of reasons (see Little 2006). Yet despite his misgivings I was hooked, if only because PCT offered a view of individuals that included a sense of agency and choice, even if it were a choice limited by our previous choices of constructs and behavioural experiments (Kelly 1970a). In many ways, PCT offered me a psychological middle way between the extreme determinism of both psychoanalysis and radical behaviourism on the one hand, and the unlimited freedom of Rogerian theory on the other. PCT also seemed to be situated between the fawning scientism of B. F. Skinner and the anti-scientific position of theorists like Carl Jung. For me, PCT was like the middle path of Buddhism which I had become attracted to. A conversation with Spencer McWilliams about PCT and Buddhism, following a particularly provocative and rousing conference presentation (McWilliams 1988), proved helpful. Despite our differences concerning the nature of the relationship between the two (he saw Buddhism as subsuming PCT, whereas I saw the opposite), McWilliams assured me that the two approaches had features in common and each had something to offer the other. Both Buddhism and PCT, for example, appear to point to constant change, with Buddhism emphasising impermanence of all earthly existence and PCT positing psychological development through construct differentiation and the expansion and contraction of construct systems. Psychology,

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in the form of PCT, did seem to have some substance after all, as well as some connection to an important aspect of my undergraduate education and, indeed, my life. Much of my attraction to psychology was undoubtedly due to Brian Little, my main undergraduate mentor. Little, an extremely engaging lecturer with boundless energy and a terrific sense of humour, influenced me far beyond his splendid yet ultimately discouraging message about PCT. He persuasively presented the case for people-in-context, where the social and physical environmental contexts of all human behaviour have an influence that requires consideration (Little 1987). He developed a unit of analysis, the personal project (Little 1983), and I was attracted enough to this notion and method of analysis that I worked on an undergraduate thesis, a master’s thesis and various other research projects with him (Horley & Little 1985; Horley, Carroll & Little 1988). Although I have disagreed with Little about the best unit of analysis in personality research, always preferring the personal construct over his personality trait, the analysis of personal projects has been one aspect of my work in PCT (Horley 1988a; 1988c; 2001). Even today, personal projects analysis remains an important part of my research and clinical work (Horley 2008). Around the same time that I discovered PCT, I was exposed to community psychology. Experimental social psychology was far too artificial and too trivial for my taste, but community psychology appeared to offer more in terms of the dynamic interplay of various social groups in the real world inhabited by real people. Community psychology no doubt appealed to me because of the overtly political aspects, especially the left-leaning nature of the movement from its origins, as did early Kelly, whom I saw as an egalitarian and socialistic crusader while he travelled the back roads of western Kansas throughout the 1930s. The radical stance of community psychology appealed to me, and no doubt I was drawn to Kelly’s iconoclastic ‘whocares-what-the-majority-thinks’ approach. There seemed, however, to be little direct relevance of PCT to community or applied social psychology, notwithstanding Kelly’s work of the 1930s and the efforts of Bannister (1979) and others, who suggested otherwise. PCT really appeared to me to be an individual psychological theory. I was able to set aside this issue for some time, but it was an apparent nagging limitation of Kelly’s theory. What kept my interest in PCT at this point was its apparent ease at explaining both consistency and change. I was noticing many of my friends and family pursuing one route or the other. Personal change, even some dramatic examples like the transformation of Saul of Tarsus into Paul of Damascus, seemed to be happening to a number of those around me. I was certainly having a problem accounting for such massive and sudden shifts

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using any form of trait theory or even any variation on learning theory. PCT appeared to explain consistency and change rather easily. My own changes, admittedly relatively minor ones given my successes throughout these years, I was able to link rather readily to altered constructions and subsequent, successful behavioural experiments. I and those around me all seemed to be behaving as scientists, including a mix of good and bad scientists, just as Kelly (1955; 1958b; 1970b) had proposed. Near the end of my undergraduate years, two community psychology seminars had a major impact on my career trajectory although, needless to say, I had no idea of their impact at the time. One was taught by Don Andrews, a social learning theorist who worked with offenders and psychological aspects of criminal behaviour (Andrews & Bonta 2003). Andrews was able to demonstrate the importance of a community perspective to the development and change in anti-social behaviour. I was suitably impressed, and worked for Andrews later as a teaching assistant for his large and very popular undergraduate course in the psychology of criminal behaviour. The really influential aspect of Andrews’ arguments was his emphasis on beliefs, attitudes and values. Andrews was at a bit of a loss as to how to conceptualise and assess them properly, and this got me thinking about deficits of social learning theory and wondering anew about the possible contributions of PCT. Not long after that, following more training and exposure to criminal offenders in the real world of prison and forensic hospitals, I was prepared to argue for a PCT-based understanding of beliefs and values (Horley 1991), linked especially to the assessment and treatment work that I had been involved in with sexual offenders (Horley 1988b; Horley & Quinsey 1994; Horley, Quinsey & Jones 1997). Although we do not develop in a social vacuum, and all of us, even criminal offenders, have our constructions shaped by those around us, there is choice in our selection of constructs and our subsequent actions. PCT offered an alternative to the legal and moral conundrum of declaring law-breakers guilty and personally responsible, yet operating according to an innate disorder, such as paedophilia, in the face of which they were helpless. However important the choice corollary within PCT might be in understanding the nature and limits of freedom through the elaboration and definition of personal construct systems, there remained a problem, something lacking, in the sociality corollary. The notion of social roles and the importance of construing others’ construction processes in order to interact successfully may be central to any PCT-based social psychology, but they are far from sufficient to provide a complete foundation for a sensitive and useful social theory. I would agree with Kelly (1955), Epting et al. (1996)

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and others who have argued that a social psychological basis is provided by PCT, but we need to go far beyond what the sociality corollary has to offer. Little’s (1987) challenge that the environment is not just in our heads points to part of the problem to what is missing in PCT from a social perspective. It is not enough to consider the nature of events (Horley 1988a); we need to consider the nature of social elements, as well as the nature of relationships between elements, in order to fill this significant gap in PCT. Although Rowe (1994) may be correct, for example, in suggesting that social power involves the ability to alter others’ constructs and paint a new picture of reality, social power is much more. Power can involve very concrete skills and strengths wielded by very real social players. Indeed, people and things, our environments, are not just in our heads, although we may need to use our heads to understand aspects of our environmental contexts. A PCT-based social psychology should also address the issue of social influence on the development of constructs (Burkitt 1996), among many other issues. This social project, the elaboration of a social psychological PCT, is just beginning as far as I am concerned. Rather than view it as a fatal flaw within PCT, I choose to interpret it as an important and exciting future development. As Kelly (1955; 1963/1969) warned, if a theory is to grow and to prove relevant for an extended period of time, it must be open to modification.

Research into Offenders’ Personal Constructs My doctoral research cemented my commitment to PCT, particularly in the context of forensic psychology. My PhD supervisor, Vern Quinsey, a not too strict behaviourist, may not have encouraged my foray into the constructions of offenders, with a focus on the content of child molesters’ constructs, but at least he tolerated it. To this point, I had regarded my criminal clients as very flawed and relatively simple individuals, who required the proper assessment to reveal a rather obvious pathology, whether related to deviant constructions or some other problem area. With more experience, especially more lengthy and detailed interviews with sexual offenders, I revised my preliminary and stereotypical views of them. Sexual offenders were beginning to intrigue me, especially repeat and longterm offenders. Rather than being the possessors of some obvious pathologies, or even the unfortunate victims of a trauma or trigger that set them on the wrong course, offenders appeared to be every bit as complex, or

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even more so, than ‘regular folks’. In fact, there appeared to be fewer and fewer differences between criminals and ‘normals’. ‘There but for the grace of God’ seemed an appropriate and common mantra. About this time, I began to question the important labels, such as psychopath, that were being presented as indispensable and unassailable diagnostic terms. They appeared to be pathetic attempts, with very little thought or even research support, to shift any social responsibility for criminal deeds onto the perpetrators, although not in a way that would permit the offenders to change their ways. Offenders were, in a sense, presented with a life sentence with no real chance of parole. Many of the constructs, ‘psychopath’ in particular, struck me as devices designed to serve as straitjackets that the wearer could never escape from, thereby validating the users’ views of offenders’ incorrigibility. I swore to eschew traditional psycho-diagnostics. Certainly I would never call a client ‘psychopathic’ given that I had no idea what the term meant, except in terms of denial of subsequent mental health services and presumably more severe treatment by the police, the courts, etc. No doubt I can credit Kelly (1955) for his credulous approach and the nature of transitory diagnoses for this insight, however limited it may be. I was made aware rather quickly, however, how truly radical and rebellious such a stance remains. Surprisingly, despite incurring the disapproval of colleagues and supervisors, many of whom were likely more bemused than annoyed at my refusal to engage in traditional diagnostic labelling, I gained approval in certain circles. Many judges and parole board members regarded my psychological reports, although perhaps longer than many of my colleagues’, as much more readable and useful compared with most they received. As I was told by more than one recipient of a report, my language was clear and void of psychobabble. Between my doctoral work and return to forensic practice, I spent an interesting year at Brock University, Ontario as a one-year replacement for Jack Adams-Webber (not that anyone can replace Jack). Without AdamsWebber, the PCT environment was rather diminished, but Brock had enough of a constructivist atmosphere to make it an open and stimulating place to be. During this time, especially when Jack dropped by, it was clear that PCT presented unlimited possibilities in both experimental and applied psychology. Personally, I gained an appreciation of such things as the golden section, that pervasive and puzzling phenomenon described and investigated over the centuries by mathematicians and artists, among others. More recently, psychologists have considered the golden section, or ‘divine proportion’, of roughly 62:38 and found that it describes, among other psychological results, the use of positive vs. negative labels applied to self

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and others (see Adams-Webber 1979). My appreciation and interest in golden section research was no doubt due to discussions with Jack and with John Benjafield. While it took some time, I began to consider more of the clinical implications of the golden section in formal investigations (Badesha & Horley 2000). I left Brock to return to the familiar yet difficult confines of forensic clinical work in maximum security prisons. Boredom is seldom an issue among prison-based psychologists, at least any psychologist not falling into lockstep with the inmates and many staff who simply go about the routine business of putting in time by handing out and scoring traditional psychometric assessments. There are, however, many other problematic issues behind bars for forensic psychology, and I found that I had to deal with more than my share. One important issue for me was the balancing act of relating to incarcerated clients without becoming one. This appears to be an issue with many professionals, such as police officers (Winter 2003), who work with criminal offenders in any capacity. A common construct for inmates interpreting health professionals, at least in a Canadian context, is ‘suit’ vs. ‘not a suit’. A suit is an individual, either male or female, who is aloof and insensitive to the plight of inmates. A suit simply goes through the motions to receive a salary. To avoid being construed as a suit, I situated my office and assessment lab between two prison ranges, as opposed to the separate health wing, and against the advice of security personnel. By remaining accessible and by wearing casual yet distinctive clothing – no orange or blue denim jumpsuits were in my wardrobe – I managed to avoid the suit label. One issue that I found played an important role in forensic work was that of office furniture arrangement. My first week on the job netted me two distinct challenges from inmates whom I had never met before. Both challenges were similar in that they involved a question of whether I could push the alarm on the wall before I was assaulted, or at least words to this effect. At first I wondered what I might have done to offend these men I had just met, and in one case had said absolutely nothing to, but I realised that the furniture arrangement might have sent an unintended message to my clients. Like most prison offices, a large oak desk was positioned across the narrow office, with an alarm button, the ‘panic button’, located on the wall behind the desk. Any inmate could construe such an arrangement as a physical challenge in a setting such as a maximum secure prison. I believe that most inmates likely do view challenges where none might be intended in part to the ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ messages that are available to all who pay attention, and most inmates have plenty of time to pay attention to such points. Coupled with the likely message that anyone behind such a

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desk must be intimidated by clients, thereby demonstrating weakness – a poor quality to display in any prison – a response to the challenge from the inmate client can be the result. To prevent any misunderstandings or unintended challenges, I moved my desk against the wall, again accompanied by protests from security, allowing access to the panic button to my client, but I did not receive a single further challenge over the four years that I spent there. Whether this is a triumph of environmental psychology, or PCT at its practical best, is debatable, but I would like to understand this experience as the outcome of the application of PCT principles in an atypical area, like environmental psychology, that may result in a practical design innovation. The problem remained, however, especially sitting knee-to-knee with clients: how can a truly sensitive therapist avoid viewing the social world through the eyes of antisocial clients? Since discovering PCT, I had always been intrigued by Kelly’s (1955) notion of fragmentation as a normal psychological process. Kellyan fragmentation seemed very much at odds with popular views of cognitive consistency within social psychology, and certainly contrary to notions about the pathology of dissociation within abnormal psychology. According to Kelly’s sociality corollary, it is necessary to construe another’s construction processes in order to play a role with the other individual, but there is no reason to believe that the role that one plays is a dominant or central one for the player. In order to play a role with incarcerated inmates, it is certainly necessary to view the world through their eyes. This can mean viewing experience via ‘the inmate code’, a set of rules (i.e. a set of prisonbased ethical requirements) that direct one’s behaviour behind bars (e.g. ‘don’t rat’ or refrain from cooperating with prison authorities). I found it necessary to understand the local code and to construe my clients’ worlds through the lenses of such constructs, but I was able to stand back and not see myself, unlike some of my colleagues, as bound by the code in order to survive. I was, as it were, within the code yet beyond it; within it in terms of being inside prison walls for at least seven hours in a 24-hour period and wanting to maintain a cooperative set of relations with all inmates, yet not an inmate insofar as I was a professional with a distinct set of overriding ethical concerns. I explained to all clients at our first meeting what my requirements were with respect to the law and my profession in terms of limited confidentiality (i.e. if they made a specific and viable threat, I was compelled to report it to the authorities). In this way, I was able to meet the requirements of not ‘ratting’ while at the same time, in a sense, being in the role of potential ‘rat’. Most of my clients accepted this, and because I was direct with them I never had a problem with either respect or being put in the awkward situation of having to report on a client. This

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can be seen as employing fragmentation, or accepting and living by another’s construction processes, while at the same time not allowing such a sub-system to dominate one’s own more central subsystems. A PCT-based view of fragmentation appears not only more realistic in the context of everyday human psychology, but it represents a powerful means by which everyone, psychologists and non-psychologists alike, can come to view another’s situation in a very complete manner without compromising one’s own unique perspective. It is the means by which we add significantly to our abilities to understand others and adopt a more ‘selfless’ perspective. I recognised that my time behind prison walls working with offenders needed to come to an end. If only I had listened to my wife, who sounded the warnings on the home front, I would have exited much earlier than I did. After initially entering the business for rather mercenary reasons (a secure job with good pay), I realised that I had a commitment to my clients, and a desire to change not only individuals but a brutal and ultimately unacceptable manner of treating those who are incarcerated for offensive behaviour. Unfortunately, I could see that the end of this phase of my work was ending for reasons beyond my control. Never mind that the environment of prison work was difficult enough. The bleak, century-old perimeter stone walls I could stand – wire fences I have always found more depressing – but coming to work everyday and wondering which side of the bars I preferred because of the language and behaviour of my colleagues was too much to bear. One of my confidential reports was leaked to the press, and this was the final straw for me. I accepted an academic position, which allowed me to move to a community-based programme in order to continue my research and clinical work. Although potentially fatal and clearly careerlimiting within the confines of a prison, the leaked report provided this opportunity. Unquestionably, as Bandura (1982) has noted, chance encounters and unique events can present important, life-changing opportunities. I remain ever grateful to the unknown bastard who delivered my report to the media.

Looking Back and Looking Forward There can be no doubt that the influence of PCT on my professional work has been profound. Generally, the choice corollary has allowed me to think of my offender clients as both free to enact any pro- or antisocial behaviour based on their constructions, and at the same time to see that they are bound, as are we all, by our previous constructs and behavioural experi-

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ments. The sociality corollary has allowed me to think of my clients as active construers of others’ constructions in order to engage in a social process with them by playing a role, and more often than not playing them falsely. The importance of roles that we all play in everyday interactions in itself is a significant contribution of PCT. Allied techniques such as fixed-role therapy (Kelly 1955) have proved useful to me in forensic settings, sometimes to great effect (Horley 2005) and sometimes less so (Horley 2006). Kelly’s (1955) credulous approach compels me to listen carefully to what my forensic clients are trying to tell me because their meanings and intentions are key to any assistance that I may provide. In a sense, the credulous approach requires that I regard them as active participants in the psychotherapeutic process, and it thereby forces me to avoid any haughty therapist-knows-best attitude. While its impact on me professionally is clear, the influence of PCT on my life beyond work is not so obvious. An area that has been altered without question concerns my relationships with family and friends. I am much more forgiving of transgressions now than during my younger, prePCT years. Perhaps this is due to my adopting a psychology of personal constructs versus, for example, a psychology of personality traits. I have no doubt that I am a much better listener now, and I am always keen to hear about the events of intervening months or years when getting re-acquainted. If people are not assumed to be invariant in the face of life-events, we need to listen for the impact of those events, even those that may be viewed from a normative position as ‘minor’, on their personal construct systems. Personal experience is important, and the trajectory of a life is not easy to predict in the face of any event. One theme that permeates my life to date is what might be construed as nonconformity or, perhaps, free-thinking. I have, at least since my early teens, marched to the beat of my own drummer, whether supporting the underdog wherever they may be found or embracing unpopular causes or individuals for whatever reasons. There is no way that I can attribute my initial nonconformity to PCT, but I have been encouraged by Kelly since my discovery of it. There are a couple of personal characteristics or approaches that PCT encourages. Creativity, whether in the creativity cycle or elsewhere (Kelly 1955), is one central construct. Kelly (1955; 1964/1969; 1966/1969a; 1966/1969b) not only argued for more creativity in the professional arenas of psychology – recently, a lack of creativity and imagination has been cited as one reason for the recent paucity in theorizing in social and personality psychology (Kruglanski 2001) – but personal creativity as well.

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Creativity appears to be a basic requirement, or perhaps simply a common correlate, for those prepared to stray from the fold. PCT, it appears to me, attracts its share of creative nonconformists, or practitioners and theorists who seem to deviate appreciably from the norm (Neimeyer 1985). The issue does not appear to be a simple case of self-selection either, but PCT appears to foster the nonconformity of nonconformists. Kelly seems to have led by example, and he also pointed out that good scientists of all stripes should be prepared to question existing dogma (Kelly 1955; 1958b; 1963/1969). Audacity is another characteristic that PCT promotes, if only by Kelly’s own example. Audacity is important, come what may (Gergen 1980). Kelly, via PCT, supports and promotes professional audacity in theory and psychotherapeutic work (Epting, Gemignani & Cross 2003), but he seems to support an audacious approach to life in general. Is a life lived without risk a life well lived? At this point, it might be advisable, if not obligatory, to end on a positive note. I would like to be able to write optimistically about the future of PCT and its continued growth but – due to rebelliousness or nonconformity? – I am less than sanguine about its future. There appear to be at least two dark clouds on the horizon that force me, a genuinely optimistic individual, to be less than optimistic about the long-term viability of PCT. One is the perennial tendency to regard theory as complete, as dogma. If PCT were the ‘perfect theory’, however one might imagine such a mythical creature, any of us involved with the theory to date could well rest on our laurels because we would be the purveyors of the truth within psychology. Obviously, however, this is not the case. Unfortunately, there appears to me to have been far too much complacency about the theory and a tendency to leave its fundamental postulate and corollaries alone. Perhaps this is because of Kelly’s fastidiousness, or perhaps it is due to a combination of reasons. Whatever the case, it is not healthy. The theory needs to be regarded as a work in progress in order to be a realistic option for any who might choose to embrace it. Dead theories, like dead bodies, tend to be unpleasant to be around, except by a few perverse individuals. Continued attempts to elaborate and improve PCT must be seen as essential, even if we give Kelly his just rewards for initiating the project. Kelly (1955, 1958b), in fact, would have it no other way. A second problem is more recent, although not entirely unrelated to the issue of dogma. In many ways, it is more serious. Far too many who claim to be constructivists, if not strict adherents of PCT, appear to have abandoned the basic model of constructivism for a more biomedical model. This can be reflected in the use of psycho-diagnostics. At the risk of sounding simplistic and possibly pre-emptive, I see this as a move to the dark side.

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In fact, I will take a pre-emptive stand here, and declare all psychiatric diagnostic work as clearly anti-Kellyan. However easy it may be to go with the majority position in a clinical setting, there is no way that the use of reified constructs such as ‘psychopathy’ and ‘bipolar’ can be reconciled with PCT. The present power of psycho-diagnosis, as part of the dominant medical model and undoubtedly connected to the ‘purchasing power’ of psycho-pharmaceutical companies, may be seductive. We must not, however, allow ourselves to be seduced. There is no viable way of straddling both camps. In the choice between principles and power, I hope that true constructivists, especially Kellyans, opt for the former rather than the latter.

References Adams-Webber, J. R. (1979). Personal Construct Theory: Concepts and Applications. New York: John Wiley & Sons Andrews, D. A. & Bonta, J. (2003). The Psychology of Criminal Conduct. Cincinnati, OH: Anderson Badesha, J., & Horley, J. (2000). Self-construal among psychiatric outpatients: A test of the golden section. British Journal of Medical Psychology, 73, 547–551. Bandura, A. (1982). The psychology of chance encounters and life paths. American Psychologist, 37, 742–755. Bannister, D. (1979). Personal construct theory and politics. In P. Stringer and D. Bannister (eds.) Constructs of Sociality and Individuality. London: Academic Press Burkitt, I. (1996). Social and personal constructs: a division left unresolved. Theory & Psychology, 6, 71–77 Epting, F. R., Gemignani, M. & Cross, M. C. (2003). An audacious adventure: personal construct counselling and psychotherapy. In F. Fransella (ed.) International Handbook of Personal Construct Psychology. Chichester: Wiley Epting, F. R., Prichard, S., Leitner, L. M. & Dunnett, G. (1996). Personal constructions of the social. In D. Kalekin-Fishman & B. Walker (eds.) The Construction of Group Realities: Culture, Society, and Personal Construct Theory. Malabar: Krieger Frost, A. & Connolly, M. (2004). Reflexivity, reflection, and the change process in offender work. Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment, 16, 365– 380 Gergen, K. J. (1980). Toward intellectual audacity in social psychology. In R. Gilmour & S. W. Duck (eds.) The Development of Social Psychology. London: Academic Press Horley, J. (1988a). The construal of events: personal constructs versus personal projects. In F. Fransella & L. Thomas (eds.) Experimenting with Personal Construct Psychology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul

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Horley, J. (1988b). Cognitions of child sexual abusers. The Journal of Sex Research, 25, 542–545 Horley, J. (1988c). The units of analysis problem in psychology: an examination and proposed reconciliation. In W. J. Baker, L. P. Mos, H. Rappard & H. Stam (eds.) Recent Trends in Theoretical Psychology. New York: Springer-Verlag Horley, J. (1991). Values and beliefs as personal constructs. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 4, 1–14 Horley, J. (2001). Value assessment and everyday activities. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 13, 67–73 Horley, J. (ed.) (2003). Personal Construct Perspectives on Forensic Psychology. New York: Brunner-Routledge Horley, J. (2005). Fixed-role therapy with multiple paraphilias. Clinical Case Studies, 4, 72–80 Horley, J. (2006). Personal construct psychotherapy: fixed-role therapy with forensic clients. Journal of Sexual Aggression, 12, 53–61 Horley, J. (2008). Sexual Offenders: Personal Construct Theory and Deviant Sexual Behaviour. Hove: Brunner-Routledge Horley, J., Carroll, B. & Little, B. R. (1988). A typology of lifestyles. Social Indicators Research, 20, 383–398 Horley, J. & Little, B. R. (1985). Affective and cognitive components of global subjective well-being measures. Social Indicators Research, 17, 189–197 Horley, J. & Quinsey, V. L. (1994). Assessing the cognitions of child molesters: use of the semantic differential with incarcerated offenders. Journal of Sex Research, 31, 187–195 Horley, J., Quinsey, V. L. & Jones, S. (1997). Incarcerated child molesters’ perceptions of themselves and others. Sexual Abuse: Journal of Research and Treatment, 9, 43–55 Kelly, G. A. (1955) The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volumes 1 & 2. New York: Norton (reprinted London: Routledge, 1991) Kelly, G. A. (1958a). The theory and technique of assessment. Annual Review of Psychology, 9, 323–352 Kelly, G. A. (1958b). Man’s construction of his alternatives. In G. Lindzey (ed.) Assessment of Human Motives. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston Kelly, G. A. (1963). A Theory of Personality. New York: Norton Kelly, G. A. (1963/1969). The autobiography of a theory. In B. Maher (ed.) Clinical Psychology and Personality: The Selected Papers of George Kelly. New York: John Wiley & Sons Kelly, G. A. (1964/1969). The strategy of psychological research. In B. Maher (ed.) Clinical Psychology and Personality: The Selected Papers of George Kelly. London; John Wiley & Sons Kelly, G. A. (1966/1969a). Ontological acceleration. In B. Maher (ed.) Clinical Psychology and Personality: The Selected Papers of George Kelly. New York: Wiley

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Kelly, G. A. (1966/1969b). Humanistic methodology in psychological research. In B. Maher (ed.) Clinical Psychology and Personality: The Selected Papers of George Kelly. London: John Wiley & Sons Kelly, G. A. (1970a). Behaviour is an experiment. In D. Bannister (ed.) Perspectives in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press Kelly, G. A. (1970b). A brief introduction to personal construct theory. In D. Bannister (ed.) Perspectives in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press Kruglanski, A. (2001). That ‘vision thing’: The state of theory in social and personality psychology at the edge of the new millennium. Journal of Social and Personality Psychology, 80, 871–875 Landfield, A. W. & Epting, F. R. (1987). Personal Construct Psychology: Clinical and Personality Assessment. New York: Human Sciences Press Little, B. R. (1983). Personal projects: a rationale and method for investigation. Environment & Behaviour, 15, 273–309 Little, B. R. (1987). Personality and the environment. In D. Stokols & I. Altman (eds.) Handbook of Environmental Psychology. New York: John Wiley & Sons Little, B. R. (2006). Prompt and circumstance: the generative contexts of personal projects analysis. In B. R. Little, K. Salmela-Aro & S. Phillips (eds.) Personal Project Pursuit: Goals, Actions, and Human Flourishing. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum & Associates Little, B. R. & Grant, A. M. (2006). The sustainable pursuit of core projects: retrospect and prospects. In B. R. Little, K. Salmela-Aro & S. Phillips (eds.) Personal Project Pursuit: Goals, Actions, and Human Flourishing. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum & Associates McWilliams, S. A. (1988). On becoming a personal anarchist. In F. Fransella & L. Thomas (eds.) Experimenting with Personal Construct Psychology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Morawski, J. G. (2005). Reflexivity and the psychologist. History of the Human Sciences, 18, 77–105 Neimeyer, R. A. (1985). The Development of Personal Construct Psychology. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press Rowe, D. (1994). Wanting Everything: The Art of Happiness. London: HarperCollins Winter, D. A. (1992). Personal Construct Psychology in Clinical Practice: Theory, Research and Application. London: Routledge Winter, D. A. (2003). Stress in police officers. In J. Horley (ed.) Personal Construct Perspectives on Forensic Psychology. Hove: Brunner-Routledge

Chapter 6

Shaking Hands with A Serial Killer David A. Winter David Winter is Professor of Clinical Psychology and Programme Director of the Doctorate in Clinical Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire and Head of Clinical Psychology Services for Barnet in Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, a Chartered Clinical Psychologist and a UKCP-registered Personal Construct Psychotherapist. He has published extensively on personal construct psychology and psychotherapy research.

Elaborated aspects of theory: the credulous approach

Introduction Having negotiated a security system more elaborate than that of the best protected airport, I was ushered into a windowless room and sat facing a sofa beneath a large ‘No Smoking’ sign. This was not the first occasion on which I was due to meet a person who had committed homicide, but I had never yet knowingly met a serial killer, and the notoriety of the particular individual for whom I was waiting heightened my anticipation of being confronted with events beyond the range of convenience of my construct system. Having had a lengthy journey, involving three trains and commencing in the early hours of the morning, I had already had ample opportunity to reflect on George Kelly’s (1955; 1991a; 1991b) definition of anxiety, but now had more time to do so as I sat and waited. Eventually, the door Reflections in Personal Construct Theory. Edited by Richard J. Butler © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

96 David A. Winter opened and my interviewee was led into the room, resplendent in ‘shades’ and a lit cigar in his mouth. I automatically stretched out my hand, but then attempted not to flinch as I recalled what the hand that was gripping mine had done. A further dilemma concerned whether it was wise to draw a serial killer’s attention to the no-smoking policy, and having decided that it was probably not, I was left barely able to focus as one cigar followed another in chainsmoking which lasted for the entire three hours of our meeting. Subsequently, I also struggled with whether, in correspondence with or references to him, to be sufficiently familiar to use his first name, with the consequent greater acknowledgement of him as a human being. This, coupled with the impact on me of occasions during our meeting when his humanity was more apparent, perhaps indicated that I was experiencing threat, in the sense that Kelly (1955) described it: People are threatened by ‘evildoers.’ … The ‘evildoer’ exemplifies what we might do if we dared, or what we might be if we behaved childishly, or what we would have been if we had not tried so hard to do better. We dare not interact with him on common ground lest we slip back into the unwanted ways. In order to take protective steps against the threat that his presence arouses within us we take symbolic measures called ‘punishment’ against him. By such measures we either destroy or symbolize the destruction of the core relationship of the ‘evildoer’ with ourselves. That may make us feel a little safer from the looming shadow of ourselves as ‘evildoers’. (pp. 505–6)

Although I am not aware of being concerned about ‘slipping into’ the ways of serial killing, I may well have been threatened by a ‘looming shadow’ of myself as a potential breaker of moral codes, like my interviewee. However, whether or not Kelly’s view of threat described my own experience, his view of punishment as primarily in the service of the punisher, rather than effecting change in the punished person, did seem to resonate with this particular serial killer’s experience. It was apparent that the enforced constriction of his world to penal or psychiatric institutions since his conviction, while satisfying the need of the public for protection from and punishment of a vilified individual, had done little to modify his own construing. Indeed, paradoxically, he considered that it allowed him freedom to express his views – something that is denied people who are constrained by the obligations of the outside world. Furthermore, he viewed imprisonment as essentially constriction to a social environment largely consisting of people showing commonality in their ‘criminal’ construing and providing considerable opportunities for education in crime.

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Personal construct psychology (PCP) has given me the good fortune to meet numerous exceptional people, but I had never anticipated that among those people would be a serial killer. This particular meeting stemmed from my attempt to explore the limits of Kelly’s (1955) ‘credulous approach’, namely that ‘From a phenomenological point of view, the client – like the proverbial customer – is always right’ (p. 322).

First Encounters with Personal Construct Psychology and its Credulous Approach Like many undergraduate psychology students of my generation, I became thoroughly disenchanted with a course that focused on rats, pigeons and stimulus–response theory. Although I had originally chosen to study psychology and zoology because of a love of animals and an interest in their behaviour, hours of sitting hunched over a dissecting board on which lay the corpse of some poor creature had already extinguished my passion for zoology, which I decided to jettison after a particularly unpleasant encounter with a dead pigeon. This decision necessitated a meeting with the Professor of Zoology, who attempted to dissuade me from converting to a single honours degree in psychology, because psychology was ‘not a science’. Having resisted his attempts to change my mind, it was with particular regret that I then found myself no more enamoured with my psychology course than I had been with zoology, largely because of the attempt of this course to mimic traditional science. I had always viewed going to university as an opportunity to indulge my intellectual curiosity rather than particularly in terms of a route to a degree and a subsequent career, but at least had I persisted with my original course I would eventually have been able to enter the job market with a qualification that indicated that, at least in part, I was a ‘real scientist’! I had been very preoccupied with such thoughts when I went to a talk given by Don Bannister at a meeting of the university’s Psychology Society. This was a period when Bannister and Fay Fransella had been touring British universities with the aim of introducing students to PCP. I was entranced by Don’s passionate and witty presentation of a non-mechanistic, non-reductionist psychology, which focused on people and took their views seriously. The philosophy of constructive alternativism, and many associated aspects of the theory, deeply resonated with my own, at that time only partially articulated, approach to life. This was a time when Don was very much engaged in his research programme on schizophrenic thought disorder, which provided an excellent

98 David A. Winter demonstration of the credulous approach in indicating that people given this diagnosis were quite comprehensible when seen as employing the same construing processes as anyone else (Bannister 1960; 1962). However, it seemed to me that a major flaw in his research was that he used a repertory grid in which the constructs and elements were supplied rather than elicited from his research participants. I therefore resolved to replicate his original study but to employ a grid using clients’ personal constructs as well as one using Bannister’s original supplied constructs. Once again I was confronted by efforts to dissuade me by a supervisor who insisted that a clinical psychology project, not to mention one involving repertory grid technique, would present too many logistical problems for an undergraduate dissertation. However, I was determined to persevere with my idea, and eventually completed the study, finding that people diagnosed as schizophrenic were differentiated from ‘normal’ people by their looser construing when using Bannister’s original grid but not when using a grid with elicited constructs (Winter 1971). Their own personal constructs, although often very idiosyncratic and in several cases neologisms, seemed to provide them with as coherent anticipations of the world as did any other individual’s personal constructs. These findings provided a further argument for a credulous approach and for taking the trouble to attempt to ‘speak the language’ of the person diagnosed as schizophrenic rather than dismissing him or her as thought disordered. Two years later, I carried out a similar study for the dissertation on my clinical psychology course, but this time including the parents of clients diagnosed as schizophrenic. Not only were these clients differentiated from those with other diagnoses on Bannister’s grid but not on a grid using elicited constructs and elements, but the same was true of the parents of these two groups (Winter 1975).

Clinical Psychology Apart from the oases provided by the work of such individuals as Bannister and Fransella, clinical psychology at the time that I trained was far from credulous. My first encounter with a member of the profession was when I worked as a nursing assistant in a psychiatric hospital during my university vacation. To gain some insight into the profession, I visited the head of the hospital’s Clinical Psychology Department, a formidable lady who appeared to spend her time routinely administering the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale to every inpatient in the hospital, who told me that I would ‘never make a clinical psychologist’. Having observed her at work, I was not too devastated by her verdict.

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Nevertheless, despite her predictions, I was duly offered a place on a clinical psychology training course, where I soon discovered that my first supervisor shared her view of me. His time also appeared to be largely spent in conducting one particular activity, but in his case this was the administration of electric shocks to ‘sexual deviants’, ranging from homosexuals to those with a predilection for self-asphyxiation. Since one of my occasional duties as a clinical psychology trainee was to collect hard-core pornography seized by the Customs & Excise Department, which was then used as stimulus material in aversion therapy, I had ample opportunity to enhance my credulity about diverse sexual tastes! I also resolved to explore whether a less mechanistic, not to say barbaric, and more credulous approach could be used to treat psychosexual difficulties, an area to which I returned several years later with the use of PCP with clients with such problems (Winter 1988; 2005a). At the time when I trained, it was often considered anathema for clinical psychologists to engage in therapy at all, as opposed to being purely psychometricians like the first clinical psychologist I had encountered. Furthermore, if a clinical psychologist were to be allowed (generally by psychiatrists) to practise therapy, this was virtually always of the most mechanistic, behavioural type, as in the work of my first supervisor. During the entire course of my training, I saw two clients for therapy, one diagnosed as agoraphobic and the other a butterfly phobic. While they provided me with considerable exercise, tramping the city streets with the former client and chasing across fields to catch butterflies for use in systematic desensitisation sessions with the latter, I cannot say that this greatly developed my therapeutic skills.

A Buddhist Interlude My introduction to and absorption in PCP coincided with an immersion in Buddhism. This was partly stimulated by meeting, and being taught meditation by, two Thai Buddhist monks at university and living in their temple in Bangkok between the completion of my undergraduate course and the commencement of clinical psychology training. This was the first of numerous visits to a country that has become a second home, and where I am now writing this chapter. Buddhism appeared entirely compatible with a constructive alternativist philosophy and a credulous approach, and such compatibilities have subsequently been explored by personal construct psychologists (McWilliams 1984; Delmonte 1987). The more recent incorporation of Buddhist ideas, as well as others more commonly associated with

100 David A. Winter humanistic approaches, into ‘third wave’ cognitive-behavioural therapy (Hayes 2004) has given this approach a more constructivist slant and raised the question of when cognitive-behavioural therapy ceases to be cognitivebehavioural therapy.

Personal Styles and Therapeutic Alternatives In my first job after qualifying as a clinical psychologist, I was fortunate enough to be able to contribute to a research programme which provided consistent evidence that the therapeutic preferences and responses of both clients and clinicians reflected these individuals’ ‘personal styles’ (essentially, their core constructs). Specifically, people who were more outerdirected and conservative were more likely to favour (and, if they were a client, to respond to) a structured, directive treatment approach, such as cognitive-behavioural therapy; and those who were more inner-directed and radical were more likely to favour (and, if a client, to respond to) a more introspective, interpersonally-oriented approach, such as group analytic therapy (Caine, Wijesinghe & Winter 1981; Caine & Winter 1993; Winter, Tschudi & Gilbert 2006). The nature of clients’ presenting symptoms and aspects of the structure of their construct systems also reflected their personal styles. Later research programmes have also demonstrated links between people’s therapeutic preferences and their philosophical beliefs (Schacht & Black 1985; Neimeyer et al. 1993; 2006; Neimeyer & Morton 1997; Arthur 2000). The ‘personal styles’ research argued for a credulous attitude towards clients’ (and clinicians’) constructions of therapy and the matching of therapeutic approaches to individuals’ personal styles, with the provision of therapeutic services that reflect a philosophy of constructive alternativism (Winter 1985). When, many years later, I took up my post of director of a clinical psychology training course, I was strongly committed to offering trainees experience of a range of therapeutic approaches, including PCP, and the opportunity to specialise in an approach of their choice, rather than the almost exclusively cognitive-behavioural approach offered by most such courses at the time. As indicated in the statement of the course’s philosophical position, combining constructivism and social constructionism, this includes: Acknowledgement that there are numerous viable alternative models of psychological problems and their treatment, and therefore intensive input on four major models (cognitive-behavioural, personal construct, psychodynamic, and systemic).

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and Acknowledgement of individual differences in preferences for these models, and therefore provision of the opportunity for trainees to select therapeutic models in which to obtain advanced input in their final year.

Such a pluralistic approach to psychological therapy is in marked contrast to several current initiatives in this area, such as the ‘Improving Access to Psychological Therapies’ programme of the British Department of Health. This programme largely derives from Lord Layard’s ‘Depression Report’ (Centre for Economic Performance 2006), which concludes that ‘The demand from each of us should be quite simple … give people with mental illness the choice of psychological therapy’ (p. 14). The ‘choice of psychological therapy’ that is promoted by the ‘Depression Report’, and by subsequent developments in the ‘Improving Access to Psychological Therapies’ initiative (e.g. Clark 2007; Clark & Richards 2007; Pilling & Burbeck, 2007), is almost exclusively a choice of cognitive-behavioural therapy, albeit with the options of therapist- and computer-administered, or individual and group, or self-study-assisted and conventional, cognitivebehavioural therapy. This is reminiscent of the Monty Python sketch where a café appears to have numerous options on the menu but in fact virtually every option is a variation on spam. When a customer asks ‘Have you got anything without spam?’ the waitress replies: ‘Well, there’s spam egg sausage and spam, that’s not got much spam in it.’

The Evidence Base for Psychological Therapies Programmes such as ‘Improving Access to the Psychological Therapies’ draw heavily on an evidence base which purports to demonstrate the superiority of cognitive-behavioural therapies. However, it is increasingly apparent (e.g. Wampold 2001) that such evidence is not as clear as it purports to be in that: a) results of comparative studies favourable to cognitivebehavioural therapy may be, at least in part, due to features of the research design, and researcher allegiance, favourable to this approach; b) there is little or no evidence for the effects of the supposed active ingredients of such approaches, as compared to those of ‘non-specific’ factors such as the therapeutic relationship and therapist characteristics; and c) meta-analyses are indicating the effectiveness of non-behavioural approaches, such as psychodynamic (Crits-Christoph 1992; Anderson & Lambert 1995), systemic (Shadish & Baldwin 2003; Sexton, Alexander & Mease 2004) and process-experiential (Elliott 2002) therapies.

102 David A. Winter There has been some resistance by constructivist as well as by humanistic therapists (Bohart, O’Hara & Leitner 1998; Botella 2000) to playing the game of providing ‘evidence’ of the effectiveness of their therapies because, for example, this is construed as inconsistent with the underlying philosophies of these therapies. However, I have argued (Winter 2000) for a credulous approach to the construing of health policy-makers, funders and, indeed, most clients, who are predominantly concerned with evidence of whether therapies work. After first presenting this argument at an international congress of PCP, I was collared by an eminent personal construct psychologist on my way out of the symposium and told that I was ‘wrong’ – perhaps an unusual remark for a constructivist to make! Being particularly concerned that PCP is in danger of extinction, for example from lack of financial support, if it is not buttressed by research evidence, I have been concerned to elaborate and evaluate this therapy with particular client groups, such as those diagnosed as agoraphobic (Winter, Gournay, Metcalfe & Rossotti 2006) or who have engaged in deliberate self-harm (Winter, Sireling et al. 2007), as well as to provide systematic reviews and meta-analyses of the ‘evidence base’ for PCP (Viney, Metcalfe & Winter 2005; Winter 2005b; Metcalfe, Winter & Viney 2007). This evidence base indicates that, although differences are smaller in purely clinical samples, PCP is more effective than standard care, no treatment or being on a waiting list at post-treatment and follow-up assessment, and somewhat more effective than other therapies post-treatment but not at follow-up. Some of this work achieved a mention as a footnote in the second edition of What Works for Whom? (Roth & Fonagy 2005), a book that was originally commissioned as a guide to purchasers of effective psychological therapies. I am currently working on a book to be subtitled What Else Works for Whom? (Winter, Metcalfe & Grenyer 2008), which aims to take a broader view of the evidence base for such therapies. More generally, I have been concerned to make the broader psychological community more aware of the extensive applicability of PCP by publishing in the mainstream psychology literature (e.g. Walker & Winter 2007).

The Limits of Credulity To return to serial killing, my explorations in this area have attempted to provide some understanding of the construing processes of individuals who engage in such behaviour or in offences of serial violence (Winter 2003; 2007). This has included the analysis of a book about serial killing written

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by one of its practitioners, Ian Brady (2001), through the conversion of this book into a repertory grid (Winter, Feixas et al. 2007). Such work, however, easily runs the risk of being construed as reflecting an ‘anything goes’ moral relativism which essentially condones the construing and actions of such individuals as serial killers. Kelly (1955) himself made it clear that adopting a credulous approach does not necessarily imply that one accepts the constructions of the individual with whom one is being credulous. In addition, it has been argued elsewhere that such features of PCP as its favouring of sociality and propositional construing (Stojnov 1996) and its essentially egalitarian outlook (Warren 1992) provide a corrective to a totally relativist approach. I would argue that an approach that attempts to understand the construing of another individual, whether that individual be a serial killer or a suicide bomber, is more likely ultimately to lead to effective intervention than is a purely condemnatory, vilifying or punitive approach. For example, the notion of evil as residing within a particular person or group of people, as in George W. Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ or Ayatollah Khomeini’s ‘the Great Satan’ (Winter 2006), has hardly been conducive to peace and harmony. A not uncommon response to attempts to adopt a credulous approach with such individuals as serial killers was evident in the following review of my first foray in this area: The ‘credulous approach’ advocated by Personal Construct theorists (PCT) is relativistic psychology at its most scientistically anaemic. The pervert (sic) as a ‘role’ indeed. This kind of cynical distancing of motive from act allows David Winter, an eminent contributor, to provide the mentally disordered and detained Ian Brady with a professional platform for his especially noxious ravings (Brady 2001). Instead of locating Peter Sutcliffe’s violence as an outcome of paranoid delusions, Brady – effectively as co-researcher – is given a PCT leg-up, and insane acts are passed off as ‘slot-rattling’. Tell that to the good people of Soham. Perhaps I just do not understand. I hope not. (Gillmer 2004, p. 53)

Later in this review, the reviewer makes his position very clear: ‘Why not just admit it? PCT is an unproven shadow of CBT.’ A more favourable ‘review’ was as follows: ‘A stimulating chapter. Less mechanistic than I expected from your self-deprecating aside.’ The reviewer in this case was Ian Brady (personal communication), who went on to say: Gratifying that the GK theory validates much of my own in ‘Janus’. Particularly in a 1950s time warp and penal museum such as ‘Ashwitz’, which has persuaded one to jettison all positive thought and inclination by its regression

104 David A. Winter and institutionalised atavism. It also consoles to have one’s thoughts and ideas pivotally confirmed by independent professional reflection – just as my current tooth abscess resonates the diseased throb and pulse of this administration. An apt example of the ‘awareness of imminent comprehensive change in one’s core structure’, and the reactive solution!

It may be, then, that Gillmer was right in that Brady has perceived my writing as validating his own views. This possibility confronts me with not a little personal construct threat and guilt – such are the hazards for the personal construct psychologist who attempts to adopt a credulous approach, and more generally for any constructivist. As stated by Mahoney: the psychological demands of constructive metatheory are unsurpassed by those of any other contemporary perspective. No other family of modern theories asks its adherents to maintain such a degree of self-examining openness, to so painstakingly tolerate and harvest (rather than eliminate) ambiguity, or to so thoroughly question both the answers and the questions by which they inquire. It is not easy to be a constructivist. (1988, p. 312, emphasis in original)

Further Hazards of Credulity As Mahoney confirms, hazards may be as evident in one’s credulity towards one’s own alternative constructions as in that towards those of others. In my case, for example, I am aware that, at least in many interpersonal situations, I probably spend far too long in the circumspection phase of Kelly’s (1955) Circumspection–Pre-emption–Control Cycle, giving serious consideration to numerous alternative constructions involved in a decision rather than pre-empting one of these and acting accordingly. I am also aware that it would often be easier for me, not to mention for others in contact with me, if I did not entertain so many different views and courses of action, rather than dismissing some of these, at least in the interest of not spreading myself too thinly. At times it feels that the only certainty, apart from that of death, is in the words of a song sung in a stadium that I regularly frequent, namely that Queen’s Park Rangers are ‘the greatest football team the world has ever seen’. A small example of credulity towards one’s own constructions was stimulated recently by Joern Scheer’s creative construing network, which led me to look back at a poetic self that had briefly emerged around the time of my initial interest in PCP, and the products of which I had later largely

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dismissed as ‘adolescent’. I am grateful to Joern for encouraging me to be credulous towards these poetic constructions, in some of which I now find early experimentation with a constructivist and credulous perspective. To give one small example: In the space between sane and mad, good and bad, man and woman, old and young, black and white, wrong and right, stands a person, pleading to be seen.

Postscript from Sierra Leone I am putting the finishing touches to this chapter in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. Once again, I largely owe it to PCP for bringing me here, where an initial collaboration on research on the construing of former child soldiers (Goins et al. 2009) led me to join a delegation to help train mental health workers. Thus, I have found myself encouraging staff in the country’s only psychiatric hospital to take a credulous approach to their clients. This included asking each of the clients on a particular ward, the majority of whom were chained to their beds, what type of therapeutic group activity they would like to be introduced on the ward. Since the overwhelming preference was for listening to music, a cassette recorder was purchased by the delegation, together with the resources required for the activities being introduced on other wards by my colleagues. Watching the ward’s first music group, in which most of the clients were freed from their beds and danced, holding their chains, with the staff, ranks as one of the most moving experiences of my life. I have also been able to adopt a credulous approach in interviewing residents and staff in both the psychiatric hospital and a Christian faithbased counselling and rehabilitation centre concerning their constructions of psychological problems and their treatment. This has allowed exploration of contrasts between ‘demonic’ and ‘non-demonic’ problems, and correspondingly between those for which faith healing, traditional healing and western psychiatric approaches are regarded as the appropriate treatment.

106 David A. Winter It seems not inappropriate that I should be reflecting on PCP and its credulous approach in a city that was founded as the home of freed slaves, and in a country that has undergone so many horrors, not least the amputations performed by the rebel forces in the civil war that ravaged the country for some ten years. Kelly’s psychology is, for me, imbued with the hope, and the possibility, that people can move from positions of slavery to freedom. That freedom is one in which alternative constructions can be explored and respected, but within the limits that they are not enacted to the extent that they constrain the constructions of, shackle or maim another person or social group. While, from a PCP perspective, credulity for alternative constructions may not have limits, tolerance of alternative behaviours certainly does.

References Anderson, E. M. & Lambert, M. J. (1995). Short-term dynamically oriented psychotherapy: a review and meta-analysis. Clinical Psychology Review, 15, 503–514 Arthur, A. R. (2000). The personality and cognitive-epistemological traits of cognitive behavioural and psychoanalytic psychotherapists. British Journal of Medical Psychology, 73, 243–257 Bannister, D. (1960). Conceptual structure in thought-disordered schizophrenics. Journal of Mental Science, 106, 1230–1249 Bannister, D. (1962). The nature and measurement of schizophrenic thought disorder. Journal of Mental Science, 108, 825–842 Bohart, A. C., O’Hara, M. & Leitner, L. M. (1998). Empirically violated treatments: disenfranchisement of humanistic and other psychotherapies. Psychotherapy Research, 8, 1–57 Botella, L. (2000). Personal construct psychology, constructivism, and psychotherapy research. In J. W. Scheer (ed.) The Person in Society: Challenges to a Constructivist Theory. Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag Brady, I. (2001). The Gates of Janus: Serial Killing and its Analysis. Los Angeles: Feral House Caine, T. M., Wijesinghe, O. B. A. & Winter, D. A. (1981). Personal Styles in Neurosis: Implications for Small Group Psychotherapy and Behaviour Therapy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Caine, T. M. & Winter, D. A. (1993). Personal styles and universal polarities: implications for therapeutic practice. Therapeutic Communities, 14, 91–102 Centre for Economic Performance’s Mental Health Policy Group (2006). The Depression Report: A New Deal for Depression and Anxiety Disorders. London: London School of Economics Clark, D. M. (2007). Effective psychological treatments for anxiety disorders. Paper submitted to the IAPT Expert Reference Group in support of

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the Department of Health’s submission to the Comprehensive Spending Review Clark, D. M. & Richards, D. A. (2007). Delivery options for evidence-based psychological treatments. Paper submitted to the IAPT Expert Reference Group in support of the Department of Health’s submission to the Comprehensive Spending Review Crits-Christoph, P. (1992). The efficacy of brief dynamic psychotherapy: A metaanalysis. American Journal of Psychiatry, 149, 151–158 Delmonte, M. (1987). Constructivist view of meditation. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 26, 286–298 Elliott, R. (2002). The effectiveness of humanistic therapies: a meta-analysis. In D. J. Cain & J. Seeman (eds.). Humanistic Psychotherapies: Handbook of Research and Practice. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Gillmer, B. (2004). Review of personal construct perspectives on forensic psychology. Clinical Psychology, 38, 53 Goins, S, Winter, D., Patient, S., Scrivener, L., Sundin, J. & Woolman, L. (2009). The construing of former child soldiers: an exploratory study. Paper presented at the 18tt International Congress of Personal Construct Psychology, Venice Hayes, S. C. (2004). Acceptance and commitment therapy, relational frame theory, and the third wave of behavioral and cognitive therapies. Behavior Therapy, 35, 639–665 Kelly, G. A. (1955) The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volumes 1 & 2. New York: Norton (reprinted London: Routledge, 1991) Kelly, G. A. (1991a). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volume 1. A Theory of Personality. London: Routledge Kelly, G. A. (1991b). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volume 2. Clinical Diagnosis and Psychotherapy. London: Routledge McWilliams, S. A. (1984). Construing and Buddhist psychology. Constructs, 3, 1–2 Mahoney, M. J. (1988). Constructive metatheory: II. Implications for psychotherapy. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 1, 299–315 Metcalfe, C., Winter, D. A. & Viney, L. L. (2007). The effectiveness of personal construct psychotherapy in clinical practice: A systematic review and metaanalysis. Psychotherapy Research, 17, 431–442 Neimeyer, G. J., Lee, J., Aksoy, G. & Phillip, D. (2006). Epistemic styles among seasoned psychotherapists: some practical implications. In J. Raskin & S. Bridges (eds.) Studies in Meaning, vol. 3. New York: Pace University Press Neimeyer, G. J. & Morton, R. J. (1997). Personal epistemologies and preferences for rationalist versus constructivist psychotherapies. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 10, 109–123 Neimeyer, G. J., Prichard, S., Lyddon, W. J. & Sherrard, P. A. D. (1993). The role of epistemic style in counselling preference and orientation. Journal of Counselling & Development, 71, 515–523 Pilling, S. & Burbeck, R. (2007). Cognitive behavioural therapy and the effective treatment of depression. Paper submitted to the IAPT Expert Reference Group in

108 David A. Winter support of the Department of Health’s submission to the Comprehensive Spending Review Roth, A. & Fonagy, P. (2005). What Works for Whom? A Critical Review of Psychotherapy Research. New York: Guilford Schacht, T. E. & Black, D. A. (1985). Epistemological commitments of behavioural and psychoanalytic therapists. Professional Psychology: Research & Practice, 16, 316–323 Sexton, T. L., Alexander, J. F. & Mease, A. L. (2004). Levels of evidence for the models and mechanisms of therapeutic change in family and couple therapy. In M. J. Lambert (ed.) Bergin and Garfield’s Handbook of Psychotherapy and Behavior Change. New York: Wiley Shadish, W. R. & Baldwin, S. A. (2003). Meta-analysis of MFT interventions. Journal of Marital & Family Therapy, 29, 547 Stojnov, D. (1996). Kelly’s theory of ethics: hidden, mislaid, or misleading? Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 9, 185–199 Viney, L. L., Metcalfe, C. & Winter, D. A. (2005). The effectiveness of personal construct psychotherapy: a meta-analysis. In D. A. Winter & L. L. Viney (eds.) Personal Construct Psychotherapy: Advances in Theory, Practice and Research. London: Whurr Walker, B. M. & Winter, D. (2007). The elaboration of personal construct theory. Annual Review of Psychology, 58, 453–477 Wampold, B. E. (2001). The Great Psychotherapy Debate: Models, Methods, and Findings. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Warren, W. G. (1992). Personal construct theory and mental health. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 5, 223–238 Winter, D. A. (1971). The meaningfulness of personal and supplied constructs to chronic schizophrenics and normals. Unpublished BSc dissertation, University of Durham Winter, D. A. (1975). Some characteristics of schizophrenics and their parents. British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 14, 279–290 Winter, D. A. (1985). Personal styles, constructive alternativism and the provision of a therapeutic service. British Journal of Medical Psychology, 58, 129–136 Winter, D. A. (1988). Reconstructing an erection and elaborating ejaculation: personal construct theory perspectives on sex therapy. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 1, 81–99 Winter, D. (2000). Can personal construct therapy succeed in competition with other therapies? In J. W. Scheer (ed.) The Person in Society: Challenges to a Constructivist Theory. Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag Winter, D. A. (2003). A credulous approach to violence and homicide. In J. Horley (ed.) Personal Construct Perspectives on Forensic Psychology. London: Routledge Winter, D. A. (2005a). Towards a personal construct sex therapy. In D. A. Winter & L. L. Viney (eds.) Personal Construct Psychotherapy: Advances in Theory, Practice and Research. London: Whurr

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Winter, D. A. (2005b). The evidence base for personal construct psychotherapy. In F. Fransella (ed.) The Essential Handbook of Personal Construct Psychology. London: Wiley Winter, D. A. (2006). Destruction as a constructive choice. In T. Mason (ed.) Forensic Psychiatry: Influences of Evil. Totowa, NJ: Humana Winter, D. A. (2007). Construing the construction processes of serial killers and other violent offenders: 2. The limits of credulity. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 20, 247–275 Winter, D., Gournay, K., Metcalfe, C. and Rossotti, N. (2006). Expanding agoraphobics’ horizons: an investigation of the effectiveness of a personal construct psychotherapy intervention. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 19, 1–29 Winter, D., Feixas, G., Dalton, R., Jarque-Llamazares, L., Laso, E., Mallindine, C. & Patient, S. (2007). Construing the construction processes of serial killers and other violent offenders: 1. The analysis of narratives. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 20, 1–22 Winter, D. A., Metcalfe, C. & Grenyer, B. (2008). Effective Psychotherapies: What Else Works for Whom? Chichester: Wiley Winter, D., Sireling, L., Riley, T., Metcalfe, C., Quaite, A. & Bhandari, S. (2007). A controlled trial of personal construct psychotherapy for deliberate self-harm. Psychology & Psychotherapy, 80, 23–37 Winter, D., Tschudi, F. & Gilbert, N. (2006). Psychotherapists’ theoretical orientations as elaborative choices. In P. Caputi, H. Foster & L. L. Viney (eds.) Personal Construct Psychology: New Ideas. Chichester: Wiley

Chapter 7

Encounters of the Puzzling Kind: the Organisational Corollary in Relation to Self-construing Richard Butler Richard Butler qualified at Bristol University. Throughout his clinical practice (through long-stay rehabilitation to childhood difficulties), applied sports psychology (with the British Olympic Association), research endeavours (recently with a longitudinal survey on preventative strategies in child health) and consultancy (the World Health Organisation) he has sought to draw on the principles of personal construct theory, fine-tuned by having had the fortune to work alongside Don Bannister at High Royds Psychiatric Hospital from 1978 to 1986.

Elaborated aspects of theory: core construing; hostility; organisational corollary; performance profiling; self-construing Each person has his own entanglements and it is often convenient for him to preserve them. Kelly (1978)

Background Although childhood is viewed axiomatically as a formative time in our personal history, Phil Salmon (1970) astutely questioned the notion that development unravels in a predetermined sequence. Youngsters, like others, Reflections in Personal Construct Theory. Edited by Richard J. Butler © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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encounter the vagaries of their environment and typically search for meaning through construing the events before them. It might be argued that in choosing, in a Kellyan sense, to act in ways that better serve their construction system, young children essentially construct their own development. As Van Morrison wisely tended in his song ‘Enlightenment’, ‘all around baby, you can see, you’re making your own reality’. I was brought up in a decidedly moralised family where the work ethic, typical of a northern industrial town, predominated. Family values were governed monolithically with a constricted perceptual field where an attitude that things were either right or wrong held sway. A watershed occurred when I reached the age of 11. After working reasonably hard on an odd project at school I gratifyingly finished second in the class in that final year in primary school. Yet intriguingly, although children finishing in the first 11 were awarded a place at grammar school, I was singled out by some obscure selection procedure and unceremoniously shipped off to modern school as a failure. I now see the event in terms of invalidation. The dangled evidence of a certain scholastic adeptness was abruptly cast into doubt. I’d been preemptively straitjacketed at a contrast pole, fostering a potential major realignment of self-construing. Further, I was led to question that sense of fairness and justice which Dorothy Rowe (2003) has highlighted as a core developmental construct. That elementary trust in authority could no longer be presumed. I was genuinely baffled.

Puzzlement At the time my puzzlement seemed to toy in an ungainly way with a raft of feelings, yet nowhere in Mildred McCoy’s (1977) wonderful treatise on emotion is there any reference to such a state of perplexity, nor to being confounded, stumped, flummoxed or having an acute sense of being all at sea. George Kelly (1955; 1991a; 1991b) offered two identifying threads with respect to emotion, both of which resonated easily with my experience. He suggested that emotions arise when either our current construing is found wanting or when the fate of part or all of our construct system is at stake. Both seemed in accord with my sense of bafflement. Don Bannister (1977) suggested some feeling states such as humour, worry, invention, love and wonder survive as mysteries within psychology because they make no sense viewed as either ‘cognitive’ or ‘affective’, and as such tend to remain free from the shackles of psychological experimentation. Puzzlement might well be framed in just such a vein.

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Phenomenologically, three facets seemed evident. Although McCoy (1977) described ‘surprise’ as a sudden need to construe events, the dismay I experienced appeared more crucial and more akin to the notion of shock – a sudden awareness of the need to construe the self differently – which we (Butler & Green 2007) sketched in a proposed expansion of McCoy’s model. Second, there was uncertainty and unpredictability, which Kelly classically depicted as anxiety – that startling awareness of being confronted by events which lie mostly outside the range of convenience of one’s construct system. It was not that failure was unconstruable, more that the possible implications needed to be harnessed and grappled with. Finally, I was bemused. McCoy (1977) described bewilderment as awareness of imminent comprehensive change in non-core structure, arising when faced with novel events that require alteration of construing in order to make sense. Fair enough; but this depiction again seemed to lack the sense of precariousness I felt, particularly in relation to core construing.

The Experience Reframed Tom Ravenette’s (1977) maxim that we don’t refer to our constructs in order to act rings essentially true. At the time I dealt with the reverberations of invalidation at a low level of awareness. Although invalidation can distort construing, it may provide the opportunity for adaptation and reconstruction. I now suspect I ‘channelled’ my psychological functioning in two ways. The experience of failure may have initially felt threatening in the Kellyan sense that imminent comprehensive change in core construing looked likely. However, although ‘self as failure’ had a prevailing context, the necessary revision would involve excavating the very foundation of my self-construing. I sensed the image was being foisted on me and, as I was later to understand through the liberating message of personal construct theory (PCT), I didn’t have to construe myself in ways others were resolved to see me. I steadfastly resisted reconstruing. To paraphrase Eleanor Roosevelt, folk can only make you feel inferior with your consent. I was probably, as McCoy (1977) puts it, angry – that forceful determination to ensure personal conformity in order that constructions avert being invalidated. Anger generally precedes hostility, which Kelly regarded as the continued effort to extort validational evidence in favour of a social prediction which has already been recognised as futile. Thus hostility is self-preserving. When invalidation is anticipated as potentially devastating, we may doubt the confronting evidence and maintain our current ways of construing by

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altering events to conform to our original predictions. On reflection it seemed apposite to extort confirming evidence that my ‘nameless’ judges might just have been wrong. Thus I securely held on to a working-class identity with both its work ethic and love of sport, choices that served me well in the potentially intimidating environment of a tough new school. In the spirit of hostility I also worked hard so that I might, in time, prove those in positions of power could not be implicitly counted on. Interesting how enduring hostility can be. The experience of distrust in authority had other effects, probably best appreciated in terms of the choice corollary, which states that a person chooses that alternative in a dichotomised construct through which they anticipate the greatest possibility for the elaboration of their system. Given that ‘authority as trusted’ no longer made much sense, some simple slot rattling whereby convention and authority were aligned at the contrast end – ‘not to be trusted’ – seemed worth exploring. I found experimenting with nonconformity, rebellion, obstinacy, and the like, which meshed surprisingly well with the freer times of the late 1960s, drew all kinds of benefit. Not least was that I became something of a puzzle to others, a stance Jackson & Bannister (1985) interestingly noted among some characters in their study of difficult-to-understand youngsters. As with hostility, I find the power of mystery enduringly fruitful in my adult years. After all, only dead fish swim with the stream.

And then … Considering my options with university beckoning I cast around for a course I anticipated might limit the chance of failure while endorsing antiauthoritarianism. What better choice than psychology? In terms of mystifying all those around me, including family, teachers and friends, it proved a success. However, undergraduate psychology turned out to be a barren landscape which treated people as objects to be probed and examined, but certainly not invited into any experiment. I was yet again puzzled, this time by a chasm between traditional psychological approaches to understanding people and what I intuitively thought I understood about them. After writing this I re-read ‘The autobiography of a theory’, where Kelly describes a similar nonplussed experience, being faced with the dominant S–R equation in his first course in psychology (Kelly 1963/1969). We, of course, know the eventual outcome of his puzzlement. Well, I hung on with withering expectations. I was on the brink of dropping the whole psychology thing for the charm of marine biology when,

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out of the blue during a module on personality, came a lecture (only one in three years of study) on PCT. Suddenly, out of a miasma of confusion, came fragments of clarity. What resonated particularly was Kelly’s first principle, which invited inquiry along the lines of ‘If you wish to know, then why not ask’. Quickly finding and devouring Bannister & Fransella (1986), I found Kelly’s invitation that individuals are best understood metaphorically in terms of being scientists whose aim is to predict the world and their self through noting replications called constructs exciting reading. Psychology for the first time made sense.

Influences Even before I met him, Don Bannister had been a major influence on my thinking, research and clinical practice. His writings offered a thread of wisdom and perspicacity to my hazy puzzlement. I went to work as a trainee at High Royds Psychiatric Hospital (wonderfully captured in the film Asylum) set in a valley north-west of Leeds, struggling with my research project on validation of thought disorder in those with chronic schizophrenia. Within a month of starting, Don arrived clutching a Medial Research Council grant and proudly asserting he was the longest serving senior psychologist in the UK, with 17 years under his belt. As a result of sharing some commonalities including a working-class identity, a strong sense of Yorkshire-ness and a passion for beleaguered football teams (Doncaster Rovers were as poor as my team, Huddersfield Town) we became friends, played tennis (badly) each week and I eventually persuaded him to play goalkeeper (equally badly) for our departmental football team, Psykick Rovers. Don’s influence was consuming. He taught with keenness, with a challenge to orthodoxy, with an unconventionality that saw him, on occasions, employ his jacket as a makeshift board rubber. As a supervisor and mentor he helped resolve many clinical dilemmas and predicaments, of which the following examples are typical. With crossed feet typically lolled across his cluttered desk or sitting in the hospital grounds for an impromptu tutorial, Don shed many glorious moments of clarity. Schizophrenia, though a hotbed of provocative academic theory, could alternatively be construed as a determined search for meaning from the protagonist’s perspective (Bannister 1962; 1963). Although validation of thought disorder may promote ‘unconventional’ behaviour (as viewed by staff), it may alternatively represent ‘healthy’ tightening of construing (Bannister 1965). Whilst those with agoraphobia may be helped behaviourally, unless their ill-defined view of self as non-agoraphobic is addressed in the way that Fransella

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(1972) explored the resolution to stuttering, they remain psychologically housebound. Finally, Don encouraged a view that youngsters do not alter their behaviour in response to empirically tested therapies unless the implications of that change are understood (Tschudi 1977; Butler, Redfern & Forsythe 1990; Butler 1994a).

The Puzzle of Others Through research on understanding the psycho-neurological impact of amateur boxing (Butler, Forsythe et al. 1993; Butler 1994b) I became involved in sports psychology, helping athletes work towards enhancing their performances (Butler 1996; 1997). I was soon to realise the dilemma parents often have in relation to their children – that of being puzzled (Jackson & Bannister 1985) – seemed exactly that experienced by coaches towards athletes. Despite their best cajoling, coaches invariably seemed baffled at why athletes failed to do what they expected of them. An alternative to the ‘teaching’ relationship between a coach (or parent) and performer (or youngster), and one Kelly advocated for therapeutic encounters, is that of supervisor–PhD student where a model of equal expertise forms the foundation of the relationship (Butler 1997; Butler & Green 2007). Here athlete and coach are both acknowledged as experts in their particular fields and share each other’s knowledge in constructing the best way forward. This, of course, fits seamlessly with the sociality corollary where the role of ‘coaching’ is enhanced when the coach sees fit to attempt construing the athlete’s perspective.

Performance Profiling Capturing a sense of the athlete’s expertise led to a methodology called performance profiling (PP) which facilitates both the athlete’s and coach’s awareness with regard to performance (Butler & Hardy 1992; Butler, Smith & Irwin 1993; Butler 1997; 1999). Traditional, the format consists of a visual display of aspects perceived by the athlete to be important for them to perform at their best, on to which their current ability is mapped. It takes seriously the notion that the athlete is in the business of constructing often quite elaborate theories of their performance and that interventions might best be focused on their perceived needs. PP honours the raw data, posing no predicament in terms of analysis for the athlete involved. Protagonists may digest an individualised visual sketch

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of the athlete’s perceived strengths and weaknesses on meaningful constructs. Where a discrepancy between current and idealised performance becomes noticeable, programmes to enhance such qualities can subsequently be developed. As David Winter (1992) advocates, instruction and support are at their best where constructive social interaction enables interventions to meet the athlete’s needs. Butler & Green (2007) have subsequently explored PP in relation to work with children and young people.

The Organisation Corollary Constructs rarely stand alone. Kelly suggested they are both interrelated and subsuming, structured as a hierarchical architecture of constructs (Kelly 1955; 1991a, 1991b), for which he outlined the organisation corollary. Figure 7.1 depicts a representation of this corollary, with PP envisaged at the base of this hierarchy. Given Jean-Paul Sartre’s view that a single gesture

Figure 7.1 A diagrammatic representation of the self

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implies a worldview, constructs (and thus behaviours) at the base of the hierarchy inevitably reflect more superordinate constructs. Kelly’s notion of constructs subsuming other constructs is generally described in terms of superordinacy and subordinacy. Pyramiding, which is essentially a means of understanding the behavioural constituents of psychological constructs, enables the elaboration of subordinate constructs. It seeks to elicit phenomenologically important behaviours by asking what folk ‘do’, or as in PP, inviting individuals to identify qualities they perceive as important in those who excel in their field.

The Notion of Self At a more superordinate level are psychological constructs which often relate to how people think about themselves. The self appears a fairly ubiquitous conception. Rarely do conversations unravel without reference to ‘I’. From a constructivist perspective notions of a ‘true self ’ draw little honour. In suggesting that individuals reach out to impose meaning on events with which they are confronted, and as such events invariably include the person’s own notion of self, Kelly proposed that we essentially construct the dimensions of our own identity. And we do so in the same way we construe the world around us. As Bannister (1983) hinted: ‘the self picture and the world picture are painted on the same canvas and with the same pigments’. The self might therefore be appositely considered as a sub-system within the person’s construct system. Bannister held an involved interest in the notion of self, apparent in his research on children’s self-construing (Bannister & Agnew 1976) and his later novel writing (Bannister 1987). He elaborated many of William James’s ideas regarding the self (Bannister 1983) along five dimensions. The legitimacy of individuality, he proposed, fosters a sense of separateness and distinctiveness in western societies whereas such individualism may seem egotistical, indulgent and narcissistic in eastern cultures. Second, a sense of coherence enables experiences to be related vs. a world that appears disintegrated and uninterpretable. Third, the legitimacy of history relates the extent to which an individual has a sense of continuity, employing their biography as a thread with notions that they are the ‘same person’ they were yesterday, last year or as a child, despite often significant changes in themselves vs. the sense of living in the here-and-now. Fourth, the legitimacy of agency which, in sympathy with the choice corollary, Bannister identified as the degree to which a person typically seeks to elaborate and develop their self (extension) in contrast to preserving the self through

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resisting fresh experiments (definition). Finally, the legitimacy of presentation hinges on the eagerness a person has to communicate a vision of their self (public) vs. the desire to remain mysterious to others (private).

Exploring the Self Bannister’s theoretical notions lay the foundations for an understanding of the sense of self, yet in the applied field grappling with the self as ‘I’ has proved daunting and esoteric. Within the clinical sphere Bannister enduringly advocated that the most puzzling behaviour might make sense if understood from the actor’s perspective. Thus we should move from investigating the person’s complaint to elaborating their system of self-construing. Capturing a person’s sense of self has generally been operationalised in terms of self-concept or self-esteem and has led to vast array scales for both children and adults (Blascovich & Tomaka 1991). From surveys of self-measures employed over the last 20 years, Butler & Gasson (2005) highlighted some problematic conceptual and methodological issues in relation to current measures. Confusion over definition has led to interchangeability of terminology where self-concept, self-image and self-esteem are frequently employed synonymously and indiscriminately. Susan Harter (1999) suggested terms used to describe the self are simplistic prefixes rather than legitimate constructs. However, something of a consensus is finally emerging. Self-concept is now regarded as a global, overarching presentation of self, self-esteem an evaluative aspect of self, whilst self-image alludes to how people typically describe themselves (Blascovich & Tomaka 1991; Butler & Green 1998). Most published scales of self-concept/self-esteem have been developed and psychometrically validated on small, geographically limited samples, with arguably little correspondence with a national census, thus creating significant problems in generalisation. Finally, and perhaps most damning, the composition of scales has been almost exclusively author generated, with psychologists guilty of deciding which items are valid descriptors of self.

Employing Construct Theory Principles in Assessing Self PCT has traditionally appealed to the repertory grid as a method of exploring how people make sense of themselves. Although grids can offer unique insights into a person’s phenomenological and idiopathic self-structure, they

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present construct relationships in terms of statistical associations which may not necessarily resonate with the psychological relationship between constructs. Bannister persuasively advocated employing information that individuals provide about themselves. Thus rather than converting a person’s ratings into aggregated sums or statistical correlations (as in grids) the ‘raw data’ can form a shared basis of an understanding. Bannister also suggested we should not be hesitant about supplying constructs as folk will use them in their own personal way. However, scales should be composed of items elicited and understood by the population with whom the scale is employed. Thus developing a relevant measure requires items to a have shared understanding of meaning and represent the most frequently elicited self descriptions. Bannister & Fransella (1986) suggest PCT is potentially rich as an inspiration for new ‘instruments’. In such a vein we have endeavoured to develop a means of measuring self-construing with the Self Image Profile (SIP). The original SIP (Butler 2001) was developed to display how youngsters understand their self with versions for children (aged 7–11 years) and adolescents (aged 12–16). A more recent addition has been developed for adults (aged 17–65 years) (Butler & Gasson 2004). They draw on the theoretical underpinnings of PCT and offer a means of harnessing the nomothetic values entwined in population norms and the commonality corollary with the idiopathic leanings that value people’s unique meanings in relation to their self.

Self Image Profiles: The Principles In contrast to most scales relating to self where items emerge in line with the author’s conceptualisation of self, the SIP endeavours to ensure items are relevant and meaningful to the population for whom the scale is intended. An extensive pool of constructs was generated by inviting large samples of the population to give typical self-descriptions in line with elicitation procedures described by Butler & Green (1998) and Ravenette (1977). Selected items for the SIP were the most frequently elicited selfdescriptions and people are asked to rate themselves (on a 0–6 scale) according to ‘how I am’. The SIP offers a visual profile of responses as individuals complete the scale, enabling the person to reveal to him- or herself, as well as to the clinician, something about the way they construe themselves. The avoidance of complicated scoring and ‘hidden’ agendas is accomplished through sharing such information. Such a philosophy is sympathetic to the idea of drawing on the raw data supplied by the respondent and is also in

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line with the notion of equal expertise. Although the SIP is ‘pitched’ at the psychological level of construing (Figure 7.1), with items reflecting the most frequently elicited self-descriptions, there is a theoretical acceptance of ordinal relationships in which the psychological constructs are ‘sandwiched’ between core constructs at a superordinate and behavioural constructs at a more subordinate level. For the first time in a scale of self, a differentiation between self-image and self-esteem is made in terms of definition and of scoring. Self-image is considered a descriptive notion of self (how I think about myself), whereas self-esteem reflects an evaluative judgement relating to how individuals gauge themselves (how I feel about myself), along dimensions considered important (Butler & Green 2007). Self-image is scored according to ratings on the self-descriptions, whereas self-esteem is operationalised as the perceived distance between ‘where I am’ and ‘where I would ideally wish to be’. The SIP also fosters the identification of areas of dissatisfaction (items with a discrepancy between the person’s view of self and how they would like to be), which proves invaluable as a starting point in therapeutic ventures, ensuring a focus on issues the client, rather than therapist, deems important. Figure 7.2 depicts a sample of my SIP, the five items that make up the social aspect of self. I particularly enjoy times when I can engage with others in exposing the absurd discrepancies between life and our aspirations. Thus there is little, if any, discrepancy between ‘self ’ and ‘ideal’ on items such = how I think I am

= how I would like to be

not at all

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very much 2

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13 Friendly 14 Sociable 15 Fun 16 Outgoing 17 Sense of humour Butler & Gasson (2004). Published with permission from The Psychological Corporation. Reproduced by permission of the author.

Figure 7.2 A section of the Self Image Profile for Adults depicting the social aspect of self

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as sense of humour and fun. The distance between two ratings has been discussed theoretically by Bannister & Fransella (1986), who suggest little discrepancy may imply relatively little force to change. That just about sums it up. Although I rate myself relatively low on ‘sociable’, I have no real desire to become more gregarious. I enjoy the company of a limited number of people rather than the buzz of many. So again, the lack of discrepancy indicates little desire for change. Where I am at odds with where I’d like to be is on the item ‘outgoing’. Although Bannister & Fransella (1986) suggest too large a discrepancy may represent in effect a fantasy, with an ‘ideal’ too distant to be converted into any kind of plan of action, the discrepancy on ‘outgoing’ is not of this kind. I may have work to do in developing a more approachable, chatty and unreserved side of my self.

Exploring Ways of Elaborating the Self In the clinical field, the SIP offers a foundation for therapeutic endeavours. Apposite items can be elaborated both horizontally and vertically through interested inquiry. Horizontal elaboration entails exploring the implications of potential change along a construct, where dissatisfaction with self is evident. An initial step may involve clarification of meaning, whereby the individual is invited to describe the contrast to the item on which ‘how I am’ has been scored, describe what it might be like to operate at some distance from this position on the construct or to elaborate the personal significance and advantages of being at the ‘ideal’. Developing propositional experiments where folk ‘act as if …’ fosters alternative facets of self to be tried for size for a limited period. Where movement along the construct proves demanding, Finn Tschudi (1977) offered a neat way of understanding the phenomenological resistance to desired change. He encouraged inquiry into predicted disadvantages of being at the ideal. For me ‘outgoing’ would represent, to some extent, buying into conformity. Vertical elaboration takes the shape of pyramiding or laddering. The former unearths behaviours that underpin the psychological construct, whereas the latter reveals superordinate constructs that fundamentally determine a person’s sense of self.

