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Levels
of cognitive awareness |
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"The level of
cognitive
awareness ranges
from high to low. A high-level construct is one which is readily
expressed in
socially effective symbols; whose alternatives are both readily
accessible,
which falls well within the range of convenience of the client's major
constructions; and which is not suspended by its superordinating
constructs." (Kelly,
1955/1991,
Vol.2 , p. 6/1991).
Personal constructs come into use at
various levels of our awareness. Construing at a high-level involves
what we
usually call "conscious awareness" or "thinking". Construing at this
high level
of awareness also means that the alternatives (or opposite poles)
specified in
each personal construct are available to us. At the lowest level there
is preverbal
construing which has no verbal labels attached it, and so cannot be
consciously
"thought about". Although Kelly states that preverbal construing may or
may not
occur before the onset of speech - and so have no verbal labels
attached to it
- in general practice constructs that have been developed after the
onset of
language are more often referred to as "non-verbal constructs". It has
been
suggested that an alternative term for such construing is tacit
construing
(Neimeyer, 1981).
Kelly proposed that these "levels of
cognitive awareness" be substituted for unconscious
processes. His
reasons
for making this change are crucial for our understanding of his psychology of
personal constructs. Freud and other psychodynamic theorists
believed
that
some physical energy was necessary to explain why people moved at all.
That
notion stemmed from the fact that physicists of the time saw the world
as
consisting of "inert" matter which could only be moved by some "force"
or
"energy". Freud came from a scientific background and so reasonably
argued that
some "force" was needed to prod human beings into action. This energy
system in
human beings he called "psychic energy". That energy was seen as
residing in
the Id of the personality and
together they formed The Unconscious.
Kelly said
he did not want to start from that point. He saw human beings as being
"living"
and not "inert" matter and, if that were so, one essential ingredient
of living
matter is that it moves. The issue for psychology, he argued, is to
explain why
we move as we do. So important did he think this whole issue to be that
he
incorporated it into the Fundamental Postulate
of his theory. It is "a
person's processes that are
psychologically channelized by the ways in which he
anticipates events". He says: "For
our purposes, the person is not an
object
which is temporarily in a moving state but is himself a form of motion"
(Kelly,
1955/1991, p. 48/Vol 1 p. 34). Thus, the notion of "unconscious"
construing is
as fundamental in personal construct theory as is "conscious"
construing . And
it is this aspect of Kelly's theory that makes it crucially different
from all
psychodynamic theories.
In order to deal with construing that
takes
place outside our conscious awareness, Kelly proposed that we consider
all our
construing as taking place at various levels
of cognitive awareness.
The lowest
level of cognitive awareness is preverbal
construing - which is
developed
before the onset of language and is definitely "unconscious". Then
there is submergence
- in which one pole of a personal construct is not available, and suspension -
in which one or more of the
elements making
up a construct have been "dropped out" when a new construct is formed;
he
relates this to forgetting
and repression.
But there are also other constructs
within
Kelly's theory which render aspects of our construing "unconscious".
These are, subordination, impermeability and loosening.
However, it is interesting
to note
that Kelly sees these latter ways of construing as only "unconscious"
from a
therapist's point of view and not from the client's. Kelly says: "The
therapist
may observe the apparent shifting that goes on under loose
conceptualization
and, because he cannot follow it, hypothesize that some stable
unconscious
conceptualization is taking place" (Kelly, 1955/1991, p.
466/Vol 1 p.
345).
Many of the theoretical constructs in personal construct theory can be
applied
to construing at a preverbal level, such as tight
and loose. For
instance, it
can be very loose as in dreaming or very tight as in core construing
that says
"I am fundamentally a worthless person".
Thus, with "low levels of cognitive
awareness" relating to what in other systems may be called "unconscious
processes", the elimination of the need for some "force" to make a
person move
psychologically, and the incorporation of "processes" in the Fundamental
Postulate, the concept of levels of cognitive awareness is clearly
a
central
aspect of personal construct theory.
An alternative way of looking at unconscious
processes in personal construct theory has been proposed by Bell
(1996).
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References |
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- Bell, R. C. (1996)
How can personal
construct theory explain disorders of perception and cognition? In B.
Walker,
J. Costigan, L. Viney & W. Warren (eds) Personal Construct Theory:
a
Psychology for the Future. Australian Psychological Society.
- 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 and Practice. London:
Macmillan Publishers
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Fay Fransella |
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