Core Construing At the pinnacle of the hierarchy of self-construing lies what Kelly described as core construing – higher-order constructs which govern the maintenance

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of a person’s identity (Figure 7.1). Such constructs lie fundamentally at the heart of the individual’s sense of self, guiding each anticipatory choice, action and stance they take. They may justifiably be viewed as the banner under which a person fights. If, as Denis Hinkle (1965) has shown, the higher a construct is in the hierarchy the greater are its implications, then core constructs assumedly have a wide range of convenience encapsulating the raft of self-descriptions and actions a person characteristically accounts for in terms of their self (Stefan 1977; Butt, Burr & Epting 1997). Compared to constructs at a lower level, core constructs appear to remain invariably stable, leading individuals to determinedly preserve a core belief about self, even in the face of mounting invalidating evidence, rather than seek an alternative construction as an ‘open-minded’ scientist might. Residing at a low level of awareness, core constructs are not readily accessible, yet we come to understand the world through the lens of such core constructs with little conscious awareness (McWilliams 2004). We rarely appeal to them, yet it might be argued that all our actions ultimately seek to validate or avoid invalidation of a core construct. Leitner & Thomas (2003) suggest core constructs exist at a low level of awareness precisely because of the possibility of profound threat if invalidated. Yet enticingly, it is with an understanding of such constructs that the fundamental essence of a person may be glimpsed.

Accessing Core Constructs Hinkle (1965) devised a hierarchical method, later termed laddering by Bannister and Mair (1968), to elicit ‘super-ordinate constructs of the preferred self’. Although there are no formal instructions for the process, laddering essentially hinges on a ‘form of recursive questioning’ to elicit higher-order implications of a construct (Neimeyer, Anderson & Stockton 2001). Fransella & Dalton (1990) suggest that laddering is ‘no more and no less than asking the question “why?” ’ a person would prefer to be described by one pole of a construct rather than the other. Alternatively, once a person has identified a preferred pole of a construct, Neimeyer et al. (2001) suggest asking: ‘what is the advantage of that?’ Revealing core constructs requires reflection. Fransella (2003; 2005) suggests successful laddering requires the listener to suspend their own construing (tempering their own assumptions) and seek to subsume the other person’s construing. It is in the process of laddering that one gets closest to the experience of being almost a part of the other person. From a host of

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laddered constructs I recently found, through factor analysis, four themes with respect to core construing (Butler 2006). Briefly these comprised: 1. Making sense – where core construing rotates around the capacity to impose meaning, establish coherence and develop a sense of self competence. Although all actions, according to Kelly, are scientific in the sense of enabling the person to check their theories, if a person’s core construing resonates with notions of competence, that person’s actions also test their sense of self as a good scientist. Many of my laddered constructs have a flavour resonant of such core construing. I ask many questions in seeking to understand the vagaries of the human condition and lean towards research endeavours to clarify the unknown. 2. Relatedness – where a person’s sense of self, as contended by Rowe (2003), seems embedded in the notion of relationship with others, particularly in terms of the search for approval and avoidance of criticism or rejection, leading to social conformity and self-respect. The person, as it were, trades in the sociality corollary, seeking to detect others’ opinion about the self and incorporates these into the sense of self. Through employing the core construct of self-respect, people make choices that depend on the imagined effect their actions may have on another’s mind. They are likely to seek the company of others, build friendships, enjoy social engagements, value trustworthiness, support, help and care for others and have a sense of humour. 3. Achievement – this resonates with Rowe’s second aspect of core construing, which relates to a sense of existence in terms of achievement, where a person seeks challenges, success and power. Sport, academic pursuit and work tasks, for example, offer an individual a context in which, through their competitiveness and consequent recognition, they can test their sense of self-determination. 4. Individuality – the fourth factor suggests that a person’s sense of self is bound up with notions of nonconformity, anti-authoritarianism, rebelliousness and independence, leading to a sense of self-reliance. In reflecting on his first heart attack, Kelly (1978) stressed the importance for him in remaining rebellious ‘against doing the things that people say would have avoided it’. He reckoned he was caught between ‘being a virtuous vegetable and an independent corpse’. Yet he maintained that conformity ‘works harder for the perpetuation of evil than for the achievement of goodness’. My laddered constructs are awash with references to this core construing. I choose, in a Kellyan sense, to act with creativity, rebellion, unconventionality, dissent, maverick intent and possibly eccentricity in anticipating the greatest possibility for elaboration of my sense of individuality.

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The Implications As core constructs form the foundations of a person’s sense of self it might be expected, as Kelly intimated, that validational experiences provoke emotion. McCoy (1977), for example, suggests love and happiness result from validation of core construing. Such feelings might, therefore, be predicted when we meet others’ approval (where self-respect is important), act in an idiosyncratic manner (if self-reliance is important) or find we are able to understand something that previously proved difficult (if self-competence is important). Given my core constructs concern both self-competence (the need to make sense) and self-reliance (the need for individuality) I’m at my most content when trying to understand the complexities of a child’s psychological struggle, undertaking clinical research, fathoming the psychological dilemmas of friends, striving to improve my skill base (such as golf) and doing all of this in a way that might not take the path of conformity. It is likely that a person’s notion of self is maintained through more than one core construct, and the variety of roles a person adopts may serve to validate different core constructs. Thus a person may primarily seek validation for a sense of self-determination whilst at work, self-respect when out with friends and self-competence when trying to figure out the intricacies of a new hobby. Miller Mair (1977) suggested the metaphor of a ‘community of selves’ to account for such experiences and to help articulate the complicated nature of our role relationships. I am increasingly conscious of how even my name – or should I say set of names? – reflects a community of selves. I resisted Richard for many years, primarily because it was a parental construction, yet now I employ it in the context of core construing relating to making sense, where I seek validation for achievement and recognition. Publications are an example. In other social contexts where my desire for individuality and nonconformity is paramount, I’m known as Rich (in the field of sports psychology), Rab (on the sports field) or, most typically with friends and colleagues, as Chuck. Of course, I have fostered each of these labels in their separate contexts; for though sometimes creating confusing for others, they maintain a sense of mystery for me. Interestingly, Kelly did suggest that ‘each of us invests his name with a particular kind of meaning’ (Kelly 1958/1969). At another level any behaviour may serve to validate more than one core construct at any one time. Thus a person might best anticipate the greatest possibility for the elaboration of both their self-respect and selfdetermination by choosing to work diligently on a project at work. I can anticipate validational experiences with respect to both self-competence (the

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need to make sense) and self-reliance (the need for individuality) through an involvement with the least alluring of human struggles (e.g. schizophrenia, nocturnal enuresis), the least endearing of sporting activities (e.g. amateur boxing) and the quirky need to support a perennially flawed football team (i.e. Huddersfield Town). Interestingly I suspect an engagement with PCT also serves to validate the need for both competence and individuality. Hinkle (1965) originally mooted that an awareness of core constructs is essential for understanding the world of another person and ourselves. As core constructs operate at a low level of awareness, the process of eliciting a person’s fundamental sense of self may awaken for the first time an understanding of the nature of their actions. Through interested inquiry and suspension of one’s own construing, the possibility of understanding a client’s core construing is enhanced. And in concert with the sociality corollary, therapists working in the Kellyan tradition consequently have the opportunity to enhance the therapeutic venture for both client and therapist and move towards resolving the puzzles that trap them. Reflexivity, on the other hand, affords a rare glimpse of core constructs that may just be implicated in our own puzzlement.

References Bannister, D. (1962). The nature and measurement of schizophrenic thought disorder. Journal of Mental Science, 108, 825–842 Bannister, D. (1963). The genesis of schizophrenic thought disorder: a serial invalidation hypothesis. British Journal of Psychiatry, 109, 680–686 Bannister, D. (1965). The genesis of schizophrenic thought disorder: retest of the serial invalidation hypothesis. British Journal of Psychiatry, 111, 377–382 Bannister, D. (1977). The logic of passion. In D. Bannister (ed.) New Perspectives in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press Bannister, D. (1983). Self in personal construct theory. In J. R. Adams-Webber & J. C. Mancuso (eds.) Applications of Personal Construct Theory. Toronto: Academic Press Bannister, D. (1987). Hard Walls of Ego. London: Secker & Warburg Bannister, D. & Agnew, J. (1976). The child’s construing of self. In J. K. Cole & A. W. Landfield (eds.) Nebraska Symposium on Motivation. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press Bannister, D & Fransella, F. (1986). Inquiring Man, 3rd edition. London: Routledge Bannister, D. & Mair, J. M. M. (1968). The Evaluation of Personal Constructs. London: Academic Press

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Blascovich, J. & Tomaka, J. (1991). Measures of self esteem. In J. Robinson, P. Shaver & L. Wrightson (eds.) Measures of Personality and Social Psychology. New York: Academic Press Butler, R. J. (1994a). Nocturnal Enuresis: the Child’s Experience. Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann Butler, R. J. (1994b). Neuropsychological investigation of amateur boxers. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 28, 187–190 Butler, R. J. (1996). Sports Psychology in Action. Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann Butler, R. J. (1997). Sports Psychology in Performance. Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann Butler, R. J. (1999). Performance Profiling. Leeds: National Coaching Foundation Press Butler, R. (2001). The Self Image Profiles for Children & Adolescents. London: The Psychological Corporation Butler, R. J. (2006). Investigating the content of core constructs. Personal Construct Theory & Practice, 3, 27–34 Butler, R. J., Forsythe, W. I., Beverly, D. W. & Adams, L. M. (1993). A prospective controlled investigation of the cognitive effects of amateur boxing. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 56, 1055–1061 Butler, R. J. & Gasson, S. L. (2004). The Self Image Profile for Adults. London: Harcourt Assessment Butler, R. J. & Gasson, S. L. (2005). Self esteem/self concept scales for children and adolescents: a review. Child & Adolescent Mental Health, 10, 10–12 Butler, R. J. & Green, D. (1998). The Child Within: The Exploration of Personal Construct Theory with Young People. Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann Butler, R. J. & Green, D. (2007). The Child Within: Taking the Young Person’s Perspective by Applying Personal Construct Theory. Chichester: Wiley Butler, R. J. & Hardy, L. (1992). The Performance Profile: theory and application. Sport Psychologist, 6, 253–264 Butler, R. J., Redfern, E. J. & Forsythe, W. I. (1990). The child’s construing of nocturnal enuresis: a method of inquiry and prediction of outcome. Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry, 31, 447–454 Butler R. J, Smith, M. & Irwin, I. (1993). The Performance Profile in practice. Journal of Applied Sports Psychology, 5, 48–63 Butt, T. W., Burr, V. & Epting, F. (1997). Core construing: discovery or invention? In R. A. Neimeyer & G. J. Neimeyer (eds.) Advances in Personal Construct Theory,Volume 4. New York: Springer Fransella, F. (1972). Personal Change and Reconstruction: Research on a Treatment of Stuttering. London: Academic Press Fransella, F. (2003). Some skills and tools for personal construct practitioners. In F. Fransella (ed.) International Handbook of Personal Construct Psychology. Chichester: Wiley

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Fransella, F. (2005) Some skills and tools for personal construct users. In F. Fransella (ed.) The Essential Practitioner’s Handbook of Personal Construct Theory. Chichester: Wiley Fransella, F. & Dalton, P. (1990). Personal Construct Counselling in Action. London: Sage Harter, S. (1999). The Construction of the Self: A Developmental Perspective. New York: Guilford Press Hinkle, D. (1965). The change of personal constructs from the viewpoint of a theory of construct implications. Unpublished PhD thesis, Ohio State University Jackson, S. R. & Bannister, D. (1985) Growing into self. In D. Bannister (ed.) Issues and Approaches in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press Kelly, G. A. (1955) The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volumes 1 and 2. New York: Norton (reprinted London: Routledge, 1991) Kelly, G. A. (1958/1969). Man’s construction of his alternatives. In B. Maher (ed.) Clinical Psychology and Personality: The Selected Papers of George Kelly. New York: John Wiley & Sons Kelly, G. A. (1963/1969). The autobiography of a theory. In B. Maher (ed.) Clinical Psychology and Personality: The Selected Papers of George Kelly. New York: John Wiley & Sons Kelly, G. A. (1978). Confusion and the clock. In F. Fransella (ed.) Personal Construct Psychology. London: Academic Press Kelly, G. A. (1991a). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volume 1. A Theory of Personality. London: Routledge Kelly, G. A. (1991b). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volume 2. Clinical Diagnosis and Psychotherapy. London: Routledge Leitner, L. & Thomas, J. (2003). Experiential personal construct psychotherapy. In F. Fransella (ed.) International Handbook of Personal Construct Psychology. Chichester: Wiley & Sons McCoy, M. M. (1977). A reconstruction of emotion. In D. Bannister (ed.) New Perspectives in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press McWilliams, S. A. (2004). On further reflection. Personal Construct Theory & Practice, 1, 1–7 Mair, J. M. M. (1977). The community of self. In D. Bannister (ed.) New Perspectives in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press Neimeyer, R. A., Anderson, A. & Stockton, L. (2001). Snakes versus ladders: a validation of laddering technique as a measure of hierarchical structure. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 14, 85–106 Ravenette, A. T. (1977). Personal construct theory: an approach to the psychological investigation of children and young people. In D. Bannister (ed.) New Perspectives in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press Rowe, D. (2003). Personal construct psychology and me. In F. Fransella (ed.) International Handbook of Personal Construct Psychology. Chichester: Wiley Salmon, P. (1970). A psychology of personal growth. In D. Bannister (ed.) Perspectives in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press

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Stefan, C. (1977). Core role theory and implications. In D. Bannister (ed.) New Perspectives in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press Tschudi, F. (1977). Loaded and honest questions: a construct theory view of symptoms and therapy. In D. Bannister (ed.) New Perspectives in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press Winter, D. A. (1992). Personal Construct Psychology in Clinical Practice: Theory, Research and Application. London: Routledge

Chapter 8

Sauce for the Gander Sally Robbins Sally Robbins qualified as a Clinical Psychologist in 1980 and has worked in the National Health Service with older people ever since, originally in south London and Kent, and more recently in Coventry. She has been involved in personal construct psychology since the mid-1980s, and has three book chapters and a couple of conference papers to her name.

Elaborated aspects of theory: geese; reflexivity; sauce; sociality

Introduction What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. In my culture this saying is a rare assertion of equality, at least between the sexes. If we think of it as a more general equality statement – that what is fitting for one person is also fitting for the other – it encapsulates one of my favourite aspects of personal construct psychology (PCP): the explicit application of the theory to all of us, patients and therapists alike, known as reflexivity. In the sociality corollary Kelly (1955; 1991a; 1991b) goes on to make a theoretical statement about how two of us might interact. He suggests: ‘to the extent that one person construes the construction processes of another he may play a role in a social process involving the other person’. This puts both parties together, subject to the same theory, and mutually struggling to relate to each other. It is these qualities of reflexivity and sociality in the theory that I particularly value and intend to explore in this chapter. On reflection, these aspects of the theory are important to me because I am attracted to the idea of us all being ‘in the same boat’. It is one of my touchstones in life to check my own behaviour by reversing positions and Reflections in Personal Construct Theory. Edited by Richard J. Butler © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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seeing if it still seems reasonable – that is, to check if the ‘sauce’ is suitable for both. This is probably one of the hangovers of being brought up with ‘do as you would be done by’ ringing in my ears. The beauty of the Kellyan notion of sociality is that it does not pretend that my construing and that of my client is the same; just that it is subject to the same laws. In writing this chapter I am trying to emphasise the potential usefulness of using this idea more to look at ourselves and our clients as co-participants in living the theory.

Why Sociality? Originally, I think the appeal of sociality for me was that it addresses an aspect of my work, the relationship with the patient, which was almost entirely absent from my original clinical training and yet entirely present in the actual practice. I was taught assessment, research and therapeutic techniques, but the only thing I remember in terms of how to relate to those we worked with was that we were not to answer any questions about ourselves. It may be that my memory is at fault, but having retained only this emphasis on keeping me as a person separate from the therapy process left a lot of questions unanswered and choices unexplored. Operating on this basis with everyone and in all clinical situations seemed inappropriate and was profoundly uncomfortable. Looking back I think that following this instruction would have been hostile, using the Kellyan definition of hostility as ‘the continued effort to extort validational evidence in favour of a type of social prediction which has already proved itself a failure’ (Kelly 1955; 1991a; 1991b). I was not modifying my construing in the light of experience at all. By trying to follow this instruction blindly I was ending up ignoring the outcomes of my behaviour. I was not encouraged to reflect on the feelings evoked in me by these experiences at all. By contrast, one of the main things I remember from my early supervision in PCP was being encouraged to share more of myself and to form closer relationships with the people I work with. This was probably a necessary direction of travel at the time, to redress an imbalance. The stress on reflexivity in the theory made me focus on my own construing with as much energy and attention as I applied to those I work with. I have now spent some years exploring the ‘closer’ end of my therapeutic constructs about relating to patients and I have become increasingly interested in the whole issue of how subtle changes in my approach relate to the construing of the people I am working with and affect the roles I can play.

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Examples of Sociality in Practice Issues of sociality necessarily underpin all our work with patients. The examples below illustrate some of the work situations in which I have found that an explicit consideration of what role I am playing in relation to the other’s construing system has paid dividends. When doing this I have always found it helpful to reflect on my own construing at the same time, though this is often the more uncomfortable part of the process. I have tried to represent some of this reflexivity with each example.

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The new patient

Andrew was initially referred to me as suicidal, whose suicidal wife had just been admitted to one of our inpatient wards. A retired nurse, he had cared for his wife for 10 years or more during her worsening ill health. Given his previous career he felt he was reasonably well equipped to do this, and was moreover expected by friends and family to play this role. His wife had gradually become more disabled and had been recently diagnosed as having a dementia, a diagnosis that had precipitated her wish to die. In her decline she had become more and more aggressive and belittling towards her husband, with frequent references to abuse he had experienced in the past. Her tirades were frequent, loud and often public. Sometimes she would attack him physically and Andrew found it difficult to defend himself from these assaults. He experienced this as horribly distressing. It catapulted him into a sense of vulnerability which he thought he had escaped from long ago. He could not see a way forward – hence his sense that suicide might well be the best option. In part this resulted from the contradictory messages he got from his wife and her carers about the future. He was very fearful of having her at home and the whole situation resuming as before. More importantly, as became apparent when he outlined his story, he was caught between two superordinate and conflicting constructs: ‘good husband’ vs. ‘neglectful’ and ‘vulnerable’ vs. ‘safe’. Before his wife’s illness had worsened he had been able to see himself as both a relatively good husband and as relatively safe. Now he found himself increasingly vulnerable. In order to increase his safety he needed to stop caring for her at home, but this moved him into being relatively more neglectful. Threat and guilt were the dominant features of his diagnosis. Threat, according to Kelly, is the awareness of imminent comprehensive change in one’s core structures, whereas guilt is the awareness of dislodgment of the self from one’s core role structure (Kelly 1955; 1991a; 1991b).

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As you might imagine, given the complexity of this situation, a number of other professionals were involved with Andrew and his wife in various capacities. He had felt himself compelled to explain to them all the nature of his abusive experiences, I think in part because he was so upset about them again, and in part because the information helped to explain why he felt he could no longer care for his wife. As a result, by the time I got involved, he was ready to tell me the same story, but at the same time reluctant to go over it all again. My colleagues clearly wanted me to do something about his risk of suicide, and it was equally clear, particularly from those in Social Work, that this would involve my doing some work with Andrew on what seemed to be the effect of his old traumas. I was also expected to play a practical role at times, sharing in an advocacy role for Andrew in the various meetings and discussions which revolved around the future care for his wife. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this sort of work with older people, it is quite normal for me to be involved in such practical issues. If we look at this as a construct of expectation of my role we get ‘abuse work’ vs. ‘practical advocacy’. Referring to the sociality corollary helped me to work out what was most likely to be useful to Andrew himself, rather than taking direction from my colleagues and perhaps oscillating between these two activities. Given Andrew’s position, struggling with threat and guilt, the first priority was to work on how he might begin to feel safer, and so reduce the threat at least to the level of fear, which is defined by Kelly as ‘like threat, except that, in this case, it is a new incidental construct, rather than a comprehensive construct, that seems about to take over’ (Kelly 1955; 1991a; 1991b). This we did by elaborating areas of Andrew’s construing to use old skills to help him feel more in control. He had knowledge of aromatherapy and reflexology, which he had used on patients in the past. Now he began to use it more extensively on himself. His construing of what was therapeutically useful was permeable enough to accept new ideas I supplied on how to use narrative and imagery to help him cope with his nightmares. We were able to work out an overarching strategy together and this helped him see a way out of his dilemmas. This involved first strengthening his ability to withstand doubt and emotional pressure, whilst also working through the tortuous practicalities of arranging the future care of his wife. He could see the sense of waiting until after progress had been made on these goals to decide what psychological needs he would still have then. It was by no means clear whether it would then make sense for him to try to reconstrue his old experiences of abuse then or whether he would be able to get on with his life again without having to take on this difficult and

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painful work. The idea that he might not necessarily have to do this was clearly very welcome. Finally, he was able to take on board new ways of understanding his guilt and to work on reconstruing his core roles accordingly. My main concern in working with Andrew was to get into ‘a position to encourage change’ as opposed to ‘so close I can’t see a way out either’. He was keen to be friendly with those of us who worked with him, presumably to recreate something like the working relationships he had enjoyed years ago. He described a colleague of mine as being ‘like a sister’ to him. In being different from this I was aware of seeming more distant and of his being rather disappointed that I was not ‘joining the family’.

2

The failure

Perhaps I have made the previous example of using sociality to navigate towards therapeutic success sound too easy. In case that is so, I have another example to share with you, but with a very different outcome. A lady I had been working with for five or six sessions would no longer see me. There was a theme in her story about others treating her badly, from her parents who did not tell her she was adopted, to the daughters who did not take her side against her husband. She was telling me about one daughter’s recent unsatisfactory behaviour and happened to mention that one of the things that annoyed her was that the daughter used a new tea bag for each cup of tea. Looking back, I clearly failed to keep the thought ‘so do I – is it really that big a problem?’ sufficiently to myself. I completely failed to appreciate how constellatory her construing was in this area and became myself construed in the same way as her daughter, thus destroying my therapeutic role with her. The sociality corollary in this case has at least given me a way of understanding how I ‘blew it’. When I think about this lady and others where things have not gone as I would have liked the phrase that comes is ‘the ones that got away’. Given that this harks back to the fisherman’s phrase, I suppose the contrast pole should be the ‘ones I hooked’, but actually it is more like the ‘ones I’ve done something useful with’.

3

The unusual situation

Sociality also guides me when the work I am doing is not therapeutic in the traditional one-to-one in the outpatient department style. Often in working with older people one or more aspects of this traditional model do not apply. Frequently, I see people in their own home or I will be involved in

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activities such as contributing to decisions on a care package which are beyond the range of traditional therapy, as I did with Andrew and his wife. The point here is that many of our therapeutic assumptions come from well-practised models of therapy. When we step outside these we need even more the guidance that the sociality corollary gives. Outside the therapy office I am open to a wide range of pushes and pulls on my behaviour. When I am in someone’s home should I accept a cup of tea? What about a sandwich? What if the kettle is boiling on the hob unnoticed? How should I react when the person wants to hug or kiss me? The answers, of course, depend on my construing their construction processes and then my playing whatever role seems useful. Mind you, if you say this in a room full of psychologists, and perhaps admit to some of your less orthodox responses, you had better be ready for a collective sharp intake of breath and some muttering. Years ago I heard about a lady being interviewed by a reporter on her hundredth birthday. She was asked what it was like being 100 and replied, ‘Oh you know … still trying to talk to the grown-ups.’ I think I know what she meant. When I was a teenager I thought that one day I would be grown up and that meant being sure of things – at last. Not too many years later it began to dawn on me that there is no state of being grown up. I must apologise here to any readers who have managed to progress beyond being 15 on the inside and to whom this does not make sense. As far as I am concerned the same is true of me as a clinician; part of me still yearns for certainty, but most of me knows that this is an illusion and that I do my best work by working hard in each new situation. This probably adds up to a construct along the lines of ‘creative uncertainty’ vs. ‘deadly certainty’.

4

In supervision and training

An area of concern for me, as someone specialising in work with older people ever since I qualified, is that of the ever-present age gap between me and those I work with. When I started this work I was at least 40 years younger than my youngest patients and when I moved to my second job, which had an even older client group, the gap increased still further. I had years of ‘you look just like my granddaughter’ comments, before I graduated to looking like nieces and daughters. I look forward to looking like their sisters and cousins. I have raised the issue of the client–therapist age gap before (Robbins 2005). It seems to me that when same issue in the relationship with our patients is a constant in our work we have a particular responsibility to work out some way of addressing it.

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Now that we in England are being urged to delay our retirement age beyond 65 it is theoretically possible that one day I will be older than the people I work with, but for the last 28 years and for the next 14 this has never been and will not be the case. As you read this, the way I was originally trained suggested quite rigid rules for me to follow in order to get the relationship right – to ‘act professionally’. My guess is that anyone reading this book is likely to feel, with me, that rigid rules rarely get you very far. They are like a watch that has stopped and is therefore right twice a day but otherwise useless. A rigid rule will sometimes serve us well and is better than having no construction at all to follow, but gives us little or no help for much of the time. Sociality, by contrast, acts as an algorithm to apply to each unique situation which we can use to generate an appropriate answer and subsequently to use again and again to refine and improve our approach. I try to incorporate this way of thinking in the supervision and training that I give, which is almost always with people younger than me. At the heart of PCP is the idea of sameness and contrasting difference. In talking about the issue of age we are drawing a distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them, the older people’. This leads me to encourage the people I supervise and train to look for sameness and difference in their construing of themselves and older people. When I am teaching or supervising about PCP and older people, I try to get people to elaborate their construing explicitly along these two lines, with an overlay of the corollaries to help them navigate around the territory. I emphasise the issue of explicitness, not to exclude the implicit or tacit, but because I think that much of our construing about age and our understanding of our relationships with older people tend towards the implicit and unexamined. One simple way to look at our construing in this area is to use ideas from Kastenbaum et al.’s (1972) paper ‘The ages of me’ in which the idea of people having a variety of personal and interpersonal ages is explored. Their structured interview includes items such as ‘most of the time I feel …’ and ‘I look as though I were about age …’. The original interview in the paper is quite lengthy, so in my teaching I usually use a few questions inspired by it to get trainees to loosen their idea of age from a fixed chronological property to something more varied and dynamic: a) b) c) d) e)

Chronological age How old do I look? How old would I like to be? How old do others think I am? How old do I feel inside?

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When I first used this exercise I was in my mid-twenties. I found that others sometimes seemed reluctant to admit to much of a variation between the answers of these five questions, but that if I confessed that my answer to e) had recently gone up from 12 to 13 it seemed to help. The constructions we come out with in such an exercise can help to break down any overly exclusive ‘us and them’ ideas of age. It seems self-evident that if we ourselves ‘are’ a range of ages, then older people probably are too. The range of ages might even overlap. Kastenbaum et al.’s paper reported that the discrepancy between the age people thought they looked and the age they felt themselves to be inside increased with age. This certainly holds for me: these days I am mostly about 15. This means that some 25 years ago this discrepancy was 13 years but now it has widened to 36 years. Another way of exploring the issues of same and difference is to read around and debate the construing of others in the area. When I am supervising I make reference to my ‘favourites’ in the literature, Lily Pincus’s (1981) The Challenge of a Long Life and Mary Stott’s (1981) Ageing for Beginners, to help trainees do this. These sorts of exercises can help us to elaborate our construing of ageing and to make sure it is neither too tight nor too pre-emptive to allow us to construe the construing of individual older people effectively. Another way of putting this is to say that I see this elaboration as a useful way of ‘limbering up’ for a placement working with older people. Having done such work we are more likely to be open to construing the construing systems of older people more accurately. If I reflect on what this means for me, my concern is to share what I can from my career so far, but not to do so in a way that is stultifying. Another formative experience from my training days was doing some neuropsychological tests with a very old lady and feeling under pressure to get through them and produce the answer. I felt that I was transferring the sense of pressure to her and that it was unreasonable to have expected her to do so much work in a short session. As a result, as a teacher and supervisor, I am at pains to give the people I am training and supervising the sense of being free to make decisions themselves on the spot.

5

Working with people with dementia

I have written before about some of my understanding of the changes in construing processes that tend to come with a diagnosis of dementia (Robbins & Bender 2006). In that chapter I mentioned a man I called Alf and how the love of his wife was helping to preserve his sense of his core structure despite quite drastic changes in his construing in other areas of

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his life. In writing this I was using McCoy’s (1977) understanding of love as ‘a state of awareness of the validation of one’s core structure’. I said little if anything about how I cast my own role in relation to Alf and all the people I have met with similar issues. Reflecting on this now I am aware of how thin I sometimes stretch my tenuous hold on construing the construction processes of others. Some of these people I meet before there is any question about their cognitive abilities and we are in touch because of other issues; others I meet because they are given a diagnosis of dementia and are struggling with this or because I am helping to contribute to working out what is going on with them. For all sorts of reasons I am sometimes still in touch with them when the looseness, reduction in permeability and constriction (which Mike Bender and I described in the 2006 chapter) has taken hold of much of their construing, sometimes to a point where it is no longer possible for them to speak to me. Most of my colleagues relate to these people in terms of their current mental abilities, whatever these are thought to be, so they will often talk to the carer and ignore the person. This is done with very little consideration of how what is said and how it is said may affect the person. If this is raised with them the fact that the person will not remember the incident after a few hours is cited as sufficient explanation. The question of emotional learning, or what we might describe as a relatively functioning tacit construing system, (Neimeyer 1981), does not arise, despite the fact that many of these patients will retain the sense of having felt excluded or ignored even without knowing when or by whom. When looked at from the other side we might suspect that such interactions invalidate the person’s sense of their role. In these circumstances I think the trick for us lies in developing some sort of role for ourselves that the person can appreciate as reasonable and potentially helpful whatever their current abilities, and then tying it in to a more personalised validation of their sense of self as quickly and as thoroughly as we can. If we can do this before much deterioration occurs, so much the better, because our construing of their construction processes is likely to be fuller and more accurate. Whatever our professional role, if we can do this we will at least minimise any harmful invalidation this might entail. Effectively, I am talking about showing each individual person with dementia as much love as we can, in McCoy’s definition, in order to be as useful to them as possible. I can see an example of the sort of effect I am aiming at with this strategy in the Alzheimer Café Movement, a network of informal meetings for people who have dementia or similar problems and their friends and relatives. ‘All in the same boat’ is the motto or slogan of the movement, and as I said at the beginning of this chapter, I am particularly attracted to

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the sense of equality that this expresses. Our local café meets once a month and the experience is highly valued. The people who attend know that everyone else there will either have some form of dementia or will be caring for or working with people who have dementia. The effect of this anticipation is to start the evening on a footing of shared expectations. It does not matter if the person with dementia breaks the normal social rules, as they often do in many subtle and more obvious ways. Other people are ‘in the same boat’ and will accept a wider range of behaviour than is normal. In other settings some of the people with dementia, and many of their friends and relatives, experience a sense of shame because they have somehow broken the social rules. An example might be that a husband has to order all the food and prompt his wife to eat in a café. He might then need to leave the table to escort his wife to the toilet. In a normal café such behaviour would soon get some funny looks from other customers and the husband might find himself cringing at the unwanted attention. He might feel ashamed. McCoy defines shame as: ‘an awareness of the dislodgement of the self from another’s construing of your role’ (McCoy 1977). At the Alzheimer Café this need not happen, because the other carers are likely to be able to construe the husband’s construing of the situation and play their roles accordingly. Equally, the wife who might otherwise be feeling ashamed or indeed guilty can be relatively free of such emotions because she does not experience any dislodgement from core roles. Kitwood (1997) talked about the need to focus on the person rather than the illness; the ‘person with dementia’ rather than the ‘person with dementia’. It seems that in a setting like the Alzheimer Café we manage to do this more successfully than in much of day-to-day life. So if we can construe the construing systems of people with dementia and their carers adequately, our expectations of their roles are adjusted accordingly and no sense of shame need result. Equally, if we can serve to validate their core structure to some extent, they will be less likely to feel guilty. Sometimes colleagues ask me how I can stand working with older people, many of whom are declining in their physical or mental powers. I have always known that one aspect of my attraction to the specialty is an attempt to face my own possible futures. I am working on my own ageing while I do this, letting go of my dark-haired youth and exploring my grey-haired new self, for example. I anticipate that my life in the future will still have meaning even when I lack the abilities I now rely on, and I hope people will treat me accordingly. I mentioned the motto ‘do as you would be done by’ before, so I think this is what I am trying to act on in my work with people with dementia.

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141

The organisation

During my 13 years working in Coventry I have been in four different organisations, while still working in the same job. Each time the organisation changes, and even sometimes when it doesn’t, we get new organisational priorities. The significance of this for those of us employed by the health service is that these priorities influence what is wanted of us as employees. Ultimately, they can determine whether we continue to be employed or not. My constructs around this are: ‘secure position’ vs. ‘at risk’; ‘usefully placed’ vs. ‘too detached’ or ‘too prominent’; and ‘responsible’ vs. ‘powerless’. I need to act to try to preserve what I value in our service because I prefer to be ‘responsible’ rather than ‘powerless’ and this requires that I be relatively ‘usefully placed’. In such circumstances it makes sense to optimise my role in relation to the organisation, using the trusted sociality corollary once again. Following the most recent changes in our organisation, we will be judged on its ability to perform in three areas: its managerial competence; its financial management; and its safety or governance procedures. If I want to survive in this setting, to be in a relatively ‘secure position’, and if I want to have any influence on the provision of psychological services for older people locally, I had better learn to play a role in relation to these organisational constructs. I therefore need to construe my activities in relation to these priorities and communicate them to the management and to my colleagues accordingly. It will help me to do this better, to make my arguments about services more effectively, if I can understand some of the more subordinate construing involved, in order to clarify how managers think these goals can be enacted. Wish me luck!

Reflecting on My Own Construing When it comes to thinking about my own construing I have found that sociality comes into its own when I find myself particularly discontented or surprised by the roles I play in relation to others. In such a situation I am left wondering what the role I play says about my own construing, or about my construing of the construct systems of others. Then I have to work it out. A few days before our first son was born I visited the antenatal clinic and was told that my blood pressure was too high and I would need to be admitted to hospital if a second check gave a similar reading. When it did I … went home. I was feeling very threatened in the clinic and the dominant

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thought was ‘you are not going to keep me in here’. I felt the staff were somehow the enemy hell-bent on trapping me there. After a difficult night wrestling with these feelings I went into hospital the next day and then spent the time there determined to get my blood pressure down and get out. I could not understand why I felt so desperate and, though ostensibly I managed to ‘behave properly’, I felt ashamed and puzzled about my feelings. It was only a couple of days later that I realised what my construing was about and why I looked on the staff as gaolers. My only other experience of inpatient hospital treatment had been when I was 2½ and admitted to hospital to have an ear abscess operated on. As was normal with hospitalised children in the UK in the 1950s, my parents were not allowed to stay with me. The only memories I have of that time are the feel and smell of my mother as I clung to her before she left, and the same feeling of being trapped and desperate that I experienced again 33 years later. On reflection I think this was a small example of what Leitner, Faidley & Celentana (2000) described as ‘structural arrest’. My dominant understanding of the staff was in relation to their keeping me in hospital, and although I was able to use more adult constructions of the situation to moderate my overt behaviour, my tacit construing was still frozen at the level of the 2½ year old. It took a few days to work this out, I think because most of the original construing was preverbal. Having hauled this into awareness I could then apply my adult verbal construing to my current experiences and develop more age- and situation-appropriate roles. Sometimes it can be helpful to undertake a more general review of my construct system and how it operates. For example, if we look through this chapter so far I think some themes in my construing system are clear: a concern to do something or be useful, and a stress on freedom, on responsibility and on uncertainty. I have laddered one of the constructs that I referred to earlier and produced: ‘what life is about’ vs. ‘might as well be dead’ ↑ ‘be in control of my own destiny’ vs. ‘rudderless’ ↑ ‘not at the mercy of others’ vs. ‘in others’ power’ ↑ ‘responsible’ vs. ‘powerless’ I often get similar results when I ladder. This exercise allows me to be more aware of what I am doing and to be able to spot when these themes might be colouring my understanding of others construing systems.

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Conclusion I spend almost all my time in relation to others, and at work I am paid to create relationships which effect change. I was taught to generate a certain way of relating to patients and to stick to it, but this rigidity seemed profoundly uncomfortable and largely unproductive. I often see others at work with ways of relating to their clients which appear unguided by theory. These work patterns often seem to be aimed either at generating friendship or at preserving a formal professional role, rather than generating therapeutic change. In this chapter I have tried to reflect on the ways I use sociality and reflexivity drawn from PCP to steer a different and more useful path. Over the years I have often referred to PCP as a structure that quite literally helps me to move around my psychological system and those of others. The analogy I have drawn is that of the framework of branches that a lemur swings on when it moves around its world. I do not claim to be able move with anything like the speed or elegance a lemur has, but I can dream. If I apply this image to this chapter, the sociality corollary is one of the most useful and well-used branches of PCP and reflexivity helps me to grip onto it.

References Kastenbaum, R., Derbin, V., Sabatini, P. & Artt, S. (1972). The ages of me: towards personal and interpersonal definitions of aging. Aging and Human Development, 3, 197–211 Kelly, G. A. (1955) The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volumes 1 and 2. New York; Norton (reprinted London: Routledge, 1991) Kelly, G. A. (1991a). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volume 1. A Theory of Personality. London: Routledge Kelly, G. A. (1991b). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volume 2. Clinical Diagnosis and Psychotherapy. London: Routledge Kitwood, T. (1997). Dementia Reconsidered: The Person comes First. Buckingham: Open University Press Leitner, L. M., Faidley, A. J. & Celentana, M. A. (2000). Diagnosing human meaning making: an experiential constructivist approach. In R. Neimeyer & J. Raskin (eds.) Construction of Disorders: Meaning Making Frameworks for Psychotherapy Washington, DC: American Psychological Association McCoy, M. M. (1977). A reconstruction of emotion. In D. Bannister (ed.) New Perspectives in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press

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Neimeyer, R. A. (1981). The structure and meaningfulness of tacit construing. In H. Bonarius, R. Holland & S. Rosenberg (eds.) Personal Construct Psychology: Recent Advances in Theory & Practice. London: Macmillan Pincus L. (1981). The Challenge of a Long Life. London: Faber Robbins S. E. (2005). Looking forward towards the end. In D. A. Winter & L. L. Viney (eds.) Personal Construct Psychotherapy: Advances in Theory, Practice, and Research. London: Whurr Robbins S. E. & Bender M. (2006). Making sense of dementia. In P. Caputi, H. Foster & L. L. Viney (eds.) Personal Construct Psychology: New Ideas. Chichester: Wiley Stott, M. (1981). Ageing for Beginners. Oxford: Blackwell

Chapter 9

Griddled with Angst: A Roller-Coaster Ride on the Repertory Grid Richard Bell Richard Bell is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Melbourne, Australia and has been interested in the analysis of repertory grid data since the early 1970s. He has published more than 20 articles and book chapters on aspects of repertory grid analysis (who would have thought such a boring topic could lend itself to so many publications?) and has recently co-authored with Fay Fransella an almost totally rewritten second edition of A Manual for the Repertory Grid Technique.

Elaborated aspects of theory: constructive alternativism; duality; repertory grids

Introduction A few months ago I was making my way across Europe, towards a prestigious university where I was due to present a paper on recent developments in the repertory grid technique. Luckily or unluckily (I’m still not sure which) while en route I logged into my email to find a message from my future hosts. Apologetically, they said the presentation I had sent was too complex. Could I give a simpler talk? With a whole day and a half to spare I managed to do so. The revised talk was a simple introduction which showed how the repertory grid technique is closely linked to personal construct theory (PCT). My hosts were knocked out by this. So simple and Reflections in Personal Construct Theory. Edited by Richard J. Butler © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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so obvious. It had been a cornerstone of my first constructivist journal article ‘Theory appropriate analyses of repertory grid data’ (Bell 1988), but even then it had been a point I made and moved on to the real focus of the paper, analysing grid data, something I still seem to be doing. But the grid–theory link, so simple and so obvious, was forgotten. This is a book about reflexivity and PCT. The repertory grid ought to be a tool for getting reflexivity since it provides us with a representation of our construct system. Perhaps that is why I was invited to contribute to this book, being, in the words of Jack Adams-Webber (1989), ‘an un-reconstructed grid-head’ who is therefore sensitive to the reflexive qualities of the grid technique. Alas, it is not so. I have never found completing a grid to be helpful in understanding my world. Nor have I ever seen a self-completed grid from any of the other proponents (including Kelly himself) of the technique. Have they done them and kept them hidden because they are just too revealing? Or like me, are they too crass and insensitive or too aware of the mechanics of the grid for the grid as a technique to be a vehicle for any reflexive moments? I should add that I do not believe the grid is necessarily good at providing answers – perhaps this is why it has never been a particularly strong measure in research. Rather, I have always thought the grid, and any analysis of it, rather better at providing a starting point for asking questions. I see it more as closer to the start of the information-gathering process than closer to the end. This is not to say that the grid has not played a role in what I have taken away from PCT. To use the terminology of the grid and theory, for me the grid has not been a construct or way of viewing the world, but rather an event in my world, the successive construal of which has varied my construction system, just as George Kelly said it would (the experience corollary). Thus this chapter is a tracing out of these successive construals over the past 38 years or so in a ramble through my recollections of life on the roller-coaster of the repertory grid.

The 1970s: Getting Started My first encounter with PCT occurred in a second-hand bookshop near the Prahran Market, Melbourne in 1970. I was looking for paperback detective novels (preferably old green Penguins), but having recently graduated with a degree in psychology, I felt obliged to give the psychology shelf (in those days there was only one) a quick once-over. There they were, the famous two stubby volumes in a faded blue-grey that obscured the printing of the

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title and author. Fortunately, I opened volume 1 (had I but opened volume 2 with its clinical detail, I might well have declined the purchase and might not be writing this chapter now), which of course fell open at the fold-out sample repertory grid. I was hooked (although to be honest, the four dollar price tag on the two volumes, did play a substantial role in my decision to buy) as I had just spent a semester in psychometrics studying the famous theorem of Eckart & Young (1936) and its application in factor analysing a data matrix of columns and rows – the kind of data matrix that a repertory grid is. I’d like to say I rushed home and began writing computer programs to analyse repertory grids in this way, but of course it would not be true. I bought the volumes, took them home, put them on a bookshelf … and forgot about them. I did eventually start writing computer programs, but that was in 1979, and in another country. By the end of the 1970s I had moved to the University of Western Australia and was working in a teaching services unit. Due for study leave in 1979, I had noticed in a British Educational Technology newsletter reference to a teaching appraisal system called TARGET based on the repertory grid, which had been developed by Terry Keen and Warren Hopwood at Plymouth Polytechnic. As I was spending the first part of my leave at Exeter University (just up the road from Plymouth in Australian distance) I thought I would check it out. But even at Exeter University there were grids, analysed with an ‘illegal’ copy of Patrick Slater’s INGRID program. Slater has adapted some of the psychometrics in his PhD studies on scaling personal preferences to the analysis of repertory grid data in a technique he called ‘principal components’. Some people I met thought that the program did something funny because you couldn’t get factor loadings for both elements and constructs.1 Patiently, I would explain that this was indeed possible thanks to Eckart & Young’s theorem, but usually the audience’s eyes would glaze over after a minute and a half and we would have to adjourn for a refreshing pint in the student bar in order for me to finish my point. Eventually, I made it to Plymouth Poly and tried out the TARGET system with its innovative use of video clips of teaching as elements. But I did not meet Terry Keen, who had moved to Milton Keynes where he was running an educational resource centre. It had one of the first personal computers 1

The problem has not totally gone away. A couple of months before writing this I has an email from a distinguished British psychologist still asking how this could be so.

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and when I spent a month or so with Terry later that year I began my longdelayed foray into repertory grid analysis on this computer. Pretty soon we had memory problems and had to take the machine to Oxford to get the memory doubled – from 16k to 32k (what we would now think of as a trivial size for a file). We did a couple of innovative things in that time, one of which was to introduce the intra-class correlation as a method of measuring cognitive complexity. Traditional measures of cognitive complexity were based on matching or correlating constructs. The intra-class correlation is derived from an analysis of variance of a grid. Vannoy (1965) was the first to recognise that variance analysis is a useful thing to do with grid data as such an analysis recognises two factors – the constructs and the elements – and that we can measure the complexity among the elements as well as among the constructs. Many years later I was to return to this idea in a paper with Julian Vince and the late Jacqui Costigan (Bell, Vince & Costigan, 2002).

The 1980s: the Personal Computer Revelation The 1980s were a key time in the development of methods to analyse grids. Although the major innovations (Slater’s factor analysis and Shaw & Thomas’s clustering) preceded this they were locked into mainframe computers. This was fine for university-based usage but not much help to practitioners elsewhere. Slater’s MRC-funded service had provided such a service to practitioners, but it was long gone. The 1980s saw the advent of portable computers – portable in the Goon Show sense of having a handle, otherwise ‘luggable’ was a more apposite descriptor. Those early machines also came with an inbuilt ‘high-level’ language, BASIC, which enabled anyone to produce a computer program to analyse grid data. Initially, this could be done on both PCs and Apple Macs, which was a boon as in those days the grid world seemed roughly evenly divided between the two. At the same time there was growing concern with the dominance of grid methodology. As Bannister (1985) put it: ‘grid method is a Frankenstein’s monster which has rushed away on a statistical and experimental rampage of its own, leaving construct theory neglected, stranded high and dry, far behind’, while Neimeyer (1985a) saw it as part of ‘the crisis of methodology’ for PCT and recommended that ‘construct theorists end their faithful marriage to the grid and become more methodologically promiscuous’. This was a difficult time to be doing research with grids, particularly when one could see both sides.

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But this dichotomy was not as objective as it might seem. Slater’s (1969) caustic review of Bannister & Mair’s (1968) book may have played some part in the retreat of both Bannister & Mair from the repertory grid. There were also tensions on the other side of the Atlantic and the 1987 Congress in Memphis featured a rather sharp debate between Adams-Webber (progrid) and Yorke (anti-grid), which was much toned down for publication (Adams-Webber 1989; Yorke 1989a; 1989b). A similar debate was held at the Berlin Congress in 1999, between Tom Ravenette (anti-grid) and me (Bell 2000a; Ravenette 2000), however no altercations ensued as we were both gentlemen (Tom was always a gentleman and I adopted the role for the afternoon). We agreed with each other’s perspective in such a way as to provide an invalidating experience with the dichotomy corollary for the audience. Why was the grid so dominant? The implicit answer seemed to be ‘because it is easy’. But as well as seeing the grid as an easy thing to do, it can also be seen as a way to view ‘A person’s processes [which] are psychologically channelized by the ways in which he or she anticipates events’. The repertory grid embodies the fundamental postulate of theory. This is the simple observation referred to in my opening paragraph. Fortunately, the grid has survived because it is clear that since the grid embodies the fundamental postulate, it provides an excellent basis from which to investigate and test the theory. Investigate and test the theory? That is not a phrase you see much in the personal construct literature. By the time of the 6th International Congress on PCP at Churchill College, Cambridge in 1985 (my first) I had actually read volume 1 of Kelly’s work. Chapter 1 is headed ‘Constructive alternativism’, which establishes ‘the broader framework’ for the theory of personal constructs. Kelly defines his philosophical position as part of this as constructive alternativism: ‘there are always some alternative constructions available to choose among in dealing with the world’ (Kelly 1955). One thing I’ve taken away from Kelly’s theory is this – there is always an alternative way of construing things. To be sure I already was aware of this in the narrower world of factor analysis where indeterminacies can rule, but I’d never had such a classy name for it. But by 1985, I had the feeling that I hadn’t actually seen many alternatives propounded in PCT. In fact, I’d hardly seen any criticism from within the PCP tent. Neimeyer (1985b) talked about this (‘both method and theory embody the same flaws’), quoting criticisms from a number of leading figures in the field. These criticisms were made in interviews with him, and interviews, like PowerPoint presentations, are succinct and pithy but do not have the

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reasoned structure and testing of propositions that properly worked-up criticism requires.

The 1990s: Looking at Corollaries This was a period when I became interested in what could be tested in the theory and what might be improved (constructive alternativism). I was now seriously reading Kelly. The only major development had been Dennis Hinkle’s (1965) with his laddering, and implications grid extensions of the organisation corollary. This was never published directly but became very influential in practice due to the detailed accounts given by Bannister & Mair (1968) and Fransella & Bannister (1977), without receiving much independent testing. While staying with Terry Keen in 1979, I’d seen a couple of manuscript papers from the Utrecht PCP Congress (and subsequently published). One was by Ten Kate (1981) drawing attention to some indeterminacies in the hierarchical structuring of bipolar constructs, the other by Rathod (1981) highlighting the different representations that could be obtained from a common grid. Ten Kate’s criticism was directed at Hinkle’s extension of Kelly’s theory, but subsequently Husain (1983), and indeed much earlier Ryle (1975), directed similar theoretical criticisms at Kelly’s organisational corollary itself. These issues have been elaborated in more detail in Bell (2004a). Needless to say, these criticisms have not found their way into any subsequent general accounts of the theory. The other criticism (by Rathod), pointing out how different representations of the same grid data could be obtained, sank pretty much without a trace, although it was a valid criticism of the grid, very much in line with the concerns of Bannister (1985) and Neimeyer. One reason might be that grid users, like most social scientists, dislike statistics and quantitative data analysis. What they want is an ‘expert’ to give them the answer. By and large, the providers of grid analysis computer programs do just that. You input the grid and got the picture out. What happened in between was a private matter between the computer chip and the program. But any program written to analyse grids contains a number of choice points. Whether the programmer explicitly considered these choices and chose one or simply used the only option they knew is not often made public. In writing my computer programs (originally GPACK but later others, including GRIDSTAT) I set out to follow Kelly and embody the choice corollary into my programs. Like alcohol, too much choice is supposed to bad for you (though I’m not sure; I’m still working on the alcohol problem), so these programs generally have a recommended choice.

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Some things take time. While first constructing my GPACK program in the early 1980s, I wrote: ‘Fact and artifact in the principal component analysis of grid data’. It was quaint, typewritten with appendices of cutup mainframe computer printout, showing how different pre-analysis scalings of the grid affected the results. It was eventually presented at the 12th International Congress in 1997, and an even later version finally published (Bell 2004b). To return to my constructive alternativism position of looking at the theory via the repertory grid. The theory has a number of corollaries. In general, there are two kinds: those that simply extend the fundamental postulate, for example the construction corollary; and those where data (e.g. from a grid, though not necessarily – see Millis & Neimeyer 1990) can be tested against the corollary. Such a situation occurs with the commonality corollary: To the extent that one person employs a construction of experience which is similar to that employed by another, his or her psychological processes are similar to those of the other person. This corollary has an important practical consequence. In many practical situations with large numbers of respondents, or where the sponsoring authority wishes to test some given constructs or elements, grids with common constructs and/ or elements are used. This has some distinct advantages (Fransella, Bell & Bannister 2004) if the commonality corollary holds. In 1996 at the European Personal Construct Association Conference in Reading I proposed several ways of testing whether the corollary did hold in such data. This caused some consternation among several grid practitioners who routinely assumed the given constructs meant the same thing to everyone. A simplified version was subsequently published (Bell 2000b), although one suspects the (quite simple) test is not made. (What consultant could afford the risk of it failing?) The corollary that first attracted my attention (Bell 1988), and still does, was the organisation corollary: Each person characteristically evolves, for his convenience in anticipating events, a construction system embracing ordinal relations between constructs. Constructs are organised into a system. That seems necessary if we are going to be able to behave consistently, but what kind of system is it? Kelly says it is ordinal. As indicated (briefly) earlier in the references to the criticisms of Ryle (1975) and Husain (1983), Kelly had two somewhat contradictory views as to what constitutes this ordinal relationship, but one defining quality of an ordinal relationship is that it is asymmetric. My first thoughts, as were those of Gaines & Shaw (1980), is that we should be looking for hierarchical relationships through asymmetric measures of relationships between constructs. But when I looked at the standard

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measures relating constructs, they were all symmetric (e.g. distances and correlations). Attempts to focus on theory-appropriate relationship measures have been a failure from Gaines & Shaw through to Bell (2004b). I don’t know about the other researchers, but using this approach I have found asymmetric relationships rare in the grid data I have considered (Bell unpublished, and never likely to be published). Does this mean that the corollary is invalid or that the measurement is inappropriate? We cannot tell objectively. One feature of these considerations of the organisation corollary is the notion that in order to consider an issue such as asymmetry, we have to consider two pieces of information (i.e. the construct B–construct A relationship as well as the construct A–construct B relationship). The need to consider more than one thing at a time is a pervasive characteristic of Kelly’s theory. This duality comes to the fore in the dichotomy corollary (a person’s construct system is composed of a finite number of dichotomous constructs), which has attracted the most attention, and is a rare instance of Kelly offering a modification of his theory. He originally said: ‘We are ascribing a dichotomous quality to all human thinking’ (Kelly 1955 p. 109); but in 1966 said that a dichotomous construct ‘by its successive application to events … may create a scale with a great number of points differentiated along its length. Now a person who likes grays can have them – as many as he likes’ (Kelly 1970). But later Kelly said: ‘a construct is at heart a black and white affair, rather than a scale of grays’ (Kelly 1961/1969). So which is it, George? There are two aspects to the bipolarity issue, as I have noted elsewhere (Bell 2002): the dichotomy and the bipolarity. While the former implies the latter, the latter does not require the former and is thus perhaps the more fundamental. It is this issue that has attracted research attention since the 1960s (Mair 1967). Millis & Neimeyer (1990) provided some ingenious support for this corollary using a cognitive experiment rather than a grid, and I (Bell 2000b) subsequently found support from a psychometric perspective (naturally using grid data) but remained less than convinced (Bell 2002). It is perhaps ironic that the one explicit acknowledgement of duality in Kelly’s system is the one I am least convinced by.

Since 2000: the Dual World of Constructs and Elements In 1995 I gave a paper at the Barcelona International Congress (the 11th such congress) showing how four-way grid data (constructs, elements,

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respondents and occasions) could be modelled with a non-metric canonical variate approach termed OVERALS (Bell 1995). These were some old data from recovering psychotic patients who completed grids with common elements and common constructs on four occasions. The paper, quite properly, disappeared into outer space as even I had difficulty understanding it. But one by-product of the analysis lodged in the back of my mind. When the variance of the data was partitioned among the constructs, elements, respondents and occasions, it was the elements that accounted for most of the variance. Around that time a number of people were looking at whether the way grid ratings were collected (by element or by construct) affected the structure of the grid. A student of mine, Julian Vince, was doing a small study looking at this, and for all grids we collected a range of measures. One of these was the intra-class correlation I had developed with Terry Keen hundreds of years ago (actually, in 1979) which can be (and was) calculated for both elements and constructs. We didn’t find that the method of data collection affected this statistic, but we did find that elements were more differentiated than constructs were (Bell, Vince & Costigan 2002). Why does this happen? I went back to the famous two volumes to see what Kelly had to say about elements. The answer was – next to nothing! Elements hardly get a mention. They are the forgotten component of the theory. I began to think along the lines: ‘Behind every famous construct there stands a quiet little element. She made him what he is today.’ In a rare serious moment though, I was suspicious of the role played by element role titles. Role titles have been a part of the classic repertory grid since the beginning, and their importance was argued for by Mitsos (1958). Mitsos’s study has often been taken as evidence that role titles lead to more superordinate constructs being elicited. However, this was only a conjecture, not a finding. Together with some students I did look empirically at this (Haritos, Gindidis, Doan & Bell 2004) and we found that not using role titles led to similar differentiation among elements and constructs. Using role titles led to the same differentiation among elements as in the non-role title grids, but it led to much less differentiated constructs. There were more asymmetric (hence superordinate) relationships in the non-role title grids. So much for Mitsos’s conjecture. We also classified the content of the constructs and found the content to be the same in both conditions. Since we used fixed triads to elicit constructs, we were also able to show that particular role titles led to particular kinds of constructs being elicited. Our conjecture at the end of this paper was that if the grid administrator wanted the respondent to engage in looser construing, then not using role titles would be better, but if tighter construing was desirable, then the

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use of role titles seemed called for. We wait for someone to test our conjecture. If elements are important, then perhaps more attention should be paid to them. But of course, it would be just as incomplete to neglect constructs, and that is probably where my story will end – back worrying at constructs. It may seem strange that I have not mentioned the famous yellow book, Manual for the Repertory Grid Technique (Fransella & Bannister 1977). Of course I had a copy, much borrowed and now quite battered, as most copies are. It is still cited (even though there is a later edition) and was in print (I think) for 14 years. It was the ‘bible’ for repertory grid users, although I have always felt the earlier grid book by Bannister and Mair (1968) to be just as good. The Manual was brilliant, covering the vast range of varieties and uses of the repertory grid technique. If it did have a failing, it was in the analysis section, which was drawn from elsewhere and hinted at much but delivered little in practical detail. But then I had my chance to put my money where my mouth was in 2002 when Fay Fransella invited me to co-author a second edition. The second edition may also be a good book – I am too scared to read it in case I detect embarrassing errors – but the unexpected benefit I gained from the exercise was renewed interest in aspects of the grid occasioned by having to re-read older papers in order to write my sections. Constructive alternativism struck again. One example was when Fay insisted we include a diagram of the Slade & Sheehan (1979) ‘conflict’ contribution of inequalities of sign among trios of construct correlations. Miffed, I trudged over to the library to read (and photocopy) the original paper containing the idea (Lauterbach 1975). I was idly reading it as I walked back to my office (in a desperate attempt to persuade visiting potential international, fee-paying students that this was a place of learning) and was astounded to learn that this did not translate into conflict among three constructs, but conflict between two constructs with respect to a given element. A way of examining this was quickly devised and published (Bell 2004c) and of course it provides another instance of the need to ensure that both constructs and elements are involved in assessing grid structure. At this point I thought I was done with grids. But it seems grids were not done with me. Last year I heard a presentation by Peter Caputi on applying formal concept analysis to identify hierarchies and links between constructs and elements. Peter mentioned an old, widely unused component of the GPACK program I had written to identify diamond lattice configurations among constructs. I had another look at it, was embarrassed by its primitive structure and started to look for an alternative. Whether this alternative

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turns out to be constructive remains to be seen, but the possibility of identifying hierarchies among constructs in a repertory grid and consequently testing data against Kelly’s organisation corollary is too enticing to be ignored. At the earlier mentioned congress in Cambridge in 1985, I had been entranced by a paper by Chiari and others (subsequently published as Chiari, Mancini, Niccolo & Nuzzo 1990), which took the notion of Kelly’s organisational corollary and structured it in such a way that it corresponded to hierarchical structures among what mathematicians call ‘sets’. One issue that has bedevilled the grid (as for PCT more generally) has been its isolation (Neimeyer 1985b). With respect to grid measures there has been a tendency to use idiosyncratic names for measures devised to represent structures in grids. While this can be evocative, it does tend to work against the commonality of our ideas with those of others outside PCP, who might use different labels (e.g. ‘average correlation’ instead of ‘intensity’). One feature of the Chiari et al. team was that while most of them were clinicians, there was also a mathematician. Their team construct thus managed to have the required two poles. The analysis was set out formally in a mathematical sense (which explains why no grid users could understand it) and was unambiguous and indisputable. It did have some drawbacks though. It required both poles of subordinate constructs to be nested under one pole of the superordinate construct. This was totally unpalatable to some grid users, and would have argued compellingly against the practice of laddering where only one pole is used, if such practitioners had been present and able to follow the argument. But both Kelly and Bannister had been aware that there is something interesting about the lopsided allocation of elements to construct poles. Indeed, in our studies of asymmetry (Haritos et al. 2004) we found that asymmetries were associated with lopsided construct relationships. But the asymmetric approach involved ‘collapsing’ across elements (thus ignoring them individually) in order to form asymmetric coefficients between constructs (in the same way as data are collapsed across elements in order to obtain an inter-construct correlation). We need to give the elements ‘a fair go’.2 Consequently, I am still at this unsolved problem. Inspired by Peter’s approach, I am currently looking at other ways people have devised to look at ‘partial-order’ (i.e. hierarchical) structures among constructs which work directly from the grid data themselves and do not involve any collapsing of 2

A supposedly Australian characteristic often missing from our international business and sporting endeavours.

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element data. It looks good for dependency (dichotomous) grids, but is messy for rated repertory grids. But then life is probably just that – messy. Will this obsession with grids ever end? I hope so. It would be nice to get back to something simple like detective stories. But even there, there will be two sides to the story and as many alternative constructions that can be fitted in before the final chapter. These notions of Kelly, although perhaps not those he is famous or remembered for, may well be why he has endured for so long. As for the grid, it now has a life of its own, and will go on for as long we continue to ask questions about how we construe our world.

References Adams-Webber, J. R. (1989). Some reflections on the ‘meaning’ of repertory grid responses. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 2, 77–92 Bannister, D. (1985). The patient’s point of view. In D. Bannister (ed.) Issues and Approaches in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press Bannister, D. & Mair, J. M. M. (1968). The Evaluation of Personal Constructs. London: Academic Press Bell, R. C. (1988). Theory appropriate analysis of repertory grid data. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 1, 101–118 Bell, R. C. (1995). The analysis of multi-occasion multi-grid data: an application of the OVERALS algorithm. Paper presented at the 11th International Congress on Personal Construct Psychology, Barcelona, July Bell, R. (2000a). A psychometric assessment of the bipolarity of constructs in repertory grid data. In J. Scheer (ed.) The Person in Society. Giessen: PsychosozialVerlag Bell, R. C. (2000b). On testing the commonality of constructs in supplied grids. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 13, 303–311 Bell, R. C. (2002). Das wesen persönlicher konstructe und ihre beziehungen untereinander. In J. Scheer (ed.). Identität in der Gesellschaft. Giessen: PsychosozialVerlag Bell, R. C. (2004a). Predictive relationships in repertory grid data: a new elaboration of Kelly’s organization corollary. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 17, 281–295 Bell, R. C. (2004b). The joint representation of constructs and elements in repertory grid data by component analysis: Slater’s INGRID is not the best solution. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 17, 147–152 Bell, R. C. (2004c). A new approach to measuring conflict or inconsistency in grids. Personal Construct Theory & Practice, 1, 53–59

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Bell, R. C., Vince, J. & Costigan, J. (2002). Which vary more in repertory grid data: constructs or elements? Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 15, 305– 314 Chiari, G., Mancini, F., Niccolo, F. & Nuzzo, M. L. (1990). Hierarchical organization of personal construct systems in terms of the range of convenience. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 3, 281–311 Eckart, C. & Young, G. (1936). The approximation of one matrix by another of lower rank. Psychometrika, 1, 211–218 Fransella, F. & Bannister, D. (1977). A Manual for the Repertory Grid Technique. London: Academic Press Fransella, F., Bell, R. & Bannister, D. (2004). A Manual for Repertory Grid Technique, 2nd edition. Chichester: Wiley Gaines, B. R. and Shaw, M. L. G. (1980). New directions in the analysis and interactive elicitation of personal construct systems. International Journal of Man–Machine Studies, 13, 81–116 Haritos, A., Gindidis, A., Doan, C. & Bell, R. C. (2004). The effect of element role titles on construct structure and content. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 17, 221–236 Hinkle, D. (1965). The change of personal constructs from the viewpoint of a theory of construct implications. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Ohio State University Husain, M. (1983). To what can one apply a construct? In J. R. Adams-Webber & J. C. Mancuso (eds.) Applications of Personal Construct Theory. Toronto: Academic Press Kelly, G. A. (1955) The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volumes 1 and 2. New York: Norton (reprinted London: Routledge, 1991) Kelly, G. A. (1961/1969) A mathematical approach to psychology. In B. Maher (ed.) Clinical Psychology and Personality: The Selected Papers of George Kelly. London: Wiley Kelly, G. A. (1970). Behaviour is an experiment. In D. Bannister (ed.) Perspectives in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press Lauterbach, W. (1975) Assessing psychological conflict. British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 14, 49–53 Mair, J. M. M. (1967) Some problems in repertory grid measurement. I. The use of bipolar constructs. British Journal of Psychology, 58, 261–270 Millis, K. K. & Neimeyer, R. A. (1990). A test of the dichotomy corollary: propositions versus constructs as basic cognitive units. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 3, 167–181 Mitsos, S. B. (1958). Representative elements in the role construct technique. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 22, 311–313 Neimeyer, R. A. (1985a). The Development of Personal Construct Psychology. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press Neimeyer, R. A. (1985b) Problems and prospects in personal construct psychology. In D. Bannister (ed.) Issues and Approaches in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press

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Rathod, P. (1981). Methods for the analysis of rep grid data. In H. Bonarius, R. Holland & S. Roseberg (eds.) Personal Construct Psychology: Recent Advances in Theory and Practice. London: Macmillan Ravenette, T. (2000). Do we need grids and stats? A contrary view. In J. Scheer (ed.) The Person in Society. Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag Ryle, A. (1975). Frames and Cages: The Repertory Grid Approach to Human Understanding. Brighton: Sussex University Press Slade, P. D. & Sheehan M. J. (1979). The measurement of ‘conflict’ in repertory grids. British Journal of Psychology, 70, 519–524 Slater, P. (1969). Theory and technique of the repertory grid. British Journal of Psychiatry, 115, 1287–1296 Ten Kate, H. (1981). A theoretical explanation of Hinkle’s implication theory. In H. Bonarius, R. Holland & S. Rosenberg (eds.) Personal Construct Psychology. London: Macmillan Vannoy, J. S. (1965). Generality of cognitive complexity–simplicity as a personality construct. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 2, 385–396 Yorke, M. (1989a). The intolerable wrestle: words, numbers, and meanings. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 2, 65–76 Yorke, M. (1989b). In the hall of mirrors, or reflections on ‘reflections’. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 2, 93–101

Section IV

Construct Theory as an Elaborative Choice

Chapter 10

Living Aggressively Jonathan D. Raskin Jonathan D. Raskin is a Professor of Psychology at the State University of New York at New Paltz, where he is director of the Counseling Graduate Program. He has authored or co-authored many articles and book chapters on constructivist psychology and counselling. He is also licensed as a psychologist in New York, where he maintains a small private practice. Dr Raskin received the State University Chancellor ’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities in 2007. He is also a big New York Yankees fan.

Elaborated aspects of theory: aggression; construct elaboration; hostility; social constructionism; threat

Who is this Aggressive Fellow and Why Would You Care?1 It occurs to me that aggression is one of the most important concepts in George Kelly’s Personal Construct Psychology (PCP). Without it, people would be hard-pressed to change. When I speak of aggression, I am defining it in Kelly’s idiom as the active testing of one’s personal constructs (Kelly 1

Kelly (1959) once inserted pointless footnotes just for fun (or was it to contrast the formal style of academic papers with the more informal style typical when one shares personal experiences?). As this chapter tries to bridge the academic and the personal, I’ve decided to follow Kelly’s lead by including idiotic and distracting footnotes throughout. Please ignore them, as I can assure you that they do little other than disrupt the otherwise seamless flow of my writing.

Reflections in Personal Construct Theory. Edited by Richard J. Butler © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

162 Jonathan D. Raskin 1955; 1964/1969; 1991a; 1991b). Not surprisingly, those new to PCP are often confused by Kelly’s use of the word. They define aggression more conventionally as violating others’ rights unjustly, such as when one country invades another. In some instances, aggression does involve such violations, but in many other instances it resembles something less interpersonally or physically jarring – what many might consider to be assertiveness or audacity. Regardless of how pleasantly one engages in it, aggression occurs whenever one tests the hypotheses by which one lives. Politely asking someone to clarify something so that one can test one’s construction of it can exemplify Kelly’s aggression, but so can physically or psychologically assaulting others. The key is not how nice one is, but whether one’s actions constitute experimenting with one’s constructs in daily life. Unfortunately, sometimes people engage in aggression without thinking through the consequences for themselves or others.2 Aggression is critical to testing one’s constructs, but dangerous when engaged in recklessly. Even when aggression is used in the most reflexive, respectful and self-aware manner, it still is questionable as a way to make friends and influence people. After all, when we actively test and call into question constructs that others hold dear, they often get peevish. It’s never easy to have one’s most cherished beliefs challenged, especially if there is a chance they might be invalidated. Looking back, I notice that a lot of my personal evolution into a constructivist psychologist and counsellor has involved me aggressively challenging commonly held constructions while often irritating others in the process. As many authority figures have told me repeatedly over the years, nobody likes a smart ass.3 What follows is an account of how Kelly’s conception of aggression has been a central factor in my personal evolution. I’ll try to make it interesting. After all, academics such as me usually toil away in relative obscurity. Very few people know who they are, much less care whether they were breast fed or who their first kiss was with or why they married at the age of 24 and became fanatical about George Kelly in 2

For example, when the US invaded Iraq, President Bush was probably testing out a variety of constructions pertaining to diplomacy, force and twenty-first-century foreign policy. A lot of these constructions wound up being invalidated – at which point the Bush Administration’s refusal to revise their invalidated constructs became quintessential examples of threat and hostility. More on threat and hostility later, but I bet you didn’t know when you began this footnote that it would involve a diversion into the realm of politics, now did you? These notes are just full of surprises! 3 I don’t believe my ass is smarter than any of my other body parts, but this remains an empirical question.

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graduate school. Nevertheless, I share my experiences in the hope that it provides a springboard for articulating how important, yet threatening, aggression can be as means for spurring on personal evolution and psychological change.4

The Great Stock Market Crash of Eighth Grade When I was in the eighth grade, my teacher had our class simulate the stock market of the late 1920s in order to teach us about the Great Depression. Each of the students was given a preset amount of Monopoly money and several choices of prime stocks to purchase. Just in case we couldn’t afford as much stock as we wanted, the bank (our beloved teacher) generously allowed us to buy on credit. Things were just hunky-dory until, of course, the inevitable crash came and most of us lost our shirts.5 Consequently, I found myself wondering about how the stock market (something so clearly ‘fake’) could cause so much harm and suffering. After all, stocks are not real in the same way as sticks and stones are. Stocks are only valuable because everyone agrees they are. Why couldn’t people during the Great Depression simply call a ‘do over’ and agree to go back to considering their stocks valuable? Better yet, why couldn’t people just ditch the whole stock market idea and instead trade in things that were ‘really’ valuable – food, clothes and video games.6 This was perhaps the first time I gained some awareness of social constructions (Gergen 1994; 1999; Burr 1995), those pesky little shared notions that bind people together, and not always in a good way! For the life of me, I could not understand how people could allow something that they collectively ‘made up’ to have such a profound impact on their lives. When things went wrong while my friends and I were playing video games, we simply pressed the ‘reset’ button and started over. Adults were dumb, I concluded, because they couldn’t see that a lot of what they took so seriously was stuff they simply made up – and then forgot that they had created. Thus, they became victims within games of their own making! If they had 4

Some authors use footnotes continually, perhaps because they don’t know how to convey their central ideas in the main body of their text and so have to find somewhere else to stick them. Either that or they just think footnotes look really cool. (I told you these were pointless!) 5 Some lost underwear and socks, too. The Depression was rough. 6 I was in the eighth grade. To me, video games were just as important as food and clothes.

164 Jonathan D. Raskin stopped to recall that it was all made up, they too could have reset things – just like my friends and I did when playing ‘Donkey Kong’.7 So, yes, when I was in the eighth grade my post-hoc solution to the Great Depression was a gigantic ‘do over’. This, perhaps, sheds light on why my political career never got very far. That, plus I’m short.8 Now what does all this have to do with aggression? Good question. The great stock market crash of eighth grade marks an early example of my beginning to aggressively test out the ‘real vs. made-up’ construct. Shortly thereafter, when my father’s retirement portfolio lost value in an unfortunate ‘market correction’, I made sure to tell him that it was all ‘just pretend’ anyway. To my surprise, this did not appear to cheer him up. While aggressively testing constructs pertaining to the ‘real’ seemed quite liberating to me, those around me were sometimes less enthusiastic about my efforts. On the contrary, sometimes they even got downright mad.

Resisting High School English: Universal Symbols, My Ass! Two years later, I found myself sitting in tenth grade English class reading (enduring?) Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. I was never sure why tenth graders were expected to relate to this lovely tale of Puritans contemplating whoopee and its consequences, but everyone kept talking about the literary cannon and how important it was to be exposed to ‘truly great’ literature. As the only cannon I was interested in was the one I could use to launch my copy of The Scarlet Letter into oblivion, I found the ‘truly great’ literature argument less than convincing. Who decides what makes something universally great anyhow? And what if people change their minds? Does that mean that what was universally great no longer is, or does it mean that those who determine what is universally great have colossally goofed? To make matters worse, my teacher kept hectoring the class to identify universal symbols in The Scarlet Letter. This was fun for a while – until I 7

‘Donkey Kong’ was a video game that eighth graders loved in the 1980s. Like, it was totally narly! 8 In US presidential elections, the shorter candidate almost always loses. George W. Bush was an exception to this, although some people think he lost both times anyhow. But that’s another story altogether. My point is that people tend to equate height with strength, which is an interesting (if moronic, from my height-challenged perspective) social construction.

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found out that, according to my teacher, some of the symbols we identified were ‘wrong’. I was perplexed by this. How could they be wrong? After all, weren’t we simply offering our individual interpretations? What made these interpretations right or wrong? Well, I soon realised that what made these interpretations correct or incorrect was quite basic – namely, whether they were listed in the teacher’s teaching manual. If a symbol was listed there, then it was A-OK. If not, then it was wrong. Though I didn’t have the language to express it at the time, I had encountered how powerful the social constructionist idea of warranting voice can be (Gergen 1989; Burr 1995). Those with power were those who could define which interpretations ‘went’ and which did not. ‘No!’ the teacher would bellow when a truly ridiculous (i.e. not in the teacher’s manual) symbolic interpretation was offered. It really made a person want to read more. Not surprisingly, after tenth grade English I often took an oppositional stance whenever someone asserted something as definitively and unquestionably true.9 Perhaps this was my way of vigorously testing the idea that what seemed true to people was inevitably intertwined with whose viewpoints were most respected and valued. Sometimes it was the person who seemed kindest, smartest or the most interpersonally astute and perceptive about communicating with people. At other times it was the most intimidating and threatening person present. After all, it is occasionally better to say ‘uncle’ than to get one’s head bashed in.10 Regardless, my aggression led to an important lesson. When I declined to endorse the ‘official’ symbols offered by my teacher, I received a less than stellar grade. It was at that moment that it first dawned on me that perhaps these ‘pretend’ ideas were more powerful than I had been willing to admit. Getting a ‘C’ in English is perhaps not the worst way to learn the lesson that aggression sometimes hurts, but it was unpleasant enough for me to begin the long process of revising my ‘real’ vs. ‘made-up’ construct dimension.

A College Rebel Whines Incessantly Anti-psychiatry After a year or two at college fiddling around with a variety of majors chosen just to see how stressed out I could make my parents, I settled 9

I also learned that stories featuring Puritans are generally a downer. Some might contend that having one’s head bashed in is preferable to guessing which universal symbols are in your tenth grade English teacher’s teaching manual.

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166 Jonathan D. Raskin on psychology. During my senior year, I took a seminar on abnormal behaviour. It turns out that my seminar professor was a Szaszian,11 which was precisely the reason cited when he was later denied tenure. Luckily for me, his tenure review didn’t happen until after I graduated, affording me the opportunity to read some of Dr Szasz’s naughtiest writings (Szasz 1963, 1974, 1986). I loved them. Szasz clearly laid out how minds could not be physically sick in the same way as brains. This is why the idea of a brain tumour makes sense, but a mind tumour seems downright silly. Describing the mind as sick was a metaphor taken literally. However, once defined as sick, people could more easily be dismissed, coerced or incarcerated. I liked this Szasz fellow. The fact that most everyone else in psychology didn’t only enhanced his appeal. Looking back, my fascination with Szasz turned me into what I can only describe as an incessant whiner. In every class, I prided myself on how foolish the instructor and students were whenever they opined about mental illness. It’s not that I didn’t have some good observations to offer. However, my righteousness level was through the roof. Angry young men are boring. Unaware, I began to morph into quite the opinionated and annoying humanistic psychologist. I began to regularly roll my eyes at the mechanical, essentialist nature of mainstream psychology and its oppressive implications for clinical practice. I even tried to grow a beard. It was a rough time. But looking back, I think I was aggressively testing out another aspect of the ‘real’ vs. ‘made-up’ construct. In this case, I was trying to discern whether ‘mental’ was in some respects different from ‘physical,’ and what this meant when it came to distinguishing real illnesses from fake ones. Thus, one of my early memories from graduate school is aggressively challenging the notion of mental illness in just about every class I took. It was fun looking to see which of my professors or fellow students could generate arguments that would force me to revise my Szaszian perspective. However, at times I must have caused a great deal of stress in those around me, especially as my intellectual aggression evoked threat in others. Kelly (1955; 1991a; 1991b) characterised threat as the impending sense that one’s core constructs aren’t working and require immediate change. When my aggression produced evidence that invalidated the constructs of nearby others, I became a source of threat for them. Consequently, I was not always a very popular person. 11

The ability to add ‘ian’ as a suffix to your name and have it sound like a really cool movement is a prerequisite for becoming an influential psychologist. If Thomas Szasz had been named Thomas Finklestein, his ideas might never have gained any traction at all. Nobody wants to be known as a Finkelsteinian.

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Anti-social psychology? Around this same time, I took a seminar in social psychology. I liked it. It had all the wackiest experiments, often involving confederates of one sort or another. Where else in life could you get college credit for staging horribly bloody and frightening faux accidents just to see if unsuspecting undergraduates would help people or not? This was cool stuff. As it turned out, my social psychology seminar professor happened to have a soft spot for social constructionism. Perhaps because of my Szasz-inspired humanistic leanings, I found myself turned off by this. The social constructionists kept talking about an ‘empty’ person. Instead of people creating and using discourses to speak their minds, social constructionists kept talking about ‘discourses speaking through people’. This sounded pretty nutty to me. So, in my inimitably aggressive way, I expressed my scepticism by writing my term paper about the excesses of social constructionism. My professor not only gave me a ‘B-,’ but also wrote me a pretty mediocre reference letter. Once again, I learned that aggression can have unintended consequences. Only several years later did I revisit social constructionism and give it another chance.

Why Are We Studying This Kelly Crappolla? Now you might think that I went to the University of Florida in order to study personal construct psychology (PCP) under the wise tutelage of Franz Epting.12 If only that were so! Actually, I went there because the weather seemed appealing and the university gave me a teaching assistantship. I didn’t even know that PCP was an emphasis at Florida. When I was assigned to Franz as a teaching assistant, I was surprised to find that he had spent the bulk of his professional life on this strange theory formulated in corollaries and postulates. He’d even written an entire book on its therapeutic implications (Epting 1984)! This befuddled me. Kelly’s work struck me as cold and mechanical. Corollaries? To understand the human experience? Really? It all seemed hopelessly academic. I even remember asking Franz why his research group (which, to my utter surprise, he’d invited me to join) spent so much time on this Kelly fellow rather than on more traditional humanists such as Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow. 12

To personal construct psychologists, PCP stands for personal construct psychology. For everyone else, it stands for the street drug phencyclidine. This is rather unfortunate, especially when I unthinkingly tell students that I’m ‘really into PCP’.

168 Jonathan D. Raskin To his credit, Franz patiently allowed me to whine and complain ad nauseam about PCP. He kept counselling me to ‘keep reading’ and ‘give it time’. Yet unlike my earlier teachers and professors, Franz never insisted that I change my constructions to fit with his. In other words, he did not display hostility, which Kelly (1955; 1957/1969; 1991a; 1991b) defined as forcing events to fit one’s constructs even when those constructs have repeatedly let one down. Aggressive people are open to experiences that invalidate their constructs, while hostile people inevitably distort experience so that their constructs remain unassailable (Kelly 1957/1969). Franz felt no need to force me to agree with his constructions about psychology. This allowed me to feel less threatened and consequently to be aggressive when it came to exploring personal construct psychology. To my surprise, I found myself wanting to test whether my initial constructions of Kelly’s theory as cognitive and mechanical held up – and being open to the idea that they might not. So I quietly read as many of Kelly’s writings as I could find. Once again I was being aggressive, only this time my mentor’s lack of threat in response to my aggression allowed me to push the envelope that much further. Even so, it was a little scary. After all, I had openly criticised PCP as being too cognitive. As I read Kelly, I found that my initial hypotheses about his work did not hold up very well. Constructs were not the same as cognitions; construing occurred at preverbal and bodily levels, as well as cognitively (Butt 1998; Leitner & Faidley 2008; Raskin 2008). As my initial construals of PCP were invalidated, I experienced threat – the impending recognition that my constructions about PCP did not adequately account for it. I was forced to revise my constructions of PCP and came to see it as holding that we all construct uniquely meaningful personal understandings of things. In order for a psychotherapist to help a client, the therapist doesn’t need a whole host of diagnostic labels to bandy about, but rather needs to comprehend the client’s personal meanings and then work with the client to revise those meanings as necessary (Neimeyer & Raskin 2000; Raskin & Bridges 2008). By aggressively testing (and discarding) my initial constructions of PCP, I began to like it. This was great stuff! Now instead of aggressively embracing PCP, I could have dug in my heels and refused to give up my initial constructions of it as mechanical and overly cognitive. Clinging to thoroughly invalidated constructs exemplifies Kellyan hostility. But in light of Franz’s openness, I did not become hostile. Instead, I revised my constructs to integrate a newly developing appreciation of Kelly’s theory. Part of this process involved relating Kelly’s ideas to things I already believed. For example, I began to see connections between Kelly’s emphasis on conceptualising psychopathology in terms of a client’s

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idiographic personal constructs and Szasz’s notion that problems in living constitute meaningful life dilemmas rather than physical illnesses. Hence, my first academic publication on PCP was a paper I co-authored with Franz in which we drew parallels between the ideas of Kelly and Szasz (Raskin & Epting 1993). I found that writing papers was another way of aggressively putting my constructs to the test. That’s when I realised once and for all that academia was where I belonged.

‘Hey, Aggressive Young Scholar: Please Go Away’ My first few years as a professor were spent examining PCP as it relates to abnormality, psychotherapy and ethics. However, I found myself repeatedly bumping into ‘constructivism’, of which I assumed PCP was an example. I soon discovered that while some people endorsed subsuming PCP under the constructivist banner, others were not nearly as enthusiastic about that prospect (Fransella 1995; 2006; Chiari 2000). My befuddlement about this was complicated further when good old social constructionism resurfaced in my life. The only thing that sceptical PCPers liked less than constructivism seemed to be social constructionism.13 Of course, I had been taught to be very wary of social constructionism, primarily based on the idea that it was merely a philosophically fancy environmental determinism with little respect for the creative construction processes of individuals. Who could ever embrace something as yucky as that? For a while, I managed the PCP vs. social construction debate by simply constricting my perceptual field. Stated in less technical terms, I basically ignored the social constructionist literature. This worked until students began regularly asking me about social constructionism and I had very little to say. At that point, I reluctantly began to read some of the prominent social constructionists. Though doing so was often threatening to my humanistically-oriented PCP viewpoint, I once again found myself feeling aggressive. The social constructionists seemed to be onto something when they criticised psychology for being too individualistic in its focus. Sure, PCP had its sociality corollary, which held that when people construe others’ constructions they can form close relationships with them (Kelly, 13

I once saw a prominent personal construct psychologist storm out of the room during one of social constructionist Ken Gergen’s more conciliatory talks, in which he postulated the need for more communication between PCP and social constructionism. Storming out when someone says folks coming from different perspectives should talk to one another? Now that’s what I call threat and hostility!

170 Jonathan D. Raskin 1955; 1991a; 1991b; Leitner & Pfenninger 1994). However, the social constructionist emphases on social embeddedness and the co-creation of meanings seemed to stress relationships and social context in a way that was not as fully realised within PCP. Despite my best efforts to stop it, social constructionism began to resonate with me quite forcefully. It wasn’t that PCP had nothing to say about the social, but rather that the social constructionists had a lot more to add. So I began testing out the hypothesis that PCP and social constructionism might have a lot to offer one another (Raskin 2004, 2006). This garnered some negative (threatened?) responses from esteemed and valued colleagues (Butt 2006; Fransella 2006). Once again aggression was helping me expand my worldview, but not helping me win any popularity contests. Yet I felt the need to continue being aggressive in construing social constructionism. Concepts like Shotter’s (1993) joint action14 (the idea that people co-create meaning) and Gergen’s (1989; 1991; 1994) warranting voice (the idea that what socially influential people say is more likely to be accepted as true) resonated nicely with my earlier experiences studying the Great Depression and The Scarlet Letter. The social constructionists seemed to elegantly elucidate the idea that meaning is always local, fleeting and embedded within historical and linguistic contexts (Gergen 1991; 1994; 1999; Burr 1995). I finally understood what the social constructionists meant by crazy-sounding stuff such as ‘discourses speak through people’. It wasn’t that people played no role in constructing meanings, but rather that often people adopted meanings that pre-dated their arrival on the scene. When today’s aspiring male rock star grows his hair long and starts talking like Mick Jagger, he is enacting a socially constructed discourse that pre-dates him by quite a bit; in many respects, he becomes a conduit for an already existing construct system shared by many persons past and present.

The Personal and Social As Mutually Influential These days, I still consider myself an enthusiastic personal construct psychologist, even though I endorse a less orthodox and reverent approach to Kelly’s work than some of my colleagues. In other words, I’m a personal construct psychologist who also shows enthusiasm for social constructionism and radical constructivism. In my view, all three perspectives have a 14

Am I the only one who also thought joint action was something going on in a lot of college dorm rooms? I guess it’s safer than PCP!

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great deal to offer. But must those attracted to all three theories remain fragmented when using them to talk about human psychology? How does one bridge these variations on the basic idea that people live in a world of meanings that they create for themselves? The social constructionists see meaning as emanating from the top down; what we know and who we are stem from socially constructed discourses that pre-date us (Gergen 1994; 1999; Burr 1995). The individual as a meaning constructor sometimes gets lost in such a conception. By contrast, personal construct psychologists and radical constructivists see meaning as generated from the bottom up; individuals are central and the social is merely the amalgamation of many individual constructions (Kelly 1955; 1991a; 1991b; Glasersfeld 1984; Maturana & Varela 1992; Burr 1995). Admittedly, radical constructivists take individualism a good deal further than personal construct psychologists by highlighting that not only are meanings uniquely personal, but also that each person is a closed system in touch only with its own processes (Efran & Lukens 1985; Simon 1985; Efran & Fauber 1995). People never escape their internal workings and thus the social is, in effect, a mirage (Glasersfeld 2008). More succinctly, at the extreme ends of the constructivist spectrum social constructionists squeeze the person out of the equation while constructivists cast the social as illusory. The question becomes: how does one integrate the seemingly contradictory assumptions of PCP, radical constructivism and social constructionism? This is what I’m aggressively exploring these days. Let me share some of my struggles doing so. Being aggressive is important, but rarely easy. Radical constructivists stress people as closed systems. Personal constructivists emphasise people as creative individuals. Social constructionists see people as relational beings co-constructing realities. Is it possible to interrelate all three of these perspectives? This is the kind of stuff I think about in the shower.15 What I’ve been struggling to work out is how the personal and the social can be seen as mutually influencing one another across time. Let me briefly sketch three of the hypotheses with which I’m aggressively playing.

Hypothesis 1 ‘The psychological and social originate from the biological.’ According to this hypothesis, human beings are embodied creatures who have evolved particular sensory equipment, which they use to construct understandings 15

Yes, I’m that boring a guy!

172 Jonathan D. Raskin of their world. In keeping with radical constructivism, embodiment means being a closed system (Maturana & Varela 1992; Glasersfeld 1995; Maturana & Poerksen 2004). All people ever know is their internal experience and this experience is determined by their sensory systems, which have biologically evolved over time to help them survive (Campbell 1974; Plotkin 2001). Importantly, sensory systems must allow organisms to survive and reproduce, but – in keeping with constructivism – ‘accuracy’ in perception is not required. Now with sincerest apologies to Barbara Held, I plead guilty to placing the word ‘accuracy’ in quotes. Held, who is a long-term critic of constructivism, likes to point out that constructivists use ‘scare quotes’ whenever they want to imply that there is no external truth or reality (Held 1995; 2007). To her, this shows their ‘anything goes’, anti-realist attitude. Perhaps I’m just dense, but I’ve never understood this ‘anything goes’ criticism of constructivism. What ‘goes’ is always what one’s embodied structure allows one to construct. Thus, in any situation, some things go and others don’t. Despite hyperbolic claims to the contrary, civilisation as we know it has never come to a halt simply by observing that human experience and the world itself may not perfectly ‘match’. I like to think that I’m the kind of constructivist who is not so much ‘anti’ real as I am ‘anti’ the naïve realist belief that knowledge can be validated independent of humanly constructed criteria. Aren’t good scientists usually agnostic about ultimate reality based on the assumption that what we ‘know’ (there are those scare quotes again) is simply that which has yet to be disproved? If so, then aggression is very much a central part of the scientific enterprise that Kelly so strongly valued. Further, all this makes me wonder if there might be such a thing as ‘agnostic realism’, but I’ll leave that possibility for another day’s discussion.

Hypothesis 2 ‘The psychological and social, having emerged from the biological, mutually influence one another. Each provides criteria for continued evolution and change in the other.’ According to this hypothesis, criteria for evaluating personal constructs are never independent of social norms and values, and vice versa. One person’s new construction of things can seep in and create social change; conversely, social constructions provide confines within which new personal constructs are generated. Anyone who has ever submitted a paper to a peer-reviewed journal knows that the prevailing social constructions of a discipline impact on what counts as a legitimate new construction of things; at the same time, a new construction of things, once published in a journal, often ripples through the discipline in a way that

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changes what counts as legitimate. This process of mutual influence requires aggression on the part of both author and peer reviewers.16

Hypothesis 3 ‘The social and personal also impact the biological’. What is deemed ‘biologically adaptive’ changes based on prevailing personal and social construction. Gender roles are an example. The roles that men and women initially developed based on biological evolution have changed (and continue to change) across time (Raskin 2008). For example, over the last 10– 20 years, it has become increasingly common for fathers to stay at home and raise the kids while mothers pursue careers. As such, what constitutes desirable ‘male’ or ‘female’ characteristics changes over time. This in turn influences how people choose their life partners and – to put it bluntly – who has the best chance to make babies. Thus, while our biology initially gave rise to the personal and social, the personal and social in turn not only influence one another, but influence our biology also! ‘Democracy’ is another example of how the social and personal influence what is biologically adaptive. It is an example that grows from social constructions of personhood, which have developed over the last several hundred years. Early humans aggressively developed group decision-making methods based on raw physical strength; as the saying went, ‘might made right’. In other words, group decision-making derived from the biological ability to dominate physically. But somewhere along the line, human beings began to construe themselves as self-determining and free individuals possessing certain inalienable rights.17 As a result, using brute strength to control others became socially unacceptable; it shifted from highly adaptive in early human cultures to progressively more maladaptive as people came to socially construe themselves as having basic human rights. Not only did democratic principles emerge as a new form of life, but the kinds of behaviours one could reasonably engage in and expect social success from also changed.

The End (For Now) So where do I go from here? Well, as far as I can tell, I need to keep grappling with these issues and see where it takes me. That is, I must keep 16

It’s when hostility enters the equation that the peer review process turns ugly! Like the right to use footnotes!

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174 Jonathan D. Raskin personally evolving by being aggressive. The problem is that aggression is often perceived as threatening. Kelly said so himself. Given how threatening aggression can be, it is no wonder that so many people trade reflexivity for certainty! I have tried to remain aggressive in pursuing the implications of constructivism for human psychology. These have not been merely academic pursuits. They have transformed me as a person. I am not the same individual I was during the great stock market crash of eighth grade, or even when I was writing this chapter. Every time one puts one’s constructs to the test, one potentially changes. This is precisely why life is often so threatening and hard. Change is difficult and scary, as well as wondrous and exciting. It is also inevitable, which is why by the time this chapter appears in print, it will serve as a quaint reminder of meanings (not to mention annoying footnotes) past.18

References Burr, V. (1995). An Introduction to Social Constructionism. London: Routledge Butt, T. (1998). Sociality, role and embodiment. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 11, 105–116 Butt, T. (2006). Reconstruing constructivism. Review of Studies in Meaning 2: Bridging the Personal and Social in Constructivist Psychology. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 19, 91–96 Campbell, D. T. (1974). Evolutionary epistemology. In P. A. Schilpp (ed.) The Philosophy of Karl Popper, Vol. 14, Book I. LaSalle, IL: Open Court Chiari, G. (2000). Personal construct theory and the constructivist family: a friendship to cultivate, a marriage not to celebrate. In J. W. Scheer (ed.) The Person in Society: Challenges to a Constructivist Theory. Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag Epting, F. R. (1984). Personal Construct Counseling and Psychotherapy. New York: John Wiley Efran, J. S. & Fauber, R. L. (1995). Radical constructivism: questions and answers. In R. A. Neimeyer & M. J. Mahoney (eds.) Constructivism in Psychotherapy. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Efran, J. S. & Lukens, M. D. (1985). The world according to Humberto Maturana. Family Therapy Networker, May/June, 23–28, 72–75 Fransella, F. (1995). George Kelly. London: Sage

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OK, now for a footnote that isn’t a frivolous exercise in silliness: I’d like to thank two friends and colleagues for their thoughtful feedback on this chapter: Melanie S. Hill and Jay S. Efran. Melanie deserves tenure and a raise for her astute comments on multiple drafts of this chapter, while Jay’s insight and wisdom always help me improve my ideas and how I communicate them.

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Fransella, F. (2006). PCP: A story. Paper presented at the PCP: A Personal Story Conference, Hertfordshire, September Gergen, K. J. (1989). Warranting voice and the elaboration of the self. In J. Shotter & K. J. Gergen (eds.) Texts of Identity. London: Sage Gergen, K. J. (1991). The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life. New York: Basic Books Gergen, K. J. (1994). Realities and Relationships. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Gergen, K. J. (1999). An Invitation to Social Construction. London: Sage Glasersfeld, E. von (1984). An introduction to radical constructivism. In P. Watzlawick (ed.) The Invented Reality: How Do We Know What We Believe We Know? Contributions to Constructivism. New York: Norton Glasersfeld, E. von (1995). Radical Constructivism: A Way of Knowing and Learning. London: Falmer Press Glasersfeld, E. von (2008). Who conceives of society? Constructivist Foundations, 3(2), 59–64. Held, B. S. (1995). Back to Reality: A Critique of Postmodern Theory in Psychotherapy. New York: Norton Held, B. S. (2007). Psychology’s Interpretive Turn: The Search for Truth and Agency in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Kelly, G. A. (1955) The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volumes 1 and 2. New York: Norton (reprinted London: Routledge, 1991) Kelly, G. A. (1957/1969). Hostility. In B. Maher (ed.) Clinical Psychology and Personality: The Selected Papers of George Kelly. New York: John Wiley & Sons Kelly, G. A. (1959). Feelings for and Feelings of. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Kelly, G. A. (1964/1969). The threat of aggression. In B. Maher (ed.) Clinical Psychology and Personality: The Selected Papers of George Kelly. London: John Wiley Kelly, G. A. (1991a). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volume 1. A Theory of Personality. London: Routledge Kelly, G. A. (1991b). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volume 2. Clinical Diagnosis and Psychotherapy. London: Routledge Leitner, L. M. & Faidley, A. J. (2008). Embodiment in experiential personal construct psychotherapy: theoretical and technical concerns. In J. D. Raskin & S. K. Bridges (eds.) Studies in Meaning 3: Constructivist Psychotherapy in the Real World. New York: Pace University Press Leitner, L. M. & Pfenninger, T. (1994). Sociality and optimal functioning. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 7, 119–135 Maturana, H. R. & Poerksen, B. (2004). From Being to Doing: The Origins of the Biology of Cognition, trans. W. K. Koek & A. R. Koek. Heidelberg: Carl-Auer

176 Jonathan D. Raskin Maturana, H. R. & Varela, F. J. (1992). The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding, trans. R. Paolucci. Revised edition. Boston, MA: Shambhala Neimeyer, R. A. & Raskin, J. D. (eds.) (2000). Constructions of Disorder: Meaningmaking Frameworks for Psychotherapy. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Plotkin, H. (2001). Social constructions and evolution. In C. Heyes & D. L. Hull (eds.) Selection Theory and Social Construction: The Evolutionary Naturalistic Epistemology of Donald T. Campbell. Albany, NY: SUNY Press Raskin, J. D. (2004). The permeability of personal construct psychology. In J. D. Raskin & S. K. Bridges (eds.) Studies in Meaning 2: Bridging the Personal and Social in Constructivist Psychology. New York: Pace University Press Raskin, J. D. (2006). Don’t cry for me George A. Kelly: human involvement and the construing of personal construct psychology. Personal Construct Theory & Practice, 3, 50–61 Raskin, J. D. (2008). The evolution of constructivism. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 21, 1–24 Raskin, J. D. & Bridges, S. K. (eds.) (2008). Studies in Meaning 3: Constructivist Psychotherapy in the Real World. New York: Pace University Press Raskin, J. D. & Epting, F. R. (1993). Personal construct theory and the argument against mental illness. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 6, 351–369 Shotter, J. (1993). Cultural Politics of Everyday Life: Social Constructionism, Rhetoric and Knowing of the Third Kind. Toronto: University of Toronto Press Simon, R. (1985). A frog’s eye view of the world. Family Therapy Networker, May/June, 33–43 Szasz, T. (1963). Law, Liberty and Psychiatry: An Inquiry into the Social Uses of Mental Health Practices. New York: Macmillan Szasz, T. (1974). The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct. New York: Harper & Row Szasz, T. (1986). Insanity: The Idea and its Consequences. New York: John Wiley

Chapter 11

The Guilty Choice: Reflections on Dislodgement, Extension and Definition Peter Cummins Peter Cummins is head of Adult Psychological Services (Coventry) in Coventry & Warwickshire Partnership Trust. He has been involved in personal construct psychology since 1975 and gained his diploma in PCP psychotherapy in 1988. For the last ten years he has worked mainly with people with anger problems. He has published several chapters on constructively working with anger and is the editor of Working with Anger: A Constructivist Approach.

Elaborated aspects of theory: choice corollary; core role structure; definition; extension; guilt; time binding

Introduction Throughout this chapter there is an interweaving between the personal and the professional. While personal guilt is a fairly well-recognised idea I do not think that there has been enough focus on clinical guilt. The strength and attraction of personal construct psychology (PCP) for me is its capacity to allow such an interweaving between the personal and the professional. The only other psychological system which seems to me to have the same capacity is the psychoanalytic system. But I could not use this as it has, to my mind, far too many similarities with the Catholicism that I grew up with. To cite but a few: Reflections in Personal Construct Theory. Edited by Richard J. Butler © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Psychoanalytic Long apprenticeship which precludes most normal life Authority derived from analytic succession (going back to Freud) Assumption of the analyst knowing the truth

Catholicism For priesthood long apprenticeship which precludes normal life Apostolic succession Knowing that the faith was the true faith

I trained as a clinical psychologist at a time when the dominant professional ideologies were psychoanalytic and behaviour therapy (the cognitive had not yet been married to behaviour). I knew that I could not use a psychoanalytic framework, and even to a trainee psychologist it was clear that focusing on behaviour only was a very limited way of trying to understand people. When I was introduced to the clinical use of PCP by Miller Mair at the Crichton Royal Hospital in the early 1970s the fundamental nature of PCP and its emphasis on choice within an overall structure of understanding was experienced by me as liberation. The issue that I most needed liberation from was guilt. This guilt was of a very personal kind, initially about the reality of not conforming to the requirements of being a Catholic. I later discovered the importance of what I shall call professional guilt. By this I mean all aspects of guilt which derive from my professional life as a psychologist and the experience of people who come to see me in the role of client. This can be best illustrated by using and adapting the Johari window format (Luft and Ingham 1955). Guilt I know and no one else knows (personal guilt) Guilt we are both aware of (therapeutic guilt)

Guilt my client knows and I don’t (client guilt) Guilt neither of us is aware of and have yet to discover (the goal of therapy)

Personal Guilt I grew up with a sense that there was no choice. All that was required of me was to conform to a set of social and religious norms that were not open to challenge. This position was exemplified by having to learn the catechism by heart. The catechism was in a question-and-answer format, which purported to provide the answer to almost any question that I might

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think of: e.g. ‘Who is God?’ To which the answer (still clear to me more than 50 years later!) was: ‘God is our father in heaven’. Quite what anyone who had a bad experience of parenting was supposed to make of this, I am not sure. There was, however, a real comfort in being inside a system which offered such total security in its correctness. However, the contrast to this was that I had no right to challenge the wisdom of the Church. To do so was to be guilty of one of the seven deadly sins, that of pride. The question would be put: ‘What made me think that I had the right to challenge the True Church!’ Having struggled with this it became clear that there were only two choices. The first was to accept the imperfections of the Church and to work within its structures to try to change what I thought needed to change; the other was to leave. Much later I realised that this was a good working example of Kelly’s choice corollary: ‘a person chooses for himself that alternative in a dichotomised construct through which he anticipates the greater possibility for extension and definition of his system’ (Kelly 1955; 1991a; 1991b). To stay, I decided, was to choose definition, to leave was to choose extension.

Extension and Definition ‘The choice to be made will therefore be that which appears to the individual to facilitate the anticipation of future event, either by broadening the range of convenience of the construct system or by increasing its internal consistence’ (Winter 1992). The most understandable explanation of this process that I know of is the metaphor of travelling (Walker 2003). I can really experience a country by travelling on public transport and extending my construing to take in the new elements I am confronted by while travelling (extension) or I can ‘go on an arranged tour … so someone else deals with the unpredictability’ (definition). I remember one patient telling me that he had gone to Spain on holiday and was very pleased to find an English pub because he did not want to eat ‘that foreign rubbish’. His increase in the internal consistency of his construing of all non-English food was very clear! The ultimate choice I made was to walk away from the entire institution. But, ever since, I have struggled with the construing system that is still embedded within me. The first and strongest result of leaving Catholicism was that of guilt. Guilt was what attracted me to Kelly’s theory! In a discussion of religious guilt, after a paper I had presented at the North American Personal Construct Network conference in 1994 at Butler University, Indianapolis, one of the participants told me that he had been

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brought up within a Southern Baptist tradition which told him that he should be guilty for what his parents had done to bring him into the world! I had to concede that the religious guilt I had grown up with was not as extreme! Kelly’s version of guilt is the awareness of dislodgement of the self from one’s core role structure (Kelly 1955; 1991a; 1991b). I was an expert in the experience of guilt, having grown up in Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s. Ireland at that time was almost totally Catholic (the official proportion of the population that was Catholic was over 90%). I grew up in the total certainty that we were right and that all other religions were wrong. I remember watching the pupils of a Methodist school walking from their residences to the school in a long procession, and wondering if they knew that they were wrong and likely to end up condemned on the last day. I have to laugh now at the complete certainty this memory reveals. At a recent teaching session a course participant told me that she had grown up in Cornwall within a Methodist tradition that was equally certain that they were right and all others were wrong. But within this certainty was the constant struggle to adhere to the standards required to remain within the ‘fold’. From the very beginning we were taught that we had been born with the guilt of original sin, which had been passed down from the original rejection, by Adam and Eve, of the gift of knowledge offered by God. The result of this rejection was made totally real for each one of us. We each had the individual burden of original sin and we were lucky enough to have been born within the one institution that had the means necessary to save us from the consequences of sin. The message was clear: if we did what we had been taught, conformed to the religious rites and practices we had been taught and did so in the right spirit, then we would (probably) achieve salvation and enter heaven. Any failure in this process would lead to the contrast pole to heaven – hell. Hell was lovingly portrayed as a combination of a range of extreme tortures and simply the absence of a loving God. A major motivation for conformity, therefore, was simple fear. The consequences of not being a good Catholic were very clearly spelt out. In my late thirties I spent an afternoon with an English Benedictine monk, trying to resolve some of the conflicts I still felt about the religious framework I had grown up within. Having listened very patiently to my outpouring about the nature of the Church I had grown up in, he finally turned to me and said, ‘Peter, you are a typical Irish Catholic of the 1950s – we are not like that anymore.’ Although he would not have used the language, this is a good example of time binding.

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Time Binding Winter (1992) has suggested that ‘in time binding a construct is regarded as an anachronism which was applicable only to the time when it was formed’. Therapeutically, this is an extremely useful concept, which enables the therapist and client to identify what is currently relevant and what is an ‘anachronism’. This is succinctly put by Gestalt psychology, which suggests that the past is only important insofar as it exists in the present.

1

Personal time binding

This is all good theory and something that really makes intellectual sense to me. But I have been surprised by the struggle it is to reconstrue a whole set of memories which I am now told are anachronisms! According to Wikipedia, ‘an anachronism (from the Greek ανα´ – ‘against’ and χρóνoς – ‘time’) is anything that is temporally incongruous in the time period in which it has been placed. Another sort of parachronism arises when a work based on a particular era’s state of knowledge is read within the context of a later era with a different state of knowledge’. So I discover that not only is my construction system anachronistic, it is also parachronistic!! My ideas/memories are based on a particular state of knowledge and are now being read within the context of current Catholic thinking. As I was told: ‘we are not like that now’. Which ‘only’ leaves me to change constructs that I take as a given, but now have to see as being irrelevant to the time I now live in. ‘Yes, but’ is the most common reaction I experience to having to make such change. This is, of course, accentuated by the reality that it is rarely just a single construct that needs reconstruing; more often there is a constellatory cluster of constructs. For me these included: ‘the one right way’ vs. ‘multiple ways’ ‘being secure in what needed to be done’ vs. ‘having to work it out each time’ ‘sense of purpose’ vs. ‘anything goes’ ‘no personal responsibility’ vs. ‘totally responsible’ Initially, my guilt was simply guilt that I had stopped going to church on Sunday. I had grown up in a society where everyone I knew went to mass, and where church-going was also part of the school week, with a mass as the last event before the weekend. I was probably lucky that I was unaware of Kelly’s warning that ‘a man belonging to a preliterate culture establishes

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for himself a core role structure based on his membership in a tribe. Then he breaks taboo. He no longer belonged. He may not even be able to sustain life in the face of this guilty loss’ (1955; 1991a; 1991b). Given that core role constructs are those that maintain our identity, the starkness of this warning makes perfect sense to me. But PCP helped me to see that there were ways of resolving my guilt that did not take me to the extreme of life-threatening. I think that what Kelly is absolutely brilliant at is subtly redefining the meaning of everyday words, and restructuring them into a set of psychological principles. By adopting these principles the way forward becomes much clearer. Guilt is a very good example. Let’s go back to the definition of guilt I quoted earlier. Guilt is: a) the awareness of dislodgement of the self, b) from one’s core role structure. So if I am dislodged, then what from? What is the nature of this dislodgement? What led to this change? The structure that Kelly provides for understanding guilt also gave me a way of beginning to resolve my guilt. I became clear that I had to look at what was my core role structure and whether it was really true that it had to be structured in accordance with a set of religious principles that had been provided to me. When I begin to reconstrue my core role differently, I have a right to decide. I have a right to see myself as other than tainted with original sin. I have a right to see myself as essentially separate from provided solutions – I was able to reduce the dislodgement, and the guilt began to recede. Guilt, then, in a Kellyan sense, is an integral part of any change. Inevitably as I make major changes to my core role structure I experience guilt. For example, suppose I have always been someone who is generous with money. As I now have children I cannot continue with this. When you ask me for money and I say no, I am likely to experience guilt. This is particularly true if my construct is: ‘generous with money’ vs. ‘inhuman and harsh’. Initially, there is a real risk that I will have massive guilt as I have become inhuman. It seems slightly paradoxical, but one of the things that PCP has done for me is to value the experience of guilt. It tells me that there is some sort of change going on inside me. I have learnt to accept that guilt can be a ‘good thing’ as it is a concomitant of the change that I have been struggling to achieve. The initial choice I made – in this instance to alter my attitude to giving money – while it leads to guilt, also leads to the possibility of reconstruing my whole attitude to money, e.g. now that I do not give money to everyone who asks for it I can be a better parent to my children and provide them with more of their financial needs. In this situation I may have been driven by my sense of guilt that I have not been a good enough provider. But as soon as I start to keep my money to try to resolve this guilt, I become aware that I am not bothered by the fact that I appear to

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have become inhuman. I am put in a position of choosing which is the more important (or superordinate construct) and choosing to explore one particular avenue of change.

2

Clinical time binding

For the last nine years I have worked almost exclusively with people with anger problems. I have written elsewhere of the working approaches my colleagues and I have developed. In the book that I edited (Cummins 2006) I was anxious to ensure that there was a section on developmental anger because of the clinical presentations that I heard again and again. Many of the men that I talked to would identify their anger as having begun to appear between the ages of 10 and 14. It became clear that the events of that age had been pivotal in their development of construing for adulthood and that these constructs had not progressed; rather they had frozen at the particular developmental stage. Larry Leitner’s (2000) idea of structural arrest has been a productive way of understanding this process and the consequent origins of anger. Within structural arrest sits the idea of time binding. For example: Dave’s father left home when Dave was 11. He still remembers his mother telling him that he ‘would have to be the man of the house’. Two years later his mother remarried. Dave’s story, then, was one of a struggle with his stepfather as to who was the true man of the house and a sense of massive invalidation by his mother who had ‘abandoned him’ for this rival man. This struggle was one which Dave ‘lost’, as almost inevitably he failed to detach his mother from her new partner. Dave ended up losing a fight with his mother’s new partner (Dave always refused to give him the status of stepfather), and leaving his childhood home. Fifteen years later Dave had had multiple relationships, all of which ended ‘due to my anger’. A careful assessment revealed that Dave always ended up testing the relationship to destruction, in a futile attempt to gain absolute certainty that this woman would not (like his mother) abandon him. His fear of abandonment meant that this, for him, was the ultimate invalidation. He would ring his partner dozens of times during the day and expected to know who she was with at all times. If his partner wanted to ‘go out with the girls’, then as far as Dave was concerned this could only mean that she was out to meet another man.

Leitner (2000) has taken the idea of time binding and developed it into an elaborate and elegant framework within which Dave’s construing can be clinically understood.

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Clinical Guilt 1. Client guilt Kelly’s idea of dislodgement is extremely powerful. When someone says that they feel guilty, I immediately begin to wonder what they are being dislodged from. This is an extremely useful diagnostic framework. Clinical guilt is experienced by both therapist and patient. I often have taken quite a while to appreciate the subtlety of Kelly’s choice of language, particularly when he was taking everyday words such as guilt and redefining them. I have previously quoted the example of a client who chopped part of his finger off, the first time he ignored an insult (instead of violently replying) (Cummins 2006). His dislodgement was from that of a person who would not have tolerated such an insult without beating up the other person, to a person who had decided that it was a better to just walk on. His guilt was at such an extreme level that the only way he could resolve it was to conclude that he had become such a wuss that he deserved to be punished. Another person I have worked for a long time with told me recently that ‘looking back on it I have hidden in violence for a very long time’. His struggle has been to stop ‘hiding’ in this violent version of a core role and allow another part of himself (as in the idea of ‘community of self” – Mair 1977) to become the dominant core role. Until he said this, although I knew that he had lived a violent core role, I had no idea that he had realised the nature of his core role to this extent, and that he had become ‘guilty’ as he began to stop hiding in this role. Below are three examples of therapeutic guilt: a)

I have been working with Anna for nearly a year. In the initial stages of therapy it was relatively easy to come to understand the nature of the problems she faces. Anna is intelligent and is readily able to state what it is that she needs to do to alter her life. She has written some very clear pieces of poetry which illuminate her dilemma. When she tries to alter her situation she immediately becomes so guilty that she returns to the status quo. She and I are very aware of the nature and origin of her guilt, but struggling to find a viable way of coping with the dislodgement that any attempt at change provokes in her. b) When Jim came to see me his head was shaved and he looked like someone who should be avoided. As therapy progressed the first sign of change was that he grew his hair. Jim started to control his anger and walked past a group of adolescents who jeered at him because of the length of his hair. He did not respond but ignored them. Jim felt bad for weeks afterwards, asking himself what sort of wimp he had

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become that he had allowed himself to be treated with such disrespect (to be ‘dissed’). We both knew what was going on. The anxiety for me as therapist was whether he would be able to cope with the dislodgement and to gradually reinvent his core role so that there was no longer guilt. Jane tells her partner to leave as she is not prepared to put up with his violence any longer. She is then full of guilt (exacerbated by her family) – she had no right to tell Mike to leave; she should give him yet another chance; good mothers do not deprive their children of their father … she has no right to make this choice.

2. Unknown guilt I regularly see at least two new referrals of people with anger problems every week for assessment. Each of these sessions lasts 90 minutes. I start with a very limited history of what has brought the person to make the effort to come to a psychologist. Within the NHS there is at least a threemonth wait to be seen so I know that the person who comes to see me has made a real effort to ensure that we meet. The nature of the assessment is to begin to develop a therapeutic hypothesis about the origins of the person’s anger. They have usually come to see me because of guilt, even if they do not think of it in this way. The central reason they come is the experience of dislodgement. A very common example is a man in his late twenties who told me: ‘I am doing to my children just what my father did to me’ (getting angry both verbally and physically). He clearly had an idea of what a good father does, which does not include his angry behaviour. He was equally clearly dislodged from this idea of fatherhood. He did not experience it as guilt and my job in the assessment was to make the guilt known to both of us so that we could begin to identify the guilt and therefore the nature of the dislodgement. If, for example, part of his concept of fatherhood is that ‘fathers should always be in control’, then he may experience anger every time he sees his children doing something he has previously told them not to do. His verbal/physical outburst can then be understood as part of a frantic effort to stay in control. The dislodgement is from an impossibly demanding concept of fatherhood.

Therapist Guilt and Choice: an Awareness of Dislodgement Mrs Jones, who is a patient I have known for some time, tells me that she has no money and nothing for her children to eat that evening. She is due

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to get her benefit money on the following day. She does not tell me this in the expectation that I am going to be able to resolve the situation; she is just telling me what is happening in her life. She is usually a very good manager of money but this crisis happened because she had an unexpected bill she could not avoid paying. I hope it is fairly obvious what goes through my thoughts: 1. 2.

It is not the place of therapists to lend money to their patients. Lending money would break boundaries and possible destroy our therapeutic relationship – as an experienced therapist I should know better. 3. What would my colleagues think if they knew that I evenly seriously considered lending money? 4. What would my supervisor think? 5. If I lent it on this occasion, then I am setting a precedent and she might ask me again. On the other hand: 6. 7. 8. 9.

There are times when rules are made to be broken. This is one of them. If she did ask again, I would just have to deal with it by working it through with her. No matter which decision I make I will be uncomfortable about it. Why not ask her and present my dilemma?

So I asked her if she wanted me to lend her £10 until the following day. She was surprised, embarrassed and relieved that there might be a solution. I lent her the money. She came in to see me the following day, having received her benefit money and repaid me. This incident happened nearly a year ago. It has never recurred. In the one situation where she was again short of money we were both clear that it was not appropriate for me to lend her money on a second occasion. I was very aware of a sense of potential dislodgement from my core role as therapist. My concerns 1–5 above are clear descriptions of what I see as the core role of being a therapist. They reflect values that I have been trained in, or absorbed from living within the professional identity of a clinical psychologist. I know many who would say that these are not open to challenge. If I am to remain a therapist, then I have no choice but to respect these professional boundaries. And here is where Kelly’s stance on choice comes to my rescue, because I always have a choice. And so I make the guilty choice – I lend money to

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a patient. In doing do I am opting for the extension part of Kelly’s choice corollary. I want to find out what would happen if I did lend money. I know already what the possible options are: 1.

2.

If I don’t make the offer, Mrs Jones will go home and try to sort something out. She might be able to borrow from someone else, or she and her children will go hungry for the evening. I won’t know what happened until I see her next week. If I make the offer, what will happen? The truth is, I do not know. My judgement tells me that it will be a good thing to do and that it will not turn out to be a destructive move.

I was encouraged in this by a thought-provoking seminar presented by Jay Efran at the biennial conference of the North American Personal Construct Network (now the Constructivist Psychology Network) which took place at the University of Memphis in 2004. Efran began by asking people for their thoughts on what was required to carry out psychotherapy. We, his audience, provided as many ‘givens’ as we could: weekly sessions, hourly duration, professional boundaries (and enough others to fill a large whiteboard). Efran then spent the rest of the seminar challenging every ‘given’ that we had provided. One example was the need to see people for an hour. His take on this was that some people could be seen for 20 minutes and the real work was done, while others might need 90 minutes on that particular day. This breaking of ‘givens’ was extremely helpful to me, as I had often experienced just that. I have even run over the hour (when I knew that the next patient had cancelled) because it felt that this was a useful thing to do. But I had always felt guilty about this, as if I was being not so good a therapist. What Efran’s seminar gave me was the courage to choose to make the ‘guilty choice’, to know that whichever option I choose will leave me feeling guilty. But guilt is a process to work with, to understand what is being dislodged and to work on the development of my core role to the extent that allows me to resolve the guilt. I am clear that my decision was the right one, for me and for Mrs Jones, at that particular moment/stage of therapy. I was validated in this by the later episode when she was again short of money but this time it did not feel right to lend. I said exactly this to her and she acknowledged it. In this situation she found a way round her problem which did not involve borrowing. I am equally clear that some of my colleagues were very surprised when I told them that I had lent money. To go back to Kelly’s language, I was aware of dislodgement, and chose to be dislodged and see what happened.

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Choice is at the heart of personal construct theory (PCT) and therapy. One of Kelly’s corollaries sets out to elaborate the nature of choice. The choice corollary states that a person chooses for himself that alternative in a dichotomised construct through which he anticipates the greater possibility for extension and definition of his system. If I break that down there are five sections to it: 1. The idea of alternatives. 2. How accurate my anticipation is. 3. The greater possibility. 4. Extension. 5. Definition. I still struggle with the idea of alternatives. Have I always got a choice? ‘I had no choice … she made me do it … I had no alternative … we had to do it … anyone else would have done the same in the situation I was in’. Again and again I try to persuade myself that I did not have responsibility for some less than ideal outcome of a decision that I had taken. Again and again over time I come to realise that I had indeed chosen. Every part of my life reflects the series of choices that have led to my being in the life position that I occupy. This was first clearly illustrated to me by Miller Mair, who introduced me to the American poet Robert Frost. In Frost’s poem ‘The road not taken’ are the lines: ‘Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less travelled by’ (1920). At each stage of a decision there are at least two options that I have to decide between. Sometimes I have taken the road which has been less travelled by. More often I wonder whether the choice I made was actually the more travelled road. I end up questioning how accurate my anticipation of the potential of the choice I made was. Although I have no space to stray from the central focus of this chapter, there is a whole section in PCP on the nature of anticipation and experience that I have found illuminating in understanding my own anticipations. The question of whether life choices were the ‘right’ ones is something which always leaves me wondering which option would allow for the greatest possibility. I have never forgotten the experience I had of a training placement with older adults. For many of them the problem they faced was retiring, looking back on their lives and regretting the choices that they had made in their lives; or looking back and realising that they had never had the freedom to make real choices, but had felt forced to accept what seemed possible. Thirty years later this still haunts me – that I may reach old age and regret the choices that I made.

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Every part of therapy reflects the series of choices being made by both myself and the person I am working with. And yet despite this central place there has been little written about choice and PCP. The PCP database reveals that the majority of what has been written has focused on the nature of vocational choice. There is a very good chapter on the nature of choice in PCP in Butt’s book (2008) on George Kelly but I have been able to find relatively little about clinical choices. In his chapter on the choice corollary Boxer (1982) uses the example of managerial and musician choice. The most recently published book about constructivist psychotherapy (Raskin & Bridges 2008) does not list choice in its index. Yet every part of therapy reflects the series of choices being made by me and the person I am working with. How did we both end up in my office – you as client/patient, me as psychologist? Most of the people I see come as a result of a series of events in their lives that have finally become labelled as problematic and deserving the attention of an ‘expert’. It is rare to hear someone say that they ‘made the decision entirely on their own’ to seek professional help. I have specialised in working with people who are described as having anger problems for nearly ten years. The two most common reasons for coming to see me are: 1. This is the third relationship that I have destroyed through my angry behaviour. I don’t want to destroy any more relationships. 2. I am beginning to do to my children what was done to me and I want them to have a better childhood than I had. In both scenarios the element of choice is very clear. In the first, the person did not see themselves as being responsible; their choice was to see the problem as residing in their partner. They kept up this stance as long as possible; most of them had clearly been hostile in a Kellyan sense, but finally were not able to maintain their assertion that the fault lay entirely with the other person. In the second case there is a clear choice: I do not want to repeat the experiences of my childhood, this time with me as the perpetrator of anger and/or violence. As Epting (1984) puts it: ‘the choices that exist for the person are the choices that exist between the poles of the construct’. The central problem is often that there is only one pole of the construct available ‘Angry’ v. ……. ?

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I have written elsewhere of the alternatives that people develop to being angry (Cummins 2006). These include being passive, a wimp, a wuss, relaxed or empty. For many people there is no good alternative to being angry. For some not being angry carries a very real risk, as they live in social networks where their anger protects them from physical violence. Their anger gives them a reputation that means they are not challenged. The first stage of therapy is therefore to begin to explore the implications of anger and the implications of change: what sort of life is available if you are not angry? Epting (1984) goes on to clarify that the ‘choice made is in the direction where the person sees the best opportunity for the most complete understanding of his or her world at the moment. This can be either in the direction of a more comprehensive view (extension) of the situation or in the direction of more detailed knowledge of the matter (definition).’ The choice is then made to seek help. But making that choice is, of course, only the beginning of the therapeutic journey. I have always liked the metaphor of therapy as a journey or pilgrimage (Kopp 1976). Every journey is a series of choices as the poem that I quoted earlier from Frost beautifully illustrates. It is even a choice as to where to end the journey. I have been working with Ed for four years. When he first came he had a history of fairly extreme violence. He himself had seen relatives who were even more violent. He had realised that for most of them their violence had not worked out well as their life progressed. Ed was determined to try something else. In the four years I have worked with him he has made real progress and is now very different. I have recently begun to talk to him about ending. This is a difficult process for both of us. Over the years I have grown fond of him, despite his sometimes extreme violence. I am very aware of the importance to him of our relationship. In a recent session I was talking to him about the nature of choice, and the reality that we were coming to the end of the therapeutic process. In essence I was telling him that he now had a choice – he could choose to be violent (definition) or he could use another approach which he has developed over the time I have been working with him (extension). Ed thought about what I was saying and replied: ‘I know I did those things. I am still going to be bad – I am worried that if I make this choice [to leave the bad behind and to become the new Ed] then it won’t stick, so my choice was bad. I know that you want me to get to the other side and see me GO, but what if I don’t have the skills to achieve on the other side?’ The clarity of this leaves me feeling quite humble. I have to confess that as soon as he said this I asked him if I could use it as I was struggling with

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writing this chapter. He beautifully illustrates the dilemmas of guilt and choice. His core self was around violence. He became aware that this was not a good way to proceed, could not deal with this conflict and ended up being admitted on a compulsory order to the mental health unit. On discharge I was asked to see him. As I have already described, his initial struggle was with the implications of not being violent. As he began to change and experiment with different ways of relating to people, he became aware of how proud his parents were of the efforts he was making. His core role began to change to that of new Ed who was not violent. This new Ed talked to people and tried to understand their point of view. New Ed is still very fragile and can be easily challenged by anyone who does not reciprocate – e.g. noisy neighbours who did not respond to reasonable requests were then told what would happen if they did not quieten down. Unfortunately, violent Ed had far more effect than reasonable Ed! New Ed is very aware of what an achievement it is to allow him to grow. He knows that if he can survive, then what he can build is much more robust than anything that violent Ed can produce. Both he and I are aware of just what a journey it has been. And as with most journeys, coming to the end provokes both pride – ‘I know that you want to see me GO’ – and sadness as we both contemplate the ending of a relationship that has meant a lot to both of us. And here is the last part of the reflexive nature of PCP. Therapist sad! Surely the job is to cure and move on. But my sadness is because after the initial struggle to develop a therapeutic relationship I have come to respect the sheer courage of Ed’s journey and I have been validated by the degree of trust that he has placed in me. To end this relationship and begin at the beginning with someone else is a wrench. Yet the acknowledgement of this sadness is in itself a critical part of ending therapy. Many clients still harbour the idea that I will simply move on to the next task and not remember them. It is profound validation for both of us to acknowledge the importance of the therapeutic relationship in a personal sense. Again, coming back to Kelly’s genius with words; he called his theory personal construct psychology. It is personal, involving all participants in the interactions of living. In conclusion, therefore, I am clear that people often become very angry when they are forced to see that at every stage of their life they are making choices and are not as helpless as they often think they are. When I or my client makes a wrong or right choice the results are often immediately apparent. These results often lead to the experience of guilt, both personally and professionally. It was a real surprise to me to realise that there are many different ways of dealing with guilt and that I could use guilt as a way of monitoring my own change and that of my clients. It

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was also a surprise to realise how time bound some of my core constructs were and the importance of reconstruing what had become anachronistic. To resolve guilt I have to make choices and I then have to understand the position that choice puts both me and my clients in. The idea that even the appropriate choice, which both I and client agree is the right thing to do, still leads to guilt is often a revelation to both client and his or her network of relationships. What lies behind this guilt is the result of dislodgement from the existing position/state that both the client and I began from. The resolution of such guilt can be well understood using Kelly’s ideas of extension and definition. This resolution of guilt is a key way of becoming aware of the experience of change. And this is every bit as true for me as it is for the people I have had the honour to call my clients.

References Boxer, P. (1982). The flow of choice: the choice corollary. In J. C. Mancuso & J. R. Adams-Webber (eds.) The Construing Person. New York: Praeger Butt, T. (2008). George Kelly: The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Cummins, P. (ed.) (2006) Working with Anger: A Constructivist Approach. Chichester: Wiley Epting, F. R. (1984). Personal Construct Counseling and Psychotherapy. New York: John Wiley Frost, R. (1920). The road not taken. www.Bartleby.Com-Great books on Line Kelly, G. A. (1955) The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volumes 1 and 2. New York: Norton (reprinted London: Routledge, 1991) Kelly, G. A. (1991a). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volume 1. A Theory of Personality. London: Routledge Kelly, G. A. (1991b). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volume 2. Clinical Diagnosis and Psychotherapy. London: Routledge Kopp, S. (1976). If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him: The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients. New York: Bantam Books Leitner, L. M. (2000). Diagnosing human meaning making: an experiential constructivist approach. In R. A. Neimeyer & J. D. Raskin (eds.) Constructions of Disorder. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Luft, J. & Ingham, H. (1955). The Johari window: a graphic model of interpersonal awareness. Proceedings of the Western Training Laboratory in Group Development. Los Angeles: UCLA Mair, J. M. M. (1977). The community of self. In D. Bannister (ed.) New Perspectives in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press

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Raskin, J. D. & Bridges, S. K. (eds.) (2008). Studies in Meaning 3: Constructivist Psychotherapy in the Real World. New York: Pace University Press Walker, B. M. (2003). Travelling: ‘We don’t call it travelling: we call it living’. In J. W. Scheer (ed.) Crossing Borders: Going Places. Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag Winter, D. A. (1992). Personal Construct Psychology in Clinical Practice: Theory, Research and Application. London: Routledge

Chapter 12

Different Readings of Personal Construct Theory Trevor Butt Trevor Butt trained as a clinical psychologist and worked in the NHS before becoming a teacher and an academic. He has published widely in personal construct theory and phenomenology, and is the co-editor of Personal Construct Theory and Practice. He is the author of Invitation to Personal Construct Psychology (with Viv Burr, 2004), Understanding People (2004) and George Kelly and the Psychology of Personal Constructs (2008).

Elaborated aspects of theory: choice corollary; credulous approach

My Introduction to Personal Construct Theory When I trained as a clinical psychologist in the early 1970s, the job we were being prepared for was mainly one of psychological tester. IQ and personality tests were almost routinely administered to psychiatric patients referred to clinical psychology departments. Just what the point of all this was wasn’t clear. ‘Therapy’ was something that psychiatrists did and test results were supposed to help them in diagnosis, although it was difficult to see how treatment varied in accordance with a 16PF profile or IQ score. But this was a time of transition. Psychologists were becoming dissatisfied with their restricted role and wanted more involvement in therapy. And behaviour therapy was the most available route to doing something useful. My supervisor had been the outstanding behaviour therapist Professor H. Gwynne Jones. Gwynne had taught me that any psychological assessment Reflections in Personal Construct Theory. Edited by Richard J. Butler This chapter was adapted from the original “Konstruktivismus und phaenomonologische Perspektive”, by Butt (2004). First published in Identitaet in der Gescellschaft. This material has been reproduced with permission of the publishers, Psychosozial-Verlag.

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should be tailored to the individual patient; there was no point in routine testing that made no contribution to a therapeutic plan. I now think of Gwynne as a pragmatist. This was a term not yet in my vocabulary, but it was one that was to be elaborated later when I became embedded in the psychology of personal constructs. Even then I was toying with personal construct methods, even if this was divorced from the theory. My MSc dissertation drew on a succession of repertory grids administered to a patient with whom I carried out desensitisation (Butt & Jones 1976). In the mid-1970s I worked with clients diagnosed as socially phobic. With a colleague, I ran individual and group sessions in social skills training. We found that many clients derived enormous benefit from the therapy – taking control of their lives, experimenting with their behaviour and feeling better about themselves. This I saw, and indeed still see, as the emancipatory aspect of behaviour therapy; what you are is what you do, and a sedimented self-image does not necessarily preclude radical change. However, we also found that others – perhaps half – the clients derived little or no benefit from the procedure. What was more, we could find no assessment procedure which predicted success. Here I saw the possibility of some clinical research, and I embarked on a PhD under the supervision of Gwynne Jones. He suggested Don Bannister as an advisor. Don had just moved back to Yorkshire and was doing a little teaching at the University of Leeds. At this time, I had no real interest in personal construct theory (PCT), and Don didn’t try to convert me. But he persuaded me that it presented an ideal framework for a PhD, even though I didn’t have to subscribe to the theory. The problem with social learning theory was, he contended, that it offers only localised truths about behaviour. PCT, on the other hand, is one of the last ‘grand theories’ that presents interesting propositions about the nature of construing that may be tested. The social skills approach deals only with the ‘how’ of change, and ignores the ‘why’. Perhaps remaining ‘socially unskilled’ represents a person’s elaborative choice, a concept that is entirely untheorised in social learning theory. An understanding of each client’s construct system might make this choice intelligible and enable prediction about who might or might not benefit from the therapy. My PhD thus focused on a test of Kelly’s choice corollary.

The Choice Corollary The choice corollary was one that particularly intrigued Don. On the face of it, it presents a paradox: people will choose the alternative that for them presents the best opportunities for extension or definition in their construing. Since each person both extends and defines at different times, how can we

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predict which will be their choice now? We’re left with the conclusion that whatever they do is what their construct system requires in terms of elaboration at that moment. If this turns out to be something that the observer thinks is self-defeating or even just plain daft, that was still the elaborative choice – it must have been. Don was much impressed with Fay Fransella’s research with stutterers (1970; 1972), and a PhD by Alan Radley (1973), which he had supervised. He thought that ‘there was a missing corollary here’. In public, Don was a fierce defender of Kelly, but in private, he could be quite critical of aspects of the theory. He looked forward to the day when he could extend it. Don and I became good friends, and together were part of a group that started out as an academic enterprise but ended up as a social one. I wrote drafts of six introductory chapters, reviewing the literature on social skills training, social learning theory and PCT. In this exercise, and in conversations with Don, who clearly lived the theory, I became taken with PCT almost without realising it. I read Radley’s thesis, as well as two publications (1977; 1978) of his in the personal construct literature. I was impressed by his bringing together of the work of Kelly and G.H. Mead, and also by his development of personal construct measures tailored exactly to his research questions. I took a leaf out of his book and devised a new grid in which clients considered their ‘target behaviours’ in terms of their core constructs, and carried out several pilot studies which were encouraging, and which I also wrote up (Butt & Bannister 1987). Then came the first big experiment, in which I used this grid to assess clients in a social skills group run by other therapists, with the aim of predicting who would and would not benefit from the approach. The results were quite random; one might as well have used the toss of a coin to make predictions. Because of events in my life – a new job, a baby – as well as laziness and a feeling of discouragement, I never got around to analysing the results properly and writing them up. Then Gwynne died suddenly and Don became ill and died soon after. My PhD collapsed. At this point, I suppose it should have been easy to turn away from PCT, just as I had from the PhD. But I was now hooked by the approach. The way in which this began is interesting. So often, we find ourselves taking a path that in hindsight looks clear enough. At the time, though, it’s not at all clear to us what we’re up to. We’re ‘following our noses’. It seems to make sense, but not a sense we can articulate as we are acting. There is construing here all right, but it is construing in action, not thought. Kelly knew that change was often like this. That’s why clients are asked to approach fixed roles with a propositional attitude. They are not to adopt it uncritically or try to jettison their normal ways of acting. Instead, like the reader of The Psychology of Personal Constructs (Kelly 1955) they are asked to try on new psychological clothes but with no obligation to buy, so to speak.

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What is even more interesting is that PCT came alive for me because the choice corollary had a relevance to my own situation. In my new job as a lecturer, I was having difficulty. Standing up and talking authoritatively didn’t come naturally to me. Like so many lecturers at the start of their career, I had to learn my lines mechanically, often reading woodenly from them in front of a class. I had plenty of good models to copy, and plenty of good encouraging advice and feedback from my new colleagues, but it didn’t dispel the feeling that I was a fraud. Just because I had got away with a performance today didn’t help me with a performance tomorrow. So, one day I would be failing to benefit from reinforcement and participant modelling and the next I would be offering this sort of therapy myself to social skills trainees. Increasingly, it seemed to me that this was a problem of fit. The way other lecturers did the job was fine for them, but it wasn’t my way – it just didn’t fit. Time and again, Don’s wisdom about skills training came back to me: it only focuses on how one does things and assumes that the ‘trainee’ wants to do it. It’s all about means and not ends. Here is Kelly on what therapists too often construe as ‘resistance’: Over and over again, it appeared that our clients were making their choices not in terms of the alternatives we saw open to them, but in terms of the alternatives they saw open to them. It was their network of constructions that made up the daily mazes they ran, not the pure realities that appeared to us to surround them. (Kelly 1958/1969a)

Each of us has an individual perspective and each has a core, a self-theory, into which any new behaviour has to fit.

Questioning the Corollary So what had gone wrong with my research? Why had the choice corollary not helped us to predict who would and would not benefit from social skills training? We know that Kelly advocated the use of ‘brittle hypotheses’. And I had made predictions based on the theory that had proved of no value. Had I operationalised the construing badly? Was the corollary actually useless? Here I was fortunate to work alongside sociologists, who were influential in making me reconsider my assumptions about research. Perhaps I had been carried along too uncritically with psychology’s positivism, its notion of causality and the dualism that seems to pervade all its theories, including PCT. I had thought of ‘constructs’ as cognitive entities in some way behind a person’s behaviour. So new questions arose for me in the

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wake of the failed experiment. What is inside and what is outside the person? Do ‘constructs’ inhabit the person? Do they have the status of personal cognitions? Is behaviour really the result of an ‘internal’ construing process? In Kelly’s (1955) view, a failed experiment ought to generate new questions; this is how the experience cycle is supposed to work, after all. Kelly acknowledged his debt to John Dewey, whose ‘philosophy and psychology can be read between many of the lines of the psychology of personal constructs’ (Kelly 1955). The ‘man-as-scientist’ model that PCT is built on comes from Dewey’s pragmatism, along with the emphasis on learning from failed ventures: Even with his best thought, a man’s proposed course of action may be defeated. But in as far as his act is a truly a manifestation of intelligent choice, he learns something: – as in a scientific experiment, an inquirer may learn through his experimentation, his intelligently directed action, quite as much, or even more, from a failure, than from a success. (Dewey 1910/1993)

It was this spirit of pragmatism that kept me in the orbit of PCT. The way that I had interpreted the psychology of personal constructs had led to narrow and tight predictions. But theories are there to help us think, to produce fertile questions, not simple answers. Kelly (1955) insisted that a good psychological theory needs to be stated in fairly elastic, abstract terms, and PCT is a relatively content-less theory. There are no stages of personal development, no oedipal complexes, no diagnostic categories. Instead, we have propositions about psychological processes, and if (as I had done) we rush to frame these in behavioural terms, it is not that the theory is at fault. So, I began to try to reinterpret construing, construct systems, core structures and choice – all the elements with which I had been engaged – along different lines. My subsequent writing (and eventual PhD by publication) focused on a phenomenological reading of PCT.

Phenomenology Kelly constantly declared that PCT could not be subsumed under any other theoretical approach. In his 1955 work, he underlined the similarities between PCT and what he termed ‘neo-phenomenology’. But elsewhere (Kelly 1966/1969) he misunderstood phenomenology, mistaking it for a type of introspectionism. Holland (1977) points out that it was a very partial, selective reading of European phenomenologists that was taken up

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by the American theorists Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow. It is likely that this was the only exposure to phenomenology that Kelly had. Phenomenology was a methodology devised by Edmund Husserl in the early twentieth century, to overcome the same Cartesian dualisms that were targeted by pragmatism, the tradition in which Kelly wrote. For phenomenologists, the dualisms person/world and self/other are dialectical, where focus on either pole misses the vitality of the relationship between them. Husserl developed Franz Brentano’s concept of intentionality which refers to a correlation between the person and the world, or construct and event. There is no consciousness without the world, and there is no ‘lived world’ without the person. Phenomenologists reject the idea that there is a real world (of events) behind the world of appearances (or construction) that we represent to ourselves in perception. Instead, all we have is the lived world – a psychology of personal constructs. ‘Intention’ emphasises that we are always conscious of something. We cannot experience desire unless it is desire for something, fear unless it is of something, thought unless it is about something. We are intimately connected or correlated with the world. Husserl’s vocabulary of noema and noesis (world and the way it is experienced) translates approximately into Kelly’s ‘events’ and ‘constructs’. There is a real world of events beyond our comprehension, one that would exist if humankind had never graced the surface of the earth. But all we can know is the lived world, and our construction of it. Phenomenological reflection is not to be equated with introspection, a subjective, mentalistic exercise that examines internal mental representations of a real external world (Ihde 1986). Instead, this reflection, or phenomenological reduction, attempts to get beyond our natural ways of seeing, our taken-for-granted assumptions, in a return ‘to the things themselves!’ (Husserl, cited in Ihde 1986). So the reduction, far from being an examination of the contents of the mind, is an exhortation to stand back and put aside our habitual constructions in a fresh look at the world of events. A close and fresh look at events always reveals more than is apparent from our ‘natural attitude’ – that collection of folk wisdoms and assumptions that make up the social reality that pre-dates each of us as individuals. Events will bear many more constructions than are grasped immediately. This clearly parallels Kelly’s philosophical position (derived from Dewey 1993) of constructive alternativism. However, although Husserl addressed both the subject/object and the self/other, dualism, he was less exercised by that of mind/body. He was considered by those who followed him – Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty – to have privileged reason with his proposal of a transcendental ego, an ‘I’ that in some way extracted itself from the

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intentional correlation of event/construct. For Husserl it was as though the intellect preceded the social and physical world. It is this ego that reflects on experience, or construction, and makes further sense of it (Ihde 1986). The existential phenomenologists demoted this transcendental ego, emphasising our essential being in the world (Heidegger 1927/1962), or the inevitable perspectival status of our constructions, resulting from our embodied nature (Merleau-Ponty 1962). For these existentialists, the reflections of the ego are the last development in the event–construction–construer structure. Event and construction are inextricably intertwined; and this intentional correlation denies a separation of knower and known. For Kvale (1992), Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on our perspectival construing foreshadows the development of postmodern thought. We are fundamentally pre-reflective beings, who often report feeling most alive when lost in a task. Ihde (1986) paraphrases Merleau-Ponty: ‘I am outside myself in the world of my project’. It becomes apparent that this mirrors Mead’s view that humankind is primarily impulsive and only conscious and reflective through interaction. In Kelly’s vocabulary, we construe in action, we do not possess constructs. For the existential phenomenologists, ‘existence precedes essence’ (Sartre 1958). This means that the person as a reflective consciousness is the last development in the intentional correlation. We are unable to adopt a privileged intellectual high ground, as our projects are primarily existential and interpersonal, rather than intellectual. Dewey’s and Kelly’s view of the person as self-inventing is clearly similar to Sartre’s, although Kelly’s ambiguity about core structure (Butt, Burr & Epting 1997) might be seen as placing him between transcendental and existential phenomenology. Perhaps following Dewey (see Mounce 1997), he seems reluctant to reject the idea of a unitary core self, while at the same time acknowledging its invented, constructed status. Existentialists see personal integrity as an achievement, rather than a given. The concept ‘existence’ emphasises our intersubjectivity, the commonality of our construing. The world of events will not bear just any construction; the world exhibits a resistance to our perception of it (Merleau-Ponty 1962). We certainly cannot decide to see it in any way that we want, as the Gestalt figures demonstrate in visual perception; our purposes and our embodied nature limit what we can make of things. Our projects in the world are primarily practical (existential) and not intellectual. Our constructions are both personal and social, but also limited to what is ‘afforded’ (Gibson 1979) by the world of events. Nevertheless, Ihde convincingly demonstrates that there are many more ways to see the Necker cube than the two inversions mentioned in the orthodox psychology of perception. The educated eye, much like the educated palate of the wine connoisseur, is able to detect many

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non-normative perceptions. Using hermeneutic techniques implied by the phenomenological reduction, the viewer is able to stand back from ‘sedimented’ constructions. In this way, the world is both found and made, discovered and invented. Merleau-Ponty (1962) distinguished between what he termed ‘objective thought’ and the ‘lived world’ (Hammond, Howarth & Keat 1991). Objective thought pervades the natural attitude of naïve realism. It maintains a clear separation of subject and object, and proposes that the world consists of separate objects whose dimensions and properties can ultimately be known and measured. Because these objects exist independently of each other, ‘external relations’ (that is, causal relations) exist between them. So the pressure, volume and temperature of a gas can be thought of as ‘external’ to each other, and Boyle’s law tells us how to estimate one property accurately if we have knowledge of the other two. Unfortunately, the lived world is messier than this; everything in it is ambiguous, open to interpretation. Psychological entities, like thought, emotion and behaviour, are not separate from each other. Historically, psychologists have separated the person into these different faculties, but our experience tells us that how we think, feel and act is intimately related. Therefore, ‘internal relations’ apply, where one feature of the lived world cannot be specified without implying the others. When I wave enthusiastically to a friend, it is not because of a feeling of warmth and friendliness, and my feelings are not caused by a cognitive construction of friend/enemy along which the person is placed. Friendliness is the whole configuration.

PCT and Objective Thought So the person in existential phenomenology is certainly not that straw man imagined by Kelly (1958/1969), living in a world of dreams and unconnected to reality. But neither is it the person of naïve realism, who is in contact with the real world via their senses and represents this reality in an internal cognitive space. However, Kelly famously championed the ‘manas-scientist’, a person primarily in the business of prediction and control. PCT can be read as both a somewhat positivistic cognitive theory, as well as a phenomenological approach. One way of understanding the two readings is to see them as occupying the two poles of the lived world/objective thought construct. PCT is open to a reading that implicitly rests on the natural attitude of dualism and, moreover, on the causal explanations that inhabit the objective thought of the natural sciences. This assumes the existence of a con-

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struct system within the person which is the cause of behaviour. PCT’s methodology can be seen as providing a sort of psychic X-ray, in which an individual’s system of internal constructs is revealed and can then be the focus of therapeutic attention. When the construct system is modified, behaviour will right itself in its wake. The natural attitude of today leads us to incorporate a dualism that sees minds inside bodies and constructs behind behaviour. When practitioners and academics read PCT, they are likely to interpret it within this framework, and much of the published work in the field demonstrates this. Science is, after all, the most valued enterprise as we enter the new millennium, and both status and material resources flow towards its practitioners. The public wants psychologists to be able to tell them why people think, feel and act as they do, what motivates serial killers, psychopaths and fascist dictators. People want to know exactly how traumas impact on them, and what the causal relationship is between childhood experience and adult life. Prizes are awarded for being able to successfully profile offenders, predict behaviour and explain neurotic misery. There are few for understanding the life worlds of others, aiming to interpret their actions. Merleau-Ponty (1941/1983) saw Gestalt psychology and psychoanalysis as the most promising psychologies of his day. Both pick out detailed and important aspects of the life-world and both can be read phenomenologically. Yet both fell under the spell of objective thought, looking for brain states that explain perception, or childhood experiences that cause adult neurosis. The English translation of Freud translated the German it, I and over-I as id, ego and superego. The Latin terms transform ways of experiencing the self into structures and entities within the person. Freud’s phenomenological insights were striking, but he wanted to be recognised as a scientist. Merleau-Ponty’s project was to rescue the insights of these theories; to interpret them in terms of the lived world rather than objective thought. And Kelly also wrote in two voices. He celebrated scientific endeavour in psychology, indeed recommended the man-as-scientist as a metaphor that empowered the person. This can locate PCT in the camp of the natural sciences where causal explanations are sought within the individual for his or her behaviour. ‘Constructs’ are seen as entities that inhabit the individual rather than construing as a process that goes on primarily between them. Yet Kelly also saw the person as defying description and categorisation, was sceptical about laws in psychology and doubted the value of sequential explanation. Even in his fundamental postulate he refused to talk of cognition, affect and behaviour, preferring to consider ‘a person’s processes’ in an implicit acknowledgement of the internal relations that obtain here. It

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is this latter voice that constitutes a phenomenological interpretation – or as Chiari & Nuzzo (1996) term it, a ‘hermeneutic’ constructivism. Just as Merleau-Ponty’s thought may be drawn on to achieve a different reading of Gestalt psychology and psychoanalysis, so it can help us see PCT as a methodology for understanding the lived world.

PCT and the Lived World The lived world is ambiguous. In his 1955 work, Kelly maintained a separation of events in the real world, and our individual constructions of them. This can be seen as a Kantian position, distinguishing between noumena and phenomena. Nevertheless, it is the alternative constructions that the personal construct psychologist has to work with. In his later work, Kelly (1958/1969) further emphasised this, claiming that he was ‘no longer a realist’ in the sense that the psychotherapist has to work not with what has happened to clients, but how they interpret it: ‘There is nothing so obvious that its appearance is not altered when it is seen in a different light’ (Kelly 1958/1969b). His advocating of the credulous approach precisely mirrors Husserl’s phenomenological attitude in contrast to the natural attitude. The phenomenological attitude is one of openness to new possibilities and constructions. Ihde (1986) outlines the method, or phenomenological reduction, that facilitates this attitude: 1.

Bracketing – the analyst attempts to bracket off their preconceptions in understanding phenomena. 2. Phenomenological description – phenomena are described, but causal explanation is avoided. 3. Horizontalisation – No assumptions about relative importance of phenomena are made. We can clearly see Kelly’s (1955) ‘credulous approach’ in these rules. Clients’ descriptions of their experience will be couched in terms of their construct systems; the relationships between their dimensions of meaning. The therapist must bracket off any impulse to rush to explanation based on his or her system. Careful listening is required. The credulous approach is the phenomenological attitude. Kelly insisted that the credulous approach does not imply that the therapist should be captured by the client’s construction. Instead, he or she should be able to subsume it, recognising it as one valid formulation. In phenomenological terms, it is this merging of horizons that enables intersubjectivity to emerge. In everyday life, our engagement

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with the world is primarily pre-reflective, in front of what we can say about it, but nonetheless intentional. In psychotherapy, the therapist helps clients reflect on their intentionality in a hope that this produces increased agency and power of choice. PCT offers us a range of extraordinarily powerful techniques for helping people to spell out their intentionality. Other broadly phenomenological approaches rely exclusively on lengthy interviews for this purpose (Moustakas 1994). The problem is always how the interviewer manages to bracket off his or her interpretations from those of the interviewee. Generally, this is achieved through two strategies: a recognition of this danger is itself seen as a safeguard, and interpretations are always shared with the interviewee, allowing for his or her meanings to predominate. Kellyans have always recognised the importance of reflexivity, but more importantly, their techniques guarantee fewer projections on the part of the therapist/interviewer. So, in laddering, it is clients who trace paths through their construct systems, and in the computer analysis of grids, any construct and element constellations that emerge may be a surprise to either party. In his extraordinarily detailed suggestions for analysis of self-characterisations, Kelly (1955) lists many strategies for operationalising the credulous approach. PCT techniques therefore offer truly innovative ways of extending the phenomenological attitude. In the lived world, internal relations apply. In his fundamental postulate, Kelly refused to talk of thought, feeling and action, and instead insists on referring to a ‘person’s processes’. Construing is not just a cognitive affair, but is internally related to feeling and action. There is no causal relationship between separate human faculties. We should think of construing as occurring in action, and not behind it. People do not always deliberate on what they are doing. Nevertheless, their action is intentional; as the choice corollary suggests, what is important is what they might have done, but did not (Kelly 1962/1969). In his personal construct analysis of the Eden myth, Kelly discusses it in terms of the three choices that are entailed: companionship/loneliness; innocence/knowledge; good/evil. There is an emphasis of constructs as relating to action; there is a shift in the emphasis on the meaning of the ‘personal construct’, stressing choice: a construct is at heart a black and white affair, rather than a scale of grays. Indeed, it is precisely because constructs do comprise pairs of sharply drawn contradistinctions that they enable man to make his choices, and get on with the human enterprise. (Kelly 1966/1969)

The model of humankind is ‘the person in motion’, being carries along in the stream of life, making choices as they present themselves pre-reflectively.

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Constructs, then, are not to be thought of as personal cognitions in any way causing behaviour, but are the configuration of thought, feeling and action, intentionally directed through our projects in the world. Kelly, like Merleau-Ponty, recognised that internal relationships existed not only within the person, so to speak, but between the person and the world. In his last writing (Kelly 1958/1969), Kelly rejected what he called ‘sequential explanation’, external causal relationships between events and construing. Behaviour is ‘man’s independent variable’. This may be seen as overstating individual agency, but is surely at least an empowering heuristic for a clinician whose task is to help individuals reconstrue their lives, which is, after all, the focus of convenience of PCT. But certainly Kelly was moving towards what phenomenologists advocate: describing, contextualising and understanding action rather than explaining it: ‘Explanation, in a humanistic or psychological sense seems to me to be a matter of seeing where something fits into a sequence.’

Concluding Remarks So in one sense I’ve ended up where I started – thinking about choice, but thinking about it differently. Talk of ‘constructs’ makes us think of cognitive entities, somewhere inside us. We want to map them and see how they cause behaviour. We should talk instead of ‘construing’ – of human processes rather than structures. This reminds us that concepts like emotion, cognition and behaviour are our distinctions, and they don’t exist separately in nature. Sometimes they are useful distinctions, but often they are not – and certainly not when we ask what causes what. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we frequently hear that the public has lost its faith in science because it has failed to deliver on its promises. One reason for any loss of faith in psychology as a science might be the overextension of objective thought into the lived world. Psychologists have wanted to predict and control to an unrealistic extent. Objective thought leads us to separate person from world and mind from body, and then look for external relationships between them. Interestingly, Dewey cautioned against this nearly a century ago: The question of integration of the mind/body in action is the most practical of all questions we can ask of our civilisation. Until this integration is effected in the only place where it can be carried out, in action itself we shall continue to live in a society in which a soulless and heartless materialism is compensated for by a soulful but futile idealism and spiritualism. (Dewey 1910/1993)

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We can now see an even more irrational split between this materialism and idealism. While biological psychologists seem to posit a genetic explanation for just about anything, in everyday life people also draw on mysticism to understand themselves, albeit in a causal manner. It is not uncommon to find intelligent individuals identifying themselves by their star sign, or explaining behaviour in terms of energy or karma. Dewey’s pragmatism and Kelly’s personal construct theory both resonate with phenomenology in the call to focus on action. This focus leads us to recognise that we cannot separate out thought, feeling and behaviour, any more than we can see a clear boundary between the personal and the social world. When constructivists accept the ambiguity of the lived world they can contribute significantly to the understanding of it, while at the same time forgoing the inevitably disappointing project of trying to mechanistically explain it.

Acknowledgement An earlier version of this chapter was published in J. Scheer (ed.) Identity in Society. Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag.

References Butt, T. W. (2004). Understanding People. Basingstoke: Palgrave Butt, T. W. (2008). George Kelly and the Psychology of Personal Constructs. Basingstoke: Palgrave Butt, T. W. & Jones, H. G. (1976). Untwining the double bind. In H. J. Eysenck (ed.) Case Studies in Behaviour Therapy. London: Routledge Butt, T. W. & Bannister, D. (1987). Better the devil you know. In W. Dryden (ed.) Key Cases in Psychotherapy. London: Croom Helm Butt, T. W. & Burr, V. (2004). Invitation to Personal Construct Psychology. London: Whurr Butt, T. W., Burr, V. & Epting, F. (1997). Core construing: discovery or invention? In R. A. Neimeyer & G. J. Neimeyer (eds.) Advances in Personal Construct Theory, Volume 4. New York: Springer Chiari, G. & Nuzzo, M. L. (1996). Psychological constructivisms: a metatheoretical differentiation. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 9, 163–184 Dewey, J. (1910/1993). Intelligence and morals. In D. Morris & I. Shapiro (eds.), John Dewey: The Political Writings. Indianapolis, IN and Cambridge: Hackett Fransella, F. (1970). Stuttering: not a symptom but a way of life. British Journal of Communication Disorders, 5, 22–29

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Fransella, F. (1972). Personal Change and Reconstruction: Research on a Treatment of Stuttering. London: Academic Press Gibson, J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Hammond, M., Howarth, J. & Keat, R. (1991). Understanding Phenomenology. Oxford: Blackwell Heidegger, M. (1927/1962). Being and Time. New York: Harper & Row Holland, R. (1977). Self in Social Context. London: Macmillan Ihde, D. (1986). Experimental Phenomenology. Albany, NY: SUNY Press Kelly, G. A. (1955). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volumes 1 and 2. New York: Norton (reprinted London: Routledge, 1991) Kelly, G. A. (1958/1969a). Man’s construction of his alternatives. In B. Maher (ed.) Clinical Psychology and Personality: The Selected Papers of George Kelly. New York: John Wiley & Sons Kelly, G. A. (1958/1969b). Personal construct theory and the psychotherapeutic interview. In B. Maher (ed.) Clinical Psychology and Personality: The Selected Papers of George Kelly. London: Wiley Kelly, G. A. (1962/1969). Sin and psychotherapy. In B. Maher (ed.) Clinical Psychology and Personality: The Selected Papers of George Kelly. London: Wiley Kelly, G. A. (1966/1969). Ontological acceleration. In B. Maher (ed.) Clinical Psychology and Personality: The Selected Papers of George Kelly. New York: Wiley Kvale, S. (1992). Postmodern psychology: a contradiction in terms? In S. Kvale (ed.) Psychology and Postmodernism. London: Sage Merleau-Ponty, M. (1941/1983). Structure of Behavior. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge Mounce, H. (1997). The Two Pragmatisms. London: Routledge Moustakas, C. (1994). Phenomenological Research Methods. London: Sage Radley, A. R. (1973). A study of self-elaboration through role change. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of London Radley, A. R. (1977). Living on the horizon. In D. Bannister (ed.) New Perspectives in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press Radley, A. R. (1978). The opposing self. In Fay Fransella (ed.) The Proceedings of the Second International Congress on Personal Construct Psychology. London: Academic Press Sartre, J.-P. (1958). Being and Nothingness. London: Methuen

Chapter 13

The Teacher, the Singer and the Personal Construct Theorist: an Unlikely but Fruitful Dialogue Vivien Burr Vivien Burr is a Reader in Psychology at the University of Huddersfield. She has had a long-standing interest in using Personal Construct Theory in both teaching and research, and she is co-author (with Trevor Butt) of Invitation to Personal Construct Psychology (second edition 2004). She has more recently developed an interest and published in the area of applications of construct theory in the Arts. Her other research interests include gender, media and popular culture and outside of the field of PCT she is probably best known for her book Social Constructionism (second edition 2003).

Elaborated aspects of theory: core role, embarrassment, embodiment and use of space, fixed-role therapy, Goffman, hostility, identity, reconstrual, sedimentation, validation and invalidation

Prologue In this chapter I document and reflect on my experience of becoming a university lecturer. As well as signalling an enormous change in my own identity, this experience was a personally significant induction into personal construct theory (PCT). In addition to reflecting on how my experience led me into PCT and how it helped me with the experience, I also reflect on Reflections in Personal Construct Theory. Edited by Richard J. Butler © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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how what I learned at that time benefited me in later periods of struggle with aspects of my personal identity. It seemed to me as I was writing this chapter that it was taking a distinctly narrative form, with episodes, significant events and epiphanies. And the two aspects of my identity, or ‘core role’, that occupy centre-stage in this narrative appear almost like characters in dialogue across the many years that the story spans. So I hope you will forgive the conceit of ‘the play’ as its structure.

Act I: the Early Years I started teaching at Huddersfield in 1983 and was utterly terrified when I was offered the modest position of temporary part-time lecturer. Since gaining my PhD in 1978, I had done no further academic work – in fact, little paid work of any kind. I had married, given birth to two children and, by 1983, was beginning to feel that, for the sake of my own sanity as well as the family finances, I ought to get a job. I had responded to an advertisement in the local newspaper, asking for people who might form a pool of part-time lecturers to cover staff absences. I went to the interview with no expectation that there would even be any work for me in the near future. However, with only a few weeks to go before the start of the new academic year, it seemed the Department of Behavioural Sciences was desperate to find cover for a member of staff who was on maternity leave and I was offered a part-time contract on the spot. This wasn’t what was supposed to happen in the story I had told myself. They would say noncommittal things and promise to keep my CV on file. Perhaps a few months later they would contact me and offer me something for the following year. I would have plenty of time to think about it … I remember driving home from the interview, my mind dangerously preoccupied with the knowledge that in a very short while I would be teaching undergraduates. Suddenly, it didn’t seem all that long ago that I was an undergraduate myself. My teaching duties for that year, looking back, were as unchallenging as they could be. I was to run a first year seminar group and advise second year students on their research projects. Nevertheless I was terrified. The staff in the department were kind and friendly, but when I asked for more information about what I would be expected to do I was hoping that I would at least be given a list of seminar topics, perhaps some structured exercises that I had to guide the students through. But I was told: ‘Oh, don’t worry, you can do whatever you like – that’s the great thing about this course, it’s really very flexible.’ I didn’t want flexibility; I wanted to be told what to do. Actually, I wanted to be shown what to do. I wanted to watch

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someone else do it and then copy them. I sat at home poring over the only resources that were familiar to me – my undergraduate lecture notes – hoping for inspiration. I got through the year somehow and the following year was asked to increase my teaching load to a half-time post plus some part-time hours. This included doing a different kind of teaching – lecturing in a lecture theatre. I was terrified all over again. Speaking to a roomful of students for two hours was what ‘proper lecturers’ did. It seemed a ludicrous thing for me to attempt. Like most who begin a new career, I was plagued by the thought that those with whom I was working would see that I was not a ‘real’ teacher, and that the students would uncover my ‘true’ identity as a wife and mother posing as a university teacher. I observed those around me – they looked and acted like lecturers. They had a depth of knowledge in their specialist subject, they held opinions and they had confidently written their lectures based on these intellectual resources. Students took them seriously (as it seemed to me they should). I compared myself to them and found none of these things. I was not a teacher, but I was required to become one. My first encounter with lecturing was deeply anxiety-provoking. I had detailed notes (kindly passed on to me by the lecturer I was replacing) and I did not dare depart from these. I grasped them tightly throughout the lecture and read the script word-for-word while sitting/hiding (I could not bear to stand up) behind the overhead projector. Somehow, I got through it and the students didn’t seem to be either furious at my incompetence or to have obviously worked out that I was not in fact a ‘real’ lecturer. In short, I had got away with it. But what would happen next time? It seemed that I was only ever a few days away from the appalling revelation. My solution to the problem was to be better prepared. I read furiously, wrote even more, edited, wrote more again and ended up with a set of notes that was more the size and weight of a PhD thesis than an undergraduate lecture. But it made me feel relatively safe. In the next few lectures, armed with my copious notes, I was a little less anxious and got away with it again … and again. What was it that I felt I was ‘getting away with’? It seemed that I was doing nothing more than posing as a lecturer, and sooner or later the students and other staff would see through me. The only way of putting off my inevitable exposure and shame was to make thorough and painstaking preparations before each lecture. But it would only take one student to ask me a question that I couldn’t answer and I would know that the game was nearly up. And so I put myself on a treadmill, engaging in more and more anxious preparation each time, always fearing that the next lecture would be the one where I would be exposed as an impostor.

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It seems obvious to me now that the real problem in becoming a lecturer was not about becoming more knowledgeable or proficient. It was about bridging the gap between my self-construal and what I thought of as ‘a lecturer’. However, at that time I was not able to represent the problem to myself in these terms; I saw only that my performance each time was a sham and, so it seemed, that I was probably never going to gain the knowledge or skills to do my job properly.

Act II: the Road to Personal Change It was at this time that I first became acquainted with Trevor Butt, who has subsequently become a longstanding and most trusted friend. Trevor had at the time been in regular practice as a psychotherapist with an intellectual home in PCT. His role as a psychotherapist probably gave me the confidence to reveal my insecurities to him, and he listened sympathetically and encouraged me to reflect on my experience by asking some good questions. What was the ‘evidence’ for my assertion that I wasn’t a proper lecturer or an effective teacher? What was the worst thing that I imagined could happen, my ‘nightmare scenario’? Trevor insisted that I tell him of events that could be seen as evidence that I was in fact a good teacher, for example comments from students and other staff. It all sounds so obvious now, but at the time it really was a change of perspective for me that I had not been able to begin for myself. Like most people embarking on a process of fairly radical personal change, I believe I probably also exhibited some Kellyan ‘hostility’, for a while doggedly holding on to my belief in my personal failings and refusing to acknowledge counterevidence because, again like most of us at least some of the time, I preferred to be right rather than happy; in PCT terms, I was pursuing a strategy of definition rather than extension of my construct system. I gradually came round to the idea that the problem lay in my personal construal rather than my teaching skills, and of course in the process I began to learn about PCT and its view of personal change. Trevor stepped up his efforts to help me by bringing in some structured PCT techniques: he talked me through a repertory grid, asked me to write a self-characterisation sketch and proposed that I act out a ‘fixed role’ (for a brief description, see Butt & Burr 2004) which we wrote together. I have subsequently retained a deep respect for this simple but powerful technique. It seems to me to carry a most important psychological message that one does not often find outside of micro-sociology, which is that the relationship between ‘personality’ (a problematic concept, of course) and behaviour is two-way.

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Psychologists, notably trait psychologists, assume that behaviour is both the product and externalisation of internal psychological states. But the power of the fixed role comes from our capacity to be different by behaving differently. Reconstruing is not something that entails only our mental and emotional selves. Salmon (1985a; 1985b) argues that the body is very important for our sense of self. Important aspects of our construing are manifested in our embodied activity, and we construct ourselves through our bodies as much as through what we think or say (Burr 1995; 2006a). Accordingly, my fixed role included not only a character description, but behavioural suggestions too. I now wish that I had kept these materials from the PCT exercises for future reference, but today can only say that my memory of them is that they were very helpful in setting me firmly on the road to personal reconstrual. And of course the entire episode marked the beginning of my commitment to constructivism, an epistemological stance that has been the bedrock of my academic work for the last 20 years. So one of the first ‘reflexive’ things I must say in this chapter is that my very introduction to PCT came about through reflecting on my personal experience; it was the capacity for constructivism to make sense of my problems that led me further into it as an academic.

Act III: Looking Back Of course, in writing about this now, after more than 20 years’ teaching experience, I can only offer my present construal of how things were then. If I had been asked to write this chapter in 1985 I would probably have given a somewhat different account of things. But the intervening time and experience do allow for further reflections that I believe are productive. In an earlier paper (Burr 2006b) I wrote about the difficulties in taking on the identity of ‘singer’. So in this section I want to discuss how ‘becoming a singer’ was affected by my reflections on my earlier experience of personal reconstrual, and also to consider how my more recent efforts to move into the identity of ‘singer’ now seem to inform my earlier struggles. As I suggested in Burr (2006b), in some ways, the difficulties I experienced many years ago in becoming a lecturer were the same ones that I later encountered in acquiring the new identity of ‘singer’. For Sara Bridges (2006), whom I had previously known only as an academic and personal construct theorist, the identity of ‘dancer’ was one that she had always felt was central to her sense of self, although ‘coming out’ as a dancer to her PCT colleagues and friends was a challenge. However, for me my identity

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as a singer had to be constructed in mid-life; I had to claim and take on a new public identity, one that involved ‘performing’ to an audience and that needed to be validated by others. In performance of any kind, one has to project to the audience one or more personae in addition to the ‘real self ’ (although for constructivists the concept of a ‘real self ’ is, of course, problematic). As an actor or singer, in addition to projecting the state of mind of the character or the meaning of the song, one must also project the identity of actor or singer. Although it may not normally be classed as ‘entertainment’, lecturing is nevertheless a performance; it involves having a ‘stage presence’, drawing in one’s audience and commanding their attention, using space and props effectively and, above all, not ‘forgetting your lines’ (or in the case of the singer, forgetting the musical line or lyric). These similarities make sense, for me, of the anxiety that ‘becoming a lecturer’ gave me all those years ago. It was about ‘being a lecturer’ in the eyes of students – but this was impossible if I could not own this identity first. Overcoming problems of this kind are often conceptualised at the level of negative thoughts and attitudes; the person may be thought of as ‘lacking confidence’ or suffering from ‘low self-esteem’. But the solution often cannot simply be found in rejecting negative thoughts (for example, through cognitive behavioural therapy’s ‘thought-stopping’ techniques) about what others might be thinking; ‘confidence’ in one’s ideas and one’s ability to communicate them does not simply come through encouragement from supportive others or through practice (although these are important). In my case, my difficulties were due to the distance I felt existed between my self and my construal of the university lecturer – to be able to speak with authority and assurance, to draw easily on an extensive and secure knowledge base, and consequently to be respected and revered by the students. These things were certainly not part of my self-construal at the time and seemed way beyond my reach. But my lack of ‘confidence’ had less to do with allowing the wrong kinds of thoughts to occupy my consciousness or a lack of selfesteem and more with ‘being’ what I publicly claimed to be.

Scene i: the lecturer enables the singer to emerge I have discussed above some of the issues that it seems to me are raised in the case of both the singer and the lecturer. But there are important differences too – differences which, to my mind, make the transition to the identity of ‘singer’ potentially more challenging than the transition to lecturer.

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First, unlike singing, in lecturing there is not the added complication of projecting not only the identity of performer but also the persona of the subject of the song. Second, unlike performing as a singer, the audience for my lecturer self is quite separate from those who will see and interact with me in my other roles as friend, wife, mother, etc. The audience is therefore not asked to put aside their knowledge of me in these other roles and to validate only the ‘performer’ identity. This is one reason why, for me, singing to an audience of strangers is often less nerve-wracking than performing with friends and family in the audience. Finally, unlike singing, lecturing is what I do for a living, and society more readily validates one’s job or career as a core aspect of identity. As singing is something I do in my leisure time, it could be argued that it is harder for me to successfully ‘bring off ’ an identity as a singer. But despite its apparently uncomplicated nature compared to becoming a singer, at the time ‘becoming a lecturer’ seemed the more impossible task. So it seems to me now that the earlier experience, and in particular the process of self-reconstrual, gave me an important framework on which I could ‘hang’ my later experiences, make sense of them and enable me to address the issues they raised for me. Although becoming a singer in the sense of adopting that identity has been hard and a considerable challenge, I believe the earlier experience of becoming a lecturer and the help that PCT gave me (with Trevor’s assistance) made me aware, at some level, of the issues I faced. Consequently, I have not experienced the downward spiral of feeling ‘not good enough’ at each successive performance. I did not see the problem as a lack of any personal quality; instead, I recognised that reconstrual was needed and that this could be a long, hard process. I was ready to see my difficulties as not due to a lack of personal skills but as a need for reconstrual of self. As I re-read my words (Burr 2006b) about performing as a singer being a ‘passionate pretence’ (Mair 1977), it reminds me that such a pretence is just as important for lecturing or any other public identity. Behaving ‘as if ’ one were the person one is trying to be is an important part of the change process. As I look back on my early teaching experience, I recognise how important these behavioural aspects of the fixed role were in helping me to own my new identity; and they have continued to come to my aid in times when I felt my performance, and therefore my identity as a lecturer, in doubt. My props (notes, audio-visual aids, lectern, and so forth) are often key factors for me in establishing the right mind-set for a lecture; I very consciously use them to ‘set out my stall’ to create a performance space that I can step into as a lecturer. I consciously think about my appearance, posture, tone of voice, manner of address, and so on, and am capable of

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manipulating these to create the image of the person I am passionately pretending to be. In ‘becoming a singer’ I was well aware of all this. Some years ago I attended a singers’ workshop with a member of the Opera North company. He vividly described and enacted how a famous opera singer would take to the stage in an elaborate sweep of her gown, opening her arms to the gallery in a gesture of humbly receiving the audience’s admiration. I knew immediately how important this would have been to her in constructing her sense of identity as a performer. It seems to me now that, drawing on my earlier experiences of becoming a lecturer, I was more readily able to identify embodied and behavioural aspects of the singer persona that I could work on in my ‘passionate pretence’.

Scene ii: the singer now better understands the trials of the lecturer On revisiting my paper on singing, and reading it in the light of the task to write about my earlier experience of becoming a lecturer, it brings an enriched understanding of why I experienced difficulties. Like performing as a singer, performing as a lecturer involves temporarily adopting a sense of self that is almost ‘self-important’, a self that is happy to be – perhaps even insists on being – the centre of attention. This is something in the identity of ‘singer’ that I have found very difficult. It is necessary for the singer to adopt an attitude almost of arrogance in the relationship with the audience; for the audience to ‘believe in’ the persona of the singer, the audience must feel a sense of privileged awe in his or her presence, and the singer must create the conditions for this experience through their body, language and demeanour. Whereas many people might occupy the role of public speaker from time to time, with varying degrees of difficulty, many more will consider singing in public absolutely impossible. Nevertheless, it seems to me now that the role of lecturer demands some degree of this sense of self-importance. In ordinary conversation, we (hopefully!) would consider it boorish and self-absorbed to take up the majority of the speaking time. But the implicit understanding at the foundation of the teacher–student role pairing as it is currently and widely practised is that the teacher’s knowledge is superior and that she should be listened to. (This raises further issues about the nature of education which are beyond the scope of the current chapter.) In performing the identity of ‘singer’, to the extent that one is unsuccessful at performing that role (i.e. fails to fulfil others’ expectations of a person in that role), one is likely to experience ‘embarrassment’ (Goffman 1967). Many people who have sung in public will recognise that embarrassment

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is a constant possibility. We may begin with confidence and then find we have forgotten the words or the tune, or like many unfortunate participants in reality TV shows such as ‘The X Factor’, we may quickly find that our audience does not share our estimation of our talent. As in the concept of ‘role’ as it is understood within PCT, Goffman’s notion of role not only draws on a dramaturgical metaphor but emphasises the reciprocity of roles. It is not possible to play one’s role if others cannot maintain their role in the same event. The role of singer depends on the role of audience member, and the role of lecturer on the role of student and, in the case of lecture hall delivery, the role of audience member too. As Goffman points out, when a performance fails, it is not just the performer who is embarrassed; the audience too becomes incapable of performing their role and is embarrassed too. If the lecturer makes errors, or if students ask unexpected questions that the lecturer cannot answer convincingly, embarrassment may ensue. So my anxieties, whether as a lecturer or as a singer, revolved around fears of embarrassing myself and my audience. I became painfully aware of this some years ago when my university began the practice of asking students for written feedback on the delivery of their modules. As may be expected, some comments were rather critical of my teaching. In PCT terms, my self-as-lecturer had been invalidated. The consequence was that I suddenly felt an inability to perform my role convincingly and for a while I was self-conscious and nervous in the lecture hall – in Goffman’s terms I was ‘embarrassed’ because of the perception that I was not properly fulfilling the role of lecturer in the eyes of some students. In PCT terms, I would argue that this experience also constitutes a dislodgment from core role (www.pcp-net.org/encyclopaedia/core-role.html). As I pointed out above, one’s work or career is, in western societies, probably second only to gender in being experienced as a key aspect of our identity and sense of self. When we hear of the birth of a baby, one of our first questions is ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ and when we meet a person for the first time our conversation surely turns to ‘And what do you do?’ My ‘crisis of confidence’ did not last, but for a while it was necessary to carry on ‘being a lecturer’ while feeling that I had been dislodged from that part of my core role. Although the experience of guilt is, in PCT terms, described as an awareness of dislodgement from core role structure, it may be argued that we only specifically experience guilt when the role (e.g. spouse or parent) carries strong moral obligations in the society in which we live. My earlier experience of using a fixed role to facilitate a reconstrual of self, as well as my performances as a singer, helped me through this period. These experiences reminded me that one can ‘feel’ one’s way into a desired

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identity by adopting the appropriate behaviours and by using props and costumes. The physical, embodied nature of construing has been discussed by others. Drawing on John Dewey and writing specifically about the work of F. M. Alexander (from which the term ‘Alexander technique’ derives), Mills (2003; 2006) argues for the ‘continuity of mind and body in action’; Butt (1998) writes about ways of responding to the world that have become ‘sedimented’; and Salmon (1985a; 1985b) writes eloquently about the way that our construing becomes physically apparent in our bodily posture. My reflections on my experiences as both a lecturer and a singer have reaffirmed to me the central importance of the body and behaviour in construing. Overcoming invalidation and dislodgement from core role demands a focus on behaviour and embodiment – we cannot merely ‘think’ our way (back) into our desired identities. One of the enduring aspects of my ‘performance’ as a lecturer has been a focus on the preparation of my ‘performance space’ before taking the stage. I arrange my materials, set up any equipment, shuffle my notes – anything that will help me to construct my identity as ‘lecturer’ in the presence of my audience. If I have to enter an already full lecture theatre, my entrance is carefully stage-managed and consciously performed.

Epilogue Writing this chapter has truly been a ‘reflexive’ activity. Perhaps more than most psychologists, personal construct theorists routinely attempt to bring their own experiences as teachers and practitioners within the realms of the theory. My own experience was of becoming an advocate of PCT as a result of using it to help me through a ‘crisis of confidence’. Subsequently, I have found myself fruitfully returning to my intellectual roots in PCT at times when I have struggled with relatively minor identity crises. And finally, in writing this chapter, I have revisited and reflected on my earlier experiences and interrogated them for what they may have to say to each other.

Postscript For those who are still prepared to believe I am not totally self-absorbed and have found my PCT reflections on teaching, life-drawing and singing moderately entertaining, I have recently taken up horse-riding. Watch this space …

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References Bridges, S. (2006). Music and mirrors: dance as construction of self. In J. W. Scheer and K. W. Sewell (eds.) Creative Construing: Personal Constructions in the Arts. Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag Burr, V. (1995) PCP and the body. Paper delivered to the 11th International Congress on PCP, Barcelona, July Burr, V. (2003). Social Constructionism, 2nd edition. London: Psychology Press Burr, V. (2006a). The art of writing: embodiment and pre-verbal construing. In P. Caputi, H. Foster & L. L. Viney (eds.) Personal Construct Psychology: New Ideas. Chichester: Wiley Burr, V. (2006b). Becoming a singer: PCT and voice. In J. W. Scheer & K. W. Sewell (eds.) Creative Construing: Personal Constructions in the Arts. Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag Butt, T. W. (1998). Sedimentation and elaborative choice. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 11, 265–281 Butt, T. W. & Burr, V. (2004) Invitation to Personal Construct Psychology, 2nd edition. London: Whurr Goffman E. (1967). Interaction Ritual. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Mair, J. M. M. (1977). The community of self. In D. Bannister (ed.) New Perspectives in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press Mills, D. (2003). Body, mind and society. In G. Chiari & M. L. Nuzzo (eds.) Psychological Constructivism and the Social World. Milan: FrancoAngeli Mills, D. (2006). The posture of anticipation: Kelly and Alexander. In P. Caputi, H. Foster and L. Viney (eds.) Personal Construct Psychology: New Ideas. Chichester: Wiley Salmon, P. (1985a). Living in Time. London: Dent Salmon, P. (1985b). Relations with the physical: an alternative reading of Kelly. In D. Bannister (ed.) Issues and Approaches in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press

Chapter 14

Reflexivity: What in the ‘GAK’ is that? Desley Hennessy Desley Hennessy has a BSc in mathematics, a BPsych (Hons), and soon a PhD for research on the use of tattoos as an expression of identity. Married with four children, Desley thinks she is lucky that her husband endures her fragmentation with patience and good humour, if not some bewilderment at times!

Elaborated aspects of theory: aggressiveness, anxiety, commonality, core constructs, fragmentation, individuality, invalidation, reconstruing, sociality, superordinate constructs The apparatus of reason would not be complete unless it swept itself into its own analysis of the field of experience. (G. H. Mead 1934)

Introduction Each of us at various points in our lives is likely to find ourselves in situations we are to remember for many years to come. Not so long ago, I found myself in one such predicament. It was my first personal construct theory (PCT) conference in Melbourne, Australia, and the delivery of my first ever paper outside the confines of my research group at university. At the end of the presentation, I was asked if I had thought about reflexivity. Although being somewhat new to PCT I had almost figured out constructs from elements (which ones had poles, and which didn’t) and the essentials of the Reflections in Personal Construct Theory. Edited by Richard J. Butler © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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fundamental postulate and the various corollaries. Repertory grids, selfcharacterisations, even a couple of ‘cycles’ had entered my radar. But reflexivity? What in the ‘GAK’ was that? How could I have contemplated what it meant to my research when I didn’t know what it meant, period?

Just What is Reflexivity? Reflexivity may be considered to be the attribute of a theory that allows it to be applied to itself. The subject becomes identical to the object. As developing a theory may be seen as a sample of human behaviour, any psychological theory should be applicable to the originator of that theory. Thus PCT, as a theory of human behaviour, should be able to explain how George Alexander Kelly (‘GAK’ for my purposes) developed his theory (Hinkle 1970; McWilliams 2004). Nightingale & Cromby (1999) suggest that avoiding reflexivity is impossible. Similarly, Oliver & Landfield (1962) state that ‘the reflexive aspect of psychology is essential to that subject and as such constitutes a challenge, an obligation, and an opportunity to the psychologist. The psychologist should seek to avoid fallacies of reflexivity, but not reflexivity’. Within the context of research endeavours, reflexivity has been defined as ‘the conscious attempt to identify how and what social understandings have been produced in the process of research’ (Riley, Schouten & Cahill 2003). Kelly (1964/1969) encouraged this process: ‘involvement … is what we hope will happen when a researcher places himself in the circumstances he wishes to construe psychologically.’ A question we might ask ourselves as researchers is: How do we know when we are being reflexive?

Understanding Tattooees The essence of the sociality corollary is important in undertaking research, particularly for those engaged in qualitative data collection. In order to obtain ‘quality’ data in an interview it is necessary to establish rapport; we need to be willing and able to ‘construe the construction processes of another’ (Kelly 1955). So the researcher attempts to suspend their own construing and enter the world of the research participants, to see the world as they see it. When interviewing, I employed Kelly’s notion that ‘if you do not know … ask him; he may tell you’. So I began with the simplest of statements: ‘Please tell me about your tattoo(s).’ Such an invitational approach, as I

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explained to participants, would mean that we were able to see their construction of their tattoo, rather than the construction that I, by asking my questions, might otherwise place on it. Lafitte (1957) suggests that the psychologist’s reflexive judgements will be limited by his knowledge of himself, just as his subjects’ reports are limited by their self-knowledge. The sociality corollary emphasises the importance of understanding participants’ construing in order for me to play a ‘role’ – that of researcher – in a social process with participants. I found that participants became more engaged when I invited them to see how I was attempting to construe the research process. Thus the research process was improved with reciprocation of the sociality corollary – the ‘role’ of the research participant was enhanced by their understanding my construing.

What Does it Mean to Apply Reflexivity to My Own Research? If I am to form a theory that individuals become tattooed for one of a number of reasons, most of which come under the rubric of identity, then I have to see within myself at least one of those reasons. In fact, I have found there are not only many reasons individuals become tattooed (which would seem obvious from the individuality corollary), but there is often another reason or meaning that is attached to any particular tattoo. For example, the reason Sally had a tattoo was that it was her thirtieth birthday, but the meaning of the tattoo was ‘freedom’. In addition, it has become clear from the research that individuals attribute different meanings to their tattoos, even when the symbols are the same. This is a constructivist notion of meaning, again explained by Kelly’s individuality corollary. Rick is one tattooee with multiple meanings attached to his tattoo. In his words: ‘The one on my back says “life, love, laughter”. The overall design commemorates what’s important in my life but the words themselves have separate meanings …. It’s words to live by, and also it commemorates the impact skateboarding has had on my life.’ Some tattoos are ripe with ‘heavy’ emotions. While the wearer is deeply connected to the tattoo and profoundly affected by what it means, at times explaining the true meaning of their ‘ink’ may be more than they are willing to give, or perhaps more than they believe the listener is able to receive. So, a superficial reason or meaning is given, and this is usually enough to satisfy the average enquirer. Pamela had two tattoos, both very closely linked (for her) to her self-discovery. She had gone through a period of coming to terms

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with who and what she was, and had marked that for herself at various stages. The tattoos forged a link to her Celtic heritage, including the philosophy that life is cyclical. However, when asked by the ‘man in the street’, Pamela was inclined to say that one tattoo was to mark graduating from university and the other was obtained while working at the Olympics. There was no mention of her soul-searching, her struggle and final coming to terms with her lesbianism, or the relief the pain of the tattoo provided at a time when she was feeling only despair. The meaning of a tattoo may often be covert, and there may be dimensions of the meaning that are not clear even to the wearer. I believe this is because some aspects of the meaning are at a low level of awareness, and possibly the tattoo is a representation of a pre-verbal construct. My tattoo is of a butterfly, beautifully drawn by my daughter. She has a similar one and they are a symbol of the bond between us. That should be it, one would think. However, to me, butterflies represent freedom, beauty and delicateness. So there are additional meanings. As the communality corollary indicates, my daughter and I do share meanings here. For her, too, butterflies are beautiful and delicate. However, we also hold different meanings, as explained by the individuality corollary. For Kris butterflies are more magical. She sees a rare creature that is special because it flies around in an ugly world. When I laddered my daughter about her tattoo, her superordinate construct was having a sense of calm vs. feeling anxious. However, when I was laddered about my tattoo, it became obvious that the core issue for me was around being seen vs. being annihilated. The uncovering of this core construct has helped me make sense of my own extreme reactions on occasion.

A Host of Selves … or the First Signs of Fragmentation? So, in an attempt to understand myself, I examined these ‘reasons’ and meanings of my tattoo. If the tattoo is about my link to my daughter, how could it at the same time be representative of my self? Was it the case that I was exhibiting evidence of fragmentation? I then came across a wonderful quote by Phil Salmon: Questions in psychology that are worth asking must somehow link in to the network of assumptions about oneself and others that actually operate in the way we go about our lives. If they fail to do this, then they are bound to remain irrelevant. (Salmon 1978)

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This made me think of the various separate ‘me’s’. I had a network of assumptions about myself. There was me as a person, me as a researcher, even me as a person with a tattoo; let alone the other ‘me’s’, such as mother, wife, tutor and wannabe soccer player. At first glance, I thought all these ‘me’s’ were fairly compatible. They might compete for my time and attention, but most of them pretty much knew their ‘place’ and simply waited their turn. However, I then started to think more deeply about the various aspects of ‘me’. As a researcher, I felt free to ask people about their tattoos. However, as a ‘person’, I am more reluctant to approach tattooed people. I understand now that people with tattoos are just like everyone else in terms of how they want to be treated and how they feel about their lives. They don’t want strangers walking up to them and pulling at their clothes, or touching them without being asked. While I carried out my research I had to remember, as Kelly (1964/1969) intimated, that the strategy of psychological research requires one to take deep personal risks. We know that Kelly himself was not averse to taking risks. He was a man of vision, creative and rebellious, with a caustic wit, though he was a ‘fragmented and contradictory human being’ (Fransella 1995). We know that Kelly liked to ‘challenge’ the system, yet he was ‘less tolerant of those who did not do things the way he thought they should be done’ (Fransella 1995). At the same time, Kelly was almost obsessively occupied with detail. He was quite formal, calling his students by their surnames, and insisting that they call him Dr Kelly. Landfield (in Fransella 1995) called Kelly a ‘revolutionary in the guise of a very formal man’. Kelly was generous in helping students, but at the same time, students did not always know where they stood with him (Fransella 1995). We can see here that there are aspects of his character that appear to be contradictory, or in the very least ‘inferentially incompatible’. The formal, polite, ‘proper’ Dr Kelly may not necessarily be inferred from the creative, rebellious, quick-witted ‘George’. In our attempt to further understand Kelly, I believe there are at least two tools at our disposal: the organisation corollary and the creativity cycle. Superordinate constructs help the individual cope with fragmentation at the subordinate level of their construct system; and in order to be creative, Kelly (1991a, 1991b) tells us, one needs to be able to construe both loosely and tightly, at the appropriate times. In addition, he tells us that therapy ‘involves a series of creativity cycles, each of which terminates in some well-planned, but novel, experiment’. It is not hard to imagine how Kelly himself may have engaged in such experiments. There is at least one anecdote of him doing just that – dressing in overalls to ‘clean up’ the clinical programme

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at Ohio University, before he returned (in a suit) to his ‘usual’ work (Fransella 1995). As I contemplate the various ‘me’s’, I see that I am one of many people doing research in psychology; I am one of many people doing research into tattoos; I am one of many people who have a tattoo; and so it goes. The question I need to answer is whether all these ‘me’s’ are truly compatible, or if there is contradiction going on. Is this situation more in line with Miller Mair’s (1977) ‘community of self’? Or am I looking at a genuine set of inferentially incompatible sub-systems in my construction of the world? For example, I frequently state that I am not a materialistic person, and that ‘things’ don’t matter to me. I am seen by many to be a ‘hippie’ – not wearing shoes and wearing clothes that ‘transcend’ fashion. However, I do drive a very expensive sports car. These sub-systems seem to be ‘inferentially incompatible’. However, as is often the case with fragmentation, there is a superordinate construct that enables me to make sense of these construals. For me, the ‘hippie’ and the sports car driver are both subsumed by the person who likes to feel ‘free’. Not wearing shoes makes me feel free. Not having to worry about fashion makes me feel free. Driving my car makes me feel free. I should mention the difference between core constructs and superordinacy. As Kelly states, ‘Core constructs are those … by which he maintains his identity and existence’, so we can see how my construct of being seen vs. being annihilated would be a core construct. The ‘feeling free’ construct here is superordinate, and as such, it has two functions. First, it helps me make sense of fragmentation in subordinate constructs; and second, it enables the formation of new constructs, such as those I hold about wearing shoes or driving my car. In other words, the superordinate constructs I hold must be permeable enough to include new constructs in order for me to continually extend my construct system.

Fragmentation in Tattooees Since a researcher’s personal experience becomes important primarily in how it illuminates the culture under study (Ellis & Bochner 2000), I wondered how my questions about tattooed people were linking in to my assumptions about myself. Was I guilty of seeing ‘them’ as being different from ‘me’? For this entire project to work, I had to see myself in my participants. Before that could happen, I needed to see my participants themselves.

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In the course of my interviews, some participants said things that were contradictory; indications of fragmentation. For example, Matt stated that he never really liked tattoos. He was brought up to dislike them and hardly anyone he knew had a tattoo; he related being tattooed to being of a lower socio-economic group. This made it difficult for him to explain why he had not one, but four tattoos. Considering Matt’s upbringing, we might have predicted that he would not have any tattoos. What we would have done, in Kelly’s (1955) words, is ‘make the mistake of assuming that a sample of future behaviours would be drawn from a universe having exactly the same parameters’. What we would need to do, as Kelly suggests, is study a sample of this man’s past behaviours and make our prediction based on an abstraction of those behaviours. Using PCT, there are other ways we can attempt to make sense of Matt’s behaviour. In order to truly make sense of an individual’s fragmentation, we need also to consult the modulation corollary, and examine the permeability of the individual’s constructs. So, while we might assume that this individual’s upbringing led him to believe that tattoos were ‘wrong’, we could be forgiven for thinking that his successive construals of events in his life (in line with the experience corollary) have led him to change that view. However, as previously stated, Matt thought that tattoos weren’t particularly attractive and had virtually no friends with tattoos. We find, however, a superordinate construct that helps ‘explain’ the fragmentation. Matt felt his tattoos provided some meaning and a sense of ‘self ’ where nothing else he had done could suffice. His actions are a good example of Kelly’s choice corollary, as he had taken the alternative that expanded and redefined his construction system.

Forming a Theory about Tattooees A person is not necessarily articulate about the constructions he places on his world. Some of his constructions are not symbolised by words; he can express them only in pantomime. Even the elements which are construed may have no verbal handles by which they can be manipulated and the person finds himself responding to them with speechless impulse (Kelly 1955). Getting a tattoo is one example of behaviour as a question (Kelly 1970). Ultimately the individual is attempting to address questions about him- or herself. Fundamentally, PCT acknowledges that in some way, a tattoo helps the person make sense of their world. I believe that some people get a tattoo to help them express something about themselves that they find difficult to put into words – preverbal constructs, or perhaps constructs that

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are at a low level of awareness for that individual. In this instance PCT does a very good job of explaining what is happening when a person just ‘can’t’ explain why they wanted to tattoo their body. When it comes to questions about tattoos, the most frequent would have to be: ‘Does it hurt?’ This is posed both by potential tattooees and their observers. This question reflects anxiety, given that most people find it hard to anticipate the experience of having needles jabbed into your skin thousands of times per second. This is especially true of someone who is considering a tattoo for the first time, and many opportunities for anxiety are encapsulated in that one event. Tony was not worried about whether the tattoo would hurt but rather about how well would he deal with the pain. Being extremely concerned that he might behave like a ‘girl’ and faint or vomit, Tony’s anticipation of being tattooed was outside the range of convenience of his construct system. Fortunately, he experienced some ‘positive invalidation’ through handling the situation to his satisfaction. While anxiety is often experienced with a first tattoo, it is also a possibility for those returning for subsequent tattoos. The amount of discomfort or pain experienced is a function of a number of factors, including the placement and colour of the tattoo, so while previous tattooees have some idea what the experience will be like, they cannot predict with certainty what will happen next time. The placement of a tattoo is not only a determinant of the pain experienced but is, I hypothesise, often an act of aggressiveness. Kelly (1955) defines aggressiveness as ‘the active elaboration of one’s perceptual field’, and obtaining a tattoo definitely results in elaboration! Many tattooees place their tattoo where it can only be seen when they choose to show it, for example, at the beach or in private; for them the placement is not necessarily showing aggressiveness. However, those who wear their tattoos openly are actively encouraging a reaction from others who see the tattoos. As Kelly (1955) stated: Ultimately a man sets the measure of his own freedom and his own bondage by the level at which he chooses to establish his convictions. The man who orders his life in terms of many special and inflexible convictions about temporary matters makes himself the victim of circumstances.

Reflecting on that quotation, it is perhaps not quite so relevant for many tattooees. While it is relatively easy to see how an individual with visible tattoos has, for example, set a limit to the number or type of jobs they might apply for, I suspect many would argue that the ‘matters’ about which they have conviction, as demonstrated by their tattoos, are far from tem-

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porary. Although ‘no one needs to be the victim of his biography’ (Kelly 1955), I suspect heavily tattooed individuals are aggressively creating their own life-stories.

Extending One’s Construct System As we know from the choice corollary, individuals choose to extend their construct systems. Anyone who chooses to have ink injected into their skin is definitely doing just that. The extension resulting from this choice occurs on a number of levels. As mentioned previously, the first that comes to mind is pain. In this situation, constructs the individual holds about their ability to manage pain are tested. In most instances, validation is received and the individual sees the experience as rewarding. As some tattooees express it: ‘You have to earn the tattoo.’ Another level on which a construct system is expanded is very much dependent on the placement of the tattoo. If a tattoo is in a discrete place, then it is possible that very little disturbance of your construct system is necessary. However, if you have a tattoo on your lower back and it accidentally becomes visible, it is possible that this results in expansion not only of your construct system, but also the systems of those who inadvertently see it.

When Tattoos Attack: Invalidation and Reconstruing Another interesting aspect of tattooing is what might be called ‘when tattoos attack’ – when something goes wrong. A tattoo artist may have misinterpreted the original request, the tattooee may have had unrealistic expectations, or perhaps movement at a crucial time led to a mistake in the artwork. Perhaps an older tattooee regrets an impetuous youth. On rare occasions, allergies to ink have been known to cause problems, or an individual becomes ill after having a tattoo. This is usually the result of poor hygiene, which can put the tattooee at risk of contracting hepatitis or HIV. (For more detailed investigation and discussion of tattoo risks, see Stuppy, Armstrong & Casals-Ariet 1998; Armstrong, Owen, Roberts & Koch 2002; Stirn 2003). When tattoos attack I suspect there are at least two psychological processes involved: invalidation and/or regret. Invalidation is likely to occur when the tattooee is faced with a situation that is at odds with their expectation. Perhaps they were impulsive and did not spend enough time in

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reflection about what permanence meant, and after a few weeks (or even years) they have come to realise that the tattoo is with them for life and is no longer a validating experience for them. Kelly suggests invalidation may lead to constructs being abandoned, resulting in anxiety. In line with the choice corollary, we choose the alternative that we think will give us the greater possibility to extend and define our system. When regret is experienced, the person may contemplate ‘what if’ I had made choice ‘A’ instead of choice ‘not A’? In some cases, this may mean that in reflecting on a choice where the tattoo represented an extension of the construct system the person now ‘wishes’ they had made a choice involving definition of the self. For some tattooees, extreme regret may mean that they attempt to revert to the previous situation by having their tattoo removed or covered up. Tattoos provide us with many examples of someone making a prediction that is invalidated. Zoe had what she termed ‘strong feminine images’ for her tattoos, most of which were visible. She felt that these images displayed her ‘insides on the outside’ and showed the world that she was a strong woman, despite her lack of stature. In particular, Zoe had tattoos to send a message to men that she was not to be ‘messed with’. However, the tattoos led to her feeling objectified and ‘manhandled’ when a woman pulled at her clothes to look at her tattoos. Zoe’s prediction of the tattoos as a barrier against the unwanted approaches of others in this instance was not validated. Some questions remain unanswered. Could Zoe have anticipated the actions of the woman? What was she trying to control? How would she use this encounter to modify her constructs about her tattoos?

Explaining Multiple Tattoos … Nearly a third of my participants told me that ‘tattoos are addictive’. Consider Kelly’s (1970) statement: ‘If he does perform the same experiment over and over … I shall suspect he is still looking for the answer to a question he knows no better way of asking.’ Here we need to find the question each individual is attempting to answer with their tattoo. I have only one tattoo, but I am considering getting one or two more. Through my research I have learnt that ‘serious’ tattooees ‘earn’ their tattoo by tolerating the pain. Since I did not do that, I feel that that is something I should attempt. I also feel I would like another tattoo that represents all my children. I have learnt from my participants you should have a design that means something to you, so the difficulty is in finding a design that will adequately contain this meaning.

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Since not everyone who has a tattoo is like me, perhaps PCT can offer at least one explanation for why someone would want more than one tattoo. I suspect that, for some, it is an example of hostility. Perhaps these individuals became tattooed in an effort to get a reaction from their parents, or from some other person. The reaction they wanted did not follow, so they had another tattoo. Still no reaction. Another tattoo. And so on. Of course, multiple tattoos may also be a sign of continued expression of aggressiveness. One other possibility is that the individual is answering different questions by getting different tattoos. One question may be, for example, will I cope with the pain? If the tattoo is placed where it is visible, the question may be more centred on how other people will view the tattoo and how the individual will cope with the reactions. Some tattooees have tattoos that follow their progress through life and so the question may centre on which events the individual finds important enough to inject into his or her skin. For other tattooees, questions are possibly related to the people with whom they feel connected, and the strength and meaning of that connection.

Time for Some Personal Reflexivity … Forming a Theory About Me The best one can ever expect of a theory is that it will enable him to see what he has never seen before. (Kelly 1970) Bannister (1966) proposed that we may be faced with subjects who are formulating their lives in terms of a theory and framework as extensive and well abstracted as our own. So if I am trying (as a ‘researcher’) to categorise the individuals I spoke to about their tattoos, they should at the same time be able to categorise me. If I am attempting to use theories of self to categorise tattooees, then I must be able to apply those theories to myself. The question is: Do all categories apply or just one? My research led me to believe that there are multiple reasons individuals obtain tattoos. These fall under the general area of identity, but can be further categorised into group membership (belonging needs), uniqueness, psychological growth, remembrance, personal philosophy, aesthetics and rites of passage. I shall briefly examine myself and my thesis in light of some of these. Group membership or belonging is pretty straightforward, as my daughter and I obtained our tattoos together as a symbol of each other. Likewise, writing a thesis means that I belong to a group of individuals who have

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written theses. Uniqueness is another category that applies to my tattoo, as well as my thesis. My tattoo was drawn by my daughter, so no one else will have that exact picture. With respect to my thesis, no one else had better be looking at tattoos as an expression of identity or I’m in trouble! Remembrance also applies to both my tattoo and my thesis. My tattoo is chiefly a reminder of seeing my children enjoying each other’s company as they did on the day we had our tattoos. As for my thesis, what I remember most is the participants, and the sense of gratitude and appreciation I feel for the privilege they each granted me by allowing me to learn something of who they are. Personal philosophy was another category I applied to my participants. When relating this to my thesis, I see it as the need to believe in your topic. As Salmon (1978) said: ‘the personal significance acknowledged by a researcher of the question he is working on … ultimately governs the quality of what he does’. My tattoo is a statement of my life philosophy that my children come first. A rite of passage constitutes a self-transformation. This can be a physical transformation, such as in primitive rituals, but I suspect it is always involves psychological transformation. I believe that getting a tattoo is a rite of passage, as is performing research and writing a thesis. According to van Gennep (1960), a rite of passage consists of three phases: separation, liminality and incorporation. In the separation phase the individual begins to withdraw from the group, as a means of easing the transition to another place or status. The liminal phase is a period where normal beliefs about self are relaxed. In terms of construal, the liminal phase would be the period where the individual loosens their construing as they attempt to reconstrue their view of self. I believe this is essential for the thesis writer – they need to construe themselves as someone who has finished a thesis, not just someone who is writing one! The incorporation phase happens after the rite has been performed and the individual has tightened their construing. For the primitive, the rite of passage validates that the boy is ready to become a man. For the researcher (me!) it is the validation of her belief in the research process and her ability to carry it out. For the first-time tattooee, it is the validation that the tattoo process is ‘survivable’, and that the question the tattooee was asking has been answered. Each of these situations has as its resolution a change in the way individuals view themselves – a change to one or more core constructs. Kelly (1970) suggested that ‘when we see behaviour … we will … ask … what is the experiment that is being performed, what hypotheses are being tested … and whether it opens or closes the door to any man’s further

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adventure’. My own hypotheses were related to going through the process of having a tattoo, creating a permanent link with my daughter and probably other things I have not yet discovered. Whether it closed any doors I am not sure. Certainly, it opened the door for my study on tattooees, as I would definitely not have studied that topic had I not had a tattoo myself. I also need to reflexively consider whether I am biased towards tattooees (Lynch 2000), though not in the usual sense, but because I find statements in previous research that tattooees were either criminals or psychopaths narrow-minded (Edgerton & Dingman 1963; Grumet 1983). While this research was often flawed (participants came only from jails or psychiatric wards), it could be argued that my research was flawed in reverse, as I didn’t interview anyone who was in jail or hospital. Furthermore, thinking about my thesis in light of the question of reflexivity, I started to wonder whether PCT could explain my choice of analysis. I suspect, as the choice corollary would tell us, I chose the alternative which gave me the greater possibility to extend my system. This applies to both my analysis and my view of tattooees. Having participants fill out a questionnaire and running regression analyses or other statistical procedures would not have expanded my thinking anywhere near as much as trying to sift through hours of interview transcripts. Nor would it have revealed the depth of thought that goes into many tattoos or given me the opportunity to share very personally with my participants. As Salmon (1978) indicated, ‘Kelly’s psychology is all about the process of making sense of things’.

Conclusion PCT has been very beneficial in my research. Not only has it helped me understand my participants, it has helped me understand myself, both in the context of researching tattoos and having a tattoo. When I noticed signs of fragmentation in my participants and myself, PCT was able to help me understand that too. While we are all fragmented to some degree, PCT can help us see that it is not necessarily a problem, and that being able to construe ourselves in different ways is a privilege we can choose to appreciate.

References Armstrong, M. L., Owen, D. C., Roberts, A. E. & Koch, J. R. (2002). College students and tattoos: influence of image, identity, family, and friends. Journal of Psychosocial Nursing & Mental Health Services, 40, 20–29

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Bannister, D. (1966). Psychology as an exercise in paradox. Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, 19, 21–26 Edgerton, R. B. & Dingman, H. F. (1963). Tattooing and identity. The International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 9, 143–153 Ellis, C. & Bochner, A. P. (2000). Autoethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (eds.) Handbook of Qualitative Research, 2nd edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Fransella, F. (1995). George Kelly. London: Sage Grumet, G. W. (1983). Psychodynamic implications of tattoos. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 53, 482–492 Hinkle, D. N. (1970). The game of personal constructs. In D. Bannister (ed.) Perspectives in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press Kelly, G. A. (1955) The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volumes 1 and 2. New York: Norton (reprinted London: Routledge, 1991) Kelly, G. A. (1964/1969). The strategy of psychological research. In B. Maher (ed.) Clinical Psychology and Personality: The Selected Papers of George Kelly. London: John Wiley & Sons Kelly, G. A. (1970). Behaviour is an experiment. In D. Bannister (ed.) Perspectives in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press Kelly, G. A. (1991a). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volume 1. A Theory of Personality. London: Routledge Kelly, G. A. (1991b). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volume 2. Clinical Diagnosis and Psychotherapy. London: Routledge Lafitte, P. (1957). The Person in Psychology: Reality or Abstraction. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Lynch, M. (2000). Against reflexivity as an academic virtue and source of privileged knowledge. Theory, Culture & Society, 17, 26–54 McWilliams, S. A. (2004). On further reflection. Personal Construct Theory & Practice, 1, 1–7 Mair, J. M. M. (1977). The community of self. In D. Bannister (ed.) New Perspectives in Personal Construct Theory. London; Academic Press Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Nightingale, D. J. & Cromby, J. (eds.) (1999). Social Constructionist Psychology. Buckingham: Open University Press Oliver, D. & Landfield, A. W. (1962). Reflexivity: an unfaced issue of psychology. Journal of Individual Psychology, 18, 114–124 Riley, S., Schouten, W. & Cahill, S. (2003). Exploring the dynamics of subjectivity and power between researcher and researched (electronic version). Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 4. www.qualitative-research.net/fqs. Accessed 11 February 2008 Salmon, P. (1978). Doing psychological research. In F. Fransella (ed.) Personal Construct Psychology. London: Academic Press Stirn, A. (2003). Body piercing: medical consequences and psychological motivations. The Lancet, 361, 1205–1215

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Stuppy, D. J., Armstrong, M. L. & Casals-Ariet, C. (1998). Attitudes of health care providers and students towards tattooed people. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 27, 1165–1170 van Gennep, A. (1960). The Rites of Passage, trans. M. B. Vizedom & G. L. Caffee. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Section V

No One Need be a Victim of Their Biography

Chapter 15

Differentiating the I from the ME Jerald R. Forster Jerald Forster is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington, in Seattle. He joined the faculty there as a counsellor educator in 1966. Most of his teaching, research and writing has been focused on ways of facilitating the articulation of self-identity. He developed instruments and methods for articulating personal goals, strengths and career plans. He currently directs the Dependable Strengths Project at the University of Washington.

Elaborated aspects of theory: experiencing I contrasted with the objectified ME; articulation of the ME; elaboration of the I

Introduction It was 12.31 am, 24 February 2008, and I had been lying in bed half-awake. My first awareness in my waking state was of a sound, punctuated by short periods of silence. As my cognitive processes started to kick in, I had a desire to make sense of the experience. I recognised the sound as coming from a low-flying aircraft. What I could not explain were the short silences between the sounds. I quickly came up with a possible explanation. Evidently, some type of interruption in the sound waves reaching my ears was causing them. I hypothesised that the interruptions were caused by periodic blockages of the waves as they bounced off the ground on their journey to my ears; I surmised that these blockages were probably caused by the rows of houses on streets parallel to our street. All of this experiencing took place in less than 10 seconds. Reflections in Personal Construct Theory. Edited by Richard J. Butler © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

240 Jerald R. Forster During this time, I realised I had never noticed an intermittent sound quite like that particular sound before. During the next few seconds my attention focused on the use of this experience as a key example for this chapter. I conceived of the idea that this experience might be a vivid example of what I meant by the I concept, one of the two concepts being differentiated in this chapter. This was my I experiencing what was happening in my environment. It was my I construing what was happening. It was I doing something. Soon after I formulated this I example, I started to think about a possible example from my personal life that would demonstrate the other concept, the ME. Several came to mind, including the descriptive statement about Jerald R. Forster at the beginning of this chapter. I wrote those words several months ago to describe myself to the readers of this chapter. The words describe me as an object, somewhat as I might describe some other object if it were a person. The description was written for other people, and it communicates some of what I want others to know about me. That description presents one version of my self-identity. What would the description have been like if I had only intended it for myself? My own personal description of myself would be my ME. As I pursue the concept of ME more fully below I will introduce a metaphor based on a feedback loop to describe my ME as a creation or a construction by my I. I will also offer a theoretical system wherein the ME influences the I’s subsequent construction of the ME, thereby influencing the construction of a later version of the I’s ME. This introduction provides a glimpse of my purpose in writing this chapter. I will attempt to differentiate between my I and my ME, two perspectives on myself. I will also build a case for the way this differentiation could help you be a more adaptable person who does not get stuck in a self-identity that overuses your ME-based characterisation of your I.

The Experiencing I Mead (1934) conceptualised the I-self to be the self as the subject, or the agent who is experiencing and responding to stimuli. The potential stimuli available for experiencing are highly diverse. Many of these stimuli are attended to and processed by the operations of the brain’s neocortex. Some of the stimuli are construed, or interpreted, in a process of making meaning. In terms of cognitive processing, it could be said that part of your infantile I-self processing is similar to that of lower animals, more focused on sensed external stimuli and not much mediated by symbols and language. As your

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I-self develops, its processing becomes more complex and symbolic language comes into play. Even though symbols and abstract concepts come to be used in the processing, much of this aspect of your self still operates without extensive use of language. Personal constructs form and develop to serve as templates for recognising patterns in the stimuli, which help to create meanings. Memories of meaningful experiences are stored, and the labels attached to personal constructs help the I retrieve those stored experiences. The organising and remembering of these experiences and their sequencing are greatly enhanced when they are strung together in a narrative. This aspect of the self, which I am calling I, is the doer. The I is experiencing. It is deciding, it is behaving/acting and it is construing. When I was hearing the airliner during the event described in the Introduction, I was experiencing, construing and deciding. I wasn’t very aware of myself during this process; I was focused on what was happening.

The I is a process The I can be thought of as a process, rather than an entity or a physical object. This particular process is enabled by the simple functioning brain. However, it would be too simple to equate it with the brain. The process enables awareness to occur within the brain. This awareness permits associations, connections and the making of meaning. The brain might be thought of as a processor, the vehicle for the constantly changing process. The complex processing, which is the essence of the I might also be conceived of as a number of sub-processes that enable pattern recognition and interpretation. It could be said that personal constructs form and are used as the I-processes take place.

The I is the present tense of the experiential process This brain-enabled process is taking place as a continuous stream of consciousness focused at the present moment. Theoretically, the ideal I would always be focused on what is being experienced in the now. In real life, the I is often focused on past experiences and future possibilities. When the I’s awareness is focused on a past experience or an anticipated experience, that transported awareness has been enabled by a sub-process that allows the attention to be focused on a different timeframe from the present. When thinking of a past event, the recalled experience is at the centre of my attention. Similarly, a possible future event can be imagined or constructed, and my current thoughts are projected into the future. The acuteness of

242 Jerald R. Forster awareness is compromised or clouded during these transported experiences. Being in the present, the past and the future all have their purposes and advantages. But a person who was always focused on the present could not benefit from experience, and a person who could not focus on the future could not plan. As I recall my experiences described in the Introduction, I can recall some of what I experienced the first time I heard that airliner passing overhead. Although 14 hours have passed since I first heard those interrupted noises, I can remember some of what it was like. The experience is less vivid and less real, yet I do have some of the sensations and many of the thoughts I had when I tried to make sense of what had happened the first time I experienced the event. Let me add that I think of mindfulness as meta-cognitive awareness of whatever I am experiencing in the moment, or in the present. I can be mindful when I am planning for the future or remembering the past, if I am aware that my planning and my remembering are occurring right now. When I am mindful, I am aware of both the content and the process of my thinking. (Further exploration of the sense of awareness can be found in the literature on the concept of mindfulness, e.g. Kabat-zin 1994.)

The Objectified ME Mead conceptualised the ME-self to be the self as the object, an object that is observed by the I, along with a large number of other objects also being observed by the I. Perhaps the use of the verb observed oversimplifies the process that is taking place when the ME has the attention of the I. What may be happening is that the aspect of the self called the ME has entered the awareness of the I that is experiencing what is happening in its external and internal environment. At first the ME-self might simply be recognised as another object, which is like those objects known as persons. The ME might be compared with other people interacting with the I-self. Eventually, that ME becomes a very special object, because the I comes to recognise a complex and symbiotic connection to that object. To consider a series of developmental activities of a representative child who is forming and elaborating his ME, let us follow Tommy through his early years. After several months of being called Tommy, this child looks into a mirror and says, ‘that’s Tommy’. Later, Tommy uses the pronoun me to describe the object in the mirror. Somewhere during this period of development Tommy has learned to associate the sound of the word Tommy to the object he saw in the mirror. Later, he will read the word

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Tommy and know that the word represents the body he has seen in the mirror so many times. Like most objects that become meaningful to the observing I, the ME-self will come to have a large number of special meanings, such as ‘sweet boy’ and ‘bad boy’. During the earlier stages of a person’s development, there are simple, direct associations between the object, the ME, and evaluative words or actions expressed by another person. Eventually, the personal constructs formed and employed by the I-self are used to describe ME and provide a budding self-identity. Tommy has come to use a pole of the construct sweet vs. bad to characterise himself and others. Although I have written about the ME as a fairly simple, unitary concept or symbol, I could have described the ME as a cluster of ME’s. James (1890/1950) did this when he proposed various ME’s, including the social ME, the spiritual ME and several other ME’s. However, in the theorising I shall next propose, it will be easier to treat the ME as a unitary unit or concept.

My I construes my body and constructs my ME In an earlier section, I described the I as a process wherein many connections are made among stimuli, and many relationships are recognised. These processes might be called construing, or at least include construing. Kelly (1955) defined construing as a process of interpretation. The observed objects and other stimuli are being construed. I assume that my physical body was one of the early objects selected by my evolving I for construing. After all, that body is always in close proximity to the experiencing-I, and there are ample opportunities for the I to be aware of the body. So, my experiencing- and construing-I probably used newly developed personal constructs to construct my ME. This developing construction process continued to be elaborated as new personal constructs evolved during subsequent reiterations of the construal process. In effect, my I constructed my ME, using my physical body as its original stimulus. The constructed ME may come to serve as a representative of the I, since the I is aware of the close connection between the body and its processing operation. Unfortunately, the I can attribute too much realness to its ME construction. This attribution process has been called reification and the process could restrict the further development or elaboration of the I. If the I considers its current version of ME to be sufficiently representative of the I, it may not seek further elaborations of its current construction. As the I seeks an identity, it may adopt the current ME as its primary identity, and that ME is likely to be a very limited version of the I.

244 Jerald R. Forster Consider the example of one version of my ME, which I identified in the Introduction. A good deal of that identity is now out of date. I have moved on in my career and I do not often educate counsellors. My affiliation with the University of Washington has changed, and I do not represent that university as much as I now represent some other institutions of higher learning. Yet, I might still be stuck in that former identity and it might confuse people who want to implement some joint ventures. Maybe it is time to give up that part of my identity. Maybe I could gain new awareness and be freed of some of my restrictive views of reality. Am I stuck in old roles and old perspectives because I attribute too much realness or validity to the constructed ME that has not been revised very much during the passing years?

The Relationship between the I and the ME I have elaborated two concepts that are useful for explaining the development and functioning of the self. When doing that, I did not mean to imply that these two concepts are two separate components of the self. I am proposing that these two concepts are so intertwined and related that they cannot be considered separately. Since the I has been depicted as the creator of the ME, the I is obviously the more important concept to consider. However, the ME can be objectified and described to others, so it provides the most open window to self-characterisation. After all, the ME does play an important role in the whole processing system of the self. As I propose in the next section, the ME provides feedback in the self-system that facilitates the elaboration and development of the I.

The feedback loop between the I and the ME In my initial attempt to describe the relationship between the I and the ME, I used the simple metaphor of a person seeing his or her physical image reflected in a mirror. The person who is looking is the I and the image in the mirror is the ME, a representation of the I as experienced by the I. But the actual relationship between the I as subject and the ME as object is a much more complicated than what is suggested by the mirror metaphor. Hofstadter (2007) proposes the feedback loop used in mechanical systems such as flush toilets and thermostats as a useful metaphor for explaining how the I and ME affect each other. In the case of flush toilets and thermostats, the larger system is kept in balance by at least two sub-system components that provide feedback to each other so that pre-established

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boundaries are not violated. When using this metaphor for theorising about the human self-system, Hofstadter develops a more complicated feedback loop, called a strange loop. He uses this metaphor to show how perceptions of the ME by the I change the I, which then changes the way the I comes to perceive the ME during the next loop. So, the interaction between the I and the ME keeps changing each other, causing each changed I to observe new aspects of the previously observed ME, thereby creating a new ME to be observed differently during the next round of the loop. Using this metaphor, one can get a sense of the complexity of self-identity and how it constantly develops during a process of elaboration and change. When this feedback process is framed in the language of Personal Construct theory (PCT), the experiencing I starts with a simple construct which is used to differentiate the constructed, yet observed, ME from other people. But the newly constructed ME becomes elaborated and changed from the previous ME, which might well change the personal construct previously used to make the differentiation. When this new version of the construct is used to differentiate the new ME from others, a different ME is constructed, which in turn might influence the I’s next construction of the newly different ME.

Construing the self as the integration of the I and the ME I have proposed a model wherein the I creates the ME and is influenced by that creation. While the experiencing and the construing of the I are influenced by the ME, the I is certainly more than the ME. When I write about the self, I am really writing about the I and the ME combined, because once the ME is created, it changes the I in such a way that the initial, simple I is a different process from that which was previously the case. Even though the I and ME can never be clearly differentiated after they have been developed together, I am hypothesising that we still benefit from theorising as if they were two different processes. However, I think it is useful to think of the ME as less of a process than the I. This is because images or symbols of the ME have been constructed so that they can be experienced as specific events. Specific events can be concretised or seen as being more real or permanent than are processes. This is why the ME seems to be more real than the I, even though it is not. The I is difficult to summarise or slow down, because it is a process that involves continual changing. We like to be able to convert processes to static units so that they are more like phenomena that can be sensed by our sensors. Sensing is the way we become aware of most stimuli. That is why we often use the phrase I want to make sense of what is going on, when

246 Jerald R. Forster we are faced with processes and with abstractions of phenomena that seem ambiguous and often confusing.

Can My I Intentionally Change My ME? I certainly hope that the answer to this question is yes. I think it is reasonable to assume that you can change the ME, if you accept the hypothesis that your ME is a construction. If something is constructed, you would think it could be reconstructed. However, it is generally assumed that the limbic system influences the motivations and the actions of humans and other animals. Although the ME is probably developed with processing enabled by the neocortex (of the neopallium), the limbic system of the paleopallium (midbrain) may have a significant impact on the development of the ME, operating beneath the level of consciousness. If that is the case, self-identity may be influenced by a brain system that is not affected by interventions designed to change cognitive processing. I hope that research studies will be devised and implemented to provide answers to the question raised in the title of this section.

Can a person construct a more positive ME? I believe that the answer to this question is crucial to the cultural evolution of the human species. I base this belief on my review of the theoretical and research literature, most of which has been stimulated by the positive psychology movement (Forster 2005). Martin Seligman (2002), known as the father of the movement, articulated a solid rationale for encouraging authentic happiness, which is characterised by positive MEs. Over the past 15 years I have collaborated with Bernard Haldane to create and implement methods that help people articulate their strengths (Forster 2003). These methods facilitate a process by which people recall positive experiences and then articulate the strengths they used during those experiences. I conducted research studies indicating that participation in this process resulted in significant increases in their positive selfdescriptions. These were indications of a more positive ME (Forster 1991). This research finding is similar to the results of many other studies wherein attempts are made to increase measures of self-esteem, feelings of subjective well-being and optimism. Using the model of elaboration suggested by the I–ME feedback loop, I suggest that the creation of more positive ME’s will eventually change the I. Wright (2000) makes a case that such changes are likely to further the cultural evolution of the human species.

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Can I transcend beyond my awareness of my ME? Many people, often identified with the Buddhist traditions, have written about a no-self state of awareness. Anderson (1997) is particularly insightful and articulate about this state, which he calls liberation. I have been intrigued by this possibility and I engaged in Vipassana meditation practices with the hope that I might achieve liberation. However, I seemed to lack the motivation to persist in my quest for this very desirable state of being. Yet I remain intrigued by the possibility. I think of that state of awareness as a time when my I has transcended beyond awareness of my ME. I doubt that I, or any human being, can achieve this liberating state of awareness for very long, but even short periods would be heavenly. Another way of transcending beyond the awareness of my ME is to become very focused on some engaging activity that requires my total attention. I have recognised some periods in my life when I was so engaged in what I was doing that I paid little attention to my self. Csikszentmihalyi (1997) has written a good deal about this process, which he calls flow. (Incidentally, this type of engagement has been identified as one of the three forms happiness; see Seligman 2002.)

Benefits of Differentiating the I from the ME The benefits of considering the concepts of I and ME include the possibility that you will gain insights into the ways you make sense of yourself. You might increase your awareness of the ways you process your experiences. Actually, I can’t speak to the benefits you get from considering these two templates for looking at yourself. I can, however, articulate some of the benefits I realised from thinking and writing about these aspects of the self. I feel I benefited from becoming more aware of my own constructions of my self-identity. I now seem to recognise these constructions as partial depictions of my self, generated by my complex processing. I interpret these self-constructions as less than real and less valid than the way I interpreted myself before I started using the concepts of I and ME. This does not mean that I am more confused about who I am; rather, that I am less deluded about my ways of trying to make sense of myself. By conceiving of my self-identity as a tentative and hypothetical possibility rather than as the real thing, I feel less need to defend its validity to others and myself. You may have noticed that I just wrote of defending myself to myself, as if I have two selves. Yes, I can experience myself as two selves. You can tell that other people have this dual perspective when

248 Jerald R. Forster you analyse what they say. I have heard many assertions along the lines of: ‘I couldn’t live with myself if I did that’ or ‘I feel sorry for myself’. I hypothesise that this sense of having two selves occurs because some of us experience two aspects of our processing. I am aware at a deeper level that I am processing what is going on, while at the same time I am also the product or construction of that processing. After articulating this model of an I and a ME, I began to understand why I might be feeling like two selves. Let me give a more specific situation when I benefited from this deeper awareness of my processing. In April 2007, after months of weight loss, I received the results of a biopsy informing me that cancer had been found in my pancreas. My knowledge of mortality probabilities for people with pancreatic cancer helped to activate a personal construct of dying vs. living so that I started interpreting the processes of my body as dying rather than living. I started to think of my future existence in terms of months rather than years. But, somewhat to my surprise, I did not experience feelings of dread or catastrophe. Upon further reflection, I became aware of the way I had started to construe my I-self as a current process that would cease to exist when my body and my brain stopped its processing operation – an inevitable future event. This interpretation of my self as a process gave me a sense of impermanence, freeing me from an earlier sense of being a real object or a long-standing entity. This interpretation also enabled me to detach from the sense of realness I had attributed to my ME’s, which were becoming past images or snapshots of various past experiences, never again to be experienced as they once were experienced. In a way, I had moved to an expectation of a temporary self, which is on the way to awareness of a no-self future. Instead of focusing on the precious time I had available to me, I became aware of the gratitude I felt because of the wonderful experiences and the unusual opportunities available to me in the past. As it happened, my interpretation of myself as a dying person was reversed, or at least postponed, after undergoing extensive surgery. Analysis of the tissue removed indicated that I had a less lethal cancer, a bile duct cancer. The whole experience enabled me to reconstrue my self-identity. As a result, I came to interpret my self-consciousness as less permanent and this realisation was accompanied by feelings of peacefulness and gratitude.

Concerns about What was Left Out I have addressed only a few of the specific components comprising the complex and multilayered topic of self-identity. I have focused on the aspect

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of the self that is experiencing, construing and taking action. This description of what is happening when the processes called the I are occurring identifies no more than a few of the activities encompassed by this mysterious process. I have also focused on one object of the I’s construing, a construed product called the ME. This ‘product’, which is a kind of virtual creation, is constructed from abstract templates used to see patterns in phenomena and processes. I have tried to show how these two concepts relate to each other and how the construal of the two, interacting as a system, elaborates the self. My exploration of how the I constructs the ME does not include the influence of other people on the development of the self. It could easily be said that a person’s identity comes from relationships and interactions with other people. The topics of cultural and societal influences are also very important. The impact of expectations, goals and thinking about the future should be included in any comprehensive explanations of self-identification. Anticipations of events that might happen are the guides for much behaviour and self-identity. Although I have concerns about what I have left out, I also realise that I have run out of time and space for saying more in this particular publication. I appreciate this opportunity to articulate some of my reflections on my own processing about myself. The experience of doing so has stretched my thinking so far that at times I felt almost overwhelmed. But it leaves with me a strong desire to continue towards a better understanding of something that I feel is ultimately unknowable.

References Anderson, W. T. (1997). The Future of the Self: Inventing the Postmodern Person. New York: Penguin Putnam Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997). Finding Flow. New York: Basic Books Forster, J. R. (1991). Facilitating positive changes in self-constructions. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 4, 281–292 Forster, J. R. (2003). Bernard Haldane was ahead of his time. Career Planning & Adult Development Journal, 19, 28–38 Forster, J. R. (2005). A summary of selected positive psychology literature supporting strengths-articulation. Paper presented at the 16th International Congress of the Psychology of Personal Constructs, Columbus, OH, 19 July, 2005. Accessed December 15, 2008 from Research Archive of www. dependablestrengths.org Hofstadter, D. (2007). I am a Strange Loop. New York: Basic Books James, W. (1890/1950). The Principles of Psychology. New York: Dover

250 Jerald R. Forster Kabat-zin, J. (1994). Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life. New York: Hyperion Kelly, G. A. (1955). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volumes 1 and 2. New York: Norton (reprinted London: Routledge, 1991) Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Seligman, M. E. (2002). Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realise your Potential for Lasting Fulfilment. New York: Free Press Wright, R. (2000). Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. New York: Random House

Chapter 16

Mirror Man David Green Dave Green is Clinical Director of the Doctor of Clinical Psychology training programme at the University of Leeds. He has worked clinically with young people and their families for over 30 years and currently contributes to the psychological support provided for childhood cancer sufferers at St James’ Hospital, Leeds. He is married with three children, all in their twenties. Being a child of the 1960s, Dave retains an affection not only for personal construct psychology, but also the music of Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band – hence the title of this chapter.

Elaborated aspects of theory: choice corollary, credulous approach, distributed dependencies, guilt, loaded questions, loose and tight construing

Introduction Personal construct theory (PCT) takes pride in its reflexivity. So its protagonists argue that any decent psychological theory should be able to make sense of the behaviour of psychologists as well as the actions of the poor souls they presume to study (Bannister & Fransella 1986). So I had best try to provide the reader with some tentative account of what I intend to write about and why I ended up responding to our editor’s challenge in this particular way. I am going to reflect on two matters that I have found theoretically interesting but personally perplexing. My first focus for deliberation is Kelly’s advocacy of the credulous attitude in psychotherapeutic practice. Nobody seems to make much of a fuss about this recommendation nowadays so you might assume that this is an unremarkable piece of advice that is dead Reflections in Personal Construct Theory. Edited by Richard J. Butler © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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easy to follow. I doubt that’s the case. Maybe my musings will reveal some of the complexity implicit in Kelly’s apparently simple invitation to explore the credulous position. The second half of the chapter is an attempt to employ a Kellyan concept that I have never really ‘got’, to try to make sense of an unease I don’t fully understand. The theoretical puzzler is the choice corollary and the discomfort is related to my contradictory feelings about the encroaching prospect of retirement. Could prove messy. I anticipate that much of my pondering on these questions could be described as falling within the circumspection phase of the creativity cycle, but you never know – I might even get round to doing something as a result of my ruminations.

Being Credulous Psychotherapists tend to take themselves and their craft seriously. They frequently invest a lot of time and energy in becoming more technically proficient and theoretically sophisticated as their careers progress. Indeed, quite a mini-industry has evolved to meet the ‘continuing professional development’ needs of this particular niche market. There is, however, something of a mismatch between what therapists identify as the most helpful aspects of their conversations with their clients and what the consumers themselves construe as their most useful therapeutic experiences (Llewellyn 1988). So technical proficiency can be sold to therapists as part of an evidence-based practice marketing pitch, even though close adherence to protocol might well interfere with the flexible responsiveness most often appreciated by users of psychological services (Norcross 2002). If you want to succeed in the angling supplies business, it’s more important to understand what appeals to fishermen than what appeals to fish (Ransome 1980). Of course, if you want to catch fish, it helps to be able to see the world through the fishes’ eyes. Kelly deliberately resisted the temptation to offer ‘how to do it’ advice to novice therapists. He didn’t want to encourage his followers to rush into noble attempts to resolve their clients’ difficulties without going into the ‘messy business’ of understanding them first. He did, however, offer an important clue as to how we might gain some privileged access to what makes an individual tick in psychological terms. This was his simple yet profound recommendation that we adopt a ‘credulous approach’ in our work (Kelly 1965/1969). I fancy this fundamental guidance is too often glossed over in PCP textbooks, so I plan to take this opportunity to

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comment at some length on the challenges inherent in being truly credulous in our dealings with each other. I might even confess that I don’t always manage to practise what I preach. Being credulous is not just taking a trusting, respectful stance to what our clients choose to tell us about their lives. What psychotherapist (who wants to stay in business) would admit to not taking their clients’ opinions seriously? Kelly did not elect to describe the attitude he wanted the clinical psychologists whom he trained to adopt in bland positive terms such as collaborative or person-centred, but used the unusual epithet ‘credulous’. You get the impression that George sweated blood to find le mot juste with which to convey his ideas, so I think we can assume that the term is dripping with implications. You see there is a downside to being seen as credulous. If you find yourself so described, it is more likely to be intended as an insult than a compliment. Credulous characters are gullible – they end up victims of internet scams and the like. The poor saps will believe anything you tell them. The least damning synonym I can muster is probably ‘unsuspecting’. Did Kelly really intend that personal construct therapists should open themselves up to the threat of public ridicule in this fashion? Well, yes, I imagine he did. If we accept that our clients are the experts on their own lives, if we can tolerate the uncomfortable notion that their theories are far more pertinent than ours, then the risk of appearing a mite foolish is a small price to pay for the possibility of being entrusted with the ‘inside story’ of another person’s existence. Put like that, taking a credulous stance might sound like the obvious position to adopt, but I reckon Kelly’s invitation to his fellow psychologists remains as revolutionary now as it was when first issued over 50 years ago. Doctors don’t often take a credulous approach to their patients’ accounts of their experiences (Ley 1988). Adults continue to define children by their incompetence and so miss opportunities to take young people’s opinions seriously (Salmon 1985). So if you happen to be both ill and young, you can end up being something of a bystander in your own medical consultations (Young et al. 2003). So seeking a child’s view on why they are struggling to comply with a particular treatment regime rather than lecturing them on the benefits of ‘adherence’ remains an oddly novel tack to take on the paediatric ward. ‘If you want to find out what’s wrong with a person, then why not ask them?’ is a principle that applies to all persons, young and old alike. Of course, asking the right question is only useful if you are prepared to listen carefully to the answers you receive. Real social connection requires mutual understanding – construing the construction processes of the other as the sociality corollary puts it.

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To See ourselves as Others See Us As the discerning reader my have noted, once I warm to this particular theme, I can bang on for hours on end. However, the reflexive remit given to all contributors to this volume has just put a highly effective brake on that tendency. I’m pretty good, even if I say so myself, at advancing the cause of the credulous approach, but a couple of recent incidents have led me to question whether I live up to my own publicity. I may talk the talk, but there is some doubt as to whether I always walk the walk! The first episode concerns a clinical consultation – in this instance with a woman, Jenny, in her early forties. I have recently begun to collect sessionby-session feedback from my therapeutic clients on their experience of our conversations using a brief rating scale developed to gauge the changing nature of our working alliance (Miller & Duncan 2007). On this occasion we had spent most of our time together talking through the implications of a fixed-role sketch that I had penned on the basis of our prior discussions. Although I don’t use FRT often, I’ve had some successes with the approach (Green 1997) and enjoy the chance it gives me to exercise a little literary flair. I had not therefore anticipated the mixed review that my client gave my performance, which could be fairly characterised as ‘damning with faint praise’. Although Jenny reported that she had felt pretty well heard, understood and respected, that we had talked mainly about what she wanted to talk about and that the approach we were adopting generally suited her, her overall rating of the session was the lowest of any of our consultations together. Since patient satisfaction surveys are notorious for their relentlessly positive bias, I was keen to understand more about Jenny’s refreshingly candid commentary. She wasn’t averse to the fixed-role idea, she explained, but she felt that I had displayed more enthusiasm for the venture than she had. Furthermore, once the conversation took off in the direction of how to enact the fixed-role part, the chances of her raising a couple of matters she had hoped to discuss just vanished. So keen had I been to ‘sell’ a particular personal construct technique that I had forgotten the fundamental principle of PCP and palpably failed in my commitment to being credulous. I can almost see Kelly shaking his head in disappointed admonition. The second blast of corrective feedback that I recently received was from my older daughter, Rachel, now a 27-year-old schoolteacher. As we chatted over the remnants of our festive turkey I took the opportunity to ask her how well I had listened to her views as she was growing up and how much she thought I had encouraged her to develop and express her own ideas. Rachel initially broke it to me gently. In some ways I had been very sup-

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portive in helping her voice her views on the world – provided they agreed with mine. When she had strayed from the paternally approved pathway and had the temerity to think for herself, she had not experienced my approach as respectful. In fact, I believe ‘dismissive’ was the term she used. What’s more, it hadn’t got any better as she got older. My firstborn baby then proceeded to cite a string of instances when I had ridden roughshod over her opinions on topics as diverse as T. S. Elliot’s poetry and neurolinguistic programming. She even brought my own brother, her uncle, into the witness box as he could be relied on to attest that I’d been like that for as long as he could remember! I felt as if my credentials as a credulous parent had been shot to pieces. I could, I suppose, reflect that these attributions say more about the constructions of the observer than the characteristics of the observed. I might also recall that the fragmentation corollary leaves us all room for a little creative hypocrisy when necessary. However, at heart I too recognise myself in these descriptions. I don’t think I’m up to being credulous 100% of the time. Maybe I’m just too fond of giving the world the benefit of my opinion – whether the world has invited me to comment or not. Perhaps there are also circumstances in which my determination to be helpful trumps my commitment to being credulous. So I try a little too hard with my clients and somewhat over-zealously seek to influence my children’s outlook on life. All for the best possible motives, you understand. It isn’t easy to adopt a totally credulous attitude in your dealings with others. In fact, I suspect it may be a very unusual experience for all concerned. Therein lies its therapeutic potential. It may also be that it is a stance that we should aspire to achieve and accept that often we will find we have set ourselves too ambitious a task. If we remain open to feedback on our failings, there is always the chance we’ll get closer to our goal next time around.

The Loaded Question of Retirement Kelly himself never got to retire properly. He died ‘in harness’ as it were. However, there are reasons to suspect he reflected on the some of the same issues of the ‘work–life balance’ that are now preoccupying me. His master’s thesis in Educational Sociology, written before the war, investigated the leisure time activities of workers in Kansas City. On a much more personal level, in his essay ‘Confusion and the clock’ (Kelly 1978), written both before and after surviving a major heart attack, Kelly expanded on what it feels like for a man of a certain age to face an unpredictable future.

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Interestingly, he argued that nothing that happens to us is either entirely expected or entirely unexpected (whether the event is mundane or something that strikes us as a bolt from the blue). Our personal construct systems allow us to anticipate – to adopt a posture towards the future. So without claiming great powers of prediction we are continually preparing ourselves for the eventualities that await us. So I intend devoting a few lines to my own attempts to anticipate what the developmental psychologists like to call my next life transition. You see, I’m wondering about when and how to stop work and I’m not finding it a simple matter to resolve. In fact, I’m in a distinctly lucky position in that I will (fingers crossed) have a choice about when to stop working. Unlike employees who are made redundant or are obliged to leave their jobs because of ill-health, I hope to reach my sixtieth birthday in a couple of years’ time with a decent pension available but also with the option of continuing in my current post for a further five years if I so fancy. It is only as I contemplate the prospect of retirement that I fully grasp Tschudi’s (1977) notion of a ‘loaded question’ since neither stopping nor staying strikes me as an evidently preferable decision. There’s something to be said for both choices. Despite Joni Mitchell’s famous dictum that ‘you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’ I shall begin this little exercise in self-analysis by identifying what I like about my job and am loathe to lose. It takes only a minute to construct a list of satisfactions that remind me of my good fortune in stumbling into my current trade. I get credit for showing off in public; I find myself still intrigued by the subject material of clinical psychology; I have just about enough power to enable me to get done the things I want to get done; I get to meet and know an engaging variety of individuals; and I even get to help some of them. This last throwaway line is, I suspect, the most important. I seem to remember that Kelly advised clinicians to attend closely to how their clients choose to end self-characterisations. The principle applies in this instance too. I had not appreciated how much I have come to rely on others’ dependence on me. As a clinician and a professional educator I am used to people turning to me for support and guidance. I hope these conversations prove beneficial to my various consultees, but I am increasingly aware of the good they do me.

Dependency Kelly (1962/1969) wrote presciently about the increasingly complex ‘personal matrix of reciprocal supplies and demands’ that adults construct to

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get by in modern society. So we depend on a wide number of individuals and organisations to meet our special requirements and conversely we play our own parts in meeting the needs of the many others with whom we are socially connected. It is this distribution of dependencies that is the hallmark of emotional maturity and characterises the fair exchange system on which our best communities are founded. The situational resources grid was devised to allow individuals to map out the manner in which they allocate their particular dependencies – to try to answer the recurrent question ‘in whom confide, on whom depend for what’? (Kelly 1958/1969). This analysis can prove very helpful in prompting a person to translate what Kelly termed vague longings into specific objectives (e.g. Green 2005). However, this single grid can present no more than a very partial picture. In whose worlds do we represent a significant resource on which others sense they can draw? For what problems are we considered the fixer of choice? Who would not touch us with the proverbial barge pole even in their hour of darkest need? I do not know of any research that has examined these complex interrelationships using situational resources grids, but comparable mapping exercises have been undertaken exploring reciprocal patterns in children’s friendships employing sociometric techniques (Asher & Gottman 1981). If such a study were to be conducted hereabouts, I like to imagine (somewhat egocentrically I concede) that I would feature on a fair few dependency grids. So what will happen when those supply routes are cut off? I suspect that those who currently rely on my services will find alternative suppliers – and sooner rather than later. Having changed jobs a few times in my career, I’ve noticed a recurrent trend for organisations in which I have played an evidently pivotal role to survive my departure somehow! Gaps get filled by a new therapist or another tutor or the deputy sheriff. Assuredly, some gaps are easier to fill than others, but we are not talking about a role relationship that is likely to be construed as inherently irreplaceable like those we might have with a parent or a spouse (if we are fortunate). So I guess those who currently depend on me in my professional capacity will probably find other ways to cope. But what about me? One aspect of my work that I fear I will miss badly is the regular crossgenerational contacts I enjoy with students on the university side of my post and children and young people on the hospital side. I note from the experience of some pals who have taken early retirement relatively recently that they seem to have entered a world that is peopled solely by their contemporaries or seniors. While I realise that the ‘like plays with like’ rule is established in the school playground (Graham & Cohen 1997), and probably governs our friendship choices across the life-span, I also resent the

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principle of social stratification by age. I hope this isn’t linked to some dubious wish to be ‘down with the kids’ and continuously refreshed by their youthful enthusiasm. I prefer to think that my later career choices have been influenced by something like Erikson’s (1980) notion of generativity. Involvement in professional training and devising therapeutic interventions to assist families in crisis share the same goal of using your own accrued life experience to support others in achieving their potential. There is something of the horticulturalist’s satisfaction in watching people grow before your very eyes and to feel that you have contributed in some significant way to their healthy development. I fancy it is this sort of experience that Seligman (2002) has in mind when he talks about the secret of human contentment lying in the chances we get to exercise our so-called ‘signature strengths’. For those with a sense of vocation the work setting can bring out the qualities that others appreciate and that you like in yourself. Positive psychologists tend to emphasise the universality of our beliefs about what makes for a ‘good life’, arguing that virtues such as wisdom and kindness have been recognised and valued across the centuries in a diverse range of cultures. The personal construct take on this question is, I think, oddly enough embodied in Kelly’s definition of guilt. In common usage you are expected to feel guilty if you are culpable of some misdeed. Something has been ‘your fault’ and you are therefore blameworthy to some degree. Kellyan guilt is a quite different business and is defined as a sense of ‘dislodgement from core role structures’. It is the feeling prompted when we act in a way we would not have expected of ourselves. The converse of Kellyan guilt is the ‘goodness of fit’ experience that reinforces the core construct of self-worth. So, in the ‘Confusion and the clock’ paper described earlier in this chapter, Kelly recalled feeling guilty in the midst of his semi-conscious haze that he was unable to help his wife and children deal with the prospect of his own death. I don’t think this meant he was expecting to be blamed for having had a heart attack. Rather, he saw himself as a man who looked after his family in times of trouble and he knew he was in no position to fulfil that role. Maybe my uncertainty about the prospect of retiring can be understood as indecision about quite how much revision of my core self-image is going to be required of me. A few ‘incidental’ changes I can manage, but as Kelly predicted, more ‘comprehensive’ adjustments in the way I view myself would feel much more threatening (Butler & Green 2007). I think I should also acknowledge another issue that perhaps qualifies as what the family therapists like to describe as the ‘elephant in the room’. The end of a person’s working life is an important milestone to be marked by due ceremony and reflection. It is another step along the road and so it

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is a step nearer the end of the road. I’m sure I have a construct along the lines of young at heart vs. old before their time at play here. Despite some compelling counterevidence, I am partial to the fiction that growing old is what happens to other people! This question of when to retire has implications that I am only beginning to appreciate.

The Road not Taken All the foregoing discussion will probably have left the reader wondering what the fuss is all about. It’s obvious that I should work till I drop! But there is another side to this argument that needs airing. A choice to stay in my current employment represents a victory for predictability over adventure. In the terminology of the choice corollary it implies that I prefer tighter definition of my established self-image to the riskier prospect of extending the range of my construct system. Why would I want to keep doing more of the same (and probably doing it less well than I used too) when I could be writing a fresh and exciting new chapter in my autobiography? There are characters in my community of selves that have thus far played only bit-parts and would welcome the chance to occupy centre stage for a while – Green the Traveller, Green the Entrepreneur, maybe even Green the long-distance hiker. Although some important role-relationships would inevitably diminish in their importance, others would develop. Catherine and I are starting to get used to functioning as husband and wife after relating primarily as Mum and Dad for over 20 years. More time together promises plenty of enjoyable elaboration of our understandings (and misunderstandings) of each other. My own mother is in her eighties now and has an impressive social network of playmates most of whom she had never met 10 years ago. They understand the principles of mutuality and dispersed dependencies perfectly well without needing to complete situational resources grids. I fear I may be harbouring some dangerously prejudicial stereotypes about what later life may have to offer (Hendry & Kloep 2002). Is it really my own inability to face the future at what Kelly delightfully termed ‘the one cocktail level of confidence’ that prevents me from grasping the opportunity at hand? As Philip Larkin (1988) reflects in his poem ‘Toads’: Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life? Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork And drive the brute off?

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Larkin concludes that he has not the courage to jack it all in and live on his wits as ‘something sufficiently toad-like’ squats within him too. But he presents his options as characteristically dark and mutually exclusive alternatives. So in the subsequently penned ‘Toads Revisited’ he completely rejects the idea of ever stopping working: Give me your arm, old toad; Help me down the Cemetery Road

I find that I too have been framing my choices in stark either/or terms. Perhaps there is a way I can have my cake and eat it. The kind of radical experiment in which individuals commit themselves to a rapid reorganisation of their construct systems can be liberating and life-transforming, but it can also give rise to unsustainable initiatives. Those who choose to jump in at the deep end may find themselves jumping out again pretty sharpish. Kelly described this sequence as ‘slot-rattling’. A more considered testing of the water may ultimately lead to greater elaboration. So my current plan is to review ways in which I can change my working practices over the next couple of years to free up more leisure time and try out some novel (but not all that novel) ways of earning a living. I shall try to limit my natural tendency to assume I shall be able to ‘cross that bridge when I come to it’ and engage in a spot more anticipatory construing than has been my wont. I know my retirement plans won’t simply fall into place as expected, but I do not intend to be totally unprepared for the ambush when my time comes.

Conclusion So what? Most of the foregoing musings, reflections and exploration of alternatives could be fairly classified as exercises in loose construing. I have probably pondered long enough and the time has come to gird my loins for action (a suitably muscular metaphor for the tightening phase of the creativity cycle). What differences will follow from my deliberations? As regards my quest to become more convincingly credulous I have resolved that it is more important for a father to know his children than to know what’s best for them, however noble his paternal motives might be. On the matter of retirement, I fancy I should follow the latest psychological counsel and start to devote some more time to non-work-related activities in anticipation of my next life transition (Kloep & Hendry 2006). Now where did I leave that fishing rod …?

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References Asher, S. & Gottman, J. (1981). The Development of Children’s Friendships. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Bannister, D. & Fransella, F. (1986). Inquiring Man, 3rd edition. London: Routledge Butler, R. J. & Green, D. (2007). The Child Within: Taking the Young Person’s Perspective by Applying Personal Construct Theory. Chichester: Wiley Erikson, E. (1980). Identity and the Life Cycle. New York: Norton Graham, J. & Cohen, R. (1997). Race and sex as factors in children’s sociometric ratings and friendship choices. Social Development, 6, 355–372 Green, D. (1997). An experiment in fixed-role therapy. Clinical Child Psychology & Psychiatry, 2, 553–564 Green, D. (2005). Personal construct theory and paediatric health care. Clinical Child Psychology & Psychiatry, 10, 33–41 Hendry, L. & Kloep, M. (2002). Lifespan Development: Resources, Challenges and Risks. London: Thompson Learning Kelly, G. A. (1958/1969). Man’s construction of his alternatives. In B. Maher (ed.) Clinical Psychology and Personality: The Selected Papers of George Kelly. New York: John Wiley & Sons Kelly, G. A. (1962/1969). In whom confide: on whom depend for what? In B. Maher (ed.) Clinical Psychology and Personality: The Selected Papers of George Kelly. New York: John Wiley & Sons Kelly, G. A. (1965/1969). The psychotherapeutic relationship. In B. Maher (ed.) Clinical Psychology and Personality: The Selected Papers of George Kelly. New York: John Wiley & Sons Kelly, G. A. (1978). Confusion and the clock. In F. Fransella (ed.) Personal Construct Psychology. London; Academic Press Kloep, M. & Hendry, L. (2006). Entry or exit? Transitions into retirement. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 79, 569–593 Larkin, P. (1988). Collected Poems. London: Marvell Ley, P. (1988). Communicating with Patients: Improving Communication, Satisfaction and Compliance. London: Croom Helm Llewellyn, S. (1988). Psychological therapy as viewed by clients and therapists. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 27, 223–238 Miller, S. & Duncan, B. (2007). Heroic Clients, Heroic Agencies: A Client-Directed Outcome-Informed Treatment Manual. Chicago: Institute for the Study of Therapeutic Change Norcross, J. C. (ed.). (2002). Psychotherapy Relationships that Work. New York: Oxford University Press Ransome, A. (1980). Rod and Line. Oxford: Oxford University Press Salmon, P. (1985). Living in Time. London: Dent Seligman, M. E. (2002). Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realise your Potential for Lasting Fulfilment. New York: Free Press

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Tschudi, F. (1977). Loaded and honest questions: A construct theory view of symptoms and therapy. In D. Bannister (ed.) New Perspectives in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press Young, B., Dixon-Woods, M., Windridge, K. & Heney, D. (2003). Managing communication with young people who have potentially life threatening chronic illness: Qualitative study of patients and parents. British Medical Journal, 326, 305–308

Chapter 17

Landmarks on a Personal Odyssey Finn Tschudi Finn Tschudi took early retirement in 1998 as Professor of Psychology at the University of Oslo, where his major interests were in the fields of personality and social and cognitive psychology. His underlying interest in contributing to building a more viable society is perhaps most clearly revealed in his current involvement in restorative justice, both nationally and internationally. Further information can be found on his website: http://folk.uio. no/ftschudi

Elaborated aspects of theory: ABC model; sociality; peace psychology; restorative justice

Background When I started studying psychology my hope was that psychology could contribute to building a more viable society. A related theme was to get closer to real events, which I like to think of as underlying causes, or dispositional properties. This is the major theme in my doctoral dissertation (1973). As that is now available on my website it will be only briefly touched on here. My first assignment was in psychometrics and I found it important to give a perspective on the tools used to analyse data. Data structures often appeared to be bewilderingly complex, but I wondered if special analyses might bring us closer to an underlying reality. I liken this to a satellite image of the planets and their moons. When these are transmitted to earth there is some interstellar disturbance, and it will then be necessary to use Reflections in Personal Construct Theory. Edited by Richard J. Butler © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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G

Output generated from analysis reconstructed values

TF Latent structure true configuration

AF

L

M

Data (similarities) input to analysis

NL

NL noise level. AF apparent fit, goodness of fit, stress, degree of recovery of M from G. TF true fit, degree of recovery of L by output G.

Figure 17.1 A meta-model representing the relations between latent structure (L), manifest (M) and reconstructed data (G)

sophisticated techniques to strip out the disturbance in order to get the best possible picture. I use the concepts manifest data structure vs. latent underlying phenomena. The major difference is that there will always be disturbances between the latent and the manifest. I call this noise, and it can be conceptualised as a line of a given length. When using models for analysis the intention is to get a parsimonious, yet informative picture of the underlying structure. This is at the cost of a reconstructed data representation which does not capture all the details of the manifest data. The basic ideas are represented in what I call a meta-model and are shown in Figure 17.1. Most discussions of data analysis emphasise that manifest M and reconstructed G should be fairly close. The meta-model, however, sets the goal of getting as close to the latent L as possible. I call this purification of the manifest data, or stripping out noise. The terminology pays homage to Kelly’s emphasis on dichotomous constructs. The opposite of purification is distortion. Metaphorically, we risk G ‘moving away’ from the latent L! Figure 17.1 shows that a close fit between manifest and reconstructed is incompatible with a substantial stripping out of noise. I call this distance apparent fit to contrast it with true fit. This implies a critique of much current practice, and I did some spadework to show how the notion of true fit may be applied in the specific context of multidimensional scaling. (I am also currently working on applying similar thinking to grid analysis. Details can be found on my website.) Here I simply note that the work used extensive simulation techniques which took up several hundred hours of computer programming. This was in the era of punched cards, when a single mistake meant ‘run aborted’. We then had to correct the faulty cards and hope the computer technicians would undertake another run the same day (or night). This was a true labour of love and I was glad to have the opportunity to

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express my gratitude for all technical help I was fortunate to receive in the preface to my dissertation. The following sections more clearly reflect my interest in building a viable society. First, the construct manifest–latent (otherwise known as the ABC model) was elaborated in perhaps my best-known Kellyan contribution in a paper entitled ‘Loaded and honest questions’ (1977). I then comment on surface and depth in understanding other people. This requires that one is aware not only of the differences between the other and oneself, but also the similarities. This, however, can lead to difficulties when it is tempting to see the other as ‘evil’. The next section deals with restorative justice as a way to overcome the dilemma. Recognising one’s own vulnerability may turn out not to be a threat in the Kellyan sense, but a deeply shared experience, a collective vulnerability, or ‘jointness’. Fostering such jointness is in line with the desire for ‘global ubuntu’ and it is my hope that this chapter will inspire more personal construct psychology (PCP) interest in peace psychology.

Manifest and Latent Levels in the ABC Model In the ABC model (Tschudi 1977) the principal ideas reflect those presented in my dissertation. A more extensive update of both the techniques and range of application is forthcoming (Tschudi & Winter in press). In acknowledgement of Harold Greenwald (1973),1 the main source of inspiration for the ABC model, I use one of his favourite stories to illustrate the model. 1

I went to a seminar Greenwald gave in Bergen in the early 1970s and was enthralled by his undivided attention to and respect for the client who had volunteered for a demonstration of his approach. What specifically excited me was that, as a matter of course, the client was present and free to comment in the discussion of his therapy. This was an exemplary illustration of the Kellyan stance of seeing a client as having the same epistemological status as the therapist. Greenwald became a highly valued friend. Once, I told him that he had misconstrued aspects of the life-story of a good friend. I have rarely seen him as serious as when he immediately said: ‘Tell her that I am sorry that I got her wrong’. True to style, however, he could not resist making a joke at his own expense: ‘I try to learn from my mistakes. That is how I have come to know so much; I make so many.’ I enjoyed his emphasis on using humour in therapy. He told me how Rogers had objected to this and said ‘to me therapy is a serious business’. Whenever he saw Greenwald after that he would ask, ‘Who is this fellow?’ So, to vindicate Greenwald, I cannot resist mentioning that Rogers misconstrued Buber’s I–Thou as applicable to therapy since I–Thou, unlike therapy, is a symmetrical relationship (Tschudi & Reichelt 2004).

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At the manifest level ‘A’, a person engaging in unwanted behaviour is asking a ‘loaded question’ – a symptom from which he really wants to distance himself. Being aware of a desirable contrast, the poles may be labelled ‘a1’ and ‘a2’ respectively. ‘B’ is an elaboration of ‘A’, with ‘b1’ being any negative consequence of ‘a1’ and ‘b2’ any positive consequence of the desired ‘a2’. Eliciting ‘A’ and ‘B’ is usually fairly straightforward. Quite often there is, however, an underlying latent ‘C’, which prevents movement from ‘a1’ to ‘a2’. The undesired ‘a1’ may have desirable consequences – ‘c2’; conversely, the desired ‘a2’ may have undesirable consequences – ‘c1’. This structure is also called an implicative dilemma. Being made aware of ‘C’ may point to therapeutic steps that will help the person out of the dilemma. Searching for an underlying intention – ‘C’ – may also be useful in non-therapeutic settings. This is illustrated in the following distinction between openness to underlying intentions vs. staying with more superficial stereotyping. A person with strong left beliefs politically had a predilection for indecent exposure (a1). He did not really want to do this (a2) because it might result in a jail sentence (b1), something he wished to avoid (b2). Greenwald enjoyed heading directly for the underlying level C with the direct question: ‘What’s the payoff?’ In practice, it is unlikely that this will elicit a useful answer to the basic question: ‘What is the person really after?’ In this case the answer, the advantage a1, was to express contempt for the bourgeois (c2) vs. being a conformist (c1). His dilemma was that he could see no way of controlling his tendency to indecent exposure (a2) and expressing his contempt (c2). Through humour Greenwald made this an untenable position. He pointed out that the person was really playing into the hands of the despised majority, supporting their deep conviction that ‘commies are nothing but sexual perverts’. Together with the client they arrived at a more viable solution: to express contempt by writing vitriolic comments on the various vagaries of local government. This ‘outlet’ made the desire for indecent exposure superfluous. Often students are dissatisfied with this solution, feeling there must be something more going on. My answer is to bring to the foreground the notion of the person-as-scientist. The therapist helps the client to design more satisfying experiments (cf. the Kellyan notion that ‘behaviour is an experiment’). If the client is satisfied with his new behaviour, it would be condescending to tell him ‘you have not really solved your problem’. On the other hand, it might be presumptuous to rule out the possibility of deeper levels. It is, however, up to the person with the loaded questions to decide whether further exploration is worthwhile or not!

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One personal story, illustrating the ABC model, which I was once too shy to admit to, involved, at the latent, intentional level (c2) ‘the freedom of a child playing on a beach’. The manifest, surface level stated the offshoot problem as ‘can’t handle money’ (a1) whereas what I wanted was to ‘handle money well’ (a2). The contrast to the child playing on a beach (the pole preventing movement) was revealed as ‘bourgeois, trivial, dull, sticks to the rules’ (c1). While handling money is not a major problem today there is now another haunting ‘offshoot’ of the child playing, i.e. not being able to keep things in order. Countless hours are spent in an often futile search for important items. The construct ‘freedom of the child’ vs. ‘sticks to the rules’ plays an important part in much of my current work.2 Specifically, I am quite sceptical about strict rule adherence (Tschudi 2004). For many years I (Tschudi 1983) struggled with a rejoinder to Mischel’s (1964) critique of Kelly. I found Mischel’s argument for rule adherence as a contrast to Kelly’s personas-scientist model almost a personal affront. To me, Mischel was undercutting the joy of exploring the world with an open mind. For one of his major examples – ‘I take an aspirin because I have a headache’ – I argued that contrary to Mischel there is an implied prediction here: ‘and the headache will go away’. In a paper I presented at a World Judiciary Conference in India in December 2007 (Tschudi 2007a) there is a theme which has a similar resonance for me. While the aim of the conference was to promote international law I found myself about as antagonistic to the International Criminal Court as I was to Mischel’s thesis. Laying down the law implies that harsh punishment is necessary when serious ‘crimes against humanity’ have been committed. Sometimes an implied prediction is stated (‘and reconciliation and peaceful rebuilding will be furthered’),3 but often there is a Kantian categorical imperative at work. I try to curb my predilection for spewing acerbic comments on ‘arrogant western cognitive imperialism’, and make a plea for combining indigenous and restorative practices with the possibility of criminal proceedings only if all other measures fail.

2

An offshoot of the work of the Swedish auditors Øhman et al. (2006) was a paper arguing for an appeal to higher-order principles, vs. sticking to concrete rules. In complex environments, such as nuclear plants and tracking companies, ‘social responsibility policy’ was emphasised (Tschudi 2004) 3 I have not seen any convincing general evidence for this. Criminal proceedings are no less likely to have no discernible effect and may in some cases even make matters worse. See also Tschudi (2008).

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Surface and Depth (Underlying Intentions) in Understanding Concerning understanding I have found the construct surface vs. depth useful, which is similar to my basic construct manifest vs. latent. Understanding roughly corresponds to getting to the depth or intentional level, while misunderstanding implies that the person has failed to reach this level. Any utterance takes place in a more or less transparent context and that context may be a help or a hindrance in getting to this level. Deception deals with how people sometimes create a context which serves to hide their true intentions.4 When deception is successful the deceived person has arrived at a distorted construction, but there are many situations which are not subject to deception where we also arrive at a distorted construction. Here we concentrate on situations where deception is not the major focus. Depending on your perspective, failure to get to the level of intention may be humorous, tragic or plain bizarre. I hope the reader, like me, will enjoy the following Peanuts cartoon strip:

© United Feature Syndicate, distributed by PiB Copenhagen Kelly was concerned with misunderstanding and one of his favourite examples is of the teacher who construes a pupil as ‘lazy’. This may well signal a biased construction and signify that the pupil is not doing what the teacher wants her to do. Kelly did not find ‘lazy’ to be a particularly helpful construction since it does not address the question of what the pupil’s intention is. Of course, the teacher might be perceived as being more or less locked in her own world and thus distancing herself from the pupil. 4

Interestingly, this topic has received special attention in evolutionary psychology because getting at the true intention can be a matter of life and death, especially for people living in tribes without the benefits of a protective state.

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From this point of view understanding requires being close to the other, while misunderstanding implies remaining at a distance. Understanding/misunderstanding (or not understanding) is tied to the sociality corollary, which states that to the extent that one person construes the construction processes of another, he may play a role in a social enterprise involving the other (Kelly 1955). To ‘construe the construction processes of another’ implies joining in a social enterprise and building a viable society. This is contrasted with non-social relating, which only construes ‘the behaviour of the other’ or ‘treat others as a behaving mechanism or object’ and not addressing what the person really wants (Tschudi & Rommetveit 1983). From my point of view there is a failure to understand in the way some of my PCP friends construe Skinner’s psychology. It has been a favourite game to put PCP theory at a safe distance from ‘the stimulus – jerked puppet of learning theory’. In the late 1960s I struggled with some of the chapters in the monumental seven-volume Psychology: A Study of a Science, edited by Sigmund Koch. So it was a pure delight to encounter someone who rejected the straitjacket Koch (1959) tried to impose on the contributors, imploring them to outline the philosophical background of their theories. The delightful encounter was with your archetypical ‘stimulus – jerked puppet’, B. F. Skinner (1959), who started by saying that he did not know much about theory, but doubted that he had missed much. Consequently, he preferred to ask his readers to imagine him lying on a couch and then try their best to make sense of his associations. Understanding Skinner amounted to understanding his contribution. A joke which pleased Skinner was a cartoon showing a rat triumphantly saying: ‘Boy, have I got this guy conditioned, every time I press the lever I get a pellet’. Yes, that is just how it is! Life, however, may assume any level of complexity when the varieties of schedules of reinforcement as well as the variety of reinforcers are considered. Pondering the meaning of this, Skinner found a cumulative record of results to be a valuable common denominator and when he published a collection of his papers, what more appropriate title than Cumulative Record (Skinner 1961) could there be? Rhetorically, who can match that for reflexivity? I have occasionally thought about ‘reflexivity’ among prominent psychologists and balked at the fact that I cannot remember having seen anyone in the PCP tribe honouring Skinner for reflexivity. Supporting these reflections is a memorable encounter I had with Skinner when he visited Oslo in the early 1970s. For some reason none of my colleagues felt it incumbent on them to entertain him during the evening so I was given expenses for a meal at a posh restaurant. I have never set myself the goal of being an expert on the schedules of reinforcement so I spent

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some time reading Cumulative Record to see what might be of mutual interest. At that time Albert Schweitzer was about as close to universal sainthood as Nelson Mandela is today. So when Skinner sharply criticised Schweitzer, I ‘pricked up my ears’ (to borrow an expression Kelly used when writing about learning theory). Skinner’s criticism was that by concentrating on helping others one at a time Schweitzer had succumbed to immediate reinforcement, the satisfaction of seeing instant results from his actions. If he, as a gifted physician with an interest in the plight of Africans, had instead been working in an institute of tropical medicine he might have been of help to ‘not thousands – but literally billions of people’ (Skinner 1961 p. 250). This was the first time I was confronted with the problem of the enticement of immediate gratification vs. being under the aegis5 of a more uncertain and delayed reinforcement. This general problem6 deserves universal attention. Skinner was pleased that I had picked this up, and expressed his regret that few others had noticed the point. I remember that in this vein he expressed dissatisfaction with his students. He had decided to close his laboratory and my impression was that this was (partly) because his students were almost exclusively concerned with the immediate results of their research, graduating, and so forth. Skinner, however, was basically concerned with the plight of society at large. So in effect, to criticise someone like Skinner is similar to the teacher who construes the pupil as ‘lazy’. It does not reflect a real attempt to find what Skinner is after, to unearth his intentions and thus the underlying deep structure.7 5

In ‘Loaded and honest questions’ (Tschudi 1977) I mention that even for a diehard Skinnerian it may be permissible to use the shorthand expression ‘motivated by’ in this context. But out of respect for Skinner I avoid using ‘motivated’ here, and settle on the quainter ‘under the aegis of ’. 6 A salient example is working on efficient measures to overcome the long-term harmful effects of global warming. I hope work being done on the problem of succumbing to immediate reinforcement may be helpful here. Concerning G. W. Bush’s reticence, I am reminded of a joke where a serious businessman baldly states, ‘We can’t afford to save the earth’. 7 His view of the good society can be found in his novel Walden Two. Creative performance in any field is highly valued here. Concerning the work that needs to be done, he has an excellent suggestion. Those who undertake tedious work should be required to work few hours – thus giving them more time for leisure – whereas those with interesting work would spend more hours at work. Skinner deplored rumours that his daughter was ‘raised in a Skinner box’. He and his wife did their best to provide a hospitable environment for an infant, and Skinner was very happy that his daughter chose to work as a creative artist.

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Staying at the surface and avoiding the deeper layer is not what I consider to be honest. To make the point as unambiguously as possible: on the face of it obsessive behaviour may seem rather stupid. Yet I cannot conceive of anyone in PCP who would point at the person with a derisive ‘ha, ha, how stupid’. Here charitable constructions can be taken for granted. Why can I not take such constructions for granted when it comes to alternative approaches to psychology? First, I cannot bring myself to think that critics really believe their diatribe will make antagonists ‘mend their ways’ and become converts to a PCP perspective. It is now elementary psychology that such criticism is more likely to lead to increased antagonism, not dialogue, which in my mind should be the goal whenever fundamental disagreements arise. This is a primary goal in peace research, which I will expand on later. Failure to construe by similarity and stay exclusively with construal by difference may be at the root of many serious problems. George W. Bush after the 11 September 2001 (9/11) terrorist attacks epitomises this when he drew a contrast between ‘America as the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world’ and the attackers, who were described as ‘evil flesh, bone and blood’. (cf. Jordanger and Alapack 2007 for an in depth analysis of US response to terror). A relentless fight is thus necessary – a fight which currently seems to spell yet more disaster. Bush does not appear to be able to construe any important similarities between his own self-righteousness and that of the ‘terrorists’. In the Tomkins tribe one reaction to 9/11 was to ask ‘what have we done to make them hate us so much that they can do such a thing?’ This is consistent with a view that if we were the victims of equally terrible treatment as we have subjected them to we might feel inclined to ‘match’ the 9/11 heinous act. Somewhat to my surprise Tony Blair’s reaction was similar. He suggested that ‘the dragon’s teeth are planted in the fertile soil of wrongs unrighted, of disputes left to fester for years’ (quoted in Kaldor 2003), which I take to imply accepting some responsibility for having planted ‘the dragon’s teeth’. In the Kellyan tradition there is a keen interest in both the difficulties involved in understanding people committing serious crimes (e.g. serial killers) and the possibilities of overcoming such difficulties. David Winter (personal communication) is trying to engage the infamous British serial killer Ian Brady in dialogue, and has explored ‘Construing the construction processes of serial killers and violent offenders’ (2007). He identifies ‘threat’ as a major obstacle and quotes Kelly (1955 p. 505) that ‘they [evildoers] may exemplify what we might all too readily become if only we dared or were less vigilant’, and in a courageous self-reflection closes his essay by taking to heart that ‘to find the source of evil … we need look no further than ourselves’.

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Threat can thus be seen as a major obstacle to understanding and joining the other in a social enterprise. Perhaps inspired by the Jungian ‘shadow’ concept (which corresponds to the present use of ‘latent’) Kelly (1955 p. 506) saw distancing oneself from ‘evildoers’ as ‘making us feel a little safer from the looming shadow of ourselves as evildoers’. In line with criminological thinking about the stigmatising of offenders as basically a way to buttress a shaky identity for law-abiders, Kelly saw punishment as ‘having a deterrent effect against evildoing – our own evildoing! It helps to clarify our stand as a non-evildoer by making it clear that the evildoer is not one of us.’

Restorative Justice and the Road to Global Ubuntu? Recognising an aching gap between ourselves and evildoers raises the converse question of the ways to close the gap, by integrating evildoers instead of ostracising them. This is a prime issue in the currently burgeoning field of restorative justice (RJ) (www.restorativejustice.org). While this is my principal current interest – largely thanks to Johan Galtung recruiting me to the peace organisation TRANSCEND (www.transcend.org) – I have failed to find current PCP of much help, although the underlying value system is highly congruent with PCP. A major source of current interest in RJ comes from studying indigenous practices. Maoris in New Zealand and Indians in Canada have been especially important. On a trip to Australia in 1998 I had the opportunity to study how Maori inspiration from New Zealand had further evolved in Australia and have especially enjoyed inspiration from my friends David Moore and John McDonald and have been pleased to help introduce their work in Norway. The basic procedures are described in Moore & McDonald (2000), Neimeyer & Tschudi (2003), Tschudi & Reichelt (2004) and Tschudi (2008), so I will just give the barest sketch here. When harm has been done, an impartial facilitator talks with and prepares the persons most involved for a meeting, a conference. This implies not only ‘offender’ and ‘victim’,8 but also persons who can support both parties, and others who may have a stake in the event. It is very important that those attending are seated in a circle in order to avoid any hierarchical structure. There is no table to ‘hide’ behind and note-taking is discouraged. 8

In a conference one never uses the terms ‘offender’ and victim’, but ‘person who performed act x’ and ‘person who experienced act x’. In part this is to avoid further stigmatising, but also because there are many cases where someone who is an ‘offender’ from one perspective may turn out to be a ‘victim’ when viewed from another perspective.

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A primary task for the facilitator is to prevent anyone from dominating and/or intimidating the others by way of status, sex or personal power. This egalitarian outlook in conferencing is highly congruent with Kelly’s theory (Warren 1992). Furthermore, the person-as-scientist model and the sociality corollary imply that the scientist has the same epistemological status as the subject (Tschudi & Rommetveit 1983). The conference has a dual aim: to find out how (to what extent) the harm done can be ameliorated and how to prevent similar harm from recurring. Harm implies that a ‘rift’ has been made in a community and the aim is to heal this rift and strengthen the social web. Basically, this is a holistic view where healing is the major focus and not imposing ‘just punishment’. It is often the case that the ‘victim’ (the ‘bereaved’ in cases where someone has been killed) will tend to see the ‘offender’ as ‘dehumanised’ as an object, an ‘it’ in the Buberian sense. How can the gap between such a view and the other be closed? First, it is necessary to give negative emotions a free outlet (barring physical violence). Unlike court proceedings, which usually limit the context to the immediate harm and the degree of culpability of the ‘offender’, whole persons are in face-to-face contact on an equal basis in the conference. What might in other contexts seem trivial occurrences can in these circumstances touch ‘core constructs’ and bring about healing emotional experiences. In a conference convened after a young woman fatally hit another girl while drunk driving, a moment came when a photograph of the accident was passed round.9 As the photo slowly made its way round the room, a reverential silence descended, punctuated only by an occasional sob. This, in the words of the facilitator, was the point of emergence of collective vulnerability, experienced as a sense of physical deflation. As the participants united in the poignant recognition of the fragility and brevity of life, their new sense of coherence was cemented (Neimeyer & Tschudi 2003). Collective vulnerability is the awareness that ‘we are all in the same boat’ – what I like to call jointness/connectedness – and is a turning point which paves the way for mutual understanding and cooperation. The sense of deflation was facilitated by a growing realisation among the group that the driver was not the only one to blame. Others could have played a part by stopping her the fatal evening. In a variant of restorative justice (ho’o pono 9

The power of seeing a picture in ‘humanising’ the other was brought out by Nils Christie in his study of Norwegian guards in a concentration camps for Serbians during the Second World War. After the war the major difference between those not indicted for torture vs. those indicted was that the former had been shown pictures of the prisoners’ families.

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pono in Hawaii) all participants are asked: ‘What could you have done to prevent the harmful event?’ An important turning point may be that the ‘offender’ is shamed but in a way that points to reintegration (cf. Braithwaite 2002). Shaming by authority persons who are psychologically distant from the offender is, however, likely to lead to further distancing by the offender. This is why it is important to have persons supporting the ‘offender’ participate in the conference. Concerning punishment, Kelly (1955 p. 507) hoped ‘that [the ‘criminal’] will see that it is only a part of him that is condemned’. Such a hope is much more likely to be realised when persons close to the ‘offender’ in a conference may distance themselves from the harmful act, while at the same time emphasising that ‘this is basically a good person’. Where there is distance between people worried about a certain policy and the person responsible for the policy, it may be useful to think in terms of a chain exerting an indirect influence. Braithwaite (2002) uses the example of being ‘required to shame some military adventurism of a US president’. His suggestion is ‘placing a story of human dimensions on the media which touches the heart of a Chelsea Clinton that causes someone like her to say, “Dad, you must pay attention to this story”’. The general hypothesis is that the closer a person is to an ‘offender’ the more influence this person may have. Not a startling proposition from the point of view of common sense, but one that often requires much ingenuity to implement. How can we influence Bush to bring an end to the war in Iraq? A looming shadow is not only associated with one’s own tendency to immoral behaviour. I suggest that a more general formulation is the fear of having fundamental weaknesses and vulnerabilities exposed. This is related to shame, a topic extensively treated in the Tomkins tradition (Nathanson 1992). While this contribution is important in describing various defences against shame, the importance of acknowledging shame or weaknesses has not received sufficient attention. Elsewhere (Tschudi 2005) I have argued for the general importance of ‘acknowledging vulnerability’ and a concomitant warning against not only denying weaknesses but also overstating one’s strengths. For some experts a realisation that they do not have a viable answer to a problem in their own field may be perceived as a serious threat. Seikkula (1996) has worked extensively with alternatives to conventional treatment of psychosis (drugs, hospitalisation) and describes meetings of all possible helpers in the spirit of ‘open dialogue’. Similar to ‘collective vulnerability’, such meetings may lead to a period of depression, a common feeling of hopelessness. This can then lead to a sense of connectedness and a realisa-

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tion that each one has an important role to play in an emerging plan (see Tschudi & Reichelt 2004 for further discussion of Seikkula’s approach and similarities to conferencing). Might it be the case that we all have such looming shadows but suffer a collective delusion that the shadow is unique to us? It then makes sense that discovering that vulnerability is not unique to oneself harbours not only deflation and depression but at the same time is a shared feeling that opens the way for viable cooperation. When working on this chapter I was asked how I have experienced vulnerability. Returning to ‘the child playing on a beach’, what might further explorations of his background reveal? A relevant association is an intense drive for unfettered exploration. At the tender age of three I told my mother at breakfast that I would do as my parents had done, go to northern Norway, so my mother made me some food for the road. After scarcely a mile or so I was stopped by a lady, who on being told my destination firmly took me home (for further details see Tschudi 2007b). I have heard this story countless times and undoubtedly this has added layers of meaning to the event. I have thus come to think about it as a ‘nuclear scene’ (Tomkins 1991), an episode which crystallises major stultifying life problems. What I saw as a valid exploration was aborted and the dignity of the little boy was not respected. Exploring this scene and the following script was a major factor leading me to contact the Silvan Tomkins’ tribe. The three-year-old boy, later an adult, who carried a feeling of hurt dignity for being stopped on the way to northern Norway has tried to get support for his deep sense of ill-treatment and injustice. A prominent psychologist, Einar Dannevig, who used to be my therapist, patiently pointed out that I should be grateful to the woman who stopped me. Bad things might have happened to the little boy. I still remember my incredulity: ‘Did he have no conception of how hurt I was? How could he be so lacking in compassion?’ I was on the verge of leaving the therapy! My view has changed since then. As I have got older, I have fallen a few times, once from my bike, head first. It might have been serious. On each occasion the first person to see me has offered excellent help and support. I was recently in a position to try to help a seriously injured woman. When later reflecting on the similarity between my helpers and me I had a profound experience that the woman who stopped me at the age of three was not the ogre I had construed but a human being exactly like my recent helpers. Now I felt a profound sense of gratitude and retrospectively thanked the woman. It’s never too late to reconstrue! Before this I had had some understanding – from my nuclear scene – that important projects will generally require good

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helpers, but not with the pronounced emotional core – joining vulnerability and community with ‘strangers’ – as I have recently experienced. In 1977 I wondered what would happen to the ‘child playing at the beach’. Is he left alone when the sun goes down? (Tschudi 1977). Fortunately not. People who were previously construed as strangers are now a (potential) ‘community of care’. There is also the joy of belonging to and extending further contact with a number of ‘epistemic communities’ (cf. Braithwaite & Drahos 2000). Such experiences serve to strengthen my compassion for the African philosophy about unity among all humans, described as ubuntu (‘I am because you are, our humanness is inextricably linked together’), thus celebrating universal respect for dignity. I discuss this further in the context of reconciliation after mass violence (Tschudi 2008) as Lindner (2006) does more generally with respect to dignity and humiliation. It seems to me that every step, however small, towards ‘global ubuntu’ must be carefully nurtured and I hope that my friends in the PCP tribe will join me in the quest for such steps.

Concluding Comment Having come to the end of this chapter I now see some continuity. The boy wanting to go to northern Norway, cherishing ‘the freedom of a child playing at the beach’, has engaged me in an unfettered exploration for latent, underlying phenomena. A by-product has been occasional irritation at constructivist dismissals of the value of this kind of search, and their concomitant dismissal of ‘truth’ (cf. Tschudi 1989; 1996). More important, however, has been recognising the value of admitting weaknesses and vulnerability if this paves the way to joint, concerted and emphatic action to rebuild connections broken by all kinds of harm. Considering how we have abused our planet I want to close by drawing attention to a slogan of a prominent Norwegian peace activist and friend, Ole Kopreitan. The slogan is the title of a Festschrift to him: ‘Now it is too late to be a pessimist’.

References Braithwaite, J. (2002). Restorative Justice and Responsive Regulation. New York: Oxford University Press

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Braithwaite, J. & Drahos, P. (2000). Global Business Regulation. New York: Cambridge University Press Greenwald, H. (1973). Decision Therapy. New York: Wyden Jordanger, V. & Alpack, R. (2007). Non-violence through understanding the American response to terrorism: myth, fear and suggestion. Unpublished manuscript. Kaldor, M. (2003). Global Civil Society: An Answer to War. Cambridge: Polity Kelly, G. A. (1955). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volumes 1 and 2. New York: Norton (reprinted London: Routledge, 1991) Koch, S. (1959). Introduction to the series. In S. Koch (ed.) Psychology: The Study of a Science. Volume 1. New York: McGraw Hill Lindner, E. G. (2006). Making Enemies: Humiliation and International Conflict. Westport, CT: Praeger Mischel, T. (1964). Personal constructs, rules and the logic of clinical activity. Psychological Review, 71, 180–192 Moore, D. B. & McDonald, J. M. (2000). Transforming Conflict in Workplaces and Other Communities. Maryborough, Victoria: Australian Print Group Nathanson, D. L. (1992). Shame and Pride. New York: Norton Neimeyer, R. A. & Tschudi, F. (2003). Community and coherence: narrative contributions to a psychology of conflict and loss. In G. Fireman, T. McVay & O. Flanagan (eds.) Narrative and Consciousness: Literature, Psychology, and the Brain. New York: Oxford University Press Øhman, P., Hackner, E., Jansson, A. & Tschudi, F. (2006). Swedish auditors’ view of auditing: doing things right versus doing the right things. European Accounting Review, 15, 89–114 Seikkula, J. (1996). Oppna Samtal [Open Dialogue]. Stockholm: Mareld Skinner, B. F. (1959). A case history in scientific method. In S. Koch (ed.) Psychology: A Study of a Science. Volume 2. New York: McGraw Hill Skinner, B. F. (1961). The flight from the laboratory. In B. F. Skinner, Cumulative Record. A Selection of Papers. London: Methuen Tomkins, S. (1991). Affect, Imagery Consciousness. Volume III. New York: Springer Tschudi, F. (1973). The latent, the manifest and the reconstructed in multivariate data reduction method. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Available at: http:// folk.uio.no/ftschudi Tschudi, F. (1977). Loaded and honest questions: a construct theory view of symptoms and therapy. In D. Bannister (ed.) New Perspectives in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press Tschudi, F. (1983). Constructs are hypotheses. In K. Adams-Webber & J. C. Mancuso (eds.) Applications of Personal Construct Psychology. London: Academic Press Tschudi, F. (1989). Do qualitative and quantitative methods require different approaches to validity? In S. Kvale (ed.) Issues of Validity in Qualitative Research. Lund: Studentlitteratur

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Tschudi, F. (1996). Constructivism and positivism: either/or versus both/and. EPCA Newsletter, 5, 21–23 Tschudi, F. (2004). Rules, complexity and emotion. Paper presented at the London School of Economics, November. Available at: http://folk.uio.no/ftschudi Tschudi, F. (2005). Acknowledging vulnerability. Paper presented at Telemark Symposium. Available at: http://folk.uio.no/ftschudi Tschudi, F. (2007a). Restorative justice and international law in the aftermath of mass violence: talk softly, but carry a (big) stick. Paper presented at the World Judiciary Summit, Lucknow, India, 5–11 December. 8th International Conference of Chief Justices of the World on article 51(c) of the Constitution of India. Available at http://folk.uio.no/ftschudi Tschudi, F. (2007b). A nuclear scene. Manuscript. Available at http://folk.uio.no/ ftschudi Tschudi, F. (2008). Dealing with violent conflict and mass victimization. A human dignity approach. In I. Aertsen et al. (eds.) Restoring Justice after Large-scale Violent Conflicts. Uffculme, Devon: Willan Publishing Tschudi, F. & Reichelt, S. (2004). Conferencing when therapy is stuck. Journal of Systemic Therapies, 25, 38–52 Tschudi, F. & Rommetveit, R. (1983). Sociality, inter-subjectivity, and social processes: the sociality corollary. In J. R. Mancuso & J. R. Adams-Webber (eds.) The Construing Person. New York: Praeger. Tschudi, F. & Winter, D. (in press). The ABC model revisited. In P. Caputi (ed.) Methods in Personal Construct Theory. Warren, W. G. (1992). Personal construct theory and mental health. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 5, 223–238 Winter, D. A. (2007). Construing the construction processes of serial killers and other violent offenders: 2. The limits of credulity. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 20, 247–275

Chapter 18

Reconstruing After a Change in Health Status Jörn Scheer Jörn Scheer is Emeritus Professor of Medical Psychology at the University of Giessen, Germany. He has published extensively in the fields of psychosomatic medicine, psychotherapy, medical and health psychology, and of course in personal construct psychology (PCP). He is co-editor of the ejournal Personal Construct Theory & Practice and the Internet Encyclopaedia of Personal Construct Psychology. His latest edited books deal with cross-cultural aspects of PCP and with PCP and the arts.

Elaborated aspects of theory: choice; commonality; individuality; sociality

Background When a theoretical approach is applied to a specific field there are two ways of deciding whether it is a sound way of looking at things. One is to see whether the theory helps us understand the events or the specifics of that particular field. This can be done without personal experience in the field. The other is to see whether the theory makes sense to the people involved. This may be called dual validation of a theory. The topic is ‘reconstruing after a change in health status’, and I shall begin by recalling something that happened to me a few years ago. Three and a half years before writing these reflections I had a heart attack. It was a minor one; I felt no pain, but rather experienced ‘narrowed vision’ for a few minutes, probably a symptom of an ischaemic process. So I Reflections in Personal Construct Theory. Edited by Richard J. Butler © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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phoned a friend, a doctor, and asked him what he thought it was. He suggested that I needed an ECG, took me to a hospital and it turned out that I was having, or had had, a heart attack. I had to stay in hospital for a couple of weeks. Several angiographies were performed, that is, a catheter was inserted into the coronary arteries to identify any narrow spots, the stenoses. An angioplasty was then performed to dilate the stenoses by introducing a small balloon into the arteries, which was then inflated. A little metal tube, a stent, was then inserted to keep the blocked artery open. After that, the blood flowed freely again and I recovered. And that was about it. This is something that happens to about 300,000 people in Germany every year. Nothing special then. But 100,000 of them die in the course of the event, and that certainly makes a difference because we others are survivors. And that has implications – implications for the way we construe ourselves, our lifestyle, our position in the world, and so on. When I say ‘we’, it shows that I think there should be some commonality in the construing of people who have had this experience. This is to do with the need to give some sort of meaning to the event, to make sense of it – to use the terms you will find in every other personal construct psychology (PCP) paper.

Looking for Commonality Being a good constructivist, I, of course, remembered that George Kelly too had had a heart attack and had written about it in his paper ‘Confusion and the clock’ (1978). So I read the paper again and, to be honest, I was disappointed. It starts as a kind of chatty musing about what it would be like if one, as a silent and invisible observer, could see oneself 24 hours later. Obviously it is about the possibility (or rather impossibility) of precise anticipation of events. This goes on for five pages, and then there is an interruption. The rest of the paper was written more than a year later. In the meantime, major events had occurred in Kelly’s life. The first was a heart attack. Then there was the round-the-world trip which Kelly and his wife undertook in 1961. This lasted several months and is described in the well-known paper ‘Europe’s matrix of decision’ (1962). Then, a year after the heart attack, Kelly described the experience in the second part of that paper. What I had hoped to find was a description and possibly an analysis of the processes of ‘making sense’ of the event, of the processes of validation or invalidation involved in a major life-event like this one, and about the reconstruing that might take place. After all, Kelly had his heart attack at exactly the same age as myself, 56. What he wrote about was the feeling

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of closeness to, and responsibility for, his family, and a sense of guilt because he might have ‘to leave them without having properly planned for their future’ (his words). Then there were ‘twinges of anguish’ caused by the guilt and by the ‘disarray in the orderliness of mind and body [he] had come to rely upon’. The ‘whole system of anticipations got badly mixed up’, which Kelly also saw as a failure of truths. In his words: So when I looked up at the face so dear to me and mustered sense enough to recognize what had really happened in spite of my shortcomings, I felt a great surge of reassurance. The moment is still very clear to me. As for my feelings of inadequacy, of wrong-doing, or of sin, it became clear that they were important to me only if I lived to do something about them. (Kelly 1977)

He covered only the first few hours following the event, but not what it meant to him about its implications for his life. Maybe it did not mean anything beyond the immediate experience and beyond his relationship to his loved ones. Fair enough. As he put it: ‘I must tell you, too, that as far as I can see, things do not turn out in others’ lives the way they have in mine.’ True enough! Obviously, an experience that seems similar does not imply a similar meaning-making – which may be seen as a caveat when interpreting another person’s predicaments: ‘individuality over commonality’ …

An Approach to Making Sense of Having a Heart Attack There was something else I re-read. About 15 years earlier, in my pre-PCP days, I had done some research with a friend, who worked on an intensive care ward as the doctor in charge, on the experience of people in ICU. We were particularly interested in the coping styles of patients with myocardial infarctions (heart attacks), which was later published as ‘Patients in hospital after a heart attack’ (Klapp & Scheer 1984). We discussed the issue of ‘denial’ which was a common theme in the literature on coronary patients (we thought it was in part an artefact of the way doctors communicate with patients, because it appears to occur less when patients talk to nurses) and described four types of patients with respect to the way they appear to observers (i.e. the carers) when in hospital. These are: •

The ideal case (who is most likely to recover quickly) is the patient who is able to ‘regress in the interest of progression’. They can accept that they are seriously ill and able to ‘regress’ to the ‘oral’ state of

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dependency. Their regression is flexible and pertains only to parts of the self; the patients can accept support and are able little by little to regain control over their lives. • Other patients cannot accept the dependency as it threatens their sense of autonomy. They fight for control and try to get into a position of dominance. They cause trouble for staff and attempt to leave the ward as early as possible, often against medical advice. • Then there is the group that seems to be complacent but in reality are covertly anxious and depressed. They seem nice and the staff love them. They seem to resemble the first group but are really more like the second, it’s just that their social skills are better developed and so they can hold back their chaotic fears and catastrophic fantasies. • The fourth group is openly dependent in a child-like regression. They suffer from hypochondriac fears, cling to staff and are unable to recover fully, tending to stay longer than necessary because of their anxiety. This was written within the context of a psychodynamic way of thinking. Nothing wrong with that. These different types of patients can be found – the description reflects clinical experience viewed through psychoanalytic templates. Where would I locate myself? In the first, realistic group, of course. Did it teach me anything about my own experience? No. It seems no more than a description of what happens, and it is probably helpful for staff to make sense of what they experience with their patients.

A Constructivist Approach to Illness and Injury Then I re-read something else. The constructivist classic on people’s view of their illnesses is Linda Viney’s Images of Illness (1983). In a chapter written later for the first volume of Advances in Personal Construct Psychology (1990) Viney proposes a ‘constructivist model of psychological reactions to physical illness and injury’. Basically, it consists of reformulated corollaries to suit the situation of seriously ill patients. The general propositions are these: • •

•

People who are ill try to make sense of what is happening to them. Anticipation through the use of a construct system of already proven effectiveness may not be possible for seriously ill people who are under considerable threat of pain, bodily mutilation and even death, so that their constructs no longer work well. The constructs held by people about their illnesses may appear inaccurate to others, yet these constructs determine how they act.

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Viney (1990) further offered a set of propositions about the construing of people who are ill: • • • •

•

People develop their constructs by interpreting their own past experiences. People who are ill differ in how they construe their current experience. Ill people differ in the permeability of their construct systems. People who are ill or injured may have constructs that are too loose and so make too many general predictions to be useful (or too tight, leading to too restrictive predictions). Ill people can change their construct systems by reinterpreting their experiences.

Finally, Viney (1990) offered the following propositions about emotions: •

• •

• •

When people’s construct systems that enable them to interpret and anticipate what is happening to them effectively, they experience positive emotions; but when their systems are not effective they experience negative emotions. People who are ill become anxious when the events they experience are beyond the range of convenience of their construct systems. People who are ill become angry when they are trying to secure validation for a construct that has failed them in their attempts at anticipation. The other way in which physically ill people may deal with their anger is to turn it against themselves. All physically ill people should express their anxiety and anger.

That seems to make sense. It’s how a constructivist would look at things – from the point of view of his or her theory. But as always with this more formal theory, it needs concretisation. Empirically this was done in Viney’s work by asking the open-ended question: ‘I’d like you to talk to me for a few minutes about your life at the moment – the good things and the bad – what it is like for you’. Over 600 patients – the majority of them patients who had had a heart attack – were interviewed by six researchers and their answers were scored using the well-known Gottschalk–Gleser content analysis technique (Gottschalk & Gleser 1969). This generated ‘scales’ for emotions based on counts of themes indicating e.g. ‘anxiety’ or ‘helplessness’. In this way, nine typical ‘images of illness’ were identified as follows (Viney 1983):

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Distressing images of illness 1. Images of uncertainty. 2. Anxiety-laden images. 3. Anger-laden images. 4. Images of helplessness. 5. Depression-laden images. 6. Images of isolation. More pleasant images of illness 1. Happy images and humour. 2. Images of competence. 3. Images involving families and friends. In summary, Viney (1990) suggested that ‘the constructivist model identified five emotional components of the psychological reactions to physical illness and injury. They consisted of constructs laden with anxiety, depression, anger expressed indirectly and helplessness, together with competence.’

Images and Constructs Now, I have to admit that these results left me perplexed. First, the notion of images seems to imply ‘properties’ of an illness, not really ‘construing’ illness. In the texts, however, ‘constructs’ and ‘images’ are used more or less interchangeably, although it is also said that people ‘construct images’. They ‘try to make sense of themselves and their world and then act according to the images they have of them’ (Viney 1983). Second, Viney’s method of identifying ‘constructs’ seems rather unspecific and theory-free: the Gottschalk–Gleser method can be used with any theory in the researcher’s mind. Finally, I could not find what to me are the specific characteristics of (most) construing – the bipolarity, the principle of contrasting events or elements and the process of anticipating in the task of making sense of the events one encounters – in the ‘images’. What I read here reminded me more of the traditional state–trait approach in personality psychology, but no ‘person in motion’ – so important in PCT! Certainly, sick people may be uncertain about the future, they may be anxious, they may be angry, feel helpless and depressed, often isolated. Some use humour as a coping strategy, some maintain a sense of competence, especially when they are supported by friends and family. But people change in the course of time, they react, they interact, and that will surely have an impact on how they experience being ill.

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In fact, I too was uncertain about the outcome of all this. It seemed unfair and it made me angry that I had had a heart attack and not other people I know who don’t give a stuff about their health. But nothing bad had happened to them. I did not feel depressed and isolated because I had people looking after me. And humour has always been an important part of my repertoire of coping styles. I can see some of the well-known ‘basic emotions’ here and a lot of common sense, but where is the construing process? To me, this approach implies seeing an illness as something ‘out there’, something ‘I have’ and consequently have ‘an image of’.

Construing My Own Experience Maybe I’ve simply missed the point! Maybe the intention of this kind of research is more focused on an overall analysis and not on helping individuals understand what happens to them. But when I think back to what I experienced, I have to admit that I did not have an ‘image of my heart attack’. What did I experience then? I think, in order to learn about ‘personal constructs’, to understand how someone makes sense of an illness, ‘gives meaning’ to it, it is necessary to adopt a ‘diachronic view’, by which I mean looking at what happened before, what is happening now and what will come next – in short, really seeing construing as a process of anticipating in light of past experiences as proposed in the propositions above, but not discernible in the ‘images’! This is also the excuse for discussing my personal experience in more detail. So what are my illness-related constructs?

•

If I look at my constructs regarding health and life, I have to say that I have always been one of the healthiest persons I know and I have been aware of this; in other words, ‘healthy’ vs. ‘unhealthy’ was an important construct for me. • Having had a mother who was often ill, I was also aware of the benefits of a healthy lifestyle. Following a family tradition of outdoor activity, I did not smoke, consumed alcohol moderately, was slim rather than overweight, later played football and took up running – but not fervently. So ‘living healthily’ vs. ‘not healthily’ was another important construct. But I did not really live like this for health reasons. As I recall it, that was just the way I was, the way ‘we were’.

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Then there was a temporary slight increase in my blood pressure that I had had 15 years earlier but which had then gone away. Add to that the fact that my father, brother, mother and uncle all died following a heart attack, my brother at 59, my uncle at 65, while my father had his first heart attack at 56. So this leads to a construct of ‘vulnerability’ vs. ‘invincibility’.

In accordance with the first construct, I saw myself on the ‘invincibility’ side … This may suffice for now.

Reconstruing the Experience Now imagine the disarray (Kelly’s term) caused by having a heart attack in spite of always having been healthy, regardless of a healthy lifestyle, but in line with my family history … some sort of reconstruing seemed called for. Take further the fact that Kelly was exactly my father’s age (born in 1905), had his heart attack at the time my father had his (at 56), and that I too had mine at 56. Fortunately, though, my father lived to the age of 84, as did other members of his family. •

So the possibility of longevity becomes another construct: ‘bound to die young (and foolish)’ vs. ‘becoming old and wise’. • And a construct of ‘predetermination’ vs. ‘being in control of one’s own destiny’. • And a construct of ‘being in control’ vs. ‘being at another’s mercy’ – but whose? (Fate? The doctors?) – a construct with a wider range of convenience than only health. Now the notion of validation/invalidation has to be considered. In this context, I found Beverly Walker and colleagues (2000) helpful. In the event of an unexpected, unknown, unprecedented event, such as a sudden illness, we are not performing the experiment implied in the notion of Kelly’s ‘cycles’. We are not, or not always, or maybe not even most of the time, the experimenting men/women-as-scientists testing the best ways. We are often forced into pseudo-experiments where we can either make use of the experience or not. My constructs about health and illness did not really change; but my position on some of them did. For example, I see myself now as more on

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the ‘vulnerable’ side – an endangered specimen, so to speak. But another construct that I had had for a long time – something like ‘it’s worth all the hassle’ vs. ‘don’t bother, don’t get stressed out’ – which I had not seen in relation to health, became more important. The fact is that the knowledge that, in the absence of the well-known risk factors, apparently certain, though unknown genetic factors (whatever they are) are important did not lead me to fatalistic construing, such as ‘obviously there’s nothing you can do about it’ (or, more precisely, to adopting, or ‘choosing’, the fatalistic pole). Rather, it led to my ‘being a good patient’ (taking all prescribed medication; being high on compliance!), reducing possible ‘stressors’ and considering early retirement, i.e. staying in the ‘doing’ mode. I could also say that the range of convenience of this construct was extended – forced by increased investment, as Walker et al. (2000) point out – the investment in this case being pushed by the life and death issues involved in having a heart attack. However, if my experience had included severe pain, bypass surgery, etc., more and other changes in my construct systems might have resulted. When talking to other people about my heart attack – this certainly was one of my ways of making sense of it! – I found that the validation/invalidation process can be done ‘virtually’ or ‘on behalf of ’. Some people said: ‘If this guy has had a heart attack, in spite of his healthy lifestyle and all that, than there’s nothing to be done to prevent a heart attack so I might as well go on smoking and boozing.’ You could say they chose one pole of a construct. Others went straight to their doctor to have an angiography, thus choosing the other pole – and this leads to the conclusion that people do whatever provides them with greater ‘definition’. In the same way, the well-known heart patient in ICU who continues working from his hospital bed using his mobile phone does so because it gives him greater definition. He is not engaging in a validational cycle but may be acting like this in the interest of ‘preserving the integrity and coherence of his overall system of understanding’, as Walker et al. (2000) put it. So we are talking about the choice corollary, not about unreasonable behaviour. What I have not discussed in this paper are possible contributions from other approaches. For instance, the components of the ‘health belief model’ (perceived personal vulnerability or the barriers to, and benefits of, healthrelated behaviour) might be translated into the language of construing, as well as its modern derivatives (e.g. the ‘theory of reasoned action’, etc.). This applies also to concepts like ‘locus of control’ or ‘self-efficacy’ and it means taking these facets not as dispositional properties but as ‘ways of

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construing’. I think there is a considerable body of conceptual evidence for constructivists to pick up and use.

And the Future? Conclusions for further research, in my view, involve carefully analysing individual construing processes instead of cross-sectional research on large samples, whether they involve content scales or formal scores based on repertory grid elicitation. In this paper, I have tried to combine the treatment of some general issues with a ‘Psychology of story-telling’, as Miller Mair (1989) puts it. So I should like to conclude with an anecdote that may serve as a further illustration of some of the issues. Implicitly, it involves the notion of a hierarchy in construing and the change in the hierarchical position that a construct may have. You might also talk of priorities or of values. Three men, all in their late fifties, are discussing health issues in a pub after a music rehearsal. One of them had a heart attack a while ago and acts as an observer. Incidentally, he is a saxophonist. (That’s me.) The second recalls his recent heart attack and reports that he has now quit smoking and has cut his red wine consumption from one bottle a day to half a bottle. The third says: ‘I can’t imagine doing that! Giving up all the pleasures in life, just for a couple of extra years!’ Says the second: ‘My life, as it is now, is quite enjoyable. I love my job as a professor, I enjoy playing the trumpet in our band, and I am happy with my family. If I can continue with this life for a few years more simply by giving up smoking and drinking only half a bottle of wine a day, that’s a small sacrifice for a large gain!’ Obviously the same construct, probably a superordinate one – having fun and enjoying life – has a different meaning to the two of them. Six months later, the third guy, a trombonist, just as the weekly rehearsal is about to start, has a heart attack. Paramedics, hospital, emergency room, angioplasty, discharge after two weeks. And did he change his lifestyle, adjust his subordinate constructs? He certainly did. He gave up heavy smoking, but carried on drinking a bottle of wine a day, after all that’s what doctors recommend these days … So sometimes non-validation does lead to reconstruction. Or, as Trevor Butt (2002) quotes the existential phenomenologists: existence precedes essence. I certainly agree with him that ‘constructs … are not to be thought of as personal cognitions in any way causing behaviour, but are the configuration of thought, feeling and action, intentionally directed through our projects in the world’.

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Postscript – Ten Years on The above reflections were written nearly four years after the event they describe. Another six years have since passed, so it may be time now for a ‘ten-year follow-up’. Thinking about my situation and my construing now, I find it difficult to distinguish clearly between what can be seen as the consequences of the heart attack I had at age 56 and what could be attributed to ‘normal ageing’ from 56 to 66. But then, physical changes – whether they occur gradually or abruptly – are an inseparable part of the process of normal ageing. That said, we can look at the conditions ten years on. My physical health seems to be better than that of many others of my age cohort. I have been spared the common hassles affecting the outer and inner organs; I run and cycle regularly; I take part in outdoor activities. Obviously, my heart attack was a ‘minor’ one. But I am still taking all the standard medication, inevitably becoming ‘drug-dependent’ for the rest of my life. So I am reminded every morning and every evening of what happened all those years ago. What about my constructs? Although in everyday conversation I use the common expression I ‘had a heart attack’ or ‘I have a heart condition’ I don’t really see it as something I had and don’t have any more. Maybe different from what e.g. a broken leg would mean (which I have never had, so I am only guessing), the heart condition is an important part of my selfconstrual. Among the implications is an increased awareness of the ‘limitedness of life’, or, generally speaking, of our mortality, and I have the feeling that I’ve been ‘granted extra time’. And I can much more easily communicate with people who are suffering from cancer or have another terminal illness. Some people say: ‘But anyone can be hit by a truck at any time – so what’s so special?’ But I feel that it does make a difference whether you have had a glimpse of the abyss or not. And I still know people who say that they don’t care about gaining a few extra years if that means giving up all the pleasures in life (as they see it) – as in the anecdote above. Finally, a word about ‘sociality’. A few years after the event, I corresponded with the late James Mancuso, one of the eminent PCT scholars, and we exchanged our construals of what had happened to us – he had had a heart attack that turned out to be not a myocardial infarction but a specific problem with the aorta with quite different medical implications. As he recalled it, a stunning experience was that ‘The Others’ invariably construed what had happened to him in a different way from his experience: ‘Thus, the difference between my construing of the situation and the construing of my friends and associates – who insisted on thinking of my condition as a “heart attack” – gave us a very different anticipation of what

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my life would be like following the incident and the repair.’ In a similar way, I found that ‘The Others’ know what causes a heart attack and consequently knew what condition I was in – most referred to ‘stress’, especially some of my fellow psychologists who forwarded the odd ‘psychosomatic’ construals. No doubt persons suffering from much worse conditions than those I went through, especially cancer patients, have to deal and cope with the constructions of others (family, friends, doctors) in addition to what they experience themselves anyway. It often seems to be difficult for ‘The Others’ to adopt a ‘credulous stance’ (in Kelly’s sense) as they have to cope with their own anxieties and threats provoked by what they see in the ‘real’ sufferers. So one of the lessons to be learned seems to be that sociality is something that has to be actively worked on by ‘The Others’, something that does not come naturally. Clearly, pity and empathy are not the same, although one might think that one is a condition for the other. Looking back, I ask myself: did PCP help? Yes. I don’t look for a (possibly hidden) meaning of what happened, as so many others seem to do who have been afflicted by a traumatising event. I am fully aware that I am the one who attaches meaning and that it is up to me to choose what to make of it and what to do. Do I live differently? Yes and no, or rather no and yes, as indicated above. Constructs such as ‘managing one’s own destiny’ and ‘being in control’ do not seem to contradict taking a stance like ‘que sera sera – whatever will be will be …’.

References Butt, T. (2002). Konstruktivismus: eine phänomenologische Perspektive. In J. W. Scheer (ed.) Identität in der Gesellschaft. Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag Gottschalk, L. A. & Gleser, G. C. (1969). The Measurement of Psychological States through the Content Analysis of Verbal Behavior. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press Kelly, G. A. (1962). Europe’s matrix of decision. In M. R. Jones (ed.) Nebraska Symposium on Motivation 1962. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press Kelly, G. A. (1977). The psychology of the unknown. In D. Bannister (ed.) New Perspectives in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press Kelly, G. A. (1978). Confusion and the clock. In F. Fransella (ed.) Personal Construct Psychology. London: Academic Press Klapp, B. F. & Scheer, J. W. (1984). Der Infarktpatient im Krankenhaus – Psychische Bewältigungsprozesse und die Beziehung zum Behandlungsteam. In J. W. Scheer & E. Brähler (eds.) Ärztliche Maßnahmen aus psychologischer Sicht – Beiträge zur Medizinischen Psychologie. Berlin: Springer

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Mair, J. M. M. (1989). Kelly, Bannister, and a story-telling psychology. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 2, 1–14 Viney, L. L. (1983). Images of Illness. Malabar: Krieger Viney, L. L. (1990). A constructivist model of psychological reactions to physical illness and injury. In G. J. Neimeyer and R. A. Neimeyer (eds.) Advances in Personal Construct Psychology. Volume 1. Greenwich, CT: Jay Press Walker, B. M., Oades, L. G., Caputi, P., Stevens, C. D. & Crittenden, N. (2000). Going beyond the scientist metaphor: from validation to experience cycles. In J. W. Scheer (ed.) The Person in Society: Challenges to a Constructivist Theory. Giessen: Psychsozial-Verlag

Chapter 19

Constructions of Death and Loss: A Personal and Professional Evolution Robert A. Neimeyer Robert A. Neimeyer is a Professor in the Department of Psychology, University of Memphis, where he also maintains an active clinical practice. Neimeyer has published 20 books, including Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Loss, and serves as editor of the Journal of Constructivist Psychology and Death Studies. The author of over 300 articles and book chapters, and a frequent workshop presenter, he is currently working to advance a more adequate theory of grieving as a meaning-making process. Neimeyer served as President of the Association for Death Education and Counselling and Chair of the International Work Group for Death, Dying, & Bereavement. In recognition of his scholarly contributions, he has been granted the Eminent Faculty Award by the University of Memphis, and made a Fellow of the American Psychological Association. For more information, see http://web.mac.com/neimeyer

Elaborated aspects of theory: anxiety, death, grief, loss, threat

Introduction When my father died on the eve of my twelfth birthday, one world ended and another began. Long depressed and increasingly isolated by the progressive glaucoma that had robbed him of his sight and that now threatened to Reflections in Personal Construct Theory. Edited by Richard J. Butler © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

294 Robert A. Neimeyer take from him the family pharmacy he had founded 20 years before, he decided one cold January evening to relinquish a life that had for him become unliveable. Our awareness of his suicide – meticulously planned, drawing on the same pharmaceutical skills that once had sustained his life – burst in on my sleeping nine-year-old brother and me the next morning in the form of our mother’s panicked announcement that she could not wake our father. Frightened and bewildered, we scrambled out from under our cowboy quilt and stood peering around the door jamb of our parents’ bedroom, as our mother approached our father’s lifeless body, touched him through the thin turquoise bedcover and then recoiled in horror and a convulsion of tears. With that one abrupt gesture, most of what constituted the themes of our family narrative was swept away and we were thrown collectively into a tumultuous renegotiation of who we were, how we would manage and what his death meant. Many of the subsequent emotional, relational and occupational choices made by my mother, my brother, my little sister and me can be read as responses to my father’s fateful decision, though their meaning continues to be clarified, ambiguated and reformulated across the years. Of course, the intervening years brought with them a train of additional losses, a consistent counterpoint to my life’s many gains. Among the most poignant of these would be a range of relational lapses, subtle and unsubtle, the sudden death of friends in spasms of violence or through senseless medical malpractice, and the slow wasting of my mother through a progressive emphysema that robbed her of life one breath at a time. Now, I write these words in the wake of our family’s memorial gathering for my motherin-law, Gloria, who lived with verve and optimism through all but the final months of the cancer that slowly turned down the flame of her life until it flickered out in her home and in our arms. In both their commonality and individuality these different losses at times have served to affirm shared and personal frameworks of meaning, and at others have initiated a search for significance in events that seemingly eluded comprehension. Although I did not always recognise it at the time, they therefore primed me for the key themes of constructivism, and ultimately melded with a maturing professional identity that found increasing coherence with the personal. My goal in this chapter is to offer some working notes on this personal and professional evolution, tacking from my own life experiences to the theory that held a clarifying mirror to them, and that ultimately generated a multifaceted research programme concerned with death, suicide and grief as a central strand of my life work. Although this process has been highly individualised in its impetus and expression, it is hardly unique – indeed the braiding together of life and work is likely to be a common theme in

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the careers of engaged clinicians, active scholars and productive scientists. To frame this account I will therefore shift from the personal to professional, and offer a view from the lofty perch of the psychology of science, before descending again into the darker valley of personal experience in which my constructivist sojourn began.

Networks of Enterprise Writing about the psychology of scientific creativity, Howard Gruber (1989) introduced the concept ‘networks of enterprise’ to explain how scientists organise a programme of purposeful work across a period of many years, and frequently a lifetime. As he elaborated: I use the term ‘enterprise’ to cover groups of activities extended in time and embracing other activities such as projects, problems, and tasks. Commitment to an enterprise is exhibited by the recurrent reappearance of activities belonging to it. The key point is that the creative completion of a project leads not only to satisfaction and relaxation but also to the replenishment of the stock of projects and problems within the enterprise in question, and to reinvigoration for further work. (Gruber 1989 p. 246)

While making no pretence that the creativity of my own work over the last few decades bears comparison to that of Charles Darwin or Jean Piaget, the subjects of Gruber’s analysis, I nonetheless can resonate to his depiction of ‘the protracted hard and unremitting work’ that yields conceptual and methodological innovations. Likewise, his depiction of the branching and grafting of such networks over time strikes a responsive chord in me, as ‘the periods of dormancy which each enterprise in such a network must necessarily undergo allows … room and time for creative forgetting, mutual assimilation of distinct schemata, and serendipitous encounters with the real world’, all of which carry the work forward in partly predictable, partly unpredictable directions. Finally, the sheer ‘duration, difficulty, and complexity of the work combine to promote development of all sorts of relationships of collaboration and communication among workers in the same vineyards’, reflecting the importance of the social psychology, as well as the cognitive psychology of science (Neimeyer et al. 1989). My goal in this chapter is to reflect on one of my own central networks of enterprise across the years, specifically that concerning the place of death in human life. Although this selective rendering of my long-term interests neglects some of the other major branches of my investments over time,

296 Robert A. Neimeyer especially those concerned with constructivist theory and psychotherapy, it is sufficient to convey several of the features of such networks as described by Gruber, including their longevity, cross-fertilisation, social organisation and the way in which their evolution reflects the personal evolution of the scientist. The reflexivity inherent in this sort of retrospection on a career in the course of pursuing it seems appropriate to an orientation such as personal construct theory (PCT), which blurs the line between the personal and professional, while recognising that the self-narrative so constructed cannot claim to be a wholly veridical account of life-events (Neimeyer 1995). At a substantive level, I also hope that this review will help summarise a widely dispersed literature for those readers sharing my interest in thanatology (the study of death and dying) and acquaint other personal construct theorists around the world with a thriving research programme that takes some of its inspiration from the theory we share. As this network of enterprise has unfolded over the last 30 years, it has naturally developed three distinguishable emphases: death threat and anxiety; suicide intervention; and grief and loss. I will therefore review each of these in turn.

Death Threat and Anxiety As the reader might imagine, my family’s plunge into the tumultuous terrain of bereavement through suicide precipitated all of us into a world that none of us knew how to inhabit, and one that was violently at odds with the Catholicism of our community in the small Ohio town in which we lived. Thus, it is not surprising that this profound confrontation with the unknown, compounded greatly by my mother’s decision to flee reminders of her loss by moving to the distant state of Florida – thereby sundering any remaining strands of continuity in our experience – prompted me to find some stability in the two worlds I could master: school and work. Throwing myself at age 12 into both, I managed to get through adolescence as best I could and entered the University of Florida some six years later in the early 1970s. It was there I discovered PCT in the context of a life-changing freshman course in Personality Theories taught by Seth Krieger, a charismatic and personable graduate student of Franz Epting. Delving deeply into Kelly’s (1955) magnum opus, the basic metaphor of the personal scientist, boldly striving to organise and respond to the onrush of events and not merely be a ‘victim of his biography’, struck a responsive intellectual chord in me, ennobling my own sometimes desperate efforts to do something similar. More viscerally, I resonated to Kelly’s depictions of

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anxiety as confronting experiences for which our constructs were pitifully insufficient, and threat as immersion in a foreboding and forbidden shift in the whole of our system triggered by looming invalidation of core constructs. Consciously, I connected precisely none of this, or my similarly passionate draw to the darker existential philosophies of Martin Heidegger or Jean-Paul Sartre, to my own experience of traumatic loss. With the wisdom of hindsight I would now understand this seemingly astonishing naïveté as a vindication of other aspects of Kelly’s theory, namely the fragmentation corollary, with its acknowledgement of the compartmentalised structure of less than fully integrated construct systems, his notion of suspension of elements of experience for which we have no suitable structure, and the protective role of attentional constriction in managing an overwhelming internal or external world. In brief, Kelly’s theory offered me a refined and coherent vocabulary for beginning to reflexively construe my own experience, and I took to it like a duck to water. Academically, the historical core of my interest in personal constructs and thanatology originated in research being conducted at the University of Florida by Epting, Krieger and a coterie of graduate students, including Larry Leitner. Prompted in part by the upsurge of popular and professional interest in issues of death and dying (Kübler-Ross 1969), the Florida group brought to bear the conceptual and methodological resources of PCT on the problem of assessing people’s attitudes towards their own eventual mortality, a nascent area of research cluttered with psychometrically shabby instrumentation and poorly designed studies. The result of this effort to upgrade the death attitude literature was the Threat Index (TI) (Krieger, Epting & Leitner 1974), a repertory grid-based measure that operationalised Kelly’s (1955) concept of threat as the ‘awareness of imminent, comprehensive change in one’s core structures’. Specifically, the TI required eliciting a significant sample of death-relevant constructs (e.g. painful vs. painless, familiar vs. unfamiliar, meaningful vs. meaningless) from the respondent through a triadic comparison of situations involving death (e.g. a tornado kills three children in an elementary school; your grandmother dies in her sleep). The respondent was then asked to rate the elements self, preferred self and (personal) death on these constructs, and the number of ‘splits’ in which both self-elements were aligned with one construct pole, and death with its contrast, served as the index of the subjective threat that would be required to construe the death of self as a personal reality. As an undergraduate research assistant, I joined the research effort at the point when TI was being developed into a standardised measure to circumvent the rather cumbersome administration of full repertory grids to individuals, which limited the measure’s use in research. Thus, my first task

298 Robert A. Neimeyer was to assist in the administration of grid-based interviews, in order to elicit thousands of death-relevant constructs and then winnow these to the 30 or 40 most commonly occurring dimensions to comprise the items for the standardised paper-and-pencil form of the instrument. The work was initially fascinating, offering me a glimpse of people’s views of life and death within the mutually reassuring format of a structured interview. I fell in love with the work and the theory behind it, and soon devised several studies of my own which helped establish the psychometric soundness of the resulting measure (Neimeyer 1986; Neimeyer, Dingemans & Epting 1977; Rigdon et al. 1979). As this research proceeded over the following decades, TI consolidated its place as one of the most valid and reliable instruments in the broad but varied death anxiety literature (Neimeyer 1994; Neimeyer, Moser & Wittkowski 2003). But despite the initial thrill of the research, the fairly compulsive methodological focus of the early work also generated a certain restiveness among the younger members of the research team. I recall strolling along a lake on the campus in 1975 with Peter Dingemans, my principal coinvestigator and graduate exchange student from the Netherlands, lamenting and laughing about the possible irony of spending our careers on minor issues like the internal consistency of the TI, when our imaginations led us to far broader horizons. This intermittent dissatisfaction with a psychometric preoccupation yielded a handful of substantively interesting articles on such topics as the death threat experienced by suicide intervention workers (Neimeyer & Dingemans 1980; Neimeyer & Neimeyer 1984) and on the link between death anxiety and the completion of one’s existential projects (Neimeyer & Chapman 1980; Neimeyer 1985), but for the most part, research with TI and its derivatives remained rigorously methodological until about 1990. It was chiefly this psychometric research that was summarised in my earlier review of the TI literature (Neimeyer 1994). This focus continued briefly into the 1990s, producing a massive study of TI with my student Marlin Moore, which yielded a confirmatory factor analysis of the measure (Moore & Neimeyer 1991), still to the best of my knowledge the only one of its kind on a death attitudes instrument. Eventually, however, the psychometric properties of TI were established even to our scientific satisfaction, allowing my students and me, now at the University of Memphis, to begin applying it – and a few other soundly developed death anxiety scales (Neimeyer & Moore 1994; Neimeyer & Gillies 2001) – to a host of substantive areas. Our first target was the frequently noted finding that women report greater fear of personal death than men, across dozens and perhaps hundreds of studies in the vast death anxiety literature (Neimeyer & Van Brunt 1995; Neimeyer & Fortner

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1997). Although this was typically explained in terms of the greater emotional expressiveness of women, our findings led us to call this interpretation into question, as it held in a large sample of men and women even when we controlled for their level of self-disclosure (Dattel & Neimeyer 1990). We also began to examine the personal anxieties about death experienced by vulnerable groups, such as a large group of gay and bisexual (G/B) men living in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic (Bivens et al. 1994). Here again, our findings were surprising and informative: HIV-positive men (half of whom had developed AIDS symptomatology) and the caregivers who worked with them were actually far less threatened and anxious about the prospect of death than were G/B men who were HIV-negative and uninvolved in caregiving. Further scrutiny of our data suggested a possible explanation for this pattern of results, as the former two groups reported significantly more intrinsic religious faith than their less directly affected peers. This study, and my ongoing treatment of gay men in therapy, led to a broader review of the role of death awareness and anxiety in the psychosocial adjustment of persons with AIDS, and how it might be dealt with in the context of counselling (Neimeyer & Stewart 1998; Neimeyer, Stewart & Anderson 2004). A second vulnerable population to attract our attention in the early 1990s was older adults, whose age and health status placed them at a high risk of death. Together with my student Barry Fortner, I first undertook a qualitative review of research on death anxiety in the elderly, trying to make sense of the often contradictory studies pointing to various markers of elevated fear of death (e.g. gender, health status) in an ageing population (Neimeyer & Fortner 1995). This effort convinced us of the need for a more systematic approach to integrating the literature, leading us to undertake a major quantitative review of all published and unpublished studies of death attitudes in older adults. The results were illuminating: across nearly 50 studies, totalling in excess of 4,500 participants, older adults’ fears of personal death were found to be unrelated to gender and religious faith, departing from the typical findings in the death anxiety literature on younger populations. Instead, the most powerful predictors turned out to be their level of ‘ego integrity’ or life-satisfaction – the feeling that they had lived long and well – in combination with their level of institutionalisation and physical health problems (Fortner & Neimeyer 1999). Reflecting on these findings, we placed them into the context of life-span developmental theory, and considered those dehumanising aspects of institutional care and medical difficulties that could exacerbate fears of death at the end of life (Fortner, Neimeyer & Rybarczeck 2000; Neimeyer & Fortner 2000).

300 Robert A. Neimeyer A recent elaboration of this same research programme stemmed from its fusion with the studies of attitudes toward ageing spearheaded by one of my former student, Steve DePaola (reviewed below). Specifically, we investigated the relationship between death anxiety, attitudes toward older adults and personal fears of ageing in a group of nearly 200 older men and women (DePaola et al. 2003). As predicted, we found that respondents with greater personal anxieties about their own ageing and death – and especially the unknown implied by the latter – displayed more social derogation of elders, a group to which the respondents themselves belonged! Other intriguing findings pointed to ethnic differences in the character of death attitudes, with Caucasian Americans reporting greater fears of a protracted and painful dying process, whereas African Americans were more fearful about what transpired after death, including fears of being buried alive, of bodily decomposition and the fate of their souls in an afterlife. A complementary prong of this research effort entailed examining not the elders themselves, but the health care professionals who work with them most frequently, at least in the United States. Thus, DePaola and I began to study the psychosocial context of nursing homes, where dismissive, avoidant or infantilising attitudes on the part of staff towards residents is an all too common occurrence. Comparing a large group of nursing home staff to demographically similar controls from the Memphis community, we discovered that staff as a group had comparable levels of death threat to controls, and the comparison group actually was more fearful of contact with dead bodies, perhaps as a function of their less frequent exposure. However, we also discovered that increasing levels of death concern were associated with greater personal anxiety about ageing, especially among nursing home workers, who also displayed significantly more negative attitudes toward the elderly (DePaola, Neimeyer, Lupfer & Fiedler 1992). Subsequent research extended these findings by providing evidence that nursing assistants, the least trained caregivers in care facilities for the elderly, had higher levels of personal death anxiety than registered nurses and supervising nurses in these same facilities (DePaola, Neimeyer & Ross 1994). This increased my concern about the possible link between personal death attitudes and suboptimal caregiving, especially among less trained and less experienced helpers – a concern that found expression in the studies of counsellors and suicide interventionists (reviewed below). A final line of work on death attitudes concerned the reactions of counsellors to situations involving death and loss, testing the assumption, widely held in thanatology circles, that such situations trigger more discomfort and avoidance on the part of caregivers than other potentially serious problems

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(Katz & Johnson 2005). Masters level counsellors were given a set of 15 written descriptions of both death-related counselling scenarios (e.g. grief, life-threatening illness, suicide risk) and non-death-related situations (e.g. rape, spouse abuse), and Tom Kirchberg and I found that five of the eight problems they rated as most uncomfortable were in the former category. In contrast, none of the seven least distressing situations concerned death or loss. However, our attempts to link these reactions to levels of personal death threat or years of counselling experience proved unsuccessful (Kirchberg & Neimeyer 1991). Having discovered evidence of discomfort with death among these neophyte counsellors, Marie Terry, Alex Bivens and I then sought to test the generality of this effect by recruiting a large group of highly expert grief therapists (averaging 14 years’ experience). Both in their ratings of brief presenting problems and in their written responses to detailed ‘transcriptions’ of opening statements by clients, these experts reversed the earlier finding, experiencing death and grief issues as more comfortable to respond to than other serious but non-death-related problems (Terry, Bivens & Neimeyer 1995). Moreover, counsellors responded with greater empathy to clients presenting with grief and loss issues, a tendency that was enhanced with more years of training and practice in death education and counselling. However, neither comfort nor empathy was related to personal death fears in the counsellors, who were characteristically quite death-accepting and typically religious. Practical as well as theoretical concerns drew my attention once again to trainee counsellors, as this was the group that was visibly death- and griefavoidant, not only in our first study, but also in my supervision of doctoral trainees in psychotherapy in our departmental clinic. I therefore welcomed further collaboration with Kirchberg, my co-investigator in the original study, in conducting a more tightly controlled and more realistic study of counsellors’ responses to death and grief situations with clients. For this study, we enlisted the help of actors, carefully balanced for gender and race, to enact the part of clients presenting with death-related (e.g. grief, AIDS) or non-death-related (e.g. marital discord, physical handicap) problems, and videotaped their performances. Counsellors then watched one set of videos, rating their discomfort and recording their responses to the clients’ self-presentations. As we hypothesised, we found greater discomfort in responding to the death than to non-death enactments, a response that proved to be mediated by the personal death fears of the counsellor. Contrary to our predictions, counsellors expressed slightly more empathy in relation to death and grief situations, although the level of empathy was surprisingly small in absolute terms (Kirchberg, Neimeyer & James 1998).

302 Robert A. Neimeyer The least empathic responses were provided by counsellors who construed death in fatalistic terms on the TI, suggesting that working with death and loss can prove especially challenging for inexperienced counsellors, whose personal death anxieties leave them vulnerable to such work. More recently, we have extended this concern with the psychological challenges of working in an end-of-life context by studying protective factors that could mitigate the impact of unique stressors that lead to burnout in nurses, counsellors, social workers and chaplains who work with terminally ill clients and their families. Surveying a large group of medical and mental health practitioners attending palliative care seminars, we found that daily spiritual experiences – sensing the divine or transcendent in everyday life – was negatively correlated with physical, cognitive and emotional forms of burnout in the workplace. In addition, a negative correlation was found between the amount of end-of-life (EOL) training received and burnout in the physical and cognitive domains. However, training did not appear to have a substantial impact on EOL workers’ level of emotional exhaustion (Holland & Neimeyer 2006). In hindsight, it can be seen that my substantive research on death threat and anxiety over the decades has reached towards a kind of symmetry, stemming from a focus on the death concerns of vulnerable populations (e.g. persons with AIDS, the elderly), then broadening to include the potentially problematic role played by the personal death fears and concerns of those who work with them (e.g. caregivers, nurses, counsellors). Although this complementary research strategy was at best only half-conscious at the time, a roughly parallel pattern was evident in my research in a second death-related area – suicide intervention.

Suicide Intervention In another apparent expression of unconscious motivation, within a few months of my arriving at the University of Florida, I found myself seeking training as a paraprofessional in one of the pioneering suicide and crisis intervention centres on the east coast of the United States, again without explicitly connecting my doing so with my own life-experience. Instead, I simply attributed my engagement in this work to my deepening interest in psychology, reinforced by my early research on death attitudes from a personal construct perspective. Whatever its source, my motivation was sufficiently strong to engage me in crisis intervention work, initially as a trainee and volunteer, and ultimately as a trainer and supervisor, in a series of suicide prevention centres from my undergraduate years through graduate

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school and beyond. Inevitably this spawned another line of research that interwove with the enterprise of studying death attitudes over a period of more than 20 years. My early work with Dingemans had generated more questions than answers about the death concerns of suicide intervention workers, as some findings had pointed to the elevated death threat in this group (Neimeyer & Dingemans 1980), while later work contradicted this conclusion (Neimeyer & Neimeyer 1984). As I observed the widely varying ways in which my fellow volunteers responded to callers in crisis, I began to wonder what role staff anxieties about death and dying played in their responses to clients who often were quite literally presenting with a life-threatening situation. However, as I contemplated this question in light of our initial studies, I soon confronted a more basic problem: the dearth of credible assessments of suicide prevention skills that could make an empirical answer to this question feasible. Thus, I began (as we had with the TI research) constructing the first self-report instrument for the assessment of suicide prevention competencies – the Suicide Intervention Response Inventory (SIRI) (Neimeyer & MacInnes 1981) – and then taking it through a series of validational studies through the 1980s, which collectively supported its psychometric soundness (see Neimeyer & Pfeiffer 1994a for a review). The logic of the SIRI was straightforward, consisting of 25 responses on the part of a potentially self-destructive client (e.g. veiled suicide threats, perturbation, depressive helplessness), to which the respondent could choose one of two possible replies, one constructive and the other neutral to negative from the perspective of crisis intervention theory. The score on the SIRI was simply the number of preferred responses. Later research refined the instrument by establishing a ‘gold standard’ provided by a panel of highly expert suicidologists, with deviation from their Likert ratings of ideal responses serving as an index of the respondent’s competence (Neimeyer & Bonnelle 1997). By the late 1980s the SIRI was ready to be used in substantive research, which initially took the form of attempting to catalogue the ten most frequent errors of medical and non-medical suicide interventionists (Neimeyer & Pfeiffer 1994b). Surveying in excess of 200 professional and paraprofessional staff, we found superficial reassurance, avoidance of strong feelings, professional distancing, inadequate assessment of suicidal intent, failure to identify precipitating problems and passivity to be relatively common responses. Medically trained interventionists in the sample tended to err in ways that were distinctive from the psychologically trained counsellors: whereas the former favoured defensive, distancing, advice-giving and dismissive interactions, the latter displayed excessive passivity and failure to structure interactions with a potentially suicidal client.

304 Robert A. Neimeyer This rekindled earlier concerns about the personal factors that could contribute to such suboptimal responses among interventionists. As a result, Barry Fortner, Diane Melby and I studied a large and heterogeneous group of respondents likely to have contact with people in the midst of a suicidal crisis, who varied from untrained peers, through crisis paraprofessionals, to masters level psychologists and counsellors (Neimeyer, Fortner & Melby 2001). The results were illuminating: level of training, experience with suicidal clients and death acceptance were positively associated with suicide intervention skills, whereas a personal history of suicidality and a casual, permissive stance towards suicide as a ‘personal right’ were negatively associated with appropriate responding. Moreover, among the most highly trained professional interventionists, a personal history of suicidality was even more strongly associated with poorer suicide counselling skills. Placing these findings in an international context could prove still more sobering, as our recent research with hundreds of Italian physicians and nurses indicates that an astonishingly small percentage of them receive any training in the management of suicidal crisis, despite their keen interest in it, and general practitioners in particular show marked deficiencies in identifying appropriate responses to suicide threat in a patient (Palmieri et al. 2008). One spin-off of this research was our decision to use the SIRI as a screening device to ensure a minimum level of suicide management competency in a randomised controlled trial of mutual support groups and cognitive therapy for depression (Bright, Baker & Neimeyer 1999). These findings also informed my attempt to develop a more coherent training agenda for counselling psychologists in suicide and hastened death, one that gave attention to the experiential exploration of personal attitudes towards death and suicide, as well as systematic training in professional ethics and crisis management (Neimeyer 2000b). A final feature of our research programme in suicide intervention also deserves a brief mention, namely, my work with Steve Hughes to elaborate a model of suicidal behaviour (Hughes & Neimeyer 1990), which integrates a number of constructivist features (e.g. constriction and disorganisation of the personal construct system) with other cognitive processes (e.g. foreshortened future time perspective, impaired problem-solving). This provided not only a heuristic framework for clinical assessment, but also spawned one of the few genuinely prospective studies of suicide risk, in which risk factors assessed at one point in time were used to predict escalating suicidality in the weeks that followed. By tracking nearly 80 patients admitted to psychiatric hospitals, we discovered that their relatively common reports of suicide ideation across the course of hospitalisation were best predicted by their level of assessed

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hopelessness at admission. However, the prediction of those patients likely to be placed on 15-minute checks by staff because of elevated suicide risk was improved by the additional consideration of other, more fundamental factors: their turn towards self-negativity within their own systems of meaning and the worsening of their ability to define and resolve critical life problems. Finally, the emergence of extremely high risk behaviours, such as self-injury sufficient to mandate one-on-one observation, was predicted not only by hopelessness, self-negativity and impaired problem-solving, but also by the unique impending disorganisation of patients’ construct systems regarding the social world as assessed by repertory grid technique (Hughes & Neimeyer 1993). These findings seemed to carry practical as well as theoretical import, suggesting the necessity of attending to qualitatively different indices of risk at the level of people’s construct systems as the suicidal crisis deepened. By implication, the projection of a more hopeful future that might be a minimum sufficient intervention to mitigate risk of self-injury among suicide ideators might be woefully inadequate for a high-risk client facing abject self-hatred, helplessness and the disintegration of perceived order in the social world. In such a case, more than simple crisis intervention is called for, as the therapist and client must grapple with a more basic assault on the latter’s world of meaning that can make the planned or precipitous abdication of life seem like the most logical choice. Recently, I have collaborated with my British colleague, David Winter, in reviewing the multifaceted contributions of PCT to conceptualising the suicidal choice, which provides an empirically informed and novel approach to the multiple paths that can eventuate in self-harm (Neimeyer & Winter 2006).

Grief and Loss Examined through the rear-view mirror that mid-life affords, the evolution of my scholarship has followed a topical progression from the general to the specific with reference to my own life and losses. That is, my early undergraduate interest in death attitudes represented one of the larger concentric circles targeted by my research, in the sense that it focused on construing the relationship between self and death in general. A graduate school concentration on suicide intervention tightened this focus and came ‘closer to home’ in its attention to the most life-altering of the losses in my experience, at least up to that point. But it was with the development of a specific focus on meaning reconstruction in bereavement, a development of only the past 10 or 12 years, that I began to hit my personal bull’s-eye.

306 Robert A. Neimeyer In part, this shift in focus represented a natural extension of the previous two foci, in combination with the impact of my clinical practice, which had long included significant numbers of clients dealing with losses of all kinds, through bereavement, assault, illness, job loss, relationship deterioration and geographic displacement. But this move also embodied a more personal and conscious motivation to span my two largely separate identities as a thanatological researcher on the one hand, and constructivist psychotherapy theorist on the other, as well as to respond to further personal experiences of loss of my mother, father-in-law and best friend in short succession. The result was a new hybrid programme of scholarship on meaning reconstruction in the wake of loss, a programme that has now moved to centre stage as an orienting frame for my own thinking and that of my students. The overarching proposition animating our work to date is that grieving is a process of reconstructing a world of meaning that has been challenged by loss (Neimeyer 1997). Issues of meaning-making in the wake of loss had, of course, received some attention in earlier work on bereavement (Marris 1974; Parkes 2001), but for the most part this had been a side-note to a much more central concern with emotional stages of adjustment in response to loss or a psychiatric preoccupation with acute symptomatology of grieving construed in largely pathological terms. In contrast, a new breed of grief researchers was beginning to attend to the ruptured assumptive world of the bereaved person (Janoff-Bulman 1989), the cognitive processes by which the bereaved cope with loss (Bonanno & Kaltman 1999; Malkinson 2007) and the post-traumatic growth displayed by many of those who experience adversity (Calhoun & Tedeschi 2006). Likewise, it was apparent that the field of grief theory was evolving, as scholars took a second look at timeworn assumptions about the need to ‘withdraw emotional energy’ from the one who has died, in order to ‘reinvest’ it elsewhere (Hagman 1995). Instead, thinkers were beginning to focus on the potentially sustaining continuing bonds the bereaved construct to the deceased (Klass, Silverman & Nickman 1996), and the active processes by which they strive to ‘relearn the world’ in the wake of loss (Attig 1996). My own entry into these discussions in various professional settings was enthusiastic, as I saw the immediate applicability of constructivist concepts and methods in advancing an alternative and more constructive understanding of the human response to loss. Our initial constructivist contribution to this conceptual reorientation took place at the juncture of thanatology and traumatology, as my postdoctoral colleague, Alan Stewart, and I endeavoured to conceptualise loss in terms of the traumatic assault on the survivor’s world of meaning (Neimeyer & Stewart 1996). Our guiding metaphor in this work was the

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self-narrative, defined as the life-story one both enacts and expresses, which gives a sense of coherence to one’s identity over time (Neimeyer 2004). In our view, traumatic loss disrupts the continuity of the narrative construction of self, dislodging the individual from a sense of who he or she is (Neimeyer 2000c). Complicated grief can result, especially in vulnerable individuals whose sense of self and relationships is tenuous as a function of an insecure attachment history (Neimeyer, Prigerson & Davies 2002). For example, the struggle to ‘emplot’ traumatic events within one’s selfnarrative can leave a fragmented sense of autobiographical continuity through time, much as a previously naïve conscript to the war in Iraq might survive horrific experiences of combat or terrorism that his fellow infantrymen did not, only to find it impossible to build a conceptual bridge between the person he once was and the person he has become. Traumatic losses of many kinds, we theorised, would introduce sharp experiential discrepancies to the survivor’s self-narrative, while at the same time challenging the individual’s capacity to subsume the traumatic events into the pre-existing construct system. Gradually, I elaborated this model to include other forms of disruption of the self-narrative occasioned by loss, contributing not only to disorganised narratives as described above, but also to dominant narratives in which a single constricted view of the traumatic self comes to ‘colonise’ a person’s identity, and dissociated narratives in which secret stories of loss (e.g. through disguised suicide or unspoken histories of incest) precluded the fuller integration of the experience into one’s personal or relational reality (Neimeyer 2004; Neimeyer & Arvay 2004). To assess construct systems that had been compromised in these ways, we experimented with the use of biographical construct repertory grids, a variation of the repertory grid technique that I had explored in the early 1980s (Neimeyer 1985d). The method consisted of a structured interview in which interviewees were presented with triads of life-events anchored by iconically rich scenes depicting important ‘chapters’ in the person’s lifenarrative (e.g. when I rode my tricycle to the community swimming pool at the age of five, played baseball at age 12, served in the army, the birth of my first child). Comparing and contrasting these ‘plot elements’ in their own life-stories, respondents formulated thematic constructs which compared and contrasted the different events (e.g. ‘powerful’ vs. ‘helpless’; ‘filled with rage’ vs. ‘filled with love’). Case studies using this technique, accompanied by a visual printout of self-identity plots, proved illuminating to us as investigators and therapists, and to the bereaved or traumatised persons with whom we shared the results (Neimeyer & Stewart 1996; Neimeyer, Keesee & Fortner 2000). Roughly contemporaneous research by

308 Robert A. Neimeyer Kenneth Sewell and his colleagues (Sewell 1996; 1997; Sewell et al. 1996) extended this ‘life-event grid’ paradigm and lent preliminary empirical support to the emerging constructivist model. Although I remain fascinated with the potential power of grid technique to aid in the articulation of meaning systems disrupted by loss, I also find myself shifting in other methodological directions. In particular, I have been drawn to broader narrative models and methods, prompted in part by misgivings I share with Yorke (1989) and others about the degradation of more comprehensive meanings entailed by the segmentation of accounts of loss into the adjectival antonyms elicited by the repertory grid technique. Not only does the relatively unconstrained report of oral or written narratives of loss provide a valuable source of qualitative data that is subject to various forms of disciplined analysis (Neimeyer & Hogan 2001, Neimeyer, Hogan & Laurie 2008), but it also began to suggest a vast array of narrative means to therapeutic ends in the context of grief counselling. As an example of the former, with my students Adam Anderson and James Gillies, I began experimenting with the coding of brief responses to probing questions, which we put to over 1,000 bereaved persons, regarding the sense they have made of their loss experience; any form of unexpected benefit or life lesson the experience has brought them; and progressive or regressive shifts they have noticed in their sense of personal identity in the wake of the loss. This multifaceted and ongoing research programme, driven especially by my two young colleagues, Joseph Currier and Jason Holland, has gone some distance towards demonstrating the power of the meaning reconstruction paradigm with a variety of losses and populations. Like Davis, NolenHoeksema & Larson (1998), we are finding that the inability to make sense of the loss in particular is emerging as the single best predictor of intensified grieving, greatly outweighing the contribution of ‘objective’ factors such as the relationship that was lost (e.g. of a parent, child, friend), the cause of death (e.g. from natural or unnatural/violent causes) or the passage of time (Currier, Holland & Neimeyer 2006; Currier, Holland, Coleman & Neimeyer 2007; Keesee, Currier & Neimeyer 2008). More tentatively, we are also glimpsing a relationship between the inability to find existential benefit in the loss or regressive identity change on the one hand, and more traumatic or complicated forms of grieving on the other (Holland, Currier & Neimeyer 2006). It even appears that the ability to make sense of the loss in personal terms interacts with other important processes in adaptation to loss, such as through mitigating the greater reports of complicated grief symptoms associated with heavier reliance on the continuing bond with the one who

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has died (Neimeyer, Baldwin & Gillies 2006). In other words, several studies converge to support the proposition that the ability to integrate the reality of loss into a system of personal meaning is a key marker of bereavement adaptation (Neimeyer 2005). Vigorous and ongoing research using this paradigm within our group has led to deeper recognition of the challenges posed by bereavement to such groups as college students (Neimeyer, Laurie et al. 2008), older adults (Neimeyer, Holland et al. 2008), those who have lost loved ones to suicide, homicide or fatal accident (Currier et al. 2006), bereaved parents (Keesee et al. 2008) and African Americans (Laurie & Neimeyer 2008), the latter being especially likely to be neglected by grief researchers. Aside from these indices of meaning-making, my colleague Heidi Levitt and I have also been drawn to examine the various narrative processes by which people formulate accounts of loss, and the implications these carry for the integration of death into their life-story (Neimeyer & Levitt 2000; 2001). For example, some people narrate their losses in an ‘external’ voice, focusing on objective events in a way that might be reported by an outside observer (‘My mother died of emphysema in the autumn. All of her children were there at her bedside, sitting in vigil. Nurses came and went, sometimes gesturing one or more family members into the hall for a medical update’). Others engage in a more ‘internal’ and emotional narrative process (‘When my mother lay dying, I felt a cascade of emotions, from hope, to despair and loneliness, to deep sadness. But above all, I had a sense of awe and privilege to be there’). Still others present a more ‘reflexive’, significanceseeking account (‘My mother’s death made me aware of the fragile order of life and the critical importance of sharing these life transitions as a family’). In subsequent research spearheaded by my student Adam Anderson, we investigated the role of these various narrative processes in promoting integration of loss and facilitating adaptation to bereavement. Although it is too early to say what our longitudinal research will reveal, we suspect that an alternation among narrative processes in ongoing personal grief journals will prove most helpful in embroidering meaning of the loss and facilitating a vital continued engagement in life (Neimeyer & Anderson 2001). Not surprisingly, the elasticity of the narrative metaphor has prompted a good deal of creative theorising on the part not only of our own research group, but also that of like-minded clinicians and scholars (Nadeau 1997; Romanoff & Terenzio 1998; Attig 2000). In my own writing in this emerging genre, I have tried to harvest the lessons of cutting-edge constructivist research to formulate some working propositions that scaffold a new theory of grieving, one that better accounts for the individuality of grief, our active

310 Robert A. Neimeyer personal processes of adaptation, and familial and cultural factors that shape our efforts after meaning (Neimeyer 1997; Neimeyer & Keesee 1998; Neimeyer & Jordan 2001). Equally, I have tried to use this nascent theory in a generative way, to envisage new constructivist practices – biographical, interview-based, reflective, metaphorical, poetic, narrative – that help bereaved people take a perspective on their losses and weave them into the fabric of their lives (Neimeyer et al. 2000; Neimeyer 2001a; 2001b; Neimeyer, Herrero & Botella 2006). One unanticipated offshoot of this work has been my personal experimentation with writing as well as publishing the poetry of loss (Neimeyer 2006), which has opened new horizons and conversations for me in communities beyond the purely clinical and scientific. Another horizon has been the not uncommon finding by other clinicians and helping professionals that a constructivist and narrative approach provides a more coherent and useful framework for their best practices (e.g. the creation of meaningful rituals; transformative procedures for restoring a sense of community in the wake of violation or loss) than did traditional theories (Neimeyer & Tschudi 2003). I have consistently found such reports to be highly affirming, as, in the words of a perceptive participant in one of my grief therapy workshops, ‘we as bereavement professionals finally have a chance to put our practice into theory’. Thus, I am hopeful that a constructivist and narrative perspective on bereavement and its complications can help foster a more effective approach to grief therapy, whose uncertain outcomes in available research studies call for deep analysis and reflection (Jordan & Neimeyer 2003; Currier, Holland & Neimeyer 2007; Currier, Neimeyer & Berman 2008).

Coda In this chapter I have reflected on my long involvement in the field of death studies, an involvement that has drawn impetus and occasional new direction from my own legacy of loss, as well as my parallel work as a constructivist theorist and clinician. This has afforded me a rare opportunity to contemplate some of the many interconnected networks of enterprise that constitute an evolving research programme, glancing back in time to its undergraduate origins in an early fascination with the measurement of death threat, and sometimes glimpsing the outline of findings that are still taking shape. No brief account can convey all the peregrinations of a lengthy and multifaceted programme of study, but I have tried to suggest something of the braiding together of different strands of theory, research

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and practice on death attitudes, suicide intervention and grief that has animated, and perhaps constrained, my work in this area. I hope that the resulting account is a reasonably honest one – at least as written from my present position in mid-career – and that the decision to focus reflexively on that work in which I have been most directly involved does not obscure the critical contribution made to this programme by many others. No doubt each of my students and colleagues could provide a unique account of some of these same developments, and see rather different significance in them, an outcome that would be fully in accord with PCT! Aside from any literal utility of this review in acquainting interested readers with the broad purview of research programmes that they might explore, extend or critique, I hope that my frequent citation of the work and role of others suggests something of the social nature of science, and the importance of collegiality and community in supporting our individual and joint initiatives. Just as the identifiable strands of our personal networks of enterprise are complexly interwoven, so too are they bound up with those of many others. Ultimately, I hope that this summary of my own collaborative work continues this process, suggesting points of useful contact and contrast with the work of others who share my long-term fascination with the role of death in human life.

References Attig, T. (1996). How We Grieve: Relearning the World. New York: Oxford University Press Attig, T. (2000). The Heart of Grief. New York: Oxford Bivens, A. J., Neimeyer, R. A., Kirchberg, T. M. & Moore, M. K. (1994). Death concern and religious belief among gays and bisexuals of variable proximity to AIDS. Omega, 30, 105–120 Bonanno, G. & Kaltman, S. (1999). Toward an integrative perspective on bereavement. Psychological Bulletin, 125, 760–776 Bright, J. I., Baker, K. D. & Neimeyer, R. A. (1999). Professional and paraprofessional group treatments for depression: a comparison of cognitive-behavioral and mutual support interventions. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 67, 491–501 Calhoun, L. & Tedeschi, R. G. (eds.) (2006). Handbook of Posttraumatic Growth. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Currier, J., Holland, J., Coleman, R. & Neimeyer, R. A. (2007). Bereavement following violent death: an assault on life and meaning. In R. Stevenson & G. Cox (eds.) Perspectives on Violence and Violent Death. Amityville, NY: Baywood

312 Robert A. Neimeyer Currier, J., Holland, J. & Neimeyer, R. A. (2006). Sense making, grief and the experience of violent loss: toward a meditational model. Death Studies, 30, 403–428 Currier, J. M., Holland, J. M. & Neimeyer, R. A. (2007). The effectiveness of bereavement interventions with children: a meta-analytic review of controlled outcome research. Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, 36, 253–259 Currier, J. M., Neimeyer, R. A. & Berman, J. S. (2008). The effectiveness of psychotherapeutic interventions for the bereaved: a comprehensive quantitative review. Psychological Bulletin, 134, 648–661 Dattel, A. R. & Neimeyer, R. A. (1990). Sex differences in death anxiety: testing the emotional expressiveness hypothesis. Death Studies, 14, 1–11 Davis, C. G., Nolen-Hoeksema, S. & Larson, J. (1998). Making sense of loss and benefiting from the experience: two construals of meaning. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 561–574 DePaola, S. J., Neimeyer, R. A., Griffin, M. & Young, J. (2003). Death anxiety and attitudes toward the elderly among older adults: the role of gender and ethnicity. Death Studies, 27, 335–354 DePaola, S. J., Neimeyer, R. A., Lupfer, M. B. & Fiedler, J. (1992). Death concern and attitudes toward the elderly in nursing home personnel. Death Studies, 16, 537–555 DePaola, S. J., Neimeyer, R. A. & Ross, S. K. (1994). Death concern and attitudes toward the elderly in nursing home personnel as a function of training. Omega, 29, 231–248 Fortner, B. V. & Neimeyer, R. A. (1999). Death anxiety in older adults: a quantitative review. Death Studies, 23, 387–412 Fortner, B. V., Neimeyer, R. A. & Rybarczeck, B. (2000). Correlates of death anxiety in older adults: a comprehensive review. In A. Tomer (ed.) Death Attitudes and the Older Adult. Philadelphia: Brunner Routledge Gruber, H. E. (1989). Networks of enterprise in creative scientific work. In B. Gholson, W. Shadish, R. A. Neimeyer & A. Houts (eds.) Psychology of Science. New York: Cambridge Hagman, G. (1995). Mourning: review and reconsideration. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 76, 909–925 Holland, J., Currier, J. & Neimeyer, R. A. (2006). Meaning reconstruction in the first two years of bereavement: the role of sense-making and benefit-finding. Omega, 53, 173–191 Holland, J. & Neimeyer, R. A. (2006). Reducing the risk of burnout in end-of-life care settings: the role of daily spiritual experiences and training. Palliative & Supportive Care, 3, 1–9 Hughes, S. L. & Neimeyer, R. A. (1990). A cognitive model of suicidal behaviour. In D. Lester (ed.) Current Concepts of Suicide. Philadelphia: Charles Press Hughes, S. L. & Neimeyer, R. A. (1993). Cognitive predictors of suicide among hospitalized psychiatric patients. Death Studies, 17, 103–124

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Janoff-Bulman, R. (1989). Assumptive worlds and the stress of traumatic events. Social Cognition, 7, 113–116 Jordan, J. R. & Neimeyer, R. A. (2003). Does grief counselling work? Death Studies, 27, 765–786 Katz, R. & Johnson, T. (eds.) (2005). When Professionals Weep. New York: Routledge Keesee, N. J., Currier, J. M. & Neimeyer, R. A. (2008). Predictors of grief following the death of one’s child: the contribution of finding meaning. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 64, 1145–1163 Kelly, G. A. (1955). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volumes 1 and 2. New York: Norton (reprinted London: Routledge, 1991) Kirchberg, T. M. & Neimeyer, R. A. (1991). Reactions of beginning counselors to situations involving death and dying. Death Studies, 15, 603–610 Kirchberg, T. M., Neimeyer, R. A. & James, R. K. (1998). Beginning counselors’ death concerns and empathic responses to client situations involving death and grief. Death Studies, 22, 99–120 Klass, D., Silverman, P. R. & Nickman, S. (1996). Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief. Washington: Taylor & Francis Krieger, S. R., Epting, F. R. & Leitner, L. M. (1974). Personal constructs, threat, and attitudes toward death. Omega, 5, 299–310 Kübler-Ross, E. (1969). On Death and Dying. New York: Macmillan Laurie, A. & Neimeyer, R. A. (2008). African Americans in bereavement: grief as a function of ethnicity. Omega, 57, 173–193 Malkinson, R. (2007). Cognitive Grief Therapy. New York: Norton Marris, P. (1974). Loss and Change. London: Routledge Moore, M. K. & Neimeyer, R. A. (1991). A confirmatory factor analysis of the Threat Index. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60, 122–129 Nadeau, J. W. (1997). Families Making Sense of Death. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Neimeyer, R. A. (1985a). The Development of Personal Construct Psychology. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press Neimeyer, R. A. (1985b). Problems and prospects in personal construct psychology. In D. Bannister (ed.) Issues and Approaches in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press Neimeyer, R. A. (1985c). Actualization, integration and fear of death: a test of the additive model. Death Studies, 9, 235–250 Neimeyer, R. A. (1985d). Personal constructs in clinical practice. In P. Kendall (ed.) Advances in Cognitive-Behavioral Research & Therapy. Volume 4. New York: Academic Press Neimeyer, R. A. (1986). The threat hypothesis: a conceptual and empirical defense. Death Studies, 10, 177–190 Neimeyer, R. A. (1994). The Threat Index and related methods. In R. A. Neimeyer (ed.) Death Anxiety Handbook. New York: Taylor & Francis Neimeyer, R. A. (1995). Constructivist psychotherapies: features, foundations, and future directions. In R. A. Neimeyer & M. J. Mahoney (eds.) Constructivism in Psychotherapy. Washington: American Psychological Association

314 Robert A. Neimeyer Neimeyer, R. A. (1997). Meaning reconstruction and the experience of chronic loss. In K. J. Doka (ed.) Living with Grief. Washington, DC: Taylor & Francis Neimeyer, R. A. (2000b). Suicide and hastened death: toward a training agenda for counseling psychology. The Counseling Psychologist, 28, 551–560 Neimeyer, R. A. (2000c). Narrative disruptions in the construction of self. In R. A. Neimeyer & J. Raskin (eds.) Constructions of Disorder: Meaning Making Frameworks for Psychotherapy. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Neimeyer, R. A. (2001a). The language of loss. In R. A. Neimeyer (ed.) Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Loss. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Neimeyer, R. A. (2001b). Lessons of Loss: A Guide to Coping. Memphis, TN: Center for the Study of Loss and Transition Neimeyer, R. A. (2004). Fostering posttraumatic growth: a narrative contribution. Psychological Inquiry, 15, 53–59 Neimeyer, R. A. (2005). Growing through grief: constructing coherence in narratives of loss. In D. Winter & L. Viney (eds.) Personal Construct Psychotherapy: Advances in Theory, Practice and Research. London: Whurr Neimeyer, R. A. (2006). Rainbow in the Stone: Selected Poems. Memphis, TN: Mercury Neimeyer, R. A. & Anderson, A. S. (2001). Loss, transition and the search for significance. In N. Thompson (ed.) Loss and Grief: A Guide for Human Services Professionals. Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Neimeyer, R. A. & Arvay, M. J. (2004). Performing the self: therapeutic enactment and the narrative integration of traumatic loss. In H. Hermans & G. Dimaggio (eds.) The Dialogical Self in Psychotherapy. New York: Brunner Routledge Neimeyer, R. A., Baldwin, S. A. & Gillies, J. (2006). Continuing bonds and reconstructing meaning: mitigating complications in bereavement. Death Studies, 30, 715–738 Neimeyer, R. A. & Bonnelle, K. (1997). The Suicide Intervention Response Inventory: a revision and validation. Death Studies, 21, 59–81 Neimeyer, R. A. & Chapman, K. M. (1980). Self/ideal discrepancy and fear of death: the test of an existential hypothesis. Omega, 11, 233–240 Neimeyer, R. A. & Dingemans, P. (1980). Death orientation in the suicide intervention worker. Omega, 11, 15–23 Neimeyer, R. A., Dingemans, P. & Epting, F. R. (1977). Convergent validity, situational stability and meaningfulness of the Threat Index. Omega, 8, 251–265 Neimeyer, R. A. & Fortner, B. (1995). Death anxiety in the elderly. In G. Maddox (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Aging. New York: Springer Neimeyer, R. A. & Fortner, B. (1997). Death attitudes in contemporary perspective. In S. Strack (ed.) Death and the Quest for Meaning. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Neimeyer, R. A. & Fortner, B. (2000). Death anxiety in older adults. In G. L. Maddox (ed.) Encyclopedia of Aging, 3rd edition. New York: Springer

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Neimeyer, R. A., Fortner, B. & Melby, D. (2001). Personal and professional factors and suicide intervention skills. Suicide & Life-Threatening Behavior, 31, 71–82 Neimeyer, R. A. & Gillies, J. (2001). Multidimensional fear of death scale. In J. Hoyer & J. Margraf (eds.) Angstdiagnostik–Grundlagen und Testverfahren. Berlin: Springer Verlag Neimeyer, R. A., Herrero, O. & Botella, L. (2006). Chaos to coherence: psychotherapeutic integration of traumatic loss. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 19, 127–145 Neimeyer, R. A. & Hogan, N. (2001). Quantitative or qualitative? Measurement issues in the study of grief. In M. Stroebe, R. Hansson, W. Stoebe & H. Schut (eds.) Handbook of Bereavement Research. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Neimeyer, R. A., Hogan, N. & Laurie, A. (2008). The measurement of grief: psychometric considerations in the assessment of reactions to bereavement. In M. Stroebe, R. O. Hansson, H. Schut & W. Stroebe (eds.) Handbook of Bereavement Research: 21st Century Perspectives. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Neimeyer, R. A., Holland, J. M., Currier, J. M. & Mehta, T. (2008). Meaning reconstruction in later life: Toward a cognitive-constructivist approach to grief therapy. In D. Gallagher-Thompson, A. Steffan & L. Thompson (eds.) Handbook of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies with Older Adults. New York: Springer Verlag Neimeyer, R. A. & Jordan, J. R. (2001). Disenfranchisement as empathic failure. In K. Doka (ed.) Disenfranchised Grief. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Neimeyer, R. A. & Keesee, N. J. (1998). Dimensions of diversity in the reconstruction of meaning. In K. J. Doka & J. D. Davidson (eds.) Living with Grief: Who We Are, How We Grieve. Washington, DC: Hospice Foundation of America Neimeyer, R. A., Keesee, N. J. & Fortner, B. V. (2000). Loss and meaning reconstruction: propositions and procedures. In R. Malkinson, Rubin, S. & E. Wiztum (eds.) Traumatic and Non-Traumatic Loss and Bereavement. Madison, CT: Psychosocial Press Neimeyer, R. A., Laurie, A., Mehta, T., Hardison, H. & Currier, J. M. (2008). Lessons of loss: meaning-making in bereaved college students. In H. Servaty-Seib & D. Taub (eds.) Assisting Bereaved College Students. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Neimeyer, R. A. & Levitt, H. (2000). What’s narrative got to do with it? Construction and coherence in accounts of loss. In J. Harvey (ed.) Loss and Trauma. Philadelphia: Brunner Routledge Neimeyer, R. A. & Levitt, H. (2001). Coping and coherence: a narrative perspective on resilience. In R. Snyder (ed.) Coping with Stress. New York: Oxford University Press Neimeyer, R. A. & MacInnes, W. D. (1981). Assessing paraprofessional competence with the Suicide Intervention Response Inventory. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 28, 176–179

316 Robert A. Neimeyer Neimeyer, R. A. & Moore, M. K. (1994). Validity and reliability of the Multidimensional Fear of Death Scale. In R. A. Neimeyer (ed.) Death Anxiety Handbook. New York: Taylor & Francis Neimeyer, R. A., Moser, R. & Wittkowski, J. (2003). Assessing attitudes toward death: psychometric considerations. Omega, 47, 45–76 Neimeyer, R. A. & Neimeyer, G. J. (1984). Death anxiety and counseling skill in the suicide interventionist. Suicide & Life-Threatening Behavior, 14, 126–131 Neimeyer, R. A. & Pfeiffer, A. M. (1994a). Evaluation of suicide intervention effectiveness. Death Studies, 18, 127–162 Neimeyer, R. A. & Pfeiffer, A. M. (1994b). The ten most common errors of suicide interventionists. In A. Leenaars, J. T. Maltsberger & R. A. Neimeyer (eds.) Treatment of Suicidal People. Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis Neimeyer, R. A., Prigerson, H. & Davies, B. (2002). Mourning and meaning. American Behavioral Scientist, 46, 235–251 Neimeyer, R. A., Shadish, W., Freedman, E., Gholson, B. & Houts, A. (1989). A preliminary agenda for the psychology of science. In B. Gholson, W. Shadish, R. A. Neimeyer & A. Houts (eds.) Psychology of Science. New York: Cambridge University Press Neimeyer, R. A. & Stewart, A. E. (1996). Trauma, healing, and the narrative emplotment of loss. Families in Society, 77, 360–375 Neimeyer, R. A. & Stewart, A. E. (1998). AIDS-related death anxiety: a review of the literature. In H. E. Gendelman, S. Lipton, L. Epstein & S. Swindells (eds.) Neurological and Neuropsychiatric Manifestations of HIV-1 Infection. New York: Chapman & Hall Neimeyer, R. A., Stewart, A. E. & Anderson, J. (2004). AIDS-related death anxiety: a research review and clinical recommendations. In H. E. Gendelman, S. Swindells, I. Grant, S. Lipton & I. Everall (eds.) The Neurology of AIDS, 2nd edition. New York: Chapman & Hall Neimeyer, R. A., & Tschudi, F. (2003). Community and coherence: narrative contributions to a psychology of conflict and loss. In G. Fireman, T. McVay & O. Flanagan (eds.) Narrative and Consciousness: Literature, Psychology, and the Brain. New York: Oxford University Press Neimeyer, R. A. & Van Brunt, D. (1995). Death anxiety. In H. Wass & R. A. Neimeyer (eds.) Dying: Facing the Facts, 3rd edition. Washington, DC and London: Taylor & Francis Neimeyer, R. A. & Winter, D. (2006). To be or not to be: personal construct perspectives on the suicidal choice. In T. Ellis (ed.) Cognition and Suicide. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Palmieri, G., Forghieri, M., Ferrari, S., Pingani, L., Coppola, P., Colombini, N., Rigatelli, M. & Neimeyer, R. A. (2008). Suicide intervention skills in health professionals: a multidisciplinary comparison. Archives of Suicide Research, 12, 232–237 Parkes, C. M. (2001). Bereavement, 3rd edition. London and New York: Brunner Routledge

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Rigdon, M. A., Epting, F. R., Neimeyer, R. A. & Krieger, S. R. (1979). The Threat Index: a research report. Death Education, 3, 245–270 Romanoff, B. D. & Terenzio, M. (1998). Rituals and the grieving process. Death Studies, 22, 697–711 Sewell, K. (1996). Constructional risk factors for a post-traumatic stress response following a mass murder. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 9, 97–108 Sewell, K. W. (1997). Posttraumatic stress: towards a constructivist model of psychotherapy. In G. J. Neimeyer & R. A. Neimeyer (eds.) Advances in Personal Construct Psychology, Volume 4. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press Sewell, K. W., Cromwell, R. L., Farrell-Higgins, J., Palmer, R., Ohlde, C. & Patterson, T. W. (1996). Hierarchical elaboration in the conceptual structure of Vietnam combat veterans. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 9, 79–96 Terry, M. L., Bivens, A. J. & Neimeyer, R. A. (1995). Comfort and empathy of experienced counselors in client situations involving death and loss. Omega, 32, 269–285 Yorke, M. (1989). The intolerable wrestle: words, numbers, and meanings. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 2, 65–76

Chapter 20

Reflections on the Creation of a Dissertation Dennis N. Hinkle Dennis Hinkle received his PhD in 1965 from Ohio State University. He studied with George A. Kelly from 1960 to 1965, then followed him to Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, where he remained until Kelly’s death in 1967. Dennis taught doctoral level psychology at several universities until 1975 when he established an independent practice in the San Francisco Bay area. He was married for 20 years and fathered three sons. He is blissfully retired with his former graduate student and partner of 34 years. His male partner is also a Clinical Psychologist.

Elaborated aspects of theory: implications; laddering; meaning; resistance to change; significance; Way of Life constructs

Introduction Autobiography is always a significant reflection on experience. George Kelly often said that what is important is not so much the events of our lives, but our reflections on them – the examined life. When he returned from travelling around the world after suffering a heart attack at the age of 56, he said that the very best part of his travels happened after he returned home and reflected on them. He expressed frustration with the multitudes of people who live unexamined lives. Reflection is a way to precipitate ourselves into new meaning and significance, to construct our narratives. I once asked Kelly what he thought the purpose of life was. He looked at me as if irritated Reflections in Personal Construct Theory. Edited by Richard J. Butler © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

320 Dennis N. Hinkle that I didn’t already know the answer then said, rather forcefully, ‘To be on with it, of course!’ His was conception of life as a structure in the process of change – being and becoming were the same. Life is process, and reflection often transforms our lives. So, Kelly wisely suggested that I reflect on my experiences of creating my dissertation. I wrote my often cited unpublished dissertation, ‘The Change of Personal Constructs from the Viewpoint of a Theory of Construct Implications’ in 1965 when I was 30. What I wrote as Chapter VII, ‘A brief autobiography of the present research’, is presented later. Now, over four decades later, I have the opportunity and wisdom to reflect again on that innovative six-month experience. I finally fully understand its personal significance in great historical detail and depth, though at the time I believed I was only concerned with understanding clients’ resistance to change. At the time, I was discouraged about the state of psychology with its plethora of useless publications, whose main purpose was to add to an author’s bibliography. Kelly asked me about this. When I listed all of my dissatisfactions with psychological research, he smiled with a look of delight and said, ‘Good! You’ll make a good psychologist! Well, I guess somebody has to do the research other than me!’ He advised me to do research that had personal significance and relevance. That way, he said, you won’t lose interest so quickly. He said the best research has personal significance, unlike so much psychological research.

Laddering and Pyramiding Developing the idea of laddering and pyramiding happened some 42 years ago – in a different galaxy! I remember that I had always been interested in social change – still am. I loved the 1960s when free speech, civil rights, the sexual revolution, the anti-war movement and the questioning of all authority were alive and well, in contrast to the deadening conformity of the 1950s. Change was in the air at last! That gave me great hope for individual liberty and a just society. It is easy to be idealistic when you don’t know anything. Anyway, as a liberal and a beginning psychotherapist, I wanted to know why people resisted change and how to persuade them to do otherwise. I passionately wanted the humanism of that era to flourish, but I feared the inevitable backlash of the religious conservatives. So, my passion was about change. Kelly had wisely advised me to investigate some area that I deeply cared about, that had a personal significance. I passionately wanted to change the conservatives! At that time, I didn’t relate this to the homophobia of the conservatives but that was the real issue, as I

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discovered much later in life. Kelly’s first law of learning was: ‘If you don’t know what a person is doing, ask them – they just might tell you.’ I first asked myself questions about my reluctance to change. The answers were always because change would mean this, this and this; or, I don’t know what that would be like, and that made me anxious. I then interviewed others and found the same issues of meaning or the absence of meaning, anxiety. Since this was sensible and perfectly clear, the task now became to demonstrate this role of meaning in resistance to change. Science describes the interdependency of variables, often represented by the pervasive X–Y coordinate graphs. Kelly’s repertory grid is a two-dimensional representation of elements as related to constructs. I thought of the meaning structure of constructs, their implications, as adding the third dimension, the Z axis to the grid. I thought of laddering as what I normally did as a therapist and a friend. I am very nosy and probing; I don’t simply take things at face value; I’m interested in the latent meaning, not just what is manifest content – a useful outcome of my early study of psychoanalysis. I learned that in friendship people like deep empathy, though such empathy is rare. It greatly reduces our universal loneliness – a central fact of the human condition. When I don’t deeply understand another, I feel lonely. Perhaps that is why I became a psychotherapist rather than an academic researcher. Therapy gave me a far more intimate knowledge of others. Kelly once told me that he felt quite privileged to be a therapist, because ‘I can sit beside the stream of human souls and listen to their wondrous songs, songs they have never revealed to another human being. This is the wonder of people, and I know you, too, know that wonder.’ I couldn’t tell him that I had discovered this wonder at age 12 when I first knew love.

Implications and the Resistance to Change My primary personal interest was in meaning, significance and resistance to change. Kelly had once described me to a faculty member as ‘a global thinker’. What he meant was that I preferred the abstract big picture – God, Man and the Universe. I knew from my personal relationships that to know another is to understand the deep structure of their actions. I have never doubted the symbolic nature of most human behaviour. One of my favourite movies is ‘Paris, Texas’, in which everything is symbolic – even the title. It was Jean-Paul Sartre who commented that a single gesture implies a worldview. For me that meant that a construct implies a hierarchy of

322 Dennis N. Hinkle constructs up to the Way of Life constructs that modulate our very lives. I once intended to measure those constructs – probably hedonism, prudence, ethics and aesthetics. Youth is a condition of nearsightedness in which, sadly, we can’t see the sunlit patterns of the tapestries of our lives, or how the warp and woof of one life is intricately interwoven with those of others to form the restless, seamless whole. At my age it is now clear. I wrote an intimate autobiography called Burning Point (Hinkle 2000), a detailed reflection on a lifetime of reconstructions in my long journey towards authenticity. It is one of the most intimate autobiographies in print. It is not for prudish erotophobes, but it tells the truth as I experienced it. Over 90 colleges and universities are using it in gay and lesbian study courses. It describes in detail the experiences that facilitated change, the turning points, my core constructs and the processes of change itself. Writing it gave me a deep understanding of the major themes of my life and of the profound significance of various relationships in my life, Kelly being a major one. Kelly often said, ‘The truth of your human relationships is the most important truth you will ever know.’ How very perceptive and wise that is. One very early relationship of love in my youth became the master template and icon of my life, for which I am eternally grateful. Because of the deep insights gained from writing Burning Point, I can now tell you the deeper personal psychological significance of my dissertation on the implications of change. The key to understanding the core conflict of my life is the simple fact that I was born with clear attraction and an affectional preference for members of my own sex. I was aware of that from age six, though I knew nothing about sexuality. In those days, samesex love was literally ‘the love that dare not speak its name’; it was a felony in all the US states, and remains so in 20 states, though the law is rarely enforced there. Students were expelled from universities for this ‘crime’. As a graduate student, I tested prisoners who had been convicted of this felony at Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus. The terror of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his ‘commie’ and ‘homo’ hunts was in its heyday during my high school days. There was no gay movement or organisations. Being gay was not a viable option. So I sought psychotherapy to cure my inclination towards ‘perversion’. My sweet Jewish therapist, a Social Learning Theorist, assured me that I was ‘not an invert, a degenerate, or a pervert’. He said I was just experiencing ‘a developmental psychosexual delay’ and that learning to love women was ‘just like learning to like oysters and green olives’. I was profoundly relieved! In the 1950s, he could not have ethically encouraged me to become a criminal. I could learn to be normal, he promised, so I married. My deepest fear in graduate

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school was that Kelly’s X-ray vision would see my crime, sin and psychopathology and that I would be expelled from the clinical programme. I believed that throughout graduate school, but I think George did know. He once pointedly said to me, ‘Some people are so frightened that they think black is white, and white is black’. He waited for me to reply, but I tightened my mask and said nothing. I discovered much later that Kelly knew about other students in our programme who were gay or lesbian and he was completely supportive of them. One became rather famous. The reason that meaning and significance were so important to me at that time was because I was continuing to live an inauthentic life, one based on fear. I was a conforming pretender with no authentic life of my own. One must first be real to have a meaningful and significant life. I was an empty actor who was afraid to change – resistant to change, because of the criminal implications of becoming real. Yes, the significant implications of change! You will have to read Burning Point to find out what happened and how it happened. The meaning of the construct gay for me profoundly changed as did my society. This world is filled with billions of inauthentic, frightened people whose lives are not yet their own; just look around. Perhaps glance in the mirror of your own soul. And the outcome in terms of research? The laddering technique was introduced. The Resistance to Change Grid was a simple exercise in rank ordering. As for the Implication Grid, it was simply a systematic way of recording what people told me that construct changes implied – its meaning and significance. It is the third dimension of the repertory grid. The techniques have been used in countless research studies ever since.

A Brief Autobiography of the Present Research And so to the final chapter of my dissertation. It represents both the endpoint of a cycle of experience and the beginning of another. The purpose of this chapter is to present a brief autobiographical overview of the sixmonth cycle of experience which terminated with the writing of this manuscript. The beginnings of a new experience cycle have been delineated in the discussion of the implications for further research in chapter VI. Since the focus of convenience of this research concerns the general problem of construct change – reconstruction – the additional requirement of the selfreflexiveness of psychological theorising implied by personal construct theory (PCT) suggests that such an autobiographical section is itself relevant to the general topic of this dissertation. If nothing else, it documents that experience does not come full-blown from the side of Jove. Experience – in

324 Dennis N. Hinkle the construct theory sense – is an interweaving of events and constructs. Thus autobiography documents a cycle of people in interaction with ideas. The educational origins of this research are complex and difficult to trace, but seem to reflect the convergence of four interrelated streams of thought. When I was initially considering ‘doing’ a dissertation (I now know that it is a living one), it was of the utmost importance for me to know that I would be able to ask people a significant question about the direction of their lives, the answer to which would be significant for me and them, and would in turn lead to further questions. This statement is related to the following four concerns: 1. Meaning and significance in psychology. 2. Change and process conceptions. 3. Models of man. 4. The relation of science to man. (The word ‘concern’ is used to indicate these broad areas of personal involvement. It was essential that the dissertation experience should be concerned with much more than its own completion.) The issue of meaning and significance had become quite salient for me after completing preparations for the general examinations in clinical psychology. Apart from the question of the theoretical significance of the various studies punctuating the geometric progression of psychological research, the question of the human significance became an even more important issue. Granted, the term ‘human significance’ lacked the elegance and simple-mindedness of operational definition, but there was no denying that it was full of meaning – and I was not at all sure that its meaning was simply surplus. It is of interest that the most exciting concept I remember from my S-R psychology and learning theory days was Clyde Nobel’s m meaning – defined as the number of associates to a given stimulus. Here, I thought, was an inroad to the person. Several other issues concerned me. Why was it that most proponents of various theoretical positions did not use their espoused position selfreflexively? That is to say, why did they use one system of conceptualisation for themselves and their intimates and another for their ‘experimental subjects’? Is there to be no psychology of psychologists? What is gained if we regard the phrase ‘experimental subjects’ as a euphemism for ‘experimental objects’? What is gained if we abandon the hypothetico-deductive ambition to deduce Man? What is gained if we regard the purpose of psychology as being the creation of Man rather than his reduction? What is gained if we

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examine Logical Positivism and Dialectical Materialism as modern sides of an ancient coin – the problem of Being and Becoming? Since each philosophy can be used to construe the other, are they not alternative constructions about construing? Can the structure vs. process dichotomy be usefully resolved by regarding Man as structure-in-process? If a psychologist were God-omniscient and omnipotent – possessing perfect prediction and control – what would he do as a psychologist? In the naïve realism sense, will the purpose of the science of psychology be to discover the secrets of Man by lifting the nightgown of Nature? This is the objectification of Man – Man the object. Not to acknowledge the existence of another, is that not the ultimate hostility? What happens if science is viewed as the human activity of the expansion and articulation of anticipations? In what sense can the goals of science be seen to be human liberty, human community (in the sense of the communion of persons) and finally, the evolving awareness of the beauty and awesomeness of human existence? What you have just read illustrates the kind of thinking which characterised the rather misty and global origins of this dissertation. As a style of thinking it was dilated, loose, propositional, invitational and an expression of personal involvement and deeply felt concern. In a very important way these issues set the outer parameters of the present work. Realising that outer parameters do not make dissertations, a very patient Kelly chided me by suggesting that a dissertation on the nature of Man would be perfectly acceptable, to which I replied that I had not yet finished my thinking on the nature of God and the Universe! Wisely, he then allowed me enough rope to hang myself; this communicated faith and clarified responsibility. From this point on the process of construing was primarily one of successive pre-emptive choice, tightening and seeking, and acknowledgement of confirmation and disconfirmation. A quotation from John Dewey – ‘Conventionalists and extremists are not inquiring’ – which I read during the national elections, provided a significant turning point. I equated inquiry with change and decided to focus on the problem of change itself. A sample of the constructs I was elaborating with respect to this problem included:‘change’ vs. ‘stability’ ‘ambiguity’ vs. ‘certainty’ ‘relativity’ vs. ‘absolutism’ ‘freedom’ vs. ‘limitation’ ‘seeking’ vs. ‘avoiding’ ‘expression’ vs. ‘repression’ ‘creativity’ vs. ‘conformity’ ‘future’ vs. ‘past’

326 Dennis N. Hinkle ‘process’ vs. ‘entity’ ‘expansion’ vs. ‘constriction’ ‘flexibility’ vs. ‘rigidity’ ‘open’ vs. ‘dogmatic’ ‘identity’ vs. ‘identity loss’ ‘static stability’ vs. ‘dynamic stability’ ‘consonance’ vs. ‘dissonance’ ‘congruity’ vs. ‘incongruity’ ‘balance’ vs. ‘imbalance’ ‘levelling’ vs. ‘sharpening’ ‘internal’ vs. ‘external locus of change’ ‘high’ vs. ‘low risk taking’ ‘high’ vs. ‘low skill at role playing’ ‘the balance of person predictability’ vs. ‘environment predictability’ … …. sociological variables and the temporal dimensionalisation of kitchen sinks. My pre-emption at this level had at least taken me from the sea, but it landed me in an atheoretical swamp. It was here that I tried on Kelly’s freely offered and amazing spectacles and caught sight of land – with mountains to climb, magnificent mountains! The problem now became to see what change meant in terms of construct theory, research and related methodologies. It became quite apparent, even though I had ‘read’ Kelly, that the significance of PCT cannot be grasped until one has envisioned with it. It is fertility – significance not yet envisioned. But vision is not enough. It is necessary to be involved with the people who are the subjects of this science. My armamentarium now consisted of such notions as ‘superordination’ vs. ‘subordination’, ‘validation’ vs. ‘invalidation’, construct density, complexity, propositionality, pre-emption, constellatoriness, ‘permeability’ vs. ‘impermeability’, ‘looseness’ vs. ‘tightness’, ‘dilation’ vs. ‘constriction’, repertory design, serial invalidation etc., and these constructs now stood in a nomothetic network. During this phase of the research I was involved in a number of extensive interviews and small, intensive pilot studies. The major lesson here was to learn how to ask questions about change to enable the person to explain himself to me systematically. At this time my conceptualisations were cluttered with many individual differences hypotheses which obscured the structure-in-process conception I was working towards. Basically, I explored the things I could do to produce a change and the variety of ways a person construed change in his life. Since the conception was self-reflexive, I became my most useful subject.

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The pressure of time became a decisive factor, since I was preparing for a research fellowship in London for the following year. As I sat staring at the mass of hypotheses, micro-theories, protocols and field notes I had compiled, I acknowledged that the time for tightening and constriction, pre-emption and choice had arrived. It is important to mention that at this moment I experienced a sense of depression because for me tightening implied a loss of implication, meaning and significance. It was not until my dissertation subjects were well along in their task of explaining themselves systematically to me that I realised – profoundly – that clarification and unequivocal prediction are the means whereby we precipitate ourselves into a new experience, new meaning and new significance. Many of the characteristics of the implication grid were totally unimagined until after the leap had been made and the data collected. The sense of the mystery of existence is not lost by clarification and commitment; it is gained. I had now specifically focused the problem to the construct implications of slot change. I elaborated the notion that construct definition must involve a statement of the superordinate and subordinate implications – the focus and range of implication – as well as its focus and range of convenience. The final issue was one of measurement techniques and methodology. By this time I had become sensitive to the loosening–tightening–testing sequence and could modulate the process, so that the hierarchical method and the implication grid technique readily evolved. The actual running of subjects was highly intimate and meaningful; it could hardly have been otherwise, since I was indexing significant personal constructs and the network of implications relating them for 28 ongoing human beings. The running of subjects represented the end of one cycle of experience, but the intimate contact and perspective which this cycle has provided now creates a magnificent vista. In this sense, determination and initiative are inexorably linked. One final note: this research was a lived experience. Science is not a disembodied entity, a mere exercise in voyeuristic objectification; it is a human activity – perhaps the human activity.

References Hinkle, D. (1965). The change of personal constructs from the viewpoint of a theory of construct implications. Unpublished PhD thesis, Ohio State University Hinkle, D. N. (2000). Burning Point. Tajique, NM: Alamo Square Press

Section VI

The Client as An Active Participant

Chapter 21

Enculturing Reflexivity Across Cultures: Non-PC Lessons from Study Abroad Naoimh O’Connor Naoimh O’Connor is Irish and facilitates cross-cultural psychology courses with American students in Italy. She also applies personal construct psychology to her work in psychological support and research, and is currently training in kinesiology. Though her piece is based on true events, direct reference to specific incidents have been elaborated upon, modified and in places, made up. Theory may be in the telling but perhaps also, there is space for the showing to go on.

Elaborated aspects of theory: culturally sensitive practice as reflexivity, rule of equivalence as triadic elicitation, back-translation as rep-grid supporter, ethnocentricity of the credulous approach, as herself

All the people like us are WE, and everyone else is THEY; And THEY live over the sea, while WE live over the way. But – would you believe it? – They look upon WE as only a sort of THEY. (Rudyard Kipling)

Reflections in Personal Construct Theory. Edited by Richard J. Butler © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Introduction ‘So,’ says the girl with the baseball cap, who never makes eye contact and spends most classes doodling in the margins, ‘if culture influences everyone, how come not every psych theory includes culture?’ You relax then, in that eighteenth-century Umbrian palazzo, standing in front of those punctiliously silent study-abroad Americans who, instead of responding to what you say, write it down; who sometimes ask you to repeat yourself as many as four times (even though it is they who have the accents!) and who flout ‘confusion’ at the mere hint of ambiguity, a word about as socially acceptable in an Irish learning context as an unfriendly mouse in Disneyland. ‘These Americans need to have everything told to them. They need you to point out that you’ve cracked a joke!’ You have been Skyping complaints to your colleagues back home, moaning about having to change your presentation style just because they are used to explicit, straight teaching, when constructive facilitation, Socratic discussion and experiential exercises have always been your preference. But, over the course of a couple of challenging semesters, you have come to see that in order to work within the range of convenience of these ‘clients’, you need to become familiar with the power and the point of the projector and work with your own resistance to change to accept whatever level of interaction your group decides is comfortable. So when the gum-popping humanities major with the multi-coloured pen points out the inconsistency between the theory and practice in the literature unprompted, it strikes you that perhaps your fears are unfounded; those fears that a ‘non-personal construct psychology (PCP)-friendly’ approach – one that involves presenting information with a limited amount of questioning or student participation – will inhibit the nature and extent of reflective learning promoted in your classroom. ‘Good question,’ you venture from behind the desk, itching to sit on it and swing your legs, even if you know that that doesn’t fit the rules of teaching in the grown-up world of the US. ‘What does anyone else think about that?’ ‘Well,’ the business major shrugs, ‘if the person coming up with the theory doesn’t, like, reflect so that he even knows about enculturation or whatever, well, he won’t think to include it in his theory, right?’ He taps his electronic pen against his note-taker. ‘It’s, like, common sense.’ It’s only when they’ve left for the day and you’re standing in the aftermath of this uncommon sense that you trip over the submerged pole to your implicit dilemma. It has taken over two academic years for

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you to make this stumble, to really appreciate what Kingdon (2005) calls the ‘doing of’ reflexivity and it seems clearer now than ever that in order for the value of personal construct theory (PCT) to outlive a class, aspects of the approach may need to be part of conventional psychological practice without bearing the stamp of PCT. That means there is no need for your students to labour through ‘construct elicitation’ when it is ‘common sense’ that making distinctions between one’s ideas is enough. They don’t need to examine the range of problems associated with non-constructivist research when they can consider the term ‘reflexivity’ as the capacity with which a theory strives to be independent of the theorist and then decide for themselves where on this dimension a study fits. Perhaps the planting ground of cross-cultural literature bears more fruit than other psychologies to do this, considering ‘what distinguishes a crosscultural approach … is the approach, not the topic’ (Matsumoto and Juang 2004). By its very nature, the practice of studying the impact of culture on groups, involves developing a heightened awareness of how culture-sensitive and ‘transportable’ one’s approach and methodology must be. You are prompted to write a short story based on your epiphany, but it is reconstrued as a chapter about personal experiences with PCP and reflexivity. This chapter outlines the lessons you learned with your American students.

Lesson 1 Make Distinctions Absolute; Use Constructs as Opposed to Explaining Them Your first class slide reads: ‘Studying the impact of culture on human development involves studying the impact of your culture on your development.’ This is as close as you can get to an explicit starting point for yet another psychology that is presented without any underlying paradigm (e.g. Ratner & Hui 2003) and borrows from a wide range of sources, from anthropology and sociology to human development and international studies. Crosscultural psychology is not a psychology ‘in’ culture, a catalogue of appropriate behaviours for business meetings between Taiwan and Moscow, distinguishing the individuality of a culture (i.e. anthropology or ‘cultural psychology’). Nor is it a psychology ‘between’ cultures, where the same kind of studies are attempted across social groups in order to make definitive statements about the similarities of world values and norms. Instead, it strives towards a systematic approach for exploring how people interact with their culture in order to sustain that culture (Ratner & Hui 2003).

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However, unlike similar areas of research (i.e. human development), cross-cultural psychology requires (rather than suggests) that students take into account the worldview associated with the source of a theory or piece of research (i.e. reflexivity). Introductory texts advise working within a ‘culturally relative’, ‘culturally sensitive’ framework and impress on the reader how even data interpretation can be filtered through one’s (cultural) preconceptions. This ‘systematic study of interactions’ vs. (not) ‘definitive catalogue of unique behaviours’ or ‘study of shared worldviews’ construct serves as a frame of reference for the multidisciplinary hybrid that has generated as many as 164 definitions of culture.1 You grew up driving off-road in Ireland, you tell them, so you don’t find following directions there as irritating as your foreign friends do, but you have learned to empathise with their frustration. If there are signposts at all, place-names are usually written in an archaic language. The locals may send a non-Irish registration plate ‘a couple of miles around the next bend’ only for them to arrive in a backyard, where they are met by a farmer who laughs that his neighbour was ‘pulling their leg’ (i.e. joking, having a laugh) because, as well as relying on Celtic divining instincts to reach a destination, the Irish cultivate a humour that can be a shade bizarre in its ironic subtlety, much to the bewilderment of a German or American tourist, who just wants to visit the round tower highlighted in the guidebook and has always been under the impression that it was the punch-line that was the point to a joke. Ireland, like Japan, rates as a high-context culture on a low–high continuum because of its implicit rules and norms, whereas countries like Germany and the US (i.e. low-context) value unambiguous verbal messages and literal communication.2 Cross-cultural psychology is concerned with describing behaviour across different cultures in this way. It is as much interested in similarities as differences, but rather than attempting to make evaluative conclusions, it aspires to an approach that does not presuppose the superiority of any one worldview (Marsella 1979). Campbell’s (1964) ‘rule of equivalence’ points out that while continua such as ‘low–high context’ or ‘individualist–collectivist’ can provide us with an inexhaustively interesting dichotomising exercise, the process of contrasting cultures remains uninterpretable until we examine at least three cultures at a time (i.e. interpret information using common denominators generated by the cultures themselves). 1

See Berry et al. (1992, pp. 165–166). For full description of the high–low context communication styles, see Hall (1976).

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You exploit the fact that you are Irish, your students are American and you are all living in Italy through an ‘ecology’ exercise. You draw a nest of five circles on the whiteboard and lodge a beaming stick-man in the centre. Then you proceed to describe how Urie Bronfenbrenner’s model outlines the constant interaction between a constantly changing individual and the varying levels of a constantly changing environment, one of which happens to be culture (i.e. at a macro-system level). You ask the class to consider challenges they have met while adapting to life in Italy, as a way of accessing social rules your students may be unaware they share. ‘People here walk so slowly. I get really irritated when they’re in front of me on the sidewalk,’ one New Yorker offers, and a half dozen colleagues nod fervently in agreement. ‘Yeah,’ agrees someone from the other side. ‘They don’t seem to understand that it’s important to go places and get things done in a, like, timeframe – you can spend hours in line at the grocery store.’ ‘That’s another thing,’ the business major jumps in. ‘They have stores for everything here! There is no, like, equivalent to Wallmart! It’s such a waste of time!’ Bronfenbrenner (1977) argues that micro-system variables include anything one comes into direct contact with on a daily basis – family, peers, education systems, community organisations. For example, Italian children do not have a structured ‘bedtime’ as American or Irish children do (Wolf et al. 1996), which suggests that from an early age, they may develop alternative appreciations of time. Meso- or exo-system variables, which involve factors that do not seem to make a direct impact on one’s life but are closely related to how the immediate environment functions, include the pausa (i.e. afternoon rest), which is established in most Italian communities. Schools, shops and businesses close for the afternoon and there is a widely shared social understanding that, as far as possible, families eat lunch together. This may reinforce an implicit value for conversation at the dining table, and the idea that personal relationships are more of a priority than being punctual (and is also reflected in the overarching macro-system of the shared cultural values and belief systems within a society). The chrono-system, then, illustrates how in Italy time itself has impacted on the way people construe time. As the Mediterranean model (Laslett 1983) suggests, since the 1970s, when Italy joined the European Union, values preserving a slow culture may be changing, especially in the towns and cities: Italian families are getting smaller, communities are less collectivist and the slow-food manifesto has been introduced as a resistance to the speed of living introduced by globalisation (Petrini & Padovani 2006). Therefore, the generation one is born into may be an additional factor

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contributing to the pace of an Italian evening stroll. Maybe, when the New Yorker chills out in Piazza Italia, she may notice that the younger Italians are in more of a hurry than their parents or grandparents. The class spontaneously contrasts their own culture with this, agreeing that, as children, they were encouraged to complete schoolwork and home chores quickly. Punctuality is valued and businesses stay open as long as people make time to shop. The expression ‘time is money’ is often used (notably this has no have a direct equivalent in Italian). They point out that some of their parents who grew up during the economic depression of the 1950s have reinforced a belief that time should be used productively, profitably. Perhaps, they suggest, this is a contributing factor to how frustrated they feel with what they see as an inept Italian service industry. (Of course, they also reflect, it is possible that Italians may find the über-efficiency of the US restaurant too fast!) Before they conclude that there are ‘reasons’ why America and Italy differ in the way people make use of time, you comment that Irish people are not renowned for being punctual, yet the Celtic Tiger economy has reflected a similar ‘time is money’ mentality to the one they suggest America nurtures. But in Ireland, the way people spend time has not always been so linked to economic factors, even if people have always placed symbolic value on land and property. Artistic traditions continue to be valued and relational interactions function differently from the nuclear family model of the US – see for example, Moane’s (2003) exploration of Ireland’s postcolonial identity. This ecological heuristic for considering how three cultures value time can be set apart from ‘imposed-etic’ methodology (i.e. studies that modify materials to be applied across societies). Levine’s (1997) pace-of-life research, for example, used three variables (the accuracy of public clocks, the speed of walkers on footpaths and the time taken for a postal clerk to issue a stamp) across 31 countries and concluded that the ‘fastest’ nations included Switzerland, Italy and Ireland and the slowest, a number of countries in South America. The US rated around the middle at 16th. Your students, who have had some experience in an Italian post office as well as on the footpath, instantly claim that the measures cannot be representative if the US is considered slower than Italy. Did Levine only measure northern Italy? ‘You know, things move much slower the further south you go!’ someone just back from a weekend in Sorrento announces. Did the researchers take account of the time of the day or the time of the year they carried out the Italian study? ‘Because the heat affects the speed that people here move at!’

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‘Anyway,’ the psych major announces, ‘there are so many different paces of lifestyle across America, calling the US a culture won’t represent its diversity.’ ‘But the literature says that Americans are homogeneous!’ You laugh nonchalantly. But you were asking for too much to be met by anything other than a collective, frowning silence. Tentatively, you point at the words ‘Irish humour’ and ‘self-deprecating irony’ on the board, before finding yourself explaining the joke. ‘What nationality was this Levine anyway?’ The business major understands – and it’s still not funny. In examining their own psychological functioning as a product of an ecology, your students have started considering psychological research, even foundational theory, as the product of one’s ecology as well. But you feel you have been talking a lot without laughing much. A sense of humour, it is argued, is the last and most complex part of a new language to master. It becomes clearer still to you that you moved to the Umbrian and not Californian hills without a hint of Kellyan apprehension because when it comes to sharing a joke, Italy and Ireland seem to be closer to speaking the same language than do Ireland and the US. So, you squirm in your seat, for it seems studying the impact of culture on human development involves studying the impact of your culture on your own development.

Lesson 2 Alternative is also Reality, Culture-Bound or Culturally Constructed From the very first class, you struggle with how to interpret the ‘abnormal psychology and culture’ literature with students who have grown up where mood regulators seem to be as ubiquitous as chicken-free chicken. Your less than ambivalent attitude towards endorsing pharmaceutical therapy is met with more hostility than appreciation. You realise that in certain cases the literature will have to speak for itself. Depression (you quote Philip 2001) crops up in medical reports almost as frequently as the common cold in the US, New Zealand and certain parts of Europe. Yet in Iran, dysphoria is valued in the same way: a sad facial expression is considered profoundly beautiful and respect at a funeral is evaluated by the level of gham o gosseh (sadness and grief) exhibited (Good & Good 1986). In China, patients are more likely to report neurasthenia, or chronic physical pain, than mental or emotional unease (Kleinman & Kleinman 1986). The psych major raises her hand to inform you that this

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actually constitutes somatisation disorder, or the expression of psychological distress through bodily complaints. She is surprised to learn that somatisation is not recognised in many eastern clinical reports as it might be in the US, because in China and Japan there is little distinction made between body and mind in the first place, and general medical practice works towards balancing the potential of the whole person on various levels (e.g. physical, emotional, community) of functioning (Yamashita & Koyama 1994). In China the purpose of medicine has been to facilitate maintaining the whole family’s health, which means using treatments that strengthen overall immunity as opposed to focusing on specific symptoms or diseases. Similarly, in India Aryuvedic medicine promotes emotional and physical wellbeing through diet and lifestyle, including yoga and meditation. This is distinct from the ‘problem-presenting’ style in the West, whereby clients feel that the more comprehensive their list of complaints, the more likely it is they will be cured (Tseng & Streltzer 1997). And, you hear yourself saying, ‘When we attempt to integrate indigenous therapies into a medical model, what is revered as standard practice in China or India comes to be regarded as “alternative” therapy in the US or Europe.’ The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) is currently the most widely used system for classification of disorders, and though it has undergone several major revisions, it has met with criticism in terms of its neglect to require the assessment of cultural elements (Paniagua 2000). Alarcon (1995) points out that a large number of disorders described in the DSM manifest themselves differently or simply do not exist in non-western societies and cultures, which make up 80% of the world’s population. And while the next edition of the DSM will include a more comprehensive account of symptom manifestation across cultures, the current edition includes an appendix listing just 25 culture-bound conditions arising in non-western countries in contrast to just under 300 ‘general psychological conditions’ in the main text. For example, emic studies have illustrated how, in South-East Asia, it is not unheard of for young males to display symptoms of koro, where they are seized by a panic that they are suffering from suk yeong (shrinking of the penis). They present with extreme anxiety and pull at their genitalia for fear that their penis will ‘grow into their abdomen’. This information generates some laughter, until the context of the condition is considered; symptoms of koro tend to appear in young, sexually inexperienced men with limited education, who grow up in an environment that inhibits rather than promotes sexual expression. Additionally, parental ethno-theory (the worldview passed from one generation to the next) for treating koro involves a

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‘community exorcism’ of the spirit ‘causing’ unrest within the person. Such traditions accept that the ghost has the power to manipulate behaviour, including sexual impotency, and it is the responsibility of the whole community to appease these powers (Yap 1974). In Japan the recognition of suffering as part of the human condition is reflected in Naikan therapy, which focuses on managing emotional imbalance through structured sitting meditation. From early in the morning until late in the evening, the client reflects on their internal state and external interaction with others; a professional interrupts the meditation for five minutes every hour as a way to ‘focus’ the reflective process. This continues for as long as necessary (Murase 1986). As a result of the lack of up-to-date resources providing guidelines for such therapies, non-western practitioners have begun to develop their own psychiatric and psychological references. For example, a group of African practitioners have devised their own catalogue to describe the form and prevalence of conditions that occupy their clinics (cited in Matsumoto & Juang 2004). In order to develop an appreciation for culture-sensitive diagnosis and treatment, the class watches the ‘case’ of Grazia, a free-spirited wife and mother who attempts to extricate herself from small town expectations of rural life in 1980s Sicily (i.e. Respiro, 2002). She is treated with antidepressant injections whenever she loses her temper or cannot communicate with her family. It is not made explicit how her behaviour first manifested and whether or not it was a reaction to her circumstances. In groups of four and five, they are invited to consider her symptoms and signs, predisposing and precipitating factors and possible treatment. The only requirement for deciding on the most appropriate, culturally sensitive treatment is that they must come to a group consensus. Some complexity arises in predisposing and precipitating factors. In general they agree that she grew up in a patriarchal society (a chrono-system factor), where women did not occupy a socially dominant role. Someone taking Italian politics points out that during the 1970s the women’s liberation movement was strong (a macro-system) and around the same time the country joined the European Union. Even though the South was less directly influenced by such shifts in cultural consciousness, Grazia may have been aware of a potentially different reality for herself and her children. One group point out that if she was living in a city or in the North, she may have had diverse outlets to express her frustration; another group argue that if changing her social circumstances changed her mood, and there is no corresponding physiological correlates, then the case may not be one of depression at all.

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It proves close to impossible for groups to reach a consensus. So instead you ask that they come up with a list of suggestions for exploring the case in greater detail. In a relatively shorter time than it took Paniagua (2000) they generate what could be considered ‘essential guidelines for the culturally sensitive practitioner’, including becoming as familiar as possible with the background and language (the Sicilian dialect) of their client, being aware of their own cultural prejudices (e.g. potentially anti-patriarchal) and not making assumptions, one way or another, based on the fact that she comes from a different culture from theirs. ‘Basically seeing her as a human being first, I guess,’ the psych major offers. The business major is irritated. ‘OK, it’s all very well to talk about seeing subjects as people, but that doesn’t change the fact that she still needs some kind of treatment.’ His frustration is tangible. ‘It’s all very well to talk about relative truths, but we should be able to measure stuff, get things done!’ It is difficult to disagree.

Lesson 3 Lose the Confounding Research Complex: Keep it Simple. Separate Variables The enthusiasm to date for examining absolutes among societies has left a gaping need for ‘a set of consistent underlying principles and guidelines that are at once ecologically sound’ and ‘culturally-sensitive’ (Ratner & Hui 2003). The Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) is an electronic database of anthropologist ethnographies as a way of attempting to use a society’s own category systems to interpret data. Data sets are organised and coded by psychologists to contribute to ‘hologeistic’ (worldwide sample) research. This makes it possible to construct a matrix against which to consider retrospectively how a culture corresponds with the ‘empirical hypotheses’ studies (Segall, Campbell & Herskovits 1966)3 or studies exploring learning styles across cultures (Yamashita 2005).4 The Six Cultures study,5 for

3

Cited in Segall et al. (1999). The ‘carpentered world’ hypothesis, for example, holds that people who grow up in a world of angles (buildings, furniture, ceilings) will rank higher on a continuum of susceptibility to the Muller–Lyer illusion. 4 Yamazaki’s (2005) descriptive meta-analysis clusters cultures along a set of six continua to examine interrelationships in how cultures function. 5 J. Whiting & B. Whiting (1975) The Six Cultures Study of Socialization of the Child.

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instance, shows that in 109 out of 183 cultures, parents considered the idea of leaving a child to sleep alone in a separate room tantamount to neglect. Campbell (1964) claims that the single major contribution of hologeistic research rests in its ‘unconfounding function’, or the extent to which it can disentangle co-occurring variables. The Trobriand Island study (Malinowski 1927), for example, challenges Freud’s claim that youth aggression towards a parent is based on an expression of sexual jealousy towards the opposite gender parent (the Oedipus complex). On an archipelago off the coast of New Guinea, the maternal uncle is the culturally designated authority figure, while the father remains what Freud would regard as the ‘object of jealousy’ (the mother’s lover) and for this population, there is no expression of teenage hostility towards the father. Such an analysis separates variables that are fused in other cultures (as in Freud’s Austria, where the father acts as both authority figure and mother’s lover). Ideally, this kind of research would be followed up by obtaining relevant data from a large number of paired societies, different enough to study but similar enough for meaningful comparison. Bronfenbrenner’s heuristic approach also claims to unconfound variables, without losing sight of human complexity, through contrasting two or more environmental systems (as opposed to cultures) while ‘controlling in’ additional sources of influence. ‘Controlling in’ is the process of acknowledging the breadth of factors that could influence those being observed by taking account of the period of time in which the study takes place as well as related media, political and cultural issues, not just specific independent variables. Beginning the scientific method from a reflective perspective means the study aspires to ecological validity while still using empirical methodology, so increasing its pragmatic capacity. ‘Headstart’ in the US, for example, is a home-based tuition programme designed for children from a socially disadvantaged background. This government-funded initiative was the result of an ecological exploration of groups of children attending a range of schools located in different socio-economic neighbourhoods. The ecological perspective makes it intuitive to consider whether the experimental design is suitable or if materials need to be modified for the purposes of meaningfulness. For example, linguistic expressions and idioms that do not translate directly across cultures (e.g. ‘I sometimes find myself feeling blue’ in a questionnaire designed to assess depression) can then be adapted so that the intended meaning is accessed (e.g. Kleinman 1995). This in turn prompts the development of alternative research methodologies, such as back-translation (the process of translating a piece into the required language, then translating it back into the original language and doing

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this as many times as necessary until both the original piece and the final translation match). Your students accept the challenge to consider their new ecology (i.e. their study-abroad programme) as a laboratory and agree that adapting to another culture has heightened their awareness of their (what you call) ‘hypothesis-testing tendencies’. Through the series of in-class experiments they conduct, one study examines the relationship between environment and memory. In confederate pairs they carry out an eye-witness investigation6 requesting participation from Italian and non-Italian tourists in the local streets. Participants (tourists of at least three nationalities for each dyad to ‘unconfound’ the effect of nationality or language) answer a short set of questions related to the clothing and facial features of ‘a recent passerby who asked for the time’ (the student confederate). Based on the literature (Segall, Campbell & Herskovits 1966, in Segall et al. 1999; Yamashita 2005), they hypothesised that low-context participants would score higher on memory accuracy. The results do not support the hypothesis, but everyone agrees that back-translating the questionnaires was not enough to control for respondents’ accents and in some cases the answers could not be coded because there was no direct English translation for certain Italian colours (e.g. sciuro, ‘clear’ in Italian). The gum-popper is doodling with the words ‘feeling blue’ until she raises her head and says, ‘There always seem to be communication problems with social research, even in the same country.’ She thinks to add: ‘It’d be good to back-translate all questionnaires and surveys – even when participants and researchers speak the same language!’ At that point, it seems appropriate to mention the repertory grid.

Lesson 4 When in Rome, be the Change In India, four is the number of the meditative mind. You wonder if this relates in some way to how many semesters it has taken you to arrive at the same number of guidelines to help you negotiate the fine line between student participation and confusion. In some ways, you feel more than ever that you are a bad planner but as good an improviser as any Italian, while at least aspiring to the low-context articulation of an American. Your intercultural experience has convinced you, without the shadow of a slot-rattle,7 that to facilitate PCT you need to emphasise the practice with minimal ref6

Modification of Loftus and Palmer’s (1974) eyewitness memory studies. Where slot-rattling refers to the temporary reconstrual of events as being the opposite of what you expected (Kelly 1955).

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erence to the theory. This involves believing enough in the material for students to reconstrue their own ‘literature matrix’. This credulous approach to presenting literature strikes you as distinct from trying to ‘teach’ PCP as a psychology apart so that students can read the literature with ‘constructivist goggles’. You include triadic elicitation exercises and critical thinking questions on the test to manage the niggling preoccupation that your students may not transfer skills they have been practising in class. You remind them to refer to the PCP encyclopedia on the web, in case they stumble on Kelly’s magnum opus (1955) and feel they have been short-changed by incessant incantations to ‘make distinctions, not war’. Still a single, altogether more disconcerting ethical issue looks back at you from the mirror of your chapter redrafting; this relates to the concept of reflexivity as a cultural construct in and of itself, the opposite pole of which may well be enculturation, but could just as easily be socialisation. That is, even though you may be aware of reflexivity, may even think you are practising it, ‘reflexivity’ remains the visible end of a construct shared by those who have grown up in a comparable ecology to yours; who, in one way or another, form part of your culture. And because the alternative pole depends on elicitation, not assumption, reflexivity may be as open to interpretation as the interpretation is open to practice. Just as PCT is limited in how the terminology can be translated (Scheer 2003), you realise that this credulous approach may not travel well, in some cases at all; there are places in the world where the concept of a ‘credulous approach’ may be as meaningless as a boat was to Columbus’s first American welcoming party. You are struck by the irony in what you see as the ‘ethnocentricity of the credulous approach’; a form of open-mindedness bearing a predefined notion of what it means to be open-minded. It disturbs you, this insidious quasi-awareness that pre-constructs may be so reliant on cultural sociality, because in spite of your best attempts, you may not always be in a position to regulate your own or recognise another’s reflexivity. You worry that you will never again be inspired by class preparation; worse, what if your students sense your phenomenological chaos and can’t be bothered to grapple with the material? And as a result, what if you never again allow a student to stump you with a question? Four may meditate in India but what if it simply isn’t enough in Europe? Oh, what if …? In one of the last classes of the final semester, you always assign a discussion paper. It is a comparative study of Chinese and US college students, concerning how they view themselves according to the independence– interdependence construct (Gao & Newman 2005). The script thus far has been that the social scientists in the class articulate flaws using their newly

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acquired reflexive vocabulary, and the others agree en masse but are challenged to offer anything further. However, this time, a communications student is the first to speak. She says she’s not a psych major but ‘even she’ can see that ‘these ethnocentric researchers’ did not pay any attention to the law of equivalence ‘for starters’. They back-translated their questionnaire, but did not account for the fact that Chinese participants would have no idea what one of the statements, ‘I do my own thing’, means, even in translated form, because it is both slang and a culture-bound construct. She concludes that ‘even if they had not used completely different participant groups’ (the Chinese were rural dwellers from all over) the US participants were all from one New York university, so ‘the sample sizes cannot be considered representative of their cultures’. ‘Yeah,’ agrees the business major, ‘they didn’t even prove all their hypotheses and still they’re trying to make their case, as if they had their minds made up before they started …’ ‘When you say “proof”, I presume you’re talking about statistical significance,’ the scribbler corrects him, without taking her eyes from her page. ‘And anyway, they should have done a few post-analyses to make sure they were hitting on meaningful responses.’ You lean on the PowerPoint projector as the discussion continues without you. In the future, there may be no need to ‘matrix’ research; opposing ideas may get lost in a cloud of translated rhetoric and your students may forget about the grapple. For now, they are grasping. And it feels like you can float even when your constructs are unevenly submerged; even when you are not laughing, when you feel like you are standing on your head, in someone else’s shoes. You are suddenly curious about the constructs that will become your students’ personal ethnographies when they return to their former ecologies; curious how your social rules will adapt as a result of this shared re-socialisation experience. ‘There will be change.’ You nod affirmatively. And without thinking, you repeat, ‘Yes, much change.’ Immediately you are met with that sinking sensation of having put your hand in your pocket and found an absolute falso. So it seems only giusto that the business major should be the one to raise an eyebrow and then, without missing a beat, quip, ‘Change professor? Change as opposed to what?’

References Alarcon, R. D. (1995). Culture and psychiatric diagnosis. Cultural Psychiatry, 18(3), 449–465

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Berry, J. W., Poortinga, Y. H., Segall, M. H. & Dasen, P. R. (1992). Cross-Cultural Psychology: Research and Applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Bronfenbrenner, U. (1977) Towards an experimental ecology of human development, American Psychologist, 513–530 Campbell, D. T. (1964) Distinguishing differences in perception from failures of communication in cross-cultural studies. In F. S. C. Northrup & H. Livingston (eds.) Cross-Cultural Understanding: Epistemology in Anthropology. New York: Harper & Row Gao, Z. and Newman, C. (2005). Converging Cultural Values? A Comparative Study of Chinese and US College Students. http://marketing.byu.edu/htmlpages/ ccrs/proceedings05/gao-newman.doc Good, M. J. and Good, B. J. (1986). The interpretation of Iranian depressive illness and dysphoric affect. In A. Kleinman & B. Good (eds.) Culture and Depression: Studies in Anthropology and Cross-cultural Psychiatry of Affect and Disorder. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press Hall, E. T. (1976). Beyond Culture. New York: Anchor Press Kelly, G. A. (1955) The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volumes 1 and 2. New York: Norton (reprinted London: Routledge, 1991) Kingdon, C. (2005) Reflexivity: not just a qualitative methodological research tool. British Journal of Midwifery, 13, 622–627 Kleinman, A. (1995). Do psychiatric disorders differ in different cultures? The methodological questions. In N. R. Goldberger and J. B. Veroff (eds.) The Culture and Psychology. New York: New York University Press. Kleinman, K. and Kleinman, J. (1986) Somatization: the interconnections in Chinese society among culture, depressive experiences, and the meanings of pain. In A. Kleinman & B. Good (eds.) Culture and Depression: Studies in Anthropology and Cross-cultural Psychiatry of Affect and Disorder. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press Laslett, P. (1983). Family and households as work group and kin group: areas of traditional Europe compared. In R. Wall, J. Robin & P. Laslett (eds.) Family Forms in Historic Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Levine, R. (1997). A geography of time. Cited in C. Ezzell (2002) Clocking cultures. Scientific American Special Edition, 287, 3, 56–57 Loftus, E. & Palmer, J. (1974) Reconstruction of automobile destruction: a example of the interaction between language and memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour, 13, 585–589 Malinowski, B. (1927) Sex and Repression in Savage Society. New York: Harcourt Brace Marsella, A. J. (1979). Cross-cultural studies of mental disorders. In A. J. Marsella, G. DeVos and F. L. K. Hsu (eds.) Perspectives on Cross-cultural Psychology. New York: Academic Press Matsumoto, J. & Juang, L. (2004) Culture and Psychology. Belmont: CA: Wadsworth

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Moane, G. (2003) Bridging the personal and the political: practices for a liberation psychology. American Journal of Community Psychology, 31, 91–101 Murase, T. (1986). Naikan therapy. In T. S. Lebra and W. P. Lebra (eds.) Japanese Culture and Behavior. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press Paniagua, F. A. (2000). Culture-bound syndromes, cultural variations and psychopathology. In I. Cuellar & F. A. Paniagua (eds.) Handbook of Multicultural Mental Health: Assessment and Treatment of Diverse Populations). San Diego: Academic Press Petrini, C. & Padovani, C. (2006). Slow Food Revolution: A New Culture for Dining and Living. New York: Rizzoli International Publishers Philip, M. (2001) Long black cloud. New Zealand Listener, August Ratner, C. & Hui, L. (2003). Theoretical and methodological problems in crosscultural psychology. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 33, 67–94 Respiro (2002). Film, written and directed by Emanuele Crialese Scheer, J. W. (2003) Cross-cultural construing. In F. Fransella (ed.) International Handbook of Personal Construct Psychology. Chichester: Wiley Segall, M. H., Campbell, D. T. & Heskovits, M. J. (1966). The Influence of Culture on Visual Perception. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Segall, M. H., Dasen, P. R., Berry, J.W. & Poortinga, Y. H. (1999). Human Behavior in Global Perspective. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon Tseng, W. & Streltzer, J. (eds.) (1997). Culture and Psychopathology, A Guide to Clinical Assessment. London: Routledge Whiting, J. & Whiting, B. (1975). Children of Six Cultures: A Psychocultural Analysis. Cambridge M. A.: Harvard University Press Wolf, A. W., Lozoff, B., Latz, S. & Paludetto, R. (1996). Parental theories in the management of young children’s sleep in Japan, Italy and the United States. In S. Harkness & C. Super (eds.) Parents’ Cultural Belief Systems. New York: Guilford Press Yamashita, I. and Koyama, T. (1994). Neurotic spectrum disorders in Japan. In J. E. Mezzich, Y. Honda & M. O. Kastrup (eds.) Psychiatric Diagnosis: A World Perspective. New York: Springer-Verlag Yamazaki, Y. (2005). Learning styles and typologies of cultural differences: a theoretical and empirical comparison. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 29, 521–548 Yap, P. M. (1974). Comparative Psychiatry: A Theoretical Framework. Toronto: University of Toronto Press

Chapter 22

The Icing on the Sausage: The Emancipation of Constructive Alternativism Dina Pekkala Dina Pekkala completed her doctoral training in clinical psychology at the University of Birmingham in 2004. Whilst in clinical training, she undertook the Personal Construct Psychology Foundation Course and a year-long PCP specialist placement in Coventry, working with anger. The theory and the approach of PCP resonated with Dina; although reluctant to belong (which some say is a prerequisite to belonging to the world of PCP), Dina had found her psychological home. For the last four years she has been using PCP with male survivors of child sexual abuse, clients with anger, teaching on the PCP Foundation Course at Coventry and grudgingly writing.

Elaborated aspects of theory: choice, constellatory constructs, constructive revision, core constructs, fear, guilt, propositional constructs, slot-rattling, threat

Introduction As I sit here before my computer, trying to think where to start, what to say … and most importantly, what not to say … my errant mind drifts off to my last client, Marie. Wearily, I interpret this as yet another example of my inability to get beyond the loose stage of the creativity cycle, and try to haul back my recalcitrant brain. Fortunately, before I have dogmatically Reflections in Personal Construct Theory. Edited by Richard J. Butler © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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reined it in, I understand the connection and thus type the first words, which have so long eluded me.

Marie This was our last session, the last time we shall meet. Over the last three years I have accompanied Marie through many life-experiences. Marie was referred to adult psychological services for anger, but as with so many of the clients referred for anger, her story was one of abuse – physical, emotional and sexual. Anger is often construed as a purely negative emotion; a client I saw earlier today told me he was evil, as were all his family, because they were all really angry. Cummins (2003) took McCoy’s (1977) definition of anger (‘awareness of invalidation of constructs leading to hostility’) and with a little tweaking produced the very succinct encapsulating definition: ‘Anger is an emotional experience of invalidation’. Those of us working from this premise know the trick is to help the client identify where the invalidation is coming from, then the anger dissipates. Frequently, as with Marie, there have been so many experiences that have been invalidating, it is hard to know where to start. Often, unpacking her past had to be suspended as she coped with the here and now. As I reflect on our work together, I wonder what we have achieved, how she will go forward and what life still has to throw at her. Paradoxically, Marie’s words as we ended therapy – ‘I’m not sure who I am’ – were oddly reassuring. As Franz Epting (1984) proposes: The client is frequently acting in a certain way because she cannot conceive (other than in the most abstract and intellectual way) of another way it might be possible to act. If, only for a few minutes, the client could start to suspend her judgment of present reality, long enough for new possibilities to become apparent, some progress might begin.

I believe, albeit uncomfortably, that there is little if any coincidence between the client groups we choose to work with and our own life-histories; likewise, the therapy we choose to work through, and the concepts of the therapy/theory that resonate with us – all in some way have a personal component. As I reflect on the work with this woman, I feel, if we have achieved nothing else, that we have accomplished a reprieve, a temporary suspension of her ‘judgement of her present reality’. We have accomplished choice and thus a realm of possibilities for construing her life. Constructive revision is now open to her, as is an opportunity for her to construct an alternative self, which can be seen as an example of constructive alternativism.

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My Attraction to PCP I find it hard to pin down and articulate what was and remains the main attraction of personal construct psychology (PCP). Both now and as I reflect back, I think the attraction is both professional and personal. Although I was introduced to PCP before I trained, it wasn’t until I undertook my clinical psychology doctorate that I had the opportunity to attend the Foundation Course in PCP run at Coventry Partnership Trust. PCP resonated with me in a way that little of my clinical training did; it made sense. And I reasoned, if it made sense to me, it would make sense to my patients. The concept of ‘man-the-scientist’ was a revolution to me, I embraced the notion of man going through life experimenting, testing out hypotheses. Many of the other therapeutic approaches I had learned about seemed so deterministic, as though man was driven by often unknown internal urges or pulled by mysterious external forces. By contrast, Kelly’s theory gave man choice, and in so doing, gave me choice, as a therapist and as an individual. The aspect of choice was also a large part of the personal attraction to PCP. Kelly’s choice corollary states that ‘a person chooses for himself that alternative in a dichotomised construct through which he anticipates the greater possibility for extension and definition of his system’ (Kelly 1955; 1991a; 1991b). Having grown up with a sense of having very few choices, and within a doctrine that told me life was all mapped out for us and we were living what had already been decreed, Kelly’s theory was a much desired anarchy. I could choose, I could experiment, I could construct alternative views of the reality I experienced; even better, I could construct an alternative self.

Constructive Alternativisim I guess nothing symbolises the ‘self ’ more than the name we are given. At 16 or 17 years old, I took a new name for myself (I have gone by this name ever since). Twenty years later, just before I graduated from my first degree, I set about legalising it, having been told by my university I would not be able to graduate with the name ‘Dina’ unless it was my legal name. My parents had, in my view, given me a really naff name; a name that gave me little ‘possibility for extension’; a name that conveyed their construct of what sort of woman they would like their daughter to be. I don’t think I knew at that age what sort of woman I wanted to be or would be, but I knew I didn’t like the limitations my name imposed. By contrast, I felt the name ‘Dina’ set no such restrictions, it afforded me ‘the greatest possibility for extension and definition’. As I write this, it sounds well thought out, but of course, at that time

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I had not heard of Kelly or PCP, but as my PCP mentor told me early on in my acquaintance with PCP, ‘As Kelly said, he didn’t invent a psychology, he just wrote a description of what people do’. In the early stages of therapy I often find that clients start to feel critical of themselves. What is occurring is that we have started to identify the issues they are struggling with and the destructive thinking patterns and behaviours they are employing, which have invariably culminated in their coming to psychological services. Although I may concede the frustration and disappointment they feel at this realisation, I often draw on metaphor to help explain and normalise what they are experiencing. I explain that I assume the lights in my office work, however, the light bulbs may have broken; but until I test whether they are working I cannot be aware of this. Until I have awareness I would not and cannot set out to change them. So often the people who present haven’t realised that things aren’t working, it hasn’t been great, true, they’ve lots of damaged relationships, but they haven’t been aware there was a different way of doing things. Epting (1984) eloquently summarises this when he says, ‘frequently [we are] acting in a certain way because [we] cannot conceive (other than in the most abstract and intellectual way) of another way it might be possible to act’. To afford ourselves other possibilities, we must ‘suspend [our] judgement of our present reality’.

Suspending Judgement of My Present Reality At 34 years old, I was, for the first time in my life, the head of the household. Prior to that, I had lived with my parents, my husband, or my husband and children. Now, it was my four young children, our two cats and me. I was the only adult; ultimately, give or take the whims and wiles of my children, I made the decisions. Not long after this newfound responsibility, an old and dear friend came to stay. On entering the kitchen, she saw one of the cats on the kitchen worktop and went to shoo it off. I stopped her. She was somewhat flabbergasted, and being an old, dear friend, not to mention very outspoken, she told me as much – how surprised she was and how this really wasn’t the Dina she knew. I reflected that she was right, the cats had not been allowed on the kitchen worktops when I was married, and they had not been allowed there when I was a child. However, what I’d come to realise was I wasn’t sure if this was my rule or everybody else’s rule. Six months later she visited again, and the cats continued to parade on the kitchen worktops. She huffed and told me that she guessed it didn’t bother me having the cats there (looking back, it blatantly bothered her). I calmly

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replied something along the lines of, ‘No, it doesn’t mean that at all, it just means I haven’t worked it out yet’. With the benefit of hindsight, I realise I was, to paraphrase Epting, suspending my judgment of my present reality long enough for new possibilities (in this case my subordinate construction of what is acceptable hygiene) to become apparent.

The Difficulty of Suspending Judgement and Slot Rattling Marie’s experiences Marie, after much pain, was starting to do the same thing. Before entering into therapy she was defined totally by her experiences. Her construing of reality was automatic and unwavering. For the most part her constructs were unquestioned, rigidly adhered to, with little permeability. Marie’s mother had, quite literally, beaten it into her that she was a ‘selfish child’ and Marie’s selfishness was what made her mother beat her. As Marie grew up, a fundamental part of her core role structure was to be the contrast pole of ‘selfish’. Marie had to be ‘considerate’. Therapy with Marie initially focused on her understanding of ‘considerate’ and what its contrast might be. At first Marie had no language to label or convey her concept of ‘considerate’. Her response was, ‘It just is … that’s how it is’. As Marie was able to identify and articulate this ‘just is’ as being ‘considerate’ we could start to explore the contrast pole. The contrast ‘selfish’ was developed; however, in relation to her behaviour, this pole had been unavailable to Marie. This, in Kellyan terms, is called the submerged pole. ‘considerate’ vs. ‘selfish’ Emergent pole Submerged pole I asked Marie to locate herself and her mother on the above construct: selfish Submerged pole

considerate Emergent pole Marie

Mother

Unpacking the construct ‘selfish’ provided the elaboration ‘making things easier for myself’. When asked to do something, Marie had to say ‘Yes’ or she was making things easier for herself, and thus was selfish. Her rationale was that it wasn’t really a hardship to do what was asked of her. When I

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asked her what would constitute a hardship, and thus absolve her of the responsibility to accommodate others, she replied ‘being dead’. Intermittently, Marie had tired of the demands she made on herself due to the impermeability of her core construct. However, she had submerged the contrast pole when still a young child. The little girl Marie could not make meaning out of a mother who loved her and yet beat her so severely. In Leitner’s (2000) persuasive theory of structural arrest, this is what he terms the ‘freezing of meaning-making’. As an adult Marie would attempt to do things differently, but her efforts were crude, unrefined and child-like. These efforts resulted in invalidation of her experiments that she could do things differently, that she could be ‘selfish’ and be accepted, and validation of her core role structure: ‘I must be considerate’ – what Kelly termed slot rattling.

Michael’s experiences Michael was referred to adult psychological services from psychiatry. He had been involved in a serious road traffic accident six months prior to his referral. The trauma of the accident had produced a ‘catastrophic cascade’; the present trauma had caused memories, flashbacks, fear and construing from Michael’s childhood traumas to pour, uncensored, into his present reality. Through long-term use of alcohol, cocaine and amphetamines Michael had managed the trauma of having been raped when he was nine years old. Michael’s core construct was that he was ‘trash’. The memories of what had happened to him made him feel like ‘trash’, the way he often behaved towards others made him feel like ‘trash’ and his use of illicit drugs as a means of coping confirmed he was ‘trash’. Over the years Michael had often tried to suspend judgement of his reality, to elaborate his construing system. Alas, the expedient escape from painful memories and negative construing, which alcohol and drugs promised, often enticed him, thus robbing him of any disconfirmation, and ricocheting Michael back into his judgement of himself as ‘trash’.

The Struggle to Revise Constructs – Constructive Revision As I look at the experiences and the challenges faced by Marie and Michael, my experiment with my unruly cats may seem somewhat inconsequential. However, I am aware that this was just one of my many experiments, which were a major revision of a set of constructions that had taken up residence within me. A bit like a houseguest who has outstayed their welcome, you’re

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not sure if you invited them or they invited themselves. I just seemed to have acquired the constructs, much as one unwittingly acquires an accent. I cannot say they were foisted on me, I cannot say that I set out to appropriate them. Rather, they seemed to have gradually infiltrated me. Ah, but as I read this again, I am aware that this is an attempt to avoid responsibility. After all, a construct is not ‘an intangible essence that floats from one person to another on the wings of an uttered word’ (Kelly 1955; 1991a; 1991b), it is a psychological process which goes on within a person. In this instance this person is me. After all, one does not acquire an accent unwittingly – unconsciously possibly, but not unwittingly. So, I was consciously setting out to suspend my judgement of my reality to enable the revision of a construct system I now held in question. ‘Man might be better understood if he were viewed in the perspective of the centuries rather than in the flicker of passing moments,’ noted Kelly (1955; 1991a; 1991b). The essence of those centuries is often condensed and captured within the family system, a system that has traditions, norms, expectations and rules. The family I was born into was rather traditional; my father had modelled himself on his father, who, from what I had been told, had modelled himself in turn on his father, and so on. Hence, as I grew up, my father didn’t seem one generation out of date, he seemed aeons out of date. Looking back, I wonder if the majority of children feel this way about their parents. My father was a self-made businessman, as were his brothers, as was his father, as was his father’s father. The men ran the businesses, the women ran the homes, bringing up the children and, when necessary, working at the side of their men. None of the women that moulded my formative years worked outside of the family business; it was unthinkable. None of the women had more than a rudimentary education, all leaving school at 14. My mother tells the story of my father’s marriage proposal and his subsequent caveat that she would, of course, have to give up her career once they married (she was a student nurse). Sadly, my mother was more than happy to agree; she was frightened of the exams she would have to take to complete her training and found my father’s ruling an acceptable avenue to avoid the threat. Kelly noted that a ‘person is not necessarily articulate about the constructions he places upon his world’ (Kelly 1955; 1991a; 1991b), whilst some construct systems may be very clearly defined. Constellatory constructs, although not necessarily clearly defined, may be articulated with a little questioning. I grew up in a family system where ‘wife’ was not a propositional construct (i.e. this did not identify the individual, married or not married), it was a very clearly defined and upheld constellatory construct. A wife was a married woman who:

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• Looked after her husband’s needs. • Acquiesced to her husband’s superior intellect, knowledge and judgement. • Looked after her children’s needs, always putting them before her own, but never before her husband’s. • Kept the family home, clean, tidy, warm and welcoming. • Drew satisfaction from doing all of the above and thus required nothing more. These defined a wife. Not to adhere to these norms was unimaginable, not really to be a wife at all, and if a woman wasn’t a wife … well, my construct system didn’t seem to have any other elements in it when it came to women’s options or roles. What I realise now is that I had chosen to define my construct system of a woman and her role, not extend it. Kelly proposes: ‘a thoughtful [woman] is neither the prisoner of [her] environment nor the victim of [her] biography’ (Kelly 1955; 1991a; 1991b). I had allowed myself to be the victim of my biography, a prisoner of my environment and the construct systems I had adopted. All of us, women and men, no matter what culture, what race and from what walk of life, are subject to role expectations; so to elaborate oneself beyond that role may take some courage and imagination (Dalton & Dunnet 1992). The time had come to elaborate myself. The guilt was enormous.

The Role of Guilt in Constructive Revision Marie Marie was born of Irish Catholic parents; guilt ran through her, like the name ‘Brighton’ runs through a stick of seaside rock. Kelly proposes that guilt is the awareness of dislodgment of the self from one’s core role structure. For Marie, even a discussion of an alternative construct of a situation, and the myriad possible responses/behaviours open to her, would produce dislodgment, and thus guilt – guilt so powerful and ‘unbearable’ that she would dismiss all alternative options and scuttle back to her core role structure. As mentioned earlier, Marie’s core construct ‘I must be considerate’ was impermeable. I proposed that we add another construct (a construct supplied by me, but a construct that I guessed from working with Marie would be very important to her) to produce a cross-section of her existing construct:

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honest

selfish Submerged pole

considerate Emergent pole

dishonest

I then asked Marie to take into consideration both constructs while she thought about the things she had done for people that week, and then plot them in the appropriate quarter. This gave her four possible categories: Considerate and honest Marie was doing what others wanted and genuinely wanted to.

Selfish and honest Marie was not doing what others wanted but was being honest about it.

Considerate and dishonest Marie was doing what others wanted and didn’t really want to.

Selfish and dishonest Marie was not doing what others wanted and was being dishonest about it. honest

x

x

selfish Submerged pole

considerate Emergent pole x x

x

x x x dishonest

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Marie’s realisation that much of her behaviour, although considerate, was actually dishonest was an important step in her process of construction revision, thus enabling her to experiment with behaviours she would previously have considered ‘selfish’ and unbearable. After a little experimentation, Marie articulated that she felt surprisingly little guilt about these new behaviours.

In Contrast My own experience of guilt was not so easily shaken off. Although I was not born into the Catholic faith, I did ‘guilt’ so efficiently as to be referred to as an honorary Catholic (I have on occasions been acutely aware of how uncomfortable I feel when a patient is unreasonably constrained and restricted because of their guilt). When I married, my father told me that marriage was 75% the woman and 25% the man. With a wry smile, I still remember all these years later the intellectual rally I felt against this. However, on a more subtle level, the role, the construing and the expectations held by me (and my family) were quite ingrained. When I became a single mother, there were substantially more constructs being tested, revised, extended, defined and defended, than just my cats’ freedom of movement and my constructs about acceptable hygiene!

The Role of Anxiety, Fear and Threat in Constructive Revision Michael’s early constructive revision Growing up in 1950s Coventry, Michael and his friends had been free. They had to go to school, but at the end of the school day, they’d tear out of class, thrust school caps into back pockets and make their mischievous, meandering ways home. Journeys were always eventful; there would be a copper (penny coin) to search for in the street so they could buy sweets; there would be each other’s caps to grab and throw into a tree, road, ditch; there would be a few lads to take on and have a fight with. Michael was small, tough and quick, but if he was honest, it was his mate Davey who was the real fighter, the real toughie, but between them, they could take on most boys; such are the beliefs (so I’m told) of nine-year-olds. Once when Davey was ill and Michael cutting home through the backalleys he turned a corner and saw two big lads, lads he’d never seen before,

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lads verging on men. Michael was a little anxious. Anxiety is ‘the recognition that the events with which one is confronted lie outside the range of convenience of one’s construct system’ (Kelly 1955; 1991a; 1991b). Michael didn’t know these lads, he’d not fought them before and they were much bigger than him … and Davey wasn’t at his side. Michael hesitated but hell, he’d give it his best and if they lambasted him, well, he and Davey could always get them tomorrow or the day after. Michael never did tell Davey what happened that evening. In fact, he didn’t tell anybody for 45 years. Initially, Michael didn’t understand what they had done to him, but he knew he couldn’t tell anybody. Michael knew fear that day. As Kelly said, ‘we are threatened by hauntingly familiar things and frightened by unexpectedly strange things’. And further he noted: ‘whether the disturbance is seen as comprehensive or incidental, it is the imminent likelihood of a sudden reconstruction of the core of our personalities that makes it a disturbance’ (Kelly 1955; 1991a; 1991b). A sudden reconstruction of Michael’s core constructs took place that afternoon: I can take care of myself

I can trust Davey with anything The world is unpredictable I can anticipate

I am vulnerable

I must keep secrets I can’t anticipate

The memories Michael had kept under control for so many years had become uncontrollable following the road traffic accident. As a consequence his drug and alcohol abuse had escalated. He was in severe debt, he was experiencing symptoms of drug-induced psychosis and all his personal relationships were strained to breaking point. Michael was disdainful of the side of him that took drugs, that drank to excess, that destroyed relationships because of his anger. Within Michael raged anger, anger against these young men who had raped him, an anger that was overwhelming and potentially destructive. For Michael, getting in touch with the anger/violence he felt towards these young men was of major threat. Threat, according to Kelly is the awareness of imminent comprehensive change in one’s core structures. Michael, as with many survivors of violent abuse, formed the construct: abuser

victim

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If Michael acknowledged and got in touch with this anger, he oscillated to the other pole of the construct and became the abuser. Michael would lament the anger and violence that had caused the break-up of three marriages. He would regret the anger that had yet again got him banned from his local pub, lost him another job, made his family withdraw from him. But Michael maintained that his anger was unrelated to the rape.

Construction revision – a way of getting in touch with anger Through the use of Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) (Shapiro 1989) we were able to revisit the events of that afternoon and engage with the traumatic memories and the anger. EMDR supplies a safe setting for ‘desensitisation’. At the end of our work, Michael explained that before we worked together it was like he had been raped a million times; through the work we had done – and I believe through EMDR in particular – Michael knew he had been raped once, but his mind had revisited the event a million times. For Michael, this distinction was profound; he stopped re-traumatising himself with the memory of the trauma. EMDR supplies a realm for ‘reprocessing’ – in PCP terms, ‘reconstruction’. One of the aspects of EMDR I find particularly compatible with PCP is the freedom it gives the individual to choose. Kelly suggested in his choice corollary that a person chooses for himself that alternative in a dichotomised construct through which he anticipates the greater possibility for extension and definition of his system (Kelly 1955; 1991a; 1991b). I believe more often than not we are attempting to move towards the option that gives us the best possible chance of mental health. Within EMDR there are no restrictions as to how the mind reprocesses an event, no limits to the constructive alternativism available to the individual. Within the safe containment of EMDR Michael could feel the full strength of his anger without becoming overwhelmed by it, without its being destructive, without its threatening his core structure, and Michael becoming the abuser. Towards the end of our last EMDR session, a very proud nine-year-old Michael told me that he and Davey had made the back-alleys safe again; these lads wouldn’t be hurting anyone else.

On a Personal Note So often it is threat, fear and/or anxiety that keeps us stuck, which makes us stay with the familiar, no matter how uncomfortable. Sometimes one can’t help but hope that with all our learning, with all our studying, we

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would have it sorted. But we are all works in progress; we are all scientists undertaking our own personal experiments. I remember the wise and amusing words of one of my third year lecturers: ‘It’s not that we don’t have shit as therapists, it’s just we can smell it from a greater distance.’ From the biographical sketch about me and the opening paragraph, the reader may have surmised, correctly, that I have a little reticence when it comes to writing (ah, I hear my fellow contributors, ‘so many of us do’). I procrastinate, put off, delay, postpone, avoid and basically dilly-dally, instead of getting down and writing. I did so throughout my undergraduate studies, my doctoral studies and every god damn time I’ve written since. (Sorry Chuck,1 but I did warn you, but I guess somebody had to submit their chapter last – maybe not on the last possible day though!) A wise friend, who also happens to be a philosopher (which, I feel, gives his thoughts some credence), told me that I had ‘performance paralysis’, explaining that ‘as long as you never write anything Dina, you can imagine yourself a brilliant, witty, insightful and generally gifted psychologist. However, the moment you commit yourself to paper, the truth of your ability will be realised. In a nutshell, ‘tis the anticipated discrepancy between the image you wish to hold of yourself and the fear of your limitations that makes you inert.’

Conclusions Having been somebody who baulked at the lack of freedom of choice available to me in my early years, I found Kelly’s personal construct psychology emancipating. Just as I have chosen the name I wished to be addressed by, so I have chosen an alternative construction of my reality. If we are fortunate, we are all growing and changing to become more the people we would like to be. Each time we learn something important, something we did not know before, we change; ‘the person that asks question B is not the person who asks question A’ (Reanney 1994). I work predominantly with men; either men who have anger and violence problems or men who were sexually abused or raped as children. These men have experienced major traumatic events in their childhoods; often they do not tell anybody about those experiences. The shame, confusion, guilt and disgust condemn them to silence, to being a ‘prisoner of [their] environment’, a ‘victim of [their] biography’ (Kelly 1955; 1991a; 1991b). When they present to psychological services, most are ready to try to deal 1

Chuck happens to be a nickname for the editor, Richard Butler – see Chapter 7.

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with those memories, those early negative, restricting construct revisions that have dictated their lives and caused them and those they want to love, hurt and damage. Sharing their journey with them as they explore and elaborate their construing is an immensely rewarding and often humbling experience. As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: ‘freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.’ And, the cats are no longer allowed on the kitchen worktops.

References Cummins, P. (2003). Working with anger. In F Fransella (ed.) International Handbook of Personal Construct Psychology. Chichester: John Wiley Dalton, P. & Dunnett, G. (1992). A Psychology for Living: Personal Construct Theory for Professionals and Clients. Chichester: Wiley Epting, F. R. (1984). Personal Construct Counseling and Psychotherapy. New York: John Wiley Kelly, G. A. (1955) The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volumes 1 and 2. New York: Norton (reprinted London: Routledge, 1991) Kelly, G. A. (1991a). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volume 1. A Theory of Personality. London: Routledge Kelly, G. A. (1991b). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volume 2. Clinical Diagnosis and Psychotherapy. London: Routledge Leitner, L. M. (2000). Diagnosing human meaning making: An experiential constructivist approach. In R. A. Neimeyer & J. D. Raskin (eds.) Constructions of Disorder. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association McCoy, M. M. (1977). A reconstruction of emotion. In D. Bannister (ed.) New Perspectives in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press Reanney, D. (1994). Music of the Mind. London: Souvenir Press Sartre, Jean-Paul. http://www.thinkexist.com/quotation Shapiro, F. (1989). Eye movement desensitization: A new treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 20, 211–217

Chapter 23

Theory, Therapy, and Life: Experiential Personal Construct Psychology and the ‘Desert Places’ of a Therapist Larry M. Leitner Larry M. Leitner is a Professor of Psychology at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association through the Divisions of Psychotherapy and Humanistic Psychology. He is past editor of The Humanistic Psychologist. He is interested in experientially based constructivist approaches to engaging persons who have been more deeply injured.

Elaborated aspects of theory: credulous approach, experiential personal construct psychotherapy, fixed role therapy, ROLE relationships, sociality corollary, transpersonal connections And lonely as it is, that loneliness Will be more lonely ere it will be less – A blanker whiteness of benighted snow With no expression, nothing to express. They cannot scare me with their empty spaces Between stars – on stars where no human race is. I have it in me so much nearer home To scare myself with my own desert places. (Robert Frost, ‘Desert Places’ (1936))

Reflections in Personal Construct Theory. Edited by Richard J. Butler © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Introduction Experiential personal construct psychotherapy (Leitner 1985) was created as an elaboration of the interpersonal and experiential implications of George Kelly’s (1955; 1991a; 1991b) personal construct psychology (PCP). Throughout its development I have emphasised the experiences of people who are viewed as among the most severely psychologically injured. The theory springs from this core concept: the intimate connection (ROLE relationship) that forms between therapist and client is the transformative mode of psychotherapy. Genuine and meaningful relating requires authentic being from both parties in a relationship (Leitner & Faidley 1995). Obviously, then, when applied to therapy, the therapist must be as real as the client in order for a ROLE relationship to exist and for the therapy to be transformative. Likewise, because a theory of therapy cannot really be separated from the person of the therapist, experiential personal construct psychotherapy (EPCP) must speak to the therapist’s personal experience, as well as to the client’s experience and the techniques of the therapy (Bugental 1987). In this chapter, I describe the ways that EPCP, in addition to systematising and concretising the experiences of seriously disturbed persons, has been a reflection of my experience of life. In addition, EPCP has shaped my professional development in ways that I could not anticipate when the work began (Leitner 1982). I begin by describing the roots that formed the bases of EPCP. Next, I describe the crystallisation and maturation of the theory. Throughout this discussion, I refer to the ways EPCP has reflected and shaped my being in the world. Thus, this chapter is part-theoretical, partclinical and part-professional autobiography.

The Beginnings of EPCP: A Credulously Experiencing Student Therapist My story begins with Kelly’s credulous approach – the conviction that the other’s report contains ‘an intrinsic truth which the clinician should not ignore’ (Kelly 1955). It is impossible to understate the importance of this concept throughout my student days. To begin with, when a client was upset with me in therapy, the credulous approach meant that I had to take the client’s reaction seriously. I could not dismiss it as a transference reaction more appropriately directed towards a parental figure, nor could I see it as no more than an example of a client’s irrationality or unreasonableness.

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These formative training experiences had a significant impact on the development of EPCP. First, when credulously listening to clients, it became clear that we are fundamentally relational creatures. Again and again, clients spoke of the dreams, injuries and terrors that were part of their relational world. However, a therapist who took such relationships seriously was going against the mainstream, individualistic zeitgeist of clinical psychology in the 1970s. For example, contrast the relational connection inherent in EPCP with Perls’ (1969) ‘Gestalt prayer’, a popular saying at the time: I do my thing, and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations And you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you, and I am I, And if by chance, we find each other, it’s beautiful. If not, it can’t be helped. (Perls 1969, flyleaf)

Note how the poem creates a construct of basically complete individuality vs. a surrendering of the self to the other. There is no appreciation of the EPCP concept of a relationship being a connection between two people, which implies an integration of separateness and connection. Alternatively, consider Rogers’ ideas about ‘being the self one truly is’ with its implications of the self as a stand-alone entity rather than the self continuously shaped by relational experiences: ‘First of all, the client moves toward being autonomous’ (Rogers 1961). From a more cognitive perspective, there are some of Ellis’s irrational beliefs portraying a self that should not be very influenced by relationships. For example, when dealing with being rejected by another, Ellis (1971) argues that rational beliefs would be beliefs like: ‘I don’t like being rejected, because it has real disadvantages’. The diminution of the human heart being rejected to ‘having real disadvantages’ illustrates the individualistic and reductionistic nature of the approach. Second, the credulous approach highlighted, for me, the EPCP issue of responsibility (Leitner & Pfenninger 1994; Leitner, Faidley & Celentana 2000). When there is an impasse, or premature termination, in therapy, for example, I have to consider carefully the ways I have contributed to the therapeutic crisis. On the one hand, if I attribute all therapeutic impasses to client pathology, I am not being credulous with my client. On the other hand, if I minimise the client’s contribution to the therapeutic crisis, I fail to credulously understand the relational (and hence co-created) nature of

364 Larry M. Leitner my client’s experience. In other words, the credulous approach leads to a relational understanding of responsibility. My growing understanding in this area was highlighted by my graduate mentor’s groundbreaking research into premature termination in psychotherapy (Landfield 1971), showing how both the therapist’s and the client’s construct systems played a role in cases of premature termination. Honouring the credulous approach had many interesting implications for my professional development. My emphasis on relationships confused and frustrated many of my clinical supervisors. Supervisors could not connect their knowledge of PCP viewed as a cognitive theory with what I did in therapy. For example, my primary long-term supervisor during my clinical internship year stated: ‘Your theory makes no sense. However, you use it well in therapy.’ My supervisors’ confusion often led to a sense of disconnection when we discussed therapy (vs. their affirming me when we listened to tapes). Further, my tendency to see client issues as reflecting something in the relationship frustrated supervisors who had been trained to understand clients’ experiences as a reflection of their pathology. I was advised by many supervisors not to ‘be so sensitive’ with regard to clients and warned that my ‘sensitivity’ would empower clients to manipulate me in pathological ways. These issues were most salient when I saw clients who carried very serious DSM labels. Most supervisors were quick to recommend referral for medication and to structure therapy around trying to get the client to ‘face reality’. In contrast, my reliance on the credulous approach allowed me to be more open to the client’s experience. As a consequence, clients shared more with me. For example, I first saw Tom on intake at a Veterans’ Hospital. He was clearly agitated and confused and was, at times, incoherent. His family filled us in on his increasingly bizarre behaviour over the previous week (including hiding in his wardrobe petrified about what hallucinatory voices were saying to him). When the admitting physicians excused themselves to make arrangements for his hospitalisation, I said to him, ‘You seem really confused about things’. Tom’s eyes welled with tears and he replied, ‘I am so confused I cannot even think’. His desperation and despair were palpable. I told him that it broke my heart to see him in such pain. He looked at me and replied, ‘As long as I don’t think about Viet Nam, I don’t get confused’. I then suggested that, perhaps while he was in the hospital, we could talk about what had happened in Viet Nam. I was met with incredulity when I argued that perhaps clients like Tom were saying things that were personally meaningful and important. For example, when I suggested that Tom’s confusion and erratic behaviour might be related to something that had happened to him in Viet Nam, I

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was given a lecture on the nature of schizophrenic thought disorganisation. Tom was attributing his confusion to Viet Nam due to a desperate search for a cause when the reality was that a schizophrenic process was the cause. I felt in a bind. I respected and trusted my supervisors, yet I respected Kelly’s (1955) comment that it might be acceptable to refer to a client initially as schizoid but that to do so after two or three sessions was unprofessional. Being true to my theory vs. accepting my supervision was quite a dilemma. I saw Tom again a few days later. Sadly, he was now in the inpatient unit. He was being given heavy doses of neuroleptics and speaking even a few words required great effort. To this day, I still wonder what might have happened in Viet Nam. The confusion felt by my supervisors played an important role in the continued development of EPCP. A supervisee is dependent on supervisors for his or her professional development. Thus, my supervisors’ confusion was a powerful experiential lesson in the subtle yet profound ways disconnection can affect someone. My being disconfirmed (in subtle ways) by people I depended on helped me develop a felt understanding of the experience of clients who were exposed to deep but subtle disconfirmations in life. My experience of invalidation by my supervisors led me to try to systematically clarify why I experienced PCP in the ways I did. I always have tried to sort professional issues out through writing. Thus, in my chapter on using personal construct theory (PCT) to treat Sue, a woman who had been diagnosed as ‘schizophrenic’ by traditional clinicians (Leitner 1980), I discussed issues that later would be bedrock principles of EPCP. For example, the paper highlights using Sue’s own meanings to understand her experience. In addition, the ways we connected and disconnected in the therapy relationship were highlighted. The EPCP concepts of honouring the client’s logic and having a theory that allows one to be technically eclectic while theoretically consistent can be seen in this chapter. I followed up on these latter points in a paper on therapy techniques (Leitner 1982). However, the seeds of EPCP, while in these papers, needed more time to fully germinate.

The Crystallisation of EPCP: Risk, Invalidation and Terror Kelly’s (1955) assertion that the sociality corollary was so vital to him that he almost entitled his theory ‘role theory’ always struck me as significant. As I continued to struggle with explaining how, to my way of thinking,

366 Larry M. Leitner PCP was not another cognitive behavioural theory, I seized on the idea of applying the credulous approach to my dilemma. Kelly not only said that the sociality corollary was vital, he also said, when discussing his fundamental postulate, that every word he used in the formal presentation of the theory was chosen for a reason. Applying the credulous approach here meant that I could expect each word in the sociality corollary to deeply reveal what Kelly wanted to convey. A credulous analysis of the sociality corollary (Leitner 1985) led to the foundational principles of EPCP. In essence, the corollary can be seen as arguing that people need intimate connections with others to feel most alive and most human. On the other hand, such relationships can (do?) injure us deeply. Thus, we also desire to retreat from or limit the depths of our ROLE relationships in order to protect ourselves from such invalidations. In retreating, we pay the price: emptiness, meaninglessness and guilt. The resulting dilemma of intimacy with its richness yet terror vs. retreating with its safety yet meaninglessness is the bedrock premise of EPCP. EPCP’s elaboration of PCP proved helpful in conceptualising the interpersonal struggles of a wide range of psychopathology. Clients continued to affirm my therapy (and my supervisees’ therapies) when we were true to this dilemma (Leitner & Guthrie 1993). We were able to experience, with our clients in the therapy room, the ways that, when their terrors and disconfirmations were touched by the therapist, they found the courage to grow beyond seemingly intractable injuries. The concept of optimal therapeutic distance (Leitner 1995) experientially defined what a ROLE relationship looked like in the therapy room – being close enough to the client that one can feel what it is like to be the client yet separate enough to realise that it is the client’s experience more than your own. In addition, EPCP provided the theoretical framework for the centrality of the relationship for psychotherapeutic growth. It also provided a theoretical explanation for therapist genuinely relating – being with the other more than doing to the other. Thus, optimal therapeutic distance dictates both profound connection as well as separation. However, implicit in the definition of optimal distance is the need for me, as a therapist, to find the courage to face my own deepest terrors and injuries. Otherwise, when dealing with deeply injured people, I will be unable to simultaneously experience the depth of the client’s desperation and utilise that experience therapeutically. In other words, I had to find the courage to face my own ‘desert places’ or risk being seen, quite rightly, as hypocritical by the clients I was trying to serve. All of us have places deep inside of us where we fear to tread. Often, these places are the results of early injuries when, because we felt so small,

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vulnerable, helpless and alone, we were unable to construe them with another. Suspended, these issues, and the primitive constructions we have of them, lie dormant until we encounter similar events in the current world. At that time, they come rushing back into a felt awareness that may be very difficult to verbalise (Leitner 1999; Leitner, Faidley & Celentana 2000). In my case, some of my ‘desert places’ involve people not hearing me when I tell them my experience and my consequent tendency to feel interpersonally invisible. So, I embarked on a (partially successful) fixed role journey of changing this issue in my life. I began by trying to ‘speak up’ in meetings and interpersonal situations. However, I quickly had this experiment invalidated. I tended to express myself more quietly than most. The result seemed to be that I could clearly state where I stood on an issue and have no one in the room hear me. For example, when the clinical faculty at my university debated a scheme to reorganise itself into three areas of ‘expertise’, no area being considered came close to any area of expertise that I felt I had and I said as much in the meeting. Five minutes later, a colleague said to me, ‘You haven’t said anything about which one of these areas you see yourself fitting into.’ In my personal life, I could say clearly how I felt. However, often, even though the words were carefully chosen, my tendency to speak in a low-key manner meant that the words were not heard. In one instance, I said very clearly that I felt threatened by a certain social situation involving having to interact with people who disliked me. When another social situation like this arose, I asked to skip the event due to my discomfort. People were surprised that I felt strongly enough about the event that I wanted to avoid it, despite my use of the word ‘threat’ to convey strong feelings. My next step involved being comfortable repeating myself. In other words, I would not construe the other’s not hearing me the first time as such an invalidation that I would withdraw. In addition, with the people I am closest to, I found the courage to discuss the process of my experience in such situations. For example, I might say that repeating myself is very threatening to me as it risks confirming my worst fears – that what I say is not important enough to be heard. Currently, I believe I have made moderate progress on this in my personal life and slight progress in my professional life. For example, the faculty recently was deciding on candidates to interview for our clinical psychology programme. Despite my having stated repeatedly that I do not believe 21-year-old undergraduates have enough experience of psychology to know what they might be interested in, my colleagues continue to ask me who I want to interview to train in my lab. I have to say repeatedly that I do not believe any personal statement about interests predicts a student’s future interests.

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The Maturation of the Theory: Affirmation and Reverence The earliest writings on EPCP (Leitner 1985; 1988) contained explicit messages about the importance of disconfirmation. For example, the theoretical position of potential terror in intimate relationships shows that others can powerfully affirm or disconfirm one’s most central meanings. ROLE relationships, those associated with the affirmation of our most central meanings, are the essence of a rich and meaningful life within EPCP. Further, Bannister (1960; 1962; 1963) had shown the ways that invalidation can seriously injure while consistent affirmation can powerfully help those struggling with schizophrenic thought disorder. Thus, with the powerful ways that invalidation in ROLE relationships injure people, turning to the importance of affirmation in human life was a logical next step. The credulous approach was central to this step also. Clients would state openly that an affirming relationship was healing to the deepest wounds they had. Trusting the experience of my clients meant that I had to take seriously the power of affirmation. For example, I have discussed elsewhere Jean, a young woman who presented hallucinating the words ‘slut,’ ‘whore’ and ‘bitch’ (Leitner 2001). Jean and I had a long history of struggling over our relationship in therapy. She would be petrified of the terror of connecting with me. However, at the termination of therapy, Jean looked at me and said, ‘Without your willingness to be there and take my experience seriously, I would have died’. My ‘taking her experience seriously’ was the power of affirming who she was. In technical terms, I validated her process of construing and it was this validation that she came to trust in the therapy. The credulous approach means that I have to understand that this affirmation was not just pleasant or important; it was life-giving (Havens 1989; Elkins 2004). At this point, the mysterious nature of human relating becomes salient within EPCP. I only can come to know you through knowing the constructions you create to engage the world. You, the creative, meaning-making, evolving process are not known directly by me. Rather, even as I experience your deepest, most central meanings, you use my coming to know you to evolve further. In other words, you use my touching you to grow just as I touch you, leaving me literally touching just where you were, not where you are. These profoundly moving experiences are what clients were telling us about the power of experiential constructivist therapy. These experiences defy logical and linear connections. Connecting on such a deep level involves the ability and willingness to symbolise experi-

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ences in a non-discursive manner (Guthrie 1991; Faidley 2001). Obviously, then, EPCP was touching the ways that ROLE relationships can be aweful, as well as awful (Leitner & Faidley 1995). In so doing, those of us elaborating EPCP were beginning a discussion of the experience of ‘reverence’ in psychotherapy and in life (Leitner & Pfenninger 1994). We defined reverence as the awareness that you are affirming the most vital aspects of the other. Taking the experience of reverence seriously led us into three interconnected areas. First, my experience of reverence means that I am aware that I am affirming you most centrally. I see the beauty and creativity of who you are. However, a part of who you are is someone who is revering me. In other words, to affirm you most vitally, I have to be willing to celebrate the ways you affirm me most vitally. It can take great courage to allow myself to take in such affirmations if I, like most humans, have been disconfirmed in numerous ways throughout life. Finally, with enough experience with interpersonal reverence, one can begin to realise that all of us fundamentally are human and deserving of such respect. In other words, we begin to experience transpersonal reverence (Leitner & Pfenninger 1994; Leitner & Faidley 1995). These theoretical issues had powerful professional and personal repercussions. Professionally, I had to allow my clients to affirm me and my work with them. I had often used humour as a way of distracting myself and others from such affirmations. For example, Patricia had been in therapy dealing with longstanding issues of depression and hopelessness. At one point, when discussing her marriage, she had said that if she could find the ideal sexual partner, it would be 20% husband, 40% father and 40% me. I must have looked surprised as she said, ‘You know, you’re not a badlooking guy, Larry’. I replied, ‘I might think so too but what do we know?’ Needless to say, issues of sexual attraction were not discussed in the therapy after this exchange. Perhaps if I could have been more affirming of her affirming of me (‘Thank you. I’m glad you think so’), our therapy would have taken a more meaningful turn in this area. This professional struggle tied in to my personal struggle with feeling affirmed by others. It was a classic example of countertransference (Leitner 1997). I had numerous disconfirming experiences throughout my early life associated with others feeling positively about me. These were statements like, ‘You are smart but …’ That occurred so often that I would anticipate the ‘but’ as soon as anyone said anything positive about me. Experientially, I felt praise as pain because the ‘but’ was coming at any moment. Rather than being moments of warmth and connection, compliments were times of high anxiety.

370 Larry M. Leitner For my fixed role journey into this desert place, I picked two people to actively experiment with. In the interest of authenticity in ROLE relationships, I decided to approach them at the level of an honest statement of process. I would wait until there was an event that precipitated the issue for me. I would then disclose the process of my experience with the other person. For example, when one of these trusted people was telling me something very personal, she also said that she ‘really valued someone as kind as you’. Rather than deflect this affirmation, I shared my personal struggle with automatically hearing the ‘but’ in such statements. She then said that there was no ‘but’ after her statement, just a ‘period’. She then encouraged me to allow the affirmation to ‘wash over’ me. Experiments like this allowed me to improve on my ability to affirm another’s affirmation of me.

The Transformational Power of Connection My growth in the area of transpersonal reverence involved taking the writings we were doing and applying them to my life outside of psychotherapy. In particular, I felt an increasingly strong need to support causes that tried to make the planet a more humane place. For example, I increased my support for political candidates less likely to objectify and vilify people who disagreed with them. In addition, I found myself connected to and defending those who had less power in my local community. This has often involved my speaking ‘truth to power’ at great personal cost. In recent years, I have listened carefully to many of my best graduate students (e.g. Thomas & Schlutsmeyer 2004) on the power of expanding the idea of the transpersonal to the more than human (e.g. the environment, the ways we are connected to the non-human world, a greater appreciation of the ways that Kelly’s theoretical idea of an integral universe means that everything we think, feel and do here impacts on the world in innumerable and immeasurable ways). All of these elaborations have led me to a greater sense of appreciation and wonder at the mysterious power of our connection with something greater than us. As an elaboration of the sociality corollary, EPCP fundamentally is about interrelatedness. Initially, the theory focused on the devastating potential of relational injury. The elaborations clarified the potential for relational affirmation to enrich life. One way of synthesising these two issues is to focus on the ways that connections are transformational. In other words, the theory behind ROLE relationship means that our connections have power over the most vital aspects of our being. However, credulously hon-

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ouring Kelly’s (1955) assumption that the universe is integral leads us into a very different realm. Kelly exemplified his integral universe assumption through his analogy that what they were doing in Columbus, Ohio affected the price of yak milk in Tibet. Kelly then is saying that every action in the world has repercussions throughout the world. Further, as someone opposed to mechanistic and reductionistic psychologies, Kelly would be loathe to define actions in overt behavioural terms. In other words, my actions involve the things I currently am doing, things I am feeling, things I am thinking, and so on. As I sit here typing this section, my fingers and thoughts about the content of the chapter impact on the universe. My concerns about a person I care for, present even as I type, also affect the universe. Thus, the very nature of reality is affected by my thoughts, feelings and actions. Further, for Kelly, it is this reality that confirms or disconfirms the constructions I use to engage it. In other words, the universe that I am affecting with every aspect of my being also is affecting me. All of us live (literally come alive) in this interconnected matrix. We then have a responsibility to consider how our ways of being impact on the entire world. Professionally, credulously understanding the power of the integral universe has meant my taking all of my actions as a psychologist more seriously. I take the nature of my connection with clients and students very seriously. Kelly challenges me to have a heightened awareness that all sorts of subtle nuances of my relating to others can be powerful. When clients are entering dark, chaotic and overwhelming spaces, I trust the power of our connection to help see them through. I try to remember that aspects of my interactions with students can be powerful affirmations or disconfirmations of them. I also try to be aware that my confirming of my students reverberates in ways I cannot know throughout the world. Personally, the idea of the integral universe has led me more towards a specific type of pacifism – a peace through social justice vs. the more typical peace through strength and or violent victory. Further, Kelly’s notion that the universe is temporal means that I need to take into account the impact of who I am on those who have not travelled on this planet yet. I affect those yet to come. One of the paradoxical aspects of life is that, while we have that responsibility, we cannot possibly come to understand all of the ways we impinge on the universe. If I rescued a child from a potentially fatal accident and that child grew up to be the next Hitler, would I have done something good or something bad? We constantly have to find the courage to act towards the good while recognising that we may be wrong. People often are

372 Larry M. Leitner paralysed by the realisation that we could be doing things that horrendously affect people in unimaginable ways. No wonder there are ‘desert places’ within us all.

Conclusions and Implications I think Kelly provides us with a very important solution to this dilemma. In addition to positing an integral universe, Kelly assumes that humans, through their evolution and increasing understanding of the world, are moving in the direction of the greater good. Kelly is insistent that, even accounting for lengthy periods of stagnation and regression, the long march of humankind is towards a better world. Being a personal construct psychologist means trusting in this long march towards a better world. I believe that this particular implication of Kellyan thought may be difficult for many people to swallow. We are talking about trusting something that cannot be reduced to a scientific proof. We are talking about faith – our belief in things that cannot be proved. To paraphrase Kelly, I am well aware of the allergy most psychologists have to the idea of faith, perhaps because their personal experiences with faith are tied up in overly moralistic and literalistic dogma. However, in this area, Kelly is only using the same basic principle that he applies to people to understand the universe. Just as people are a continuous process of evolution within PCP (Leitner & Faidley 1995), the universe is a continuous process of evolution. Just as touching the process of the other’s being reveals the wonder and mystery of the other (Leitner & Faidley 1995), experiencing the process of the more than human reveals the wonder and mystery of the universe. Embedded in Kelly’s underlying philosophy, then, is a challenge to have the courage to act boldly for what I see as the greater good (Kelly 1980), all the while recognising that my actions are just a part of a cosmos of evolution towards the greater good. The challenge is to stand for what I think is right while having the humility to realise that, if others go in a different direction, they too are a part of this mysterious more than personal process of evolution. In so doing, my life becomes infused with richness and meaning through my connections with others. Further, I can be content that I have played a part in the evolution of the universe towards the time, perhaps in the infinite future, when we all can grasp the interconnected wondrous mystery that infuses all things, human and non-human, animate and inanimate, in the universe.

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Author’s Note All clinical material has been modified to protect client anonymity.

Acknowledgement April Faidley, Amberly Panepinto, Alexandra Adame and Jill Thomas provided helpful comments on this chapter.

References Bannister, D. (1960). Conceptual structure in thought-disordered schizophrenics. Journal of Mental Science, 106, 1230–1249 Bannister, D. (1962). The nature and measurement of schizophrenic thought disorder. Journal of Mental Science, 108, 825–842 Bannister, D. (1963). The genesis of schizophrenic thought disorder: a serial invalidation hypothesis. British Journal of Psychiatry, 109, 680–686 Bugental, J. F. T. (1987). The Art of the Psychotherapist. New York: Norton Elkins, D. N. (2004). The deep poetic soul: an alternative vision of psychotherapy. The Humanistic Psychologist, 32, 76–102 Ellis, A. (1971). Growth Through Reason. New York: Institute for Rational Living Faidley, A. J. (2001). ‘You’ve been like a mother to me’: treatment implications of nonverbal knowing and developmental arrest. The Humanistic Psychologist, 29, 138–166 Frost, R. (1936/1969). Desert spaces. In R. Frost & E. C. Lathem (Eds.) The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged. New York: Holt Guthrie, A.F. (1991). Intuiting the process of another: symbolic, rational transformations of experience. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 4, 273–279 Havens, L. (1989). Coming to Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Kelly, G. A. (1955) The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volumes 1 and 2. New York: Norton (reprinted London: Routledge, 1991) Kelly, G. A. (1980). A psychology of the optimal man. In A. W. Landfield & L. M. Leitner (eds.) Personal Construct Psychology: Psychotherapy and Personality. New York: Wiley Kelly, G. A. (1991a). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volume 1. A Theory of Personality. London: Routledge Kelly, G. A. (1991b). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volume 2. Clinical Diagnosis and Psychotherapy. London; Routledge

374 Larry M. Leitner Landfield, A. W. (1971). Personal Construct Systems in Psychotherapy. Chicago: Rand McNally Leitner, L. M. (1980). Personal construct treatment of a severely disturbed woman: the case of Sue. In A. W. Landfield & L. M. Leitner (eds.) Personal Construct Psychology: Psychotherapy and Personality. New York: Wiley Leitner, L. M. (1982). Literalism, perspectivism, chaotic fragmentalism, and psychotherapy techniques. British Journal of Medical Psychology, 55, 307–317 Leitner, L. M. (1985). The terrors of cognition: on the experiential validity of personal construct theory. In D. Bannister (ed.), Issues and Approaches in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press Leitner, L. M. (1988). Terror, risk, and reverence: experiential personal construct psychotherapy. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 1, 261– 272 Leitner, L. M. (1995). Optimal therapeutic distance: a therapist’s experience of personal construct psychotherapy. In R. Neimeyer & M. Mahoney (eds.) Constructivism in Psychotherapy. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Leitner, L. M. (1997). Transference and countertransference in experiential personal construct psychotherapy. International Congress on Personal Construct Psychology, July, Seattle, WA Leitner, L. M. (1999). Levels of awareness in experiential personal construct psychotherapy. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 12, 239–252 Leitner, L. M. (2001). The role of awe in experiential personal construct psychotherapy. In R. B. Marchesani & E. M. Stern (eds.) Frightful Stages: From the Primitive to the Therapeutic. Binghampton, NY: Hawthorne Press Leitner, L. M. & Faidley, A. J. (1995). The awful, aweful nature of ROLE relationships. In R. A. Neimeyer & G. J. Neimeyer (eds.), Advances in Personal Construct Psychology, Volume 3. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press Leitner, L. M., Faidley, A. J. & Celentana, M. A. (2000). Diagnosing human meaning making: an experiential constructivist approach. In R. Neimeyer & J. Raskin (eds.) Construction of Disorders: Meaning Making Frameworks for Psychotherapy Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Leitner, L. M. & Guthrie, A. F. (1993). Validation of therapist interventions in psychotherapy: clarity, ambiguity, and subjectivity. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 6, 281–294 Leitner, L. M. & Pfenninger, T. (1994). Sociality and optimal functioning. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 7, 119–135 Leitner, L. & Thomas, J. (2003). Experiential personal construct psychotherapy. In F. Fransella (ed.) International Handbook of Personal Construct Psychology. Chichester: Wiley & Sons Perls, F. (1969). Gestalt Therapy Verbatim. Moab, Utah: Real People Press Rogers, C. R. (1961). On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Thomas, J. C. & Schlutsmeyer, M. W. (2004). A place for the aesthetic in personal construct psychology. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 17, 313–335

Chapter 24

Reflexivity, Research and Practice: Explorations in Experiential Personal Construct Psychology Alexandra L. Adame, Anthony J. Pavlo, Brendon M. Smith, Hugo J. Schielke & Larry M. Leitner Alexandra Adame, Anthony Pavlo, Brendon Smith and Hugo Schielke are clinical psychology doctoral students at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The research group has met weekly for the last few years to discuss psychology, psychotherapy and qualitative research from a constructivist perspective. Larry Leitner is Professor of Psychology at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, and the founder of Experiential Personal Construct Psychology.

Elaborated aspects of theory: choice corollary, the credulous approach, experiential personal construct psychology, reverence, ROLE relationships, sociality corollary

Introduction In this chapter, we hope to illustrate ways in which each of us finds aspects of experiential personal construct psychology (EPCP) to be useful in understanding our own construing during a specific research project. We first provide a brief introduction to EPCP and describe the research project. We Reflections in Personal Construct Theory. Edited by Richard J. Butler © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

376 Alexandra L. Adame et al. then introduce particular facets of EPCP that we believe to be especially important in our work. Three of us then describe a personally meaningful experience during the research process and explore how we use the theory reflexively to understand our processes of construing.

EPCP EPCP, an elaboration of Kelly’s (1955) personal construct psychology (PCP), builds on the sociality and choice corollaries (Leitner 1985; 1988). EPCP holds that a meaningful existence is grounded in intimate relationships. These sorts of relationships, where each person construes the construal process of the other, are termed ROLE relationships (Leitner 1985; 1988; Leitner & Faidley 1995). ROLE relationships have the potential to be enriching and terrifying. Allowing others to access our most central understandings of the world puts them in a powerful position, as they could validate or invalidate our construal processes in profound ways. This leaves us with the fundamental choice to open ourselves to others despite the potential terror of devastating injury or retreat from intimacy to a safe but empty and isolated existence (Leitner 1985; 1988). Within EPCP, the basic task of childhood is to establish a solid construction of self and other (Leitner, Faidley & Celentana 2000). EPCP holds that this occurs in three broad developmental stages. First, persons need to form a construct of self and other, which is initially accomplished by construing physical separateness. Next, we develop an experiential sense of self–other permanence. To have a solid sense of permanence, persons must be able to know, depend and count on the existence of others, even when physically separated from them. Lastly, persons develop a sense of self–other constancy. Self–other constancy involves taking into account and integrating all of the complex experiences of self and other. When severe relational injuries occur early in childhood, persons may struggle with self–other permanence. They may have an experiential world where, when the other is psychologically or physically absent, it is as if the other ceases to exist. Struggles with self–other permanence may also result in the experiential disappearance of the self as the other enters awareness. Struggles with self–other permanence often are accompanied by a sense of terror, fear and abandonment, as such experiential chaos makes it difficult to depend on one’s construal of self and other. The research group’s aim was to understand better and elaborate on the impact of early relational injuries on persons’ sense of self–other permanence.

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Research Process Over the course of one academic year, we met weekly to explore self–other permanence in experiential personal construct psychotherapy. The first author, Alexandra Adame, recorded sessions with one of her long-term clients to use for analysis. We began by identifying examples of struggles with self–other permanence as well as the impact of different interventions on self–other permanence. However, as we immersed ourselves in the experience, we increasingly found ourselves discussing our reactions to the therapy. We realised how the work had influenced us as beginning therapists. We were emotionally and professionally challenged by listening to a woman’s experiences of child abuse, domestic violence, psychiatric incarceration and continued mistreatment by the mental health system.

Overview of Mae’s Therapy Mae, a 64-year-old woman, who had been in the mental health system from the age of 16, had been committed by her family to a state psychiatric institution for 19 years. Although Mae had been labelled with schizoaffective disorder, we conceptualised her struggles in terms of self–other permanence. Mae had been prescribed various antipsychotic and mood-stabilising drugs and had undergone electroconvulsive therapy six times. Her voice was slurred from years of neuroleptic use, making listening to therapy tapes difficult. She now lives in a residential programme and entered the current treatment centre because of intense episodes of mania, severe limitations in daily living skills and life-threatening diabetes, which she is unable to manage. Mae’s therapy focused on her tumultuous relationship with her mother, who had subjected Mae to a lifetime of physical and emotional abuse, which had had devastating consequences for Mae. Mae’s mother had an almost symbiotic relationship with her daughter yet was also shockingly neglectful of her basic needs for safety, comfort and love since her birth. For example, Mae’s grandmother often would have to come to the house to feed and change the infant Mae because her mother refused to do so. Because she was physically and psychologically dependent on her mother, Mae could not be angry with her and risk breaking that connection. Therapy focused on helping Mae express her anger towards her mother without becoming overwhelmed or losing her own sense of self in the experience. Mae’s father did not intervene on his daughter’s behalf, which compounded her struggles

378 Alexandra L. Adame et al. with her mother. Mae loved and positively identified with her father. However, his silence and inaction only confirmed the devastating messages Mae was receiving about her value as a person. Later, Mae had a disastrous two-year marriage during which her husband physically, sexually and emotionally abused her. Mae struggled to survive in a relationship that replicated so much of the profoundly disconfirming messages she had received from her mother. Mae’s psychological well-being suffered and her husband and mother had her committed involuntarily to a state psychiatric institution. Tragically, Mae was raped when she was there and she became pregnant. Although she carried the baby to term, the child was a stillborn and Mae was devastated by this loss. Several years later, Mae became pregnant again and gave birth to a live daughter while still in the institution. Because she was unable to care for the baby, Mae asked her mother to raise the child. When her mother refused, Mae gave the daughter up for adoption. She continues to be tortured with the guilt of not being able to care for her child and experienced a crushing sense of loss for what could have been. After leaving the hospital and entering the community mental health system, members of Mae’s treatment team did not initially believe that Mae had a daughter, and for years thought her claim was ‘delusional’ and further evidence of her psychopathology. In the following sections, three of us discuss our experiences of listening to the tapes of Mae’s therapy and how the research process shaped our thinking about therapy, experiential constructivism and our development as psychologists.

Brendon The paradox at the heart of EPCP was extremely influential in my development as a new therapist. EPCP holds that engaging in intimate ROLE relationships, construing the construction processes of another while having one’s own construction processes construed by that other is simultaneously terrifying and necessary. While I need deep, intimate contact for a meaningful life, such relating risks the threat of injury. As others cannot be known totally (Kelly 1955; Leitner 1985), others will inevitably invalidate some of my core constructs. I am constantly engaged in the struggle over whether to approach others, to know and be known, or to retreat from them. The former entails risking invalidation in the service of a meaningful life; the latter guarantees a relatively safe, if empty, existence. All experiences simultaneously express both desires, and EPCP understands psychological health

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and pathology in terms of the struggles one encounters with intimate relating. This paradox is the prominent lens through which I understand my clients and research participants, their struggles and joys in the world, our interactions and my experiences as a therapist and researcher. As a relatively new therapist and researcher, I strive to be reflexive and consider how my struggles around ROLE relating impact on my work. In this way, I hope to illuminate areas of potential growth in myself that could benefit my clients and my research. What follows is a brief account of a particularly intense experience I had listening to Mae’s therapy. I hope to illustrate how I have attempted to turn the theory back onto myself and use the paradox of intimate relating to understand my own processes of construal. I remember one day when we were gathered round the long rectangular table of our lab, contorting our faces as we strained to understand something Mae were saying on the tape. She was heartbroken, and grew increasingly distraught as she told Alex a story from her childhood. Crying, she told of her mother chasing her round the house, trying to catch her and force her into bathwater that Mae knew was too hot. She was aware that her mother knew this as well. Mae’s mother intended to submerse her in the scalding water – not to bathe the child, but to burn her, to punish her. Perhaps Mae had stepped outside or talked to a neighbour. Although Mae was in her mid-sixties when she told Alex this story, I could hear the horror of her childhood in her voice. As she described screaming as a child, her adult voice cried out and cracked in pain and confusion, ‘She knew it was too hot!’ As I listened, pressure built up behind my eyes and chills shot through my body. I clenched my jaws, furious and heartbroken at the thought of the tiny, terrified girl. I thought, repeatedly, little people do not deserve to be treated so horribly. No one does. I stared at the table, sighing loudly and slowly shaking my head. Turning my eyes to the window, I gazed at a great tree, normally beautiful, and let my vision slowly go out of focus. It was, at that point, almost impossible to make sense of any of Mae’s words through her sobs. My body felt heavy with sadness. I thought of everything the world had heaped on her: the many rapes, beatings and indignities. I wanted more than anything at that moment for Mae to know that she had done nothing to deserve what her mother had done. I wanted Mae and other seriously injured people to know that there were those who believed that they were worthy of love simply because they were alive. Quickly I was taken with a different thought. I could not imagine how hurting her daughter seemed like the best, perhaps the only, option available

380 Alexandra L. Adame et al. to Mae’s mother. At the same time, I simply could not imagine feeling as hated, as confused, as utterly alone as Mae must have felt. It seemed as if there was an impassable gulf between myself on the one hand, and Mae and her mother on the other. I said to my colleagues that it felt as if we were from different worlds. I understand my sadness for Mae, my desire to come to know and help her, and my wish for her to know my feelings as reflective of my desire for ROLE relating with her. In this way, I genuinely wanted to connect with Mae. As a countertransference researcher, however, I am often interested in the inevitable retreat of the therapist or researcher. A common way of retreating from ROLE relating is holding the belief that others’ experiences and construing processes are utterly incomprehensible and unquestionably foreign. Although I could ‘intellectually’ understand Mae and her mother’s experiences of being abused and of abusing, at that moment the experiences themselves felt hopelessly foreign to me. Instead of viewing this ‘misunderstanding’ as an unavoidable experience around which I lacked agency, I believe that I chose to construe Mae and her mother in this limited way. We retreat from deep contact to protect our own core constructs from invalidation (Leitner, 1985). Experientially grasping the horrors of child abuse entails a deep and painful reorganisation of the vital ways I have of understanding the world. Living in a world where adults regularly feel as if they have no choice but to beat children is intensely painful for me. It challenges some deeply important core constructs. While I may know intellectually that the world is not a fair place and that innocent people often suffer horribly, accepting this at a core level means accepting the fact that, despite my best efforts, I too could end up desperately alone, without the love that makes life worthwhile. When we experientially grasp that there are millions of people, each as deserving as the next, whose lives seem to lack life-sustaining love, we face both the devastating sadness of the world and the potentially paralysing precariousness of our own existence. We have to admit what most spend their lives denying. Thus, I pre-emptively concluded that Mae, her mother and I were different from one another rather than confront the consequences of our shared existential condition. However, grasping our common humanity is necessary if we are to move closer to deeply injured clients and to understand more fully the experience of research participants. In doing so, we hope we can increasingly sustain, rather than run from, the pain that accompanies the healing process of bearing witness to the suffering of others. Little by little, we experience everyone as deeply human, and as such help one another heal.

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Alex Learning about the power of healing through meeting has been an invaluable and powerful lesson for me as a beginning therapist. The capacity for healing via the ROLE relationship in therapy is articulated in experiential personal construct psychotherapy (Leitner 1985; 1988; 1999; 2001) as well as in the writings of Martin Buber (1958; 1965), Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (1950) and Maurice Freidman (1985; 1992a; 1992b; 1996). These writings are vital to my practice of therapy. One of my primary interventions as a therapist is bearing witness to another’s life story and psychological suffering. In doing so, I hope to bring my client to a greater level of experiential awareness rather than numb or dull the experience through symptomreduction interventions. I hope to help my client feel more alive and begin to experience self and others in new ways within the safety of our relationship. The end of therapy was a difficult period for Mae and me as we mourned the loss of the relationship we had built. Mae would make brief but meaningful comments on how much she was going to miss me and how much therapy meant to her. Mae had grown significantly in therapy and could acknowledge the importance of our relationship and reflect on her feelings of loss and gratitude. At other times, though, the end of therapy activated Mae’s struggles with self–other permanence in ways that were disturbing to both of us. For instance, over the last three months of therapy, death was a prominent theme in Mae’s sessions, symbolic of my impending ‘death’ in her life. Mae was communicating to me that, when I eventually left, I would cease to exist as a person to her. At times the grief over this loss literally overwhelmed her. Six weeks before our last session, Mae experienced what the psychiatrist called a ‘manic episode’. She literally could not stop talking for hours on end at a pace that was exhausting to Mae herself and others. In our session during this period of distress, I was overwhelmed by the furious speed of her words and horrified by story after story of abuse, abandonment, loss and, of course, death. In that session, Mae was unable to acknowledge my presence as a separate person sitting opposite her. As she spoke, my chest constricted, my hands went cold and my face became flushed. A wave of panic and anxiety washed over me as I struggled to think of a way to intervene. After an hour of trying to break into the flow of her story, I was able to get a few sentences out to reassure her that she was safe now despite the horrors of the past. It took a further 15 minutes for me to tell Mae that we had overrun our time and had to end the session. While I rarely initiate touching a client, I felt so helpless to stop the flow of Mae’s words that I

382 Alexandra L. Adame et al. reached over and gently touched the back of her hand to try to get her attention. In doing so, I hoped that my physical presence would help ground her in the here-and-now experience and solidify myself as a permanent and real other. I recognised that this session was a clear example of the severity of Mae’s permanence struggles. However, when I talked about the session with the research group I realised the extent to which the incident spoke to her feelings about the loss of our relationship. Unfortunately, as a result of Mae’s increasing distress, her doctors increased her doses of anti-psychotic drugs and she was admitted to the centre’s sub-acute unit for 24-hour care. Sadly, this facility was in the grounds of the state psychiatric hospital where Mae had spent 19 years of her life. Mae experienced this move as a return to the hospital, which disheartened and demoralised her. I hurt as I recalled the first session Mae and I had in the sub-acute unit. When I stopped at the nurses’ station to ask about Mae, they told me she had been given two Ativan but still could not stop talking and go to sleep. The nurses also said that the doctor had increased her doses of antipsychotics. They seemed frustrated about the dosage increase when they told me how the drugs had sedated her. I walked to the common room, trying to prepare myself for what I was about to see. I entered the room, looked to my left and saw Mae sitting at a table with an absent stare, eyes glazed, slowly feeding herself crackers, the crumbs falling from her lips onto her shirt. Tears stung my eyes and a lump welled in my throat as I gazed at her. She looked up and at first appeared not to recognise me. After a few seconds she smiled slightly and said, in a slurred voice, ‘What are you doing here?’ I tried to compose myself and said, ‘It’s Tuesday. I came because it’s time for our session.’ Mae looked surprised but pleased that I had driven out to meet with her and slowly stood up to follow me to the activity room where we could talk. It broke my heart to see her struggling to walk down the hallway in a straight line. In drastic contrast to our last meeting, Mae’s speech was now slow and laboured. She was feeling hurt, lonely, abandoned and helpless in her current situation. These incidents were the most traumatic period of termination process for us. In the session when we met in the sub-acute facility, she began by remarking that she had been alone since her parents had died 17 years ago. The impending loss of our relationship brought up wounds from her past as Mae once again grieved the deaths of others on whom she had come to depend, but who had let her down. Her mother forced on Mae a paralysing, symbiotic mode of dependency and maintained her hold by a lifetime of physical violence and emotional abuse. Mae’s father empathised with his

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daughter, but was unable to defend and protect Mae from her mother’s wrath. I had become a stable, consistent and affirming presence in Mae’s life and she had clearly come to depend on me. In fact, the strength of our relationship spoke to how Mae had progressed in being able to differentiate between self and others, a prerequisite for being able to enter into relations with other people. During this session, and for some time after, I was deeply saddened and angry that, once again, Mae had received the message through psychiatric drugging and hospitalisation that her emotions – particularly her rage at the people who had abused her – were uncontrollably dangerous, and not to be expressed. In spite of others treating Mae as something to be controlled, contained and subdued, I insisted that she was a person worthy of reverence and that her so-called ‘symptoms’ were actually important communications about the ways she struggles with the terrors and joys of relationality. Although my work with Mae was often difficult, challenging and at times overwhelming, it also was one of the most rewarding and humbling experiences I have had as a therapist. With Mae I came to a renewed appreciation of the healing potential of the therapeutic relationship. I will always be grateful to her for this profound gift in my ongoing development as a therapist and as a person. I am honoured to have had the opportunity to know Mae. Our time together has inspired me to continue to pursue the notion of healing through meeting in my research and clinical work.

Anthony EPCP’s concept of responsibility, the willingness to examine one’s meanings and their implications for others (Leitner & Faidley 2002; Leitner, Faidley & Celentana 2000; Leitner & Pfenninger 1994) was one of the most powerful and influential concepts in my development. I was drawn to EPCP because of my interest in existentialism (Laing 1960; 1967; May 1983; Sartre 1963; 1992). I strove to embody existentialism’s honouring of freedom, dignity and humanity. However, while useful, existentialism’s ideals often remained abstract. EPCP challenged me to look at the ways these concepts influenced my own sense of self in relation to others. It was easier to view existential ideas as pertaining to humanity in general versus experiencing them in those closest to me (as well as myself). EPCP helped me bring these values to my work as a therapist, researcher and student. It also helped me to see intimate others as more fully human. Put differently, existentialism offered a powerful understanding of what it meant to be human, but EPCP’s conception of responsibility forced me to turn the gaze

384 Alexandra L. Adame et al. back on myself and examine my position in the world and its effects on those around me. EPCP posits that meanings are co-created in the dynamic interaction between self and world (Leitner & Faidley 2002; Leitner & Pfenninger 1994; Leitner, Faidley & Celentana 2000). When intimately involved with others, self and others co-create meanings used to experience the world. While often difficult, persons need to sort out the role self and other play in their experience of the world to engage others in a meaningful and responsible fashion. As the boundaries between self and other are fluid, issues of responsibility are difficult to define and negotiate. The research group discussed the ways Mae’s experience of horrendous abuse affect her sense of self–other permanence as well as the interventions that seemed most helpful. What was most profound, however, was that these conversations inevitably led back to our personal reactions (most often feelings of anger or sadness) to Mae’s experience. When processing our emotions led to discussing specific interventions, we became aware that our ability to make such interventions, to make ourselves closer to our clients, required a great deal of effort and personal reflection. For example, after Mae described the violent and abusive ways her mother treated her, she would often say, ‘Well, I guess she loved me in her own way.’ As I listened to episodes of abuse, I quickly became angry at her mother for her cruel treatment of Mae. I had difficulty understanding how she could be so destructive to this fragile child. I was also saddened and disquieted by Mae’s inability to express her anger towards her mother. With each qualification of her mother’s abuse, Mae gave up another piece of herself in order to maintain an image of a loving and supportive mother. Mae assumed excessive responsibility in these qualifications. Her mother located her troubles in Mae, insisting Mae was mentally ill and refusing to look at the ways she was behaving towards her. Coupled with the physical abuse, Mae could not see herself as the one injured at the hands of others. During her years at the state hospital she often received the message that her behaviour and the course of her life were solely her fault. Any attempt Mae made to communicate these pains (usually as ‘symptoms’) was responded to by drugging, electroconvulsive treatment and admonishments to forget about the past. Helping Mae accept and express her anger made her feel more stable and allowed her to assume a more appropriate amount of responsibility. However, when Mae was treated with respect and humanity, her sense of self often would become diffuse. Mae was terrified about contacting those parts of herself that were angry with her mother. Feeling respect from another implied that Mae was a person worthy of love and affection, a

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thought too difficult to bear as it threatened Mae’s most central constructs of herself. Not surprisingly, she would retreat from Alex, as, though she longed for the relationship, Alex’s caring was threatening to Mae’s core constructs. Mae had difficulty maintaining contact with Alex as she tried to construe herself as worthy of Alex’s investment. Until Mae could experience herself as a creative and deserving human being, Mae struggled to experience herself as a co-creator of the relationship. Alex was in a dilemma. Mae experienced her empathy, caring and commitment as threatening and retreated. As we listened to Mae describing her experiences, I struggled with Alex’s dilemma. I also became concerned as, when clients retreat in such ways, I could see how I might feel helpless and retreat also. I was threatened by experiencing how another construed such painful processes. While participating in this research, I was working with persons who had similar stories. I often wondered if I were sufficiently aware of the implications of my meaning-making system on others. I became more sensitive to the ways I might be retreating from my clients’ experiences of horror. I realised that respecting another’s dignity and freedom involved respecting their retreats. However, honouring a client’s retreats requires accepting our own feelings of helplessness and terror. I came to see that responsibility involved trusting another enough to co-create a relationship and trusting that that relationship would be the healing element. When I allowed myself to trust in EPCP’s conception of responsibility, I found myself feeling less helpless and my need to retreat subsided. At its core, responsibility implies entertaining the impact of our meanings for others. Hopefully, despite feelings of helplessness, terror and worry, we continue to grow, refuse to retreat from others and engage the values that are important to us. I feel powerfully affirmed when I see the ways clients grow as they trust me, as well as the ways I grow in the connection.

Conclusion As we reflected on our experience of working in the research group and recorded our reactions to this experience, some important themes emerged. First, each of our idiosyncratic reactions to the research project brought us back to the importance of the relationship in the therapeutic process. Mae’s experiences were terrifying to her and to others, as these experiences represented the violent and darker facets of human existence. Truly being with another in light of such horrors often is difficult but, from our perspective, such a relationship is necessary if healing is to occur.

386 Alexandra L. Adame et al. In addition, we realised the importance of self-reflexivity in learning how to be with clients who have been profoundly damaged. While less explicit at the time, the research process necessitated that we be aware of the ways our understandings of the world influenced the research process. Selfreflexivity did more than affect the process of the research. It bled into how we saw ourselves as persons. Learning clinical psychology within the tradition of personal construct psychology has been vital in our development as therapists, researchers and persons, and we our indebted to all the people keeping this tradition alive.

References Buber, M. (1958). I and Thou. New York: Scribner Buber, M. (1965). The Knowledge of Man: Selected Essays. New York: Harper & Row Friedman, M. (1985). The Healing Dialogue in Psychotherapy. New York: Jason Aronson Friedman, M. (1992a). Religion and Psychotherapy: A Dialogical Approach. New York: Paragon House Friedman, M. (1992b). Dialogue and the Human Image: Beyond Humanistic Psychology. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Friedman, M. (ed.) (1996). Martin Buber and the Human Sciences. Albany, NY: SUNY Press Fromm-Reichmann, F. (1950). Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Kelly, G. A. (1955) The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volumes 1 and 2. New York: Norton (reprinted London: Routledge, 1991) Laing, R. D. (1960). The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Laing, R. D. (1967). The Politics of Experience. New York: Pantheon Leitner, L. M. (1985). The terrors of cognition: on the experiential validity of personal construct theory. In D. Bannister (ed.) Issues and Approaches in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press Leitner, L. M. (1988). Terror, risk, and reverence: experiential personal construct psychotherapy. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 1, 261–272 Leitner, L. M. (1999). Levels of awareness in experiential personal construct psychotherapy. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 12, 239–252 Leitner, L. M. (2001). Experiential personal construct therapeutic artistry: the therapy relationship and the timing of interventions. The Humanistic Psychologist, 29, 98–113

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Leitner, L. M. & Faidley, A. J. (1995). The awful, aweful nature of ROLE relationships. In R. A. Neimeyer & G. J. Neimeyer (eds.) Advances in Personal Construct Psychology. Volume 3. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press Leitner, L. M. & Faidley, A. J. (2002). Disorder, diagnoses, and the struggles of humanness. In J. D. Raskin & S. K. Bridges (eds.) Studies in Meaning: Exploring Constructivist Psychology. New York: Pace University Press Leitner, L. M., Faidley, A. J. & Celentana, M. A. (2000). Diagnosing human meaning making: an experiential constructivist approach. In R. Neimeyer & J. Raskin (eds.) Construction of Disorders: Meaning Making Frameworks for Psychotherapy. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Leitner, L. M. & Pfenninger, T. (1994). Sociality and optimal functioning. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 7, 119–135 May, R. (1983). The Discovery of Being: Writings in Existential Psychology. New York: Norton Sartre, J.-P. (1963). Search for a Method. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Sartre, J.-P. (1992). Being and Nothingness. New York: Washington Square Press

Chapter 25

The Joint Experiment of Research Supervision Beverly M. Walker Beverly is a member of the longstanding Wollongong Personal Construct Group. Published contributions cover: PCP as a social psychology (especially dispersion of dependency); nonvalidation of construing; photography to explore identity; and constriction. Otherwise she engages with people and cats, helps things grow, explores painting, sculpture and theatre, makes things (including mosaics, patchwork and jewellery), visits places and is a Life Master at bridge.

Elaborated aspects of theory: creativity cycle, dilation, experimentation, sociality, validation In this chapter I make reference to what has occurred between me and the scores of students whom I have had the privilege to supervise for theses and research projects over 35 years. As it has not been possible to discuss the content of this chapter with each of them, I have instead made the examples generic, so no one situation refers to a single student.

Working with the Obvious I was teaching and publishing in personal construct psychology (PCP) for years before I explicitly applied the approach to my research supervision. Ridiculous in retrospect, I know. As a psychologist with research training, lacking an applied area such as counselling or organisational psychology, I Reflections in Personal Construct Theory. Edited by Richard J. Butler © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

390 Beverly M. Walker began to feel deprived of opportunities to observe others’ construing and experiment with interventions. My data seemed limited as a consequence, restricting my exploration of the position. Of course, there was my own life and the life of my friends, but the extraordinary moments, which Kelly (1963/1969) argued told us more about life, would not to be as prolific. Many people, after all, go to therapists as they are experiencing something out of the ordinary. I commonly taught about Kelly’s notion of man-as-scientist. I stressed (Walker 1992) that this was not so much a metaphor of how we always deal with the world, but of how we go about things when we function optimally. We are, as Kelly (1955) suggested, ‘incipient scientists’. Kelly (1963/1969) arrived at this metaphor because of his role as a clinician who both supervised research projects and saw clients in therapy. In what he termed ‘an afternoon with the obvious’ he alternated between working with students and clients. Eventually, it occurred to him that he ‘was really doing the same thing all afternoon long’ – with both graduate students and clients he was trying to help them formulate a problem, develop a theory about it, devise and carry out an experiment to test it, and evaluate the results. Then there would be times when both students and clients would not be making progress, trying to carry out some major experimentation without any preliminary data, ‘dragging their feet’ or plunging in prematurely. As a therapist or supervisor, he then found himself trying to get them to formulate the problem more clearly, to develop hypotheses, etc. – in short to get effective experimentation back on track. While for Kelly the implication of this insight was to propose his metaphor of people in general as potential scientists, for me it led to focusing explicitly on my role in the research supervision context from a personal construct framework. Certain things became important, but before I focus on that I want to mention briefly the literature on research supervision.

Key Issues in the Research Supervision Literature There is increasing recognition that this aspect of teaching and learning has been ‘seriously overlooked in higher education’ (Armstrong 2004) despite concern about high rates (up to 50%) of attrition and completion of programmes involving theses and dissertations. The nature of supervision has been considered the ‘single most important variable affecting the success of the research process’ (ESRC 1991). It has also been regarded as one of the most difficult and responsible tasks academics perform (Armstrong 2004), ‘the most complex and subtle form of teaching’ (Brown & Atkins 1988)

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and one for which their sole preparation may be their own, unexamined supervision experience (Lee & Williams 1999; Pearson & Brew 2002). Different approaches have been promoted as best practice in this area. Such approaches range from those supporting a single model or advice to fit all supervision relationships (e.g. Zuber-Skerritt & Ryan 1994; Delamont, Atkinson & Parry 1997) to those that advocate the importance of maximising supervisor−supervisee fit on key individual difference variables such as personality characteristics and cognitive styles (e.g. Armstrong 2004). Clearly, no overwhelming consensus exists, or perhaps can exist, on this topic, but my own experience may be of use to others. So let me return to the implications that followed from applying the theory to my supervision practice.

How Applying the Theory Changed My Practice The first important point was that the relationship we were to be engaged in as supervisor and supervisee was to be treated as one of joint experimentation. This often conflicts with students’ limited understanding of supervision. Particularly those emerging from their close dependence on parental guidance and relatively directive education find this relationship somewhat anxiety-producing; others, of course, thrive on it. I’m not sure that I changed greatly in this regard as I had never considered myself the all-knowing expert, despite having regarded my own thesis supervisors in this way. But I now could clearly label my preference for what I had previously done relatively automatically and avoid more effectively attempts to put me in the box of others’ expectations of the ‘omniscient expert’. I needed to make my use of the theory to structure our relationship clear to my co-experimenters right from the start. Often, they had very vague expectations about what would be involved and what my role would be. Undergraduate teaching does not prepare students for such a relationship, and even prior supervision may have been rather different. In part this introduction entailed talking about how the theory would be integral to the way we would go about our joint task. Frequently in the first discussion, when we explored whether it would be possible to work on a project together, I talked about aspects of the theory that were important to how I would approach the supervisory role and how I anticipated the supervisee would approach theirs. The most important of these was the creativity cycle and its composite processes of alternations between loosening and tightening. Often, I raised the possibility that some of us are better at loosening and some at tightening. For my part, I had traditionally been

392 Beverly M. Walker more likely to tighten, though more recently this has lessened. I then usually asked what the student thought they were like. We might next discuss what we needed to be careful of, given our respective preferences, and how we might achieve that. One of the consequences of this discussion was that there was now a shared language that allowed us to communicate what was happening at different phases of the supervision relationship. We could talk about how the early phases of the thesis development needed, of necessity, to be relatively loose. Often, those students who identified themselves as being better at tightening (most common, as undergraduate work rewards tightening) find this a very anxiety-provoking time. They repeatedly attempt to finalise the design without having satisfactorily explored the literature or alternative methodologies. With these students it helps if we can structure this period by, for example, setting down a time for such exploration with a deadline for a particular Ethics Committee meeting for the finalised design. For those whose preference is relatively loose or who keep seeing non-perfection in any chosen design, clearly some sort of deadline again helps, as well as discussion of the impossibility of covering all bases exhaustively. For some students using the theory to describe the processes of thesismaking and supervision introduces another possibility that they had not previously considered. The theory they would apply to their research could actually apply to something else, part of their ongoing interactions with work and other people. It is an indictment of how and what we teach in psychology courses that this can come as a shock. I have had students who have felt very disconcerted initially, particularly if they find it subsequently extends into all areas of their lives. No longer is this simply a formal academic exercise: ‘Perhaps there is something wrong with me?’ At these times I may talk with the student about how much of a relief it had been to me to realise that my work and ways of working were consistent with other areas of my life and ways of living. I might draw their attention to part of the title of Dalton & Dunnett’s (1992) valuable introduction to PCP: A Psychology for Living. I may comment that surely there is something wrong if a theory about how people function cannot be applied to non-research contexts. After all, as Lewin (cited in Marrow 1969) indicates, ‘there is nothing as practical as a good theory’. Not infrequently I also discuss the limits of my sociality. I talk about how the student is partly responsible for the effectiveness of my role. For example, I make it clear that I shall need to know if there is something personal going on in their life that is impeding their performance. Some students have withdrawn in such a situation and I have realised too late that the detrimental effect on their thesis could have been avoided if I had known of the

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problem earlier. I make it clear to students that their private business is just that (boundaries are as important in research supervision as they are in counselling), but that I do need to know in broad terms if they have a health, personal or interpersonal issue that has the potential to seriously disrupt their progress. One of the important areas of focus that colleagues and I in the Wollongong Personal Construct Group have addressed is what happens when experimentation breaks down. I (Walker 1992) used the term ‘nonvalidation’1 to provide a generic label for this. Whether we conceptualise people’s processes in terms of Kelly’s scientist metaphor or the largely analogous proposal of the experience cycle, people test out their construing optimally, often, though not exclusively, by overt behaviour. This results in situations that can result in either validation or invalidation of their ways of seeing the world. But people will use various strategies that fail to result in the testing of their experience, endlessly falling back on circumspection, forcing the data to fit their hypotheses, and many more (Walker et al. 2000). Nonvalidation encompasses all this. The three processes of validation, invalidation and nonvalidation are particularly helpful for me in thinking about what is happening to the student in the process of their thesis-making. Walker et al. (2000) write about how, at the same time, there often can be validation of one thing, accompanied by invalidation of another. In this context (as well as many others) validation of the student as a thesis developer and researcher needs to be provided at the same time as invalidation of aspects of the thesis likely to result in problems down the track, such as designs with confounding or impractical data collection strategies. Unfortunately, many academics working outside the constructivist approach do not make this distinction and, in the form of their criticism, provide no validational experience of the person or their proposal. This frequently results in nonvalidational strategies, such as the students putting their thesis-testing on hold or, in extreme cases, terminating their enrolment, thus avoiding experiment completion.

What Happens When Things Go Wrong: Dealing with Supervision Problems One of the curious things about my supervision history is that the overwhelming majority of the postgraduate students I have supervised for their 1

The unhyphenated spelling ‘nonvalidation’ rather than ‘non-validation’ is deliberate. It is intended to be a specific term, analogous in form to ‘invalidation’. In previous publications this has been ‘corrected’ without my knowledge, with the result that it has been published incorrectly.

394 Beverly M. Walker doctorates had begun supervision of their thesis with someone else. Commonly, their previous supervision relationship had broken down. In some cases the students had already collected their data. Not infrequently these were data that I might not have let them collect if I had had input into the design. Here I had to help the students create a plausible case, even though I was uncomfortable with the approach. My appreciation of the usefulness of constructive alternativism, recognising that there are alternatives to one’s current views, helped me to suspend my own perspective and see how we could make the best of this alternative. On occasion this has led me to take the view that some of the collected (but as yet unanalysed) data needed to be omitted. This could be because it wasn’t possible to develop a coherent story about the problem if it remained or, more commonly, because the student was submerged under such a mass of data that, unless the data were reduced, the thesis could not feasibly be completed in any reasonable time-frame. Such a possibility has to be approached very carefully in my experience. Students are, not unreasonably, very defensive of something that may have taken up a great deal of their time and energy. It is usually a good idea to make this initially a temporary setting aside. After all, I might be wrong. But it gives the student time to detach from the data and reach the conclusion themselves about whether they should be included. A further consequence of taking on theses at an advanced stage is that I have often picked up supervision at a time when the student was blocked. In the following sections I give examples of the ways I have found useful to overcome impasses.

Techniques to Overcome Impasses 1. Being overwhelmed by the magnitude of the thesis Several students have been so overwhelmed with the complexities of their thesis that they could not envisage a consistent path through it. Just as often I too find it difficult to keep sections of the thesis clear. This proved especially important when supervising students who had collected masses of data before I took over supervision, but were unable to clearly articulate just why some of the data were included. After thrashing around for a few sessions trying to grasp this, I decided to use whiteboards that spanned the width of a large teaching room to look at the data that had been collected. So between us the students and I wrote up the instruments or measures used and the kinds of scales or information that they provided. Things that

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were similar were grouped together (e.g. different measures of aspects of emotion), others geographically separated. The first time I did this the effect was remarkable. The student, who had been stuck for several years in the morass of their thesis, expressed immediate, overwhelming relief. It was as if the thesis was now contained within the boundaries of the board, and could be approached without the threat that had previously been looming at every turn. The design of the thesis emerged, the parts spelled out. And most important of all, it was manageable. We could now go on to clarify just what had been done and what needed still to be done, and hence develop a coherent path to the completion of the analysis. Parts of the data could be set aside while we worked on other sections in a clearly defined order. I have since used this technique with other students. In designs that involve independent and dependent variables, these could be indicated. Different sorts of measurement scales that might affect the analysis could be highlighted. This was a particularly useful measure with designs that are not conventional, where clear patterns derived from the literature cannot be followed. Generally, I have found it useful with a mix of quantitative and qualitative measures. One of my students, Desley Hennessy, has written about how helpful she found this technique: The board provides an environment that creates both a physical and emotional support: one can immerse oneself in the physical environment as well as step back to gain perspective. Stepping back aids an emotional detachment from the detail as well. In my case, having three different types of data, the board technique proved flexible in accommodating my problem by using one board for each type of data. We could then play around with the relationships between the different data types. (personal communication, 15 January 2008)

How do we conceptualise this in PCP terms? Well, of course, this is a tightening exercise, but it worked when other tightening techniques had failed. Getting the student to tell me about the design or write a summary hadn’t solved the problem I inherited. I conceptualise this task as analogous to Kelly’s (1955) therapeutic intervention of time-binding, where the therapist encourages certain construing related to, or a consequence of, a traumatic period in the client’s life, to apply to that time and not to other times, especially not to the future. In the board case it is an example of spacebinding – the main parts of the thesis are confined to the boundaries of the board. They don’t overflow, run together, swirl in circles, threatening to

396 Beverly M. Walker overwhelm the student (and their newly acquired supervisor). There they are – a finite, comprehensive list that can be ordered and, if necessary, reordered – and the result can be used to plan what will follow in a manageable order.

2. Muddled writing There have been times when I have supervised students who have difficulty in writing an argument or even an account that goes through the steps taken in an order that a reader can follow. They may know what is relevant, and often can communicate this effectively orally. But they are splotched down on the page in no apparent order, with key steps omitted. Constructing a logical sequence is a problem we have all faced. It often takes us several drafts to get it right – and then we still may need an editor or colleague to ask the critical question that lets us know we have more changes to make. To assist in this process we commonly suggest that students work from a plan set out in point form, with points and sub-points corresponding to sections and paragraphs. But I’ve had situations where students are unable to do that. After repeated requests for them to write things out in this format first failed to improve the result, I finally asked for the point form itself just for a short section of one chapter. What I received was five pages of complex, sentence-long points in no discernible order! In desperation I finally came up with a possible way to navigate round the problem. I refused to allow the student to work in their usual pattern, where high verbal facility masked difficulties in communicating in writing. I cut up some cards and worked with the student and co-supervisor in ordering a section of the thesis by writing the key issues on the cards and then sorting them into order on my desk. In this way we ‘carded’ a critical part of his method. When we finished a section we numbered them in sequence and moved on to the next part. The student then took these away to write up a method that used only the topic on the card in each section or sub-section. The student was extremely happy with this exercise. He now felt in control as he could order and re-order. But the critical thing was what was produced as a consequence. The draft method that came back was a great relief. It was the first piece of written work that was close to the standard required. It made sense and could be followed by a marker not familiar with what had happened. The student indicated that it was extremely hard to do and took much longer than previous writing. However, in the long term, it saved time as previously drafts of sections had been re-drafted ten or more times. The student

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sometimes reverted to his old, ‘easy’ way of writing, but it was immediately apparent whether the work had been ‘carded’ or not. How do we conceptualise this in PCP terms? I think two issues may be addressed here. One involves an inability to construe the construction processes of those who were to read the thesis. This failure in sociality may arise for various reasons, but may be specific to the thesis in its written form. This is a not uncommon problem and I have often tried to persuade students to write for a particular person they know rather than for the amorphous, anonymous markers who loom in a threatening way over their efforts. But even that does not work for some. A second problem appeared to be an inability to work with hierarchies, with certain things presented as subsets of others and other things as more overriding in importance. But does this solution work? One issue is the prevention of the habitual, non-functional, previous ways of working. Another seems to be that the very dilation that has led the student to come up with interesting connections between unexpected bodies of research and methodology now impedes them communicating their innovation. Whenever they consider a point, lots of connections to other issues flood their mind. As Barry Partridge, one of the several students who has used this technique, has commented for inclusion in this chapter: Cards can serve not only as roadmaps to be followed but also provide more ready navigation between parts of the essay, particularly where the work requires considerable concentration and the writer is prone to become distracted and move away from the planned direction of the work. Cards can serve as a useful means of planning … and provide ‘flags’, or checkpoints to help keep the writer on track. (personal communication, 28 October 2007)

So one way of thinking about this technique is as a means of constriction (narrowing of focus) for students who easily drift into dilation.

3. Emotions running into the thesis Another not infrequent pattern of difficulty involves the student whose emotional turmoil spills over into the thesis, preventing progress. Sometimes this occurs because the topic chosen is an attempt to resolve a pre-existing problem, a substitute for therapy. I am always wary when students propose topics such as the death of a parent, impact of rape, sibling rivalry, carers of people with dementia, marital breakdown, and so on, and ask at the outset whether this is particularly relevant to them personally.

398 Beverly M. Walker On occasions I have found it useful for students to write about their personal issues related to the topic of the thesis in a way that is separate from the main part of the thesis. This gives importance to their emotional turmoil, but channels it away from the major part of the thesis for which it is an impediment. Sometimes this personal account has been included very effectively within the thesis, either in clearly defined sections, or in an appendix. Occasionally, it has not being included at all, for simply writing it down has served its purpose and the student was then able to move on and complete the thesis.

My Failures as a Supervisor While no doubt my students, on reflection, might tell you about certain things that could have been better in my supervision (indeed, I can tell you myself), in most cases, judging from the outcomes, it has been generally ‘good enough’. However, there is a particular situation with which I haven’t coped well, and about which I still do not have much of an idea of what to do. This involves students who tend to repeatedly reject any comments I make that suggest that what they are proposing may be problematic. The result, not unnaturally, is that I feel invalidated as a supervisor. Recently, I have recognised that there is a broader pattern concerning at least some of these students. Such students generally turn up at our initial meeting to discuss the possibility of working together with a largely fully fleshed-out thesis proposal. Their problem means a great deal to them and they have read the literature widely, and so have already invested a great deal of time and energy before coming through my door. They may have already written thousands of words. They start to tell me what their proposal is. Invariably I ask them questions, questions that often suggest that they need to think further about the issues: ‘If you are going to take a constructivist stance, isn’t there a bit of a contradiction here with these so-called facts?’ ‘Don’t you think there might be other ways of seeing that issue?’ ‘Surely, that’s not necessarily how they see the problem. Isn’t that your interpretation?’ etc. Instead of responding receptively to this attempt at elaboration, these potential students respond very negatively. They look stunned that what they have presented is not self-evident; they ignore or dismiss my comments or respond in ways bordering on what feels to me to be very combative. They resist any attempts to reconceptualise, sometimes pushing it straight back to me –

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‘Well, if I can’t do that, tell me what I have to do.’ Cooperative exploration is clearly not how they see the supervision process. Clinicians may consider it analogous to resistance. I have now reached the point where I can label my experience. It is, at least partly, one of Kellyan hostility (1957/1969). For Kelly, what the recipient considers to be ‘hostility’ was the attempt by another to force them to validate a view of the world that has been invalidated. The student is trying various strategies to force me to accept their ways of seeing the problem. Consequently, I felt undermined, attacked and irrelevant, powerless to work productively with the student to improve their proposal. Now, having placed the experience in that context, I can appreciate something of what is happening from the student’s perspective. These students have presented something very core – something they believe in and have worked hard on, constructing what to them appears to be a fully worked-out proposal. Why they have done this prior to finding a supervisor is not always clear. It may have something to do with a misunderstanding of the nature of the research supervision process. Perhaps it may have to do with the importance the student attaches to their originality, or even a desire to protect their own feelings of inferiority. Irrespective, attempts by me (or anyone else) to question any part of the carefully crafted work threaten to undermine all. One piece of wool tweaked out of place will unravel the whole perfect ball. The first time this happened I was a young, inexperienced supervisor and, after repeated attempts to modify the problematic design and rationale, eventually gave the student their head and concentrated on minimising the problems. Unfortunately, the markers took a similar view to my own and, while the thesis did not fail, it received the lowest mark of any I have ever supervised. Since then I have battled vigorously to bring these students’ projects to fruition, with a great deal of angst and marginally more success. Having used the theory to reach this point of understanding such impasses, I feel slightly less threatened in my role as a potential supervisor, but have little understanding of how to overcome the situation. I have reached the point where I can now recognise the pattern in the initial discussion and decline becoming the supervisor for both our sakes, in the hope that someone else will be better able to deal with the situation. As to what to do, clearly some way needs to be negotiated whereby the threads can be tweaked without the ball appearing to unravel. I do not wish to have to cope with this situation again, but offer these observations in the hope that either supervisors or supervisees will recognise themselves here, realise that their problem is not unique and devise a better solution to the dilemma.

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Conclusion How people approach research supervision, whether as supervisor or supervisee, is intricately bound up with a theory about how people function, change and relate to each other – in short, what psychologists term a theory of personality. Everyone has such theories that enable them to make sense of themselves and others, but most commonly they are relatively unexamined and often relegated to secondary importance in situations that are construed as scientific or addressed by a set of predetermined steps or rules. Those of us are fortunate who have at hand such a practical theory as PCP to help with the intricacies of challenging relationships, such as those between supervisor and student. Much is at stake – often many years of a person’s all too short life, their core concept of who they are, their livelihood and the well-being of their family. Despite its baggage, this is a rewarding venture of joint experimentation, one that has the potential to enrich the lives of student and supervisor alike. Hopefully, some of these experiences may be useful to others embarking on this journey. Irrespective, the series of joint experiments that I have been engaged in during the course of research supervision have been the most stimulating and enjoyable of my working life. My thanks to those current and former students for what I have learned from the relationship, and not just about supervision.

References Armstrong, S. J. (2004). The impact of supervisors’ cognitive styles on the quality of research supervision in management education. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 74, 599–616 Brown, G. & Atkins, M. (1988). Effective Teaching in Higher Education. London: Methuen Dalton, P. & Dunnett, G. (1992). A Psychology for Living: Personal Construct Theory for Professionals and Clients. Chichester: Wiley Delamont S., Atkinson P. & Parry O. (1997). Supervising the PhD: A Guide to Success. Buckingham: Open University Press Economic and Social Research Council (2001). Postgraduate Training Guidelines. Swindon: ESRC Kelly, G. A. (1955). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. New York: Norton Kelly, G. A. (1957/1969). Hostility. In B. Maher (ed.) Clinical Psychology and Personality: The Selected Papers of George Kelly. New York: Krieger

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Kelly, G. A. (1963/1969). The autobiography of a theory. In B. Maher (ed.) Clinical Psychology and Personality: The Selected Papers of George Kelly. New York: Krieger Lee, A. & Williams, C. (1999). Forged in fire: narratives of trauma in PhD supervision pedagogy. Southern Review, 32, 6–26 Marrow, A. J. (1969). The Practical Theorist: The Life and Work of Kurt Lewin. New York: Basic Books Pearson, M. & Brew, A. (2002). Research training and supervision development. Studies in Higher Education, 27, 135–150 Walker, B. M. (1992). Values and Kelly’s theory: becoming a good scientist. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 5, 259–269 Walker, B. M., Oades, L. G., Caputi, P., Stevens, C. D. & Crittenden N. (2000). Going beyond the scientist metaphor: from validation to experience cycles. In J. W. Scheer (ed.) The Person in Society: Challenges to a Constructivist Theory. Giessen: Psychsozial-Verlag Zuber-Skerritt, O. & Ryan, Y. (1994). Quality in Postgraduate Education. London: Kogan Page

Sective VII

And Finally … Reflections on Reflexivity

Chapter 26

Critical Consciousness in Action: Reflections on Reflection in, From and Beyond Personal Construct Psychology Bill Warren Bill is a Conjoint Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education and Arts, the University of Newcastle, Australia, where he taught philosophy. Now recently retired from full-time academic work he holds honorary and consulting positions, as well as appointments going to the legal and ethical regulation of psychology. He is a Clinical Psychologist who has been in private practice for over 25 years, a Fellow of the Australian Psychological Society and a Chartered Clinical Psychologist in the UK.

Elaborated aspects of theory: ‘applied psychology’, critical enquiry and individual autonomy, philosophical dimensions, praxis

Introduction The invitation to reflect on my involvement in personal construct psychology (PCP) through the lens of the notion of reflexivity took me primarily into philosophy, secondly to psychology and finally to PCP. The connection between two major fields of reflection and practice as I had experienced them as an academic and practitioner turned out to be grounded in a parReflections in Personal Construct Theory. Edited by Richard J. Butler © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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ticular philosophical outlook, one in which reflection on reflection was the key identifying feature. The observations that follow arise initially from some ‘second thoughts’ when the invitation to contribute to this volume was received; the first thought was whether I actually had anything to offer the project as I understood it. This was primarily because I had not previously given my mind to the matter of how reflexivity, which is at the core of the theory of PCP, ‘worked’ at the individual level and, indeed, at the level of myself. Reflexivity, reflection on reflection as I construe the term, ‘just was’ in my academic and practical work. The second thought went to a recollection of a discussion of some ideas raised in the context of PCP as an applied psychology (Warren 2002) and to a recollection of a broader attempt to mine the philosophical dimensions of PCP (Warren 1998). In essence, it seems that I had developed confidence in the theoretical integrity of PCP by reason of its not offending my core constructs of how philosophy is properly done. That ‘proper doing’ is, in fact, reflexivity understood as always going beneath the surface to elaborate deeper levels of meaning, and always maintaining openness to changing one’s meanings – key aspects of PCP. Indeed, I seem to have written on the relations between philosophy and psychology, and the role of PCP in smoothing those relations, in a much earlier time (Warren 1990a). What follows, then, is a brief synopsis of particular ideas of a number of philosophers who have been influential in forming my outlook in my work (and perhaps my life). Thus I have assembled a collage of ideas in the same spirit and intentions that guide the collage artist in the production of something that is a ‘collection’, yet holistically is more than its parts. Hopefully, a coherent ‘whole’ in these last terms will be found to have emerged.

PCP as ‘Applied Psychology’ One of the strengths of PCP from the point of view of a broadly humanist orientation is that the psychologist does not pose as an ‘expert’ whose psychological processes are somehow different from those of others, particularly from those who are seeking help. Thus PCP is not an ‘applied psychology’ in the normal sense of the term. That is to say, the psychologist applies the knowledge accumulated in the discipline to particular contexts such as therapy, education, management, and so on. Applied psychology is a psycho-technology, and PCP, when considered in terms of applied psychology, has some interesting resonances with ideas in the field of philosophy of technology (Warren 2002). Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), in

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discussing technology, makes a distinction that is illustrative for our present interests; Paulo Freire (1921–97) is equally illuminating of our topic. Heidegger’s distinction is between a form of thinking that is lost in an advanced technological society and one that is encouraged by life in such a society. Calculative thinking is encouraged by the idea that we can and should control nature. Thus, we celebrate puzzle-solving (problems in our mundane existence life, our being) at the expense of problem-solving (those going to our existential life, our Being), diminishing our capacity to reflect on the latter. The thinking that might restore our attention to questions of Being is meditative thinking, which ‘demands of us not to cling one-sidedly to a single idea, nor to run down a one-track course of ideas’ (Heidegger 1959/1966). That is, we extend our thinking and look to deeper dimensions of our experience for clues in the mundane of life, for understandings of the more inspiring, or the ‘universals’ of life and Life. PCP has very significant affinities with the notion of working with and working in (rather than working on) the world of those who seek help or guidance; the usual notion of ‘applied psychology’ works ‘on’ them. Therapy was a process of learning about the client’s world and being credulous concerning their views of that world, albeit it is a ‘psychological process which changes one’s outlook on some aspect of life’ (Kelly 1955/1991a; 1991b). Indeed, as Kelly (1964/1969) said, ‘for a good many years I have been impressed with the similarities between psychotherapeutic and research activities’. Working ‘with’ and researching ‘with’, collaboratively in each case, are activities of reflection and of dialogue, and collaboration and dialogue bring mutual, self- and other reflection. The perspective Heidegger offered sat very well with a broadly humanist and egalitarian outlook which had inspired my academic development and left me discomforted with a role for ‘authority figures’ – indeed, situations of sub- and superordination in any context. To pose as an expert in human behaviour and relationships is difficult, even if one does not go as far as Bannister (1966), who commented that psychologists’ performance in their personal lives demonstrates their lack of expertise in the area! Here, though, the obvious attractiveness of PCP is disclosed, born of the impacts of an introduction to Heidegger’s work in my own philosophical development. The second dimension to the discussion of PCP and applied psychology (Warren 2002) turned on two ideas in the work of Freire: praxis and conscientisation. More generally, Freire (1970; 1972) distinguished between education for domestication and education for liberation. The former sees us learn our ‘place’, accept an inferior position, limit our horizons and acknowledge our ignorance in the face of those who know more and better, and who, as a consequence, possess more. Education for liberation

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allows us to see through this last illusion, to recognise that real knowledge comes not from above and outside, but from within and as a result of our encounters with the world; not from ‘banking’ but from dialogue. Freire emphasised that genuine praxis was the inextricable connection between thinking and action, with action in a real world of dominance and submission always primary. Reflection is not armchair speculation and action is not that mindless responding that is mere violence or destruction. Words devoid of action are no more than ‘verbalisms’, and action devoid of reflection mere ‘activism’ (Freire 1972). Praxis is a dialectical unity between action and reflection, subjectivity and objectivity, from which there develops that critical reflection which is the core aspect of conscientisation. This last concept refers to a deepening of awareness and understanding of the essential aspects of the relationships among people. Our humanity derives from our life with others, and that humanity will be richer when we not only critically reflect on our existence but also critically act on it (Freire 1970). Despite the odds against us, this deepening is possible because even given that the consciousness of human beings is subjected to all kinds of social and political forces which impose on us and condition, indoctrinate and influence us in a myriad of ways, we can recognise that we are so impacted. Conscientisation means overcoming illusions, a deepened awareness of things, a determination to see through the immediate reality presented to us and to act through a continuous process of action–reflection–action. These ideas from Freire and Heidegger capture why PCP is not an ‘applied psychology’. PCP does not attempt to impose understandings held by the psychologist, but is credulous. It starts with how the other sees things and, just as practice precedes theory in Freire, so understandings are lifted from rather than imposed on what the client brings. Both our and the client’s logic is elaborated to reveal, we might say, whether it represents a progressive or a degenerating research paradigm in the individual’s own life (with apologies to Lakatos 1970; Feyerabend 1975). A progressive programme brings new and novel hypotheses and its theoretical dimension is consistent with its empirical dimensions. By repeatedly examining the programme we as individuals have in place by a stance of ‘permanent reflection’ towards it in terms of its status as stagnating or progressive, we have the best possibility of progress in our understanding.

Relevant Key Ideas from other Philosophers Despite arguments that Kelly did not properly acknowledge the intellectual roots of PCP (Bruner 1956; Neimeyer 1985), there were numerous philo-

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sophical ‘links and latencies’ in his magnum opus where he does take the trouble to align his theory with some important philosophical positions (Warren 1998). Thus my second thoughts turned to these philosophers. While not wishing to make too strong a case for Kelly having had particular perspectives in mind, there is compatibility between PCP and a number of ideas that go to my present focus. Those which are particularly relevant to my discussion are Socrates’ quest, Baruch Spinoza’s conatus and his coneption of reflexivity, John Locke’s project of clarification, and the mind’s power to act on sense impressions, Edmund Husserl’s epoche, Herbert Marcuse’s focus on rescuing the individual and on critical reasoning, and ideas from a thinker of the anarcho-psychological tradition of western thought. A brief review of these ideas is important for our project here.

1. Socrates’ examined life In the Apology (38a) Socrates says: ‘the greatest good of man is daily to converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you have heard me examining myself and others … the life which is unexamined is not worth living’. This sentiment has echoed down the centuries and is perhaps synonymous with Socrates himself, whose life was one of unfettered enquiry into ‘how things are’ in contrast to ‘how we would like them to be’. Too much of such enquiry and challenge, when his examinations went to the claims to know made by others, saw him tried and sentenced to death. Socrates’ life was an educative one in that he encouraged and showed by example what the aim of true education is: to find out ‘the reason why’, to ‘give an account of things’, to install knowledge in the place of opinion (Anderson 1931/1962). Those who were tightly wedded to and who identified with their opinions found this far too challenging. By contrast to and in frequent disputation with Socrates were the Sophists. The Sophists were the first professional teachers, if this is understood to mean that they were paid for passing on information, and they had an uncritical attitude to the information they did pass on. Essentially, the graduates of their teaching merely amassed a store of opinion which left them uninterested in evaluating – seriously evaluating – that opinion; they remained ignorant and, worse, ignorant that they were ignorant of ‘real knowledge’. Real knowledge is based on sound principles that are accepted and upheld because the individual grasps their significance and truth, and ‘not because they have been handed on … they cannot be handed on but must be arrived at by man’s own thinking. … the really important process is that which goes on in the mind of the pupil, and that is thinking or learning’ (Anderson 1931/1962).

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2. Spinoza’s conatus and reflexivity The philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), one of the most systematic of philosophers, developed a comprehensive metaphysics. In his system, minds are dynamic entities which interact with other things in the world, striving to preserve their own existence under a concept of conatus. His system sees all things understood in terms of interconnection; the psychological, the social, the political, the epistemological, ethics and even God are explained in terms of interactions within the system. Spinoza’s notion of the conatus is that of an endeavour, drive or effort towards self-preservation: ‘each thing, in so far as it is in itself, endeavours to persevere in its being’ (Ethics III, proposition 6). Conatus ensures that any and every individual thing is preserved in its status as a distinct thing, that it does not merge into and become indistinguishable from other things and merely part of a chaotic flux of ‘stuff ’. For us as human beings conatus is understood as ‘desire’. Spinoza speaks of active and passive mental states, the former being those that originate from the individual, the latter in reaction to contact with the world beyond the individual. The passive emotions are obstructions to conatus and, when thus acting in terms of external influences, an individual thing, an individual human being, is not acting in accordance with its own nature and is acting irrationally. Active emotions are those that flow from conatus and are rational in that they recognise their origins in the individual, by contrast to an origin, in that thing’s reactions to things in the world are external to the individual. The second idea from Spinoza is more problematic because it takes one into the epistemological position that is rationalism, and this is not what is of interest here; nor will we go there in a descriptive piece. Suffice to note that Spinoza’s notion of clear and distinct ideas is a feature of his attempt to write a comprehensive, logical account of ‘all that there is’, through which work his fame was established. What is important about clear and distinct ideas is less whether the method of reasoning that Spinoza argued for is defensible, but rather the notion that we have ‘ideas of ideas’. Spinoza called this ‘reflexive knowledge’ and it describes a situation in which ‘when we have genuine knowledge, we necessarily realize that we have genuine knowledge’ (Hampshire 1951). His is a logical point addressing how we reason from one truth to another within his system – a form of coherence theory of truth. The point here, though, is the notion of the mind organising ideas into classes or grades, striving always for the level or grade that is the highest – ‘intuitive knowledge’.

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3. Locke’s project and the mind’s power While PCP is sometimes linked to Kant’s rationalism, the project that John Locke (1632–1704) attempted, and one aspect of his discussion in his key work of the empiricist tradition, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, is of interest here. The project was given in his acknowledgement that his labour was a ‘clearing of the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge. … To break in upon the sanctuary of vanity and ignorance [and be of] some service to human understanding’ (Locke 1689/1965). Of course, Locke made a much deeper and wider contribution to philosophy, but it is the notion of clearing the field of epistemology of distraction and errors, and the role given to the mind, that is of interest here. Locke set out ‘not to teach, but to inquire’ (Locke 1689/1965). That much is straightforward and his work at that level is a direct example of the reflection that characterises philosophy generally. In addition, though, he does not see the mind as a mere receiver of information about which it forms that building block of knowledge, the ‘idea’; he also gives the mind the power of reflection. It is through this power of reflection on ideas that Locke rebuts the rationalists’ challenge that one has knowledge of, for example, a unicorn, or the notion of infinity, or even God, even though the mind has not encountered these in experience. Locke’s response is that the mind is active and, in his chapters titled ‘Of Discerning, and other Operations of the Mind’ (XI) and ‘Of Complex Ideas’ (XII), he gives an account of the mind’s power to distinguish between the ideas it has, to reflect on its own operations in relation to simple ideas and to construct complex ideas from those simple ones. He conceives of a mind which is active even at the simplest level of its dealings with the information that comes to it through the senses. Incidentally, and strengthening the point here, he also distinguishes wit, humour and quickness of mind, all of which amuse us by combining ideas randomly and without regard to their congruity, from judgement which takes the careful separation of ideas as its starting point less we be ‘misled by similitude, and by affinity to take one thing for another’ (Locke 1689/1965).

4. Husserl’s epoche The German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) provides a different perspective on reflecting on reflection, centred now very much in epistemology and logic, and further illuminating of our present project. By

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looking at the lack of ‘purity’ in what Locke took to be the building blocks of knowledge, that is, ‘ideas’, a methodology for the mind’s reflection is suggested. Husserl was a key figure, perhaps the key figure, in that tradition of thought that is phenomenology. Among various contributions to the field of epistemology he made, either directly or through the ideas he left others such as Heidegger to develop, was his notion that to attain real knowledge one had to free the mind from everyday experiences which imposed distortions of one sort or another. The term epoche was used by the Greek Sceptics to refer to a ‘suspension of judgement’ in relation to what was being asserted by an opponent – in their context, the dogmatic assertions of an opponent in an argument or debate. Husserl uses the term to refer to a procedure wherein, recognising the distortions of our pre-existing views and opinions, we must ‘bracket them out’ and see things ‘as they are’ if we are to come to genuine knowledge. What he calls the ‘natural attitude’ is distinguished from the ‘phenomenological attitude’, the first being our everyday life of encounters with the things of the world, the second a more critical and distanced attitude insofar as our taken-for-granted, natural attitude is concerned. The phenomenological epoche requires that we look at the intentions through or with which we otherwise deal with the world ‘unthinkingly’, so to speak. Husserl’s phenomenological attitude is the reflective attitude, in contrast to the ‘things taken for granted’ attitude that commonly (usually or ‘naturally’) characterises our dealings with the world. This is not merely a ‘reflection on reflection’ in terms of the specifics of the views or interests or intentions we impose in advance, and an exposure of how these colour or determine what we take to be such and such, or so and so. More than this, it is an exercise in examining the activity of reflection itself.

5. Marcuse’s individual, and critical vs. instrumental reason The work of Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), a ‘Freudian Marxist’ and representative of the Frankfurt School, is also relevant here. Like our other mentors he wrote on a very wide canvas, only two small parts of his output being of interest here. These are his discussion of the impacts of advanced technology on the individual and his distinction between substantive or critical reason, and technological or instrumental reason. Marcuse’s (1941) essay on modern technology shifted ‘blame’ from either of the two dominant modes capitalism and socialism, to the technological system operating as what Ellul (1980) was to call a ‘self-augmenting system’. In that system, Marcuse discerned a shift in the concept of the individual and the operation of a particular form of reasoning. The idea of an indi-

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vidual as ‘the subject of certain fundamental standards and values which no external authority was supposed to encroach on’ (Marcuse 1941) gave way to a different idea. This was that of a benevolent social-political system bestowing another determined package of commodities, access to which the individual came to believe represented true freedom and true individuality. However, what had in reality happened was that ‘individualistic rationality’, which gives us difference, had been transformed into technical rationality, which produced sameness. Thus his later work was titled One-Dimensional Man (1964/1970) to stress the limitations and narrowing, as people are fitted to the system in contrast to the system serving person: ‘individual distinctions in aptitude, insight and knowledge are transformed into different quanta of skill and training, to be co-ordinated at any time within the common framework of standardized performances’ (Marcuse 1941). Further, Marcuse stressed that in the system he had first described in terms of Freudian and Marxist perspectives in Eros and Civilization (1955/1969), and had come fully to the fore by the 1960s, the individual was generally oblivious to what had happened and was happening. As he expresses it so forcefully, ‘the overpowering machine of education and entertainment unites him with all others in a state of anaesthesia from which all detrimental ideas tend to be excluded’ (Marcuse 1955/1969). Thus the demise of a qualitative sense of ‘the individual’ and the emergence of a merely qualitative one, acting in the technological system as a mere ‘human resource’ valued more for conformity to a ‘type’ than for difference, recalcitrance or having a ‘useless’ aesthetic dimension to his or her being. Further still, in this same system a particular style of reasoning develops and is enshrined; what is called technological reason in his early work, and instrumental or positivistic (that is, the allegedly ‘neutral’ reasoning of science) in the Frankfurt School more generally. The other is critical reasoning, which is a mode of thinking through things that is purified, so to speak, of other-determined, false imperatives or needs. The chief characteristic of this last is that it does not put equal significance on the use-value of enquiry and knowledge. By contrast, technological rationality is essentially utilitarian in its outlook and exploitative of the world. The one, critical reasoning, pursues, or is capable of pursuing, reflection ‘for its own sake’, whereas the other, instrumental reasoning, will always have external imperatives, most often laid down by power elites in social systems. A distinction that Erich Fromm (1964) makes between intelligence and reason illustrates from another perspective the distinction in focus. The former, reason, he says, is our ‘faculty for grasping the world with the help of thought, in contradistinction to intelligence, which is man’s ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought’. Through reason we arrive at the truth, whereas

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‘intelligence is man’s instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man’ (1964).

6. The anarcho-psychological tradition Finally, some thoughts from further afield. Anarchism, taken at its most fundamental, is a rejection of de jure authority (authority ‘by right’); rejecting, that is, that there is a legitimate basis for one individual or group claiming superordination over another individual or group. This is a complex and controversial position which in the modern world likely has its chief purchase on our interest in terms of its representing an ideal for which human beings might strive rather than a viable form of organisation for society as it is. Most usually the particular target of the anarchist criticism is the legitimacy of the state, but one particular thinker has a broader outlook that is of greater interest here. While he might have rejected the label ‘anarchist’, Max Stirner (1806–56) was a thinker whose ideas are highly consistent with the previous account of that position. He was an uncompromising exponent of the view that the grip of external imperatives on the individual must be removed (freedom from) but, far more importantly, so must the control exercised by internalised moral principles. These are imposed on us from an early age and condition conformity and submissiveness. These principles become ‘spooks’ which operate as part of a ‘wheel in the head’ which keeps all our thoughts and actions under surveillance and control. In an early essay on education Stirner distinguishes an educated person from a free person, the former using knowledge to ‘better’ him- or herself and fall in with this or that ideological set of beliefs. Merely educated people accommodate themselves to circumstances ‘in the most highly educated and elegant manner and degenerate into subservient cringing souls’ (Stirner 1842/1967). By contrast, the person who is free to can pass the real test of freedom, which is to be able to rid oneself of any particular idea (Stirner 1844/1963). Moreover, in the bigger picture, insurrection is far more important than revolution. In the latter we become free from a particular ‘constitution’ and ways of organising social life in terms of it, and supplant this fixed view with that fixed view of how things are. In the former we become ‘constitution-less’ and refuse to accept fixed views or any views that are not our own. Stirner, along with Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoevsky, is a paramount exemplar of what Carroll (1974) called ‘the anarcho-psychological tradition’. This tradition, Carroll argues, ‘prepared the way for Freud’s work, and for the subsequent modern interest in inner psychological man’ and

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which ‘played a crucial role in the emergence of the existential tradition’, in addition to articulating the theoretical outlook of ‘individualist types’ like the artist, the bohemian and l’homme de lettres (Carroll 1974).

Personal Construct Psychology in the Light of these Ideas PCP, for me, provides a psychology for the higher-order theories. Its ideographic focus keeps faith overtly with attention to the individual, and covertly it is compatible with the ambitions of those higher theories. In addition to the argument that PCP was not an ‘applied psychology’ as usually understood but saw things closer to the way Heidegger did, and that it sat comfortably with Freire’s ideas, we can make further observations in relation to the present topic. In PCP we find a view of human beings who constantly ask questions and strive for meaning. Thus the metaphor of ‘man-as-scientist’ in PCP and the idea of science, in its essential nature as enquiry, sits in a tradition that takes us back to the greatest of the ancient philosophers. Human beings make meaning, interrelate to test that meaning and, if they are mentally healthy, change the meanings as experience fails to validate their meanings. Reflexivity vis-à-vis the theory that is PCP has a parallel in the mental life of the well-functioning individual who reflects on his or her reflections and is open to change, at least in the optimal case. Socrates is the gold standard for such an outlook. The model of mind in Spinoza and his notion of conatus have significant affinities with PCP (Warren 1990b). That there needs to be a tendency to self-maintenance, the perseverance or preservation of one’s self, is analogous to the idea of core constructs which regulate the notion of self in PCP. A model of a mind which has access to its own ‘contents’, and can order those contents and evaluate them, is equally comfortable within PCP. A metaphysic that allowed for individuals ‘to be’, for the concept to have legitimacy, and, moreover, was necessary and on logical grounds, expressed in and through a most thoroughgoing systematic philosophy, provides obvious support for a psychology which has made the individual central to its theorising. Equally, in Spinoza’s argument that minds do not have the threefold division (cognition, affect, will) bequeathed to us by the ancient Greeks and where emotion and cognition are not opposite aspects but complementary is a view that is specifically consistent with PCP. Locke too offers an example of reflection turned to the material which the mind amasses and can take critically; reflection on the ideas in the mind itself.

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From the perspective that is PCP, Locke’s example of analysis and enquiry, which saw built up a comprehensive theory of knowledge, holds no fear for PCP. The notion that I might ‘get past’, rather than merely celebrate and dogmatically defend, particular understandings or the meanings I make (as male, as Australian, as a person of my age and unique biography), sits well with PCP. That I might thereby illuminate deeper features of the world in which I was situated, expose, that is, ‘universals’ of the human predicament, is equally compatible because there is in the process of validation a search for something beyond merely solipsistic certainties. That PCP has a comfortable ‘location’ in the tradition of thought emanating from Hegel through Husserl, a tradition of depth and comprehensiveness itself that leads one into hermeneutics, where PCP has an even more comfortable location (Chiari, 2000; Chiari & Nuzzo 2000; Warren 2000), ought to be, and was, a source of confidence. Further, it has a comfortable fit with that reasoning that is critical reasoning and a view of the individual as needing to be liberated from ‘false needs’ and live in a society that is democratic and in which an egalitarianism prevails (Warren 1996). Further, what a powerful notion of reflexivity is in operation in Stirner, one which radically challenges all of our reflections and the beliefs and understandings they generate. We look at all we believe and challenge it through the lens of whether we came to it and hold on to it by reason of our own critical enquiries or by its having been imposed on us by others and held in place by one or other of the ‘spooks’; that is, the moral and other principles which we are supposed to live up to. Thus was Stirner’s book subtitled The Case for the Individual against Authority and described as the most formidable assault on authoritarianism ever launched, a natural companion in my bookcase to The Psychology of Personal Constructs (Kelly 1955).

Summary and Conclusion All of the foregoing ideas, true or false ideas and for better or worse ideas, are those that provided the primary illumination of my academic development in philosophy. The likes of Socrates, Spinoza, Locke, Husserl or Marcuse and Freire, and especially Stirner, provide a great challenge for us to look beyond the mere ‘givens’ of a situation or event. They ask us to immerse ourselves in a world of practice and adopt a stance of permanent critical enquiry towards that world; never to be complacent in regard to what we think we know, but to challenge ourselves and our primary reflec-

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tions. These reflections are those of the ‘natural attitude’, those whose object is ‘the given’ and is too easily turned to focus on ‘false needs’ embodying ideas which govern me rather than me governing them. Further, when asked a particular question we should always ask: ‘What question is being ignored when I am asked to respond to this particular question?’ Uncritical reflection sees me celebrated for reasoning cleverly and with but a puzzle-solving orientation, which distracts me from other, perhaps bigger and more fundamental questions. Critical reflection based in practice sees those more fundamental questions automatic in our thinking, a thinking that emanates in a mind that functions in a ‘conscientised’ fashion. This looking beyond the givens, beyond what is obvious or comfortable or cherished by way of belief and understanding, captures the notion of reflexivity as reflecting on one’s own reflecting, and in the most fundamental way. It counsels us also not to become too complacent, too sure of oneself, too dogmatic. One has to suspend judgement, to bracket out that which is merely accidental, and be ready to give up a particular construction of one’s world and of the world. Not to be able to do so is to be snared by one or other of the plethora of ideologies ready to take ownership of us; thus we would not have ownership of self. Reflexivity is, necessarily, freedom to and this is in play in a democratic system where an egalitarian outlook thrives; PCP rests on the assumption of an underpinning egalitarian society. Reflexivity, in terms of the theory that is PCP ‘explaining itself’, has a parallel with that same reflection on reflection in that it describes in the individual, and which is highly compatible with core ideas in some of the most thoroughgoing philosophical traditions and perspectives, but particularly the anarcho-psychological tradition. More, though, the theory that is PCP accepts that it would not itself become a ‘spook’, a ‘wheel in the head’, because not only was it able to account for itself, but it urged its own demise if and when it was no longer helpful to our understanding of things. Further still, it tries to understand things as the individual sees them, giving integrity to the individual by its adoption of a credulous attitude as a stepping-off point for further inquiry into that way of seeing. The philosophers who have inspired my development were the philosophers of the left, philosophers of process, of criticism, but also of ‘getting things clear’, of disciplined thinking, of critical enquiry. They were philosophers of, or compatible with, give or take, the ethos of the anarcho-psychological tradition, those who championed the individual. The ideographic perspective of PCP is highly compatible with this. Thus, my take on reflexivity is to see it in a particular way of doing philosophy evidenced in particular philosophers and a key feature of particular

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traditions and/or modes of philosophy – chiefly, analytic and critical modes. From that perspective, PCP is assessed, and thus far has passed the assessment. It requires us to regain a focus on the bigger questions and the real problems of life, and to see through the ‘spin’ that would rationalise false needs as true needs. It stresses meditative thinking and critical reasoning, instead of calculative thinking and slavish acceptance of demands that everything be valued against a yardstick of instrumentalism, of its value ‘in use’ to some material end or outcome. Reflexivity, as here construed, is the essence of a progressive, and the negation of a degenerating, research programme, and, both internally and externally, PCP remains a progressive programme.

References Anderson, J. (1931/1962). Socrates as an educator. In J. Anderson (ed.) Studies in Empirical Philosophy. Sydney: Angus & Robertson Bannister, D. (1966). Psychology as an exercise in paradox. Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, 19, 21–26 Bruner, J. S. (1956). You are your constructs. Contemporary Psychology, 1, 355–357 Carroll, J. (1974). Breakout from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique, Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Chiari, G. (2000). Personal construct theory and the constructivist family: a friendship to cultivate, a marriage not to celebrate. In J. W. Scheer (ed.) The Person in Society: Challenges to a Constructivist Theory. Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag Chiari, G. & Nuzzo, M. L. (2000). Hermeneutics and constructivist psychotherapy: the psychotherapeutic process in a hermeneutic constructivist framework. In J. W. Scheer (ed.) The Person in Society: Challenges to a Constructivist Theory. Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag Ellul, J. (1980). The Technological System. Trans. J. Neugroschel. New York: Continuum. (First published 1977, in French) Feyerabend, P. (1975). Against Method. London: NLB Freire, P. (1970) Cultural action and conscientization. Harvard Educational Review, 40, 205–225 Freire, P. (1972). Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Fromm, E. (1964). The Sane Society. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Hampshire, S. (1951). Spinoza. Harmondsworth: Pelican Heidegger, M. (1959/1966). Discourse on Thinking. Trans. J. M. Anderson & E. H. Freund. Introduction J. M. Anderson. New York: Harper & Row Kelly, G. A. (1955) The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volumes 1 and 2. New York: Norton (reprinted London: Routledge, 1991)

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Kelly, G. A. (1964/1969). The strategy of psychological research. In B. Maher (ed.) Clinical Psychology and Personality: The Selected Papers of George Kelly. London: John Wiley & Sons Kelly, G. A. (1991a). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volume 1. A Theory of Personality. London: Routledge Kelly, G. A. (1991b). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. Volume 2. Clinical Diagnosis and Psychotherapy. London: Routledge Lakatos, I. (1970). Falsification and the methodology of scientific research programmes. In I. Lakatos & A. Musgrave (eds.) Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press Locke, J. (1689/1965). Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Abridged, edited and Introduction M. Cranston. New York: Collier Marcuse, H. (1941). Some implications of modern technology. Philosophy of Science, 414–439 Marcuse, H. (1955/1969). Eros and Civilization. London: Sphere Marcuse, H. (1964/1970). One-Dimensional Man. London: Sphere Neimeyer, R. A. (1985). Problems and prospects in personal construct psychology. In D. Bannister (ed.) Issues and Approaches in Personal Construct Theory. London: Academic Press Stirner, M. (1842/1967). The False Principle in Our Education, or Humanism and Realism. Trans. R. Beebe. Colorado Springs, CO: Ralph Miles Stirner, M. (1844/1963). The Ego and His Own: The Case for the Individual against Authority. Trans. S. Byington. Ed. with annotations and Introduction J. J. Martin. New York: Libertarian Book Club Warren, W. G. (1990a). Personal construct psychology as the ground for a rapproachment between psychology and philosophy in education. Educational Philosophy & Theory, 28, 31–39 Warren, W. G. (1990b). Is personal construct psychology a cognitive psychology? International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 3, 393–414 Warren, W. G. (1996). The egalitarian outlook as the underpinning of the theory of personal constructs. In D. Kalekin-Fishman & B. M. Walker (eds.) The Construction of Group Realities: Culture, Society, and Personal Construct Theory. Malaba, FL: Krieger Warren, W. G. (1998). Philosophical Dimensions of Personal Construct Psychology. London: Routledge Warren, W. G. (2000). Personal construct psychology, neostructuralism and hermeneutics. In J. W. Scheer (ed.) The Person in Society: Challenges to a Constructivist Theory. Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag Warren, W. G. (2002). Personal construct psychology and applied psychology. In J. Raskin & S. Bridges (eds.) Studies in Meaning: Exploring Constructivist Psychology. New York: Pace University Press

Index

ABC model 265–7 abuse 348, 357, 377–80, 384 ‘act as if’ experimentation 122, 215 aggression 15, 161–74, 228, 231 agoraphobia 11, 115 AIDS 299 alternative self 348–9, 359 Alzheimer Café 140 anarchism 414 anger 113, 183, 185, 189–191, 283, 348, 357–8, 384 anti-social behaviour 83 anxiety 10, 113, 211, 228, 283, 297, 357–8 Asperger’s syndrome 16 autism 16 awareness 350, 381 axis of reference 8 behaviour as asking a question 14 behaviour therapy 196 behavioural theories 3 behaviourism 4, 5, 178 bereavement 305, 308–10 bipolarity 36, 152, 284 bracketing 204 Buddhism 82, 99, 247

calculative thinking 407 choice corollary 7, 14, 24, 33, 88, 114, 118, 150, 179, 187–8, 190–2, 196, 198, 205, 229–30, 259, 287, 349, 358, 376 cluster analysis 11 cognitive behaviour therapy 100–101 cognitive behaviourism 5 cognitive complexity 148 collective vulnerability 273 commonality corollary 7, 16, 96, 151, 201, 224, 280, 294 community of selves 11, 29, 125, 184, 226, 259 community psychology 82–3 conatus 410, 415 conscientisation 407–8 constellatory construct 11, 181, 353 constriction 15, 112, 169, 297, 397 construct as a narrative tree 26 as a psychological process 353 as concerned with action 24 as emotional 23 as interactional 30 as inter-personal 34 as narrative 25 as perceptual 23

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as personal 27 as positional 32 as relational 34 as situational 29 as social 30 definition of 8 permeability 10 versus cognition 168, 205–6 versus concept 8, 37 construct elicitation description 8, 9 triadic 9, 47 construction corollary 7, 85, 90, 169–72, 174, 213,294 constructivist 104, 162 constructivist therapy 5 constructivist tradition 4 core construct 13, 121, 125–126, 224, 226, 258, 357, 380, 400, 406, 415 core construing 26, 122–5, 385 core role structure 13, 182, 190, 198, 201, 210, 217, 351–2, 354 countertransference 369, 380 CPC cycle 14, 104 creativity cycle 12, 26, 89–90, 225, 347, 391–2 credulous approach 16, 85, 89, 97–8, 100, 102–6, 204, 252–5, 343, 362–364, 366, 368, 371, 407–8 criminal behaviour 83 critical reasoning 413, 418 cross-cultural psychology 334 cultural impact 333 culture 334, 336 death 297, 299, 301–3, 309, 311 death anxiety 298–300 deception 268 delusions 73–74 dementia 138–40 dependency 11, 256–7, 259, 282 dependency grid 11, 257 depression 15, 327, 337, 369 dialectical materialism 325

dialogical self 32 dichotomy corollary 7, 8, 152, 264 dilation 15, 325, 397 egalitarian outlook 407 elaboration of construing definition 15, 119, 179, 188, 190, 212, 287, 349 extension 15, 118, 179, 187–8, 190, 229, 349 horizontal 122 vertical 122 elements 8, 10 elicitation of constructs triadic 343 emergent pole 8, 351, 355 empiricism 4, 5 epistemological context 4, 5, 412 epoche 412 equal expertise 116, 121 evidence base 101–2, 252 existential phenomenology 201–2 existential thought 201 existentialism 383 experience corollary 7, 15, 146, 323–4 experience cycle 14 experiential personal construct psychotherapy (EPCP) 362–3, 365–6, 368–70, 375–378, 383–5 eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) 358 family construct 31, 32 family construct system (FCS) 31–3, 36 family grid 33 family system 353 fear 134, 323, 358 fixed role journey 367, 370 fixed role sketch 69, 254 fixed role therapy 12, 46, 89, 212–13, 254

Index flow 247 focus of convenience 10, 206 foundationalism 5 fragmentation corollary 7, 14, 27, 87–8, 224–227, 255, 297 fundamental postulate 6, 149, 203, 205, 366 gestalt psychology 203 goodness of fit 258 GPACK programme 150–1, 154 GRIDSTAT programme 150 grief 301, 306–7 guilt 13, 133, 178–82, 184–7, 192, 217, 258, 354, 356 hallucinations 364, 368 Headstart 341 hierarchy of constructs 12, 13, 25, 117, 123, 151, 288, 322 horizontalisation 204 hostility 15, 113–14, 132, 168, 189, 212, 231, 399 Human Relations Area File 340 humanist philosophy 406–7 ice floe problem 51 identity as a dancer 213 as a lecturer 214–16, 218 as a singer 213–16 as a tatooee 223 images of illness 284 impgrid 12 implication grid 12, 62, 323, 327 implication of change 322–3 implicative dilemma 266, 332 implicit pole 8 impulsiveness 14 individuality corollary 7, 9, 17, 223–4, 294, 413 INGRID programme 147 intentionality 200, 205

423

invalidation 15, 112, 229, 348, 365, 367–368, 393, 398 instrumental reasoning 413 joint action 170 laddering 9, 123–124, 142, 155, 224, 320 liberation 247 loaded question 256, 266 logical conceptualisation 5 logical positivism 5, 325 loose construing 12, 63, 260, 347 low level of awareness 14, 113, 123, 126, 224, 228 mania 377 manic behaviour 15, 381 meditative thinking 407, 418 metaphor and symbolisation 5 man-as-scientist 4, 14, 17, 60, 199, 202–3, 266, 273, 296, 349, 390, 415 self as mirror 244 self narrative 307, 309 therapy as journey 190 modulation corollary 7, 10, 227 narrative coherence 27 networks of enterprise 295 nocturnal enuresis 15 non-validation 288 nonvalidation 393 objective thought 202–3, 206 obsessive behaviour 12, 271 optimum therapeutic distance 366 organisation corollary 7, 13, 117, 150–2, 155, 225 orthogonal angle 12 OVERALS programme 153

424

Index

paranoid behaviour 15 passionate pretence 215–16 performance profiling 14, 116–17 peripheral construct 17 phenomenology 199–205, 207, 412 postmodernism 5, 201 pragmatism 199–200, 207 praxis 407–8 pre-emptive construct 11, 326 pre-verbal construct 8, 142, 224 principal component analysis 11 professional constructs 16 propositional construct 11 propositional experiment 122 psychoanalytic theory 59, 178, 203 psychodynamic theories 3, 4 psychodynamic thinking 282 psychological disorder 15 pyramiding 10, 118, 320 qualitative grid 33 radical constructivism 169–72 range corollary 7 range of convenience 10, 332 rational emotive therapy 5 rationalism 4, 5, 410–11 realism 5, 202 reconstruction 358 reflection 14, 248, 279, 319–20, 322, 339, 364, 384–5, 398, 407–9, 411–12, 415–17 reflexivity 18, 36, 57–9, 61, 64–5, 74–5, 80, 126, 131–2, 143, 146, 205, 218, 222–3, 233, 251, 269, 296, 324, 326, 332–3, 341, 343, 379, 385, 405–6, 415–17 regret 230 relationality corollary 34 repertory grid 11, 145–50, 153–6, 197, 305, 307–8, 321, 323 resistance to change 17, 320–31, 332 resistance to change grid 13, 323 responsibility 363–364, 383–5

restorative justice 272–4 reverence 369–70 Role Construct Repertory Test 47 ROLE relationship 16, 362, 366, 368–70, 376, 378–81 rule of equivalence 334 ruminative behaviour 14 scepticism 5 schizoaffective disorder 377 schizophrenia 98, 115, 365 self 11, 118–19, 122–6, 139, 213, 349, 363, 376, 384 as stand alone 363 as subject ‘I’ 240–241 as the object ‘ME’ 242–244 self characterisation 9, 205, 256 self competence 124 self concept 119 self determination 124 self esteem 12, 119, 121, 246 self identity 240, 247 self identity plots 307 self image 12, 119, 121, 258–9 Self Image Profile 12, 120–122 self–other constancy 376 self–other permanence 376–7, 381, 384 self reliance 124 self respect 124 self system 245 serial invalidation 15, 63 sexual offenders 84 shock 113 situational resources grid 257, 259 slot rattling 10, 114, 260, 327, 342, 351–2 social constructionism 163, 165, 167, 169–73 social learning theory 83, 196–197 social phobia 196 social skills training 196–197

Index sociality corollary 7, 16, 34, 83, 87, 89, 116, 124, 126, 131–7, 141, 143, 169, 222–3, 253, 269, 273, 289–90, 365–6, 370, 376, 392, 397 Socratic discussion 332, 409 sophists 409 space binding 395–396 sports psychology 116 structural arrest 142, 183, 352 stuttering 15, 116 submerged pole 10, 332, 351–2, 355 subordinate construct 14, 118 subsume others construing 17 suicidal thinking 133 suicide 294, 304–305 suicide intervention 302–304 Suicide Intervention Response Inventory 303 superordinate construct 13, 25, 118, 224–7 supervision 390–394, 398–400 supplied construct 9, 98, 120

425

suspended element 16, 297, 367 suspending judgement 350–353 TARGET programme 147 technological reasoning 413 Test for Schizophrenic Thought Disorder 64 thanatology 296–297 theory characteristics of 6 thought disorder 12, 15, 62–63, 97, 115, 368 threat 13, 96, 133, 166, 168, 272, 297, 357–58, 378 Threat Index 297–298 tight construing 12, 63, 115, 327, 395 time binding 181, 183, 395 transcendental ego 200 traumatic loss 307 traumatology 306 ubuntu 276 validation 15, 125, 368