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UNDERSTANDING, EXPLANATION, AND
PERSONAL CONSTRUCTS
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Trevor Butt
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Department of Behavioural Sciences,
University of Huddersfield, UK |
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Abstract
Personal
construct psychology can be read
either as an attempt to understand people by appreciating how the world
appears
to them, or to explain their behaviour in terms of personal constructs
that
inhabit some interior Cartesian realm. In this article, I maintain that
this understanding versus explanation distinction (Dilthey, 1988) is useful and helps us
clarify
the personal construct project. By examining the phenomenological
strengths of
personal construct methods, we can approach an understanding of the
person that
appreciates the complexity of the lived world.
Keywords: personal
constructs; phenomenology; understanding versus explanation
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UNDERSTANDING VERSUS EXPLANATION
It was Dilthey (1988) who first proposed
a
strong distinction between causal explanation and understanding. In the
natural
sciences, causal explanations of natural phenomena are sought, ideally
through
the use of experiments where independent variables are manipulated and
dependent variables subsequently measured. But Dilthey (1988) argued
that the
social sciences should not model themselves on the natural sciences. In
the
complex lived world that we inhabit, we cannot always expect to find
causal
connections. Understanding human action is more like interpreting a
text than
explaining the movement of particles. In the interpretation of a text,
we move
back and forth between an examination of a word or and the sentence in
which it
is embedded. The sentence is made up of words whose ambiguity is
dispelled by
their context. Similarly, we understand sentences only when we read
them in the
broader contexts in which they themselves are embedded. Only then can
we pick
out say, a metaphoric or ironical sense intended. We move to and fro
between
part and whole to grasp the meaning in what has been termed a
hermeneutic circle
(Ihde, 1986). So, for example, we might read the word 'groom' as
applied to
children and realise that it is not being used either as a noun (one
who looks
after horses) in its literal sense as a verb (to comb or care for an
animal,
usually a horse). It is only in the context of the current societal
anxiety
about paedophilic strangers that we apprehend its metaphoric meaning,
along
with the menacing connotations. In the same way then, we make sense of
human
action by reading it in the context in which it occurs. So when I say '
I
understand why you did that', I do not mean that we have access to your
private
thoughts and feelings. Instead, I mean that it makes some sense to me,
given
what I can see of the situation in which you appeared to be placed. A
more
refined understanding is achieved if and when I can appreciate exactly
how
things did appear to you: your construction of events.
Now one might argue, following Rorty
(1982), that explanation is itself a type of understanding, and that
the
understanding versus explanation dichotomy is too crude to capture the
scientific venture. But for the personal construct theorist, any
construct
should be evaluated in terms of its utility. And I maintain that it is
a useful
construct. In the area of personality, there is an ever increasing
tendency
towards a reductionism that looks for causal explanation in either
brain
science or an interior Cartesian realm (Butt, 2004). The rejection of
causal
explanation highlights the value of a science of personality that
promotes an
understanding based on the construing of the other's processes of
construction.
Clearly, the psychology of personal constructs (Kelly, 1955) is one
approach to
personality that is firmly grounded in this type of understanding. In
this
sense it is a phenomenological approach; one that is primarily
interested in
the way in which the world appears to people (Kelly, 1955, p. 42). Both
phenomenology and the pragmatic tradition in which Kelly worked are
firmly
monist and not dualist (Merleau-Ponty, 1944/1962; Dewey, 1910/1993).
Both are
committed to understanding phenomena at the level at which they appear,
avoiding both reductionism and recourse to a mind made up of different
substance to the body. But although contemporary theorists see strong
links
between Kelly's pragmatism and phenomenology (Warren 1998; Butt, 2003,
2004),
Kelly himself maintained a distance between his work and phenomenology
(Kelly,
1969a). Reading The Psychology of
Personal Constructs, it is easy to think of
personal constructs as personal cognitions, the property of a ghost in
the
machine (Ryle, 1949) that exist behind and indeed power behaviour. In
this
article, I will argue that an understanding of people is best achieved
by
avoiding this sort of explanation. I will begin by examining personal
construct
theory's links with phenomenology.
PHENOMENOLOGY
Kelly (1969a) famously 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, 1969b) 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 by American theorists
Rogers and
Maslow. It is likely that this was the only exposure to phenomenology
that
Kelly had. Phenomenology was a methodology devised by 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 dualities where
focus on
either pole misses the vitality of the relationship between them.
Husserl
developed Brentano's concept of intentionality
that 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, 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, p. 29). 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 – Heidegger,
Sartre
and Merleau-Ponty – to have privileged reason with his
proposal of a transcendental ego,
an 'I' that in some way extracted itself from
the 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), 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 inter-twined; 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 post-modern
thought. We
are fundamentally pre-reflective beings, who often report feeling most
alive
when lost in a task. Ihde (1986: 47) 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 give up 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 inter-subjectivity, 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, 1944/1962). 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 (1986) 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 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' (See 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. But unfortunately, the lived
world is
messier than this; everything in the lived world 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 at 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.
Objective thought has proved useful in
the
natural sciences, where it made possible the type of causal explanation
so
often sought after in the psychology of personality. If we conceive of
constructs as personal cognitions that are responsible for the way we
act, we
bring objective thought to bear. If, on the other hand, we see
constructs as
embedded in action itself (Butt, 1998), they lose their power of causal
explanation. One way of understanding the two readings is to see them
as
occupying the two poles of the lived world/objective thought construct.
PCT AND OBJECTIVE THOUGHT
I have argued that the person in
existential
phenomenology is certainly not that straw man imagined by Kelly
(1969b), 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 'person as 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. Kelly paid
tribute to
Dewey, recognising that in many respects the psychology of personal
constructs
reflects Dewey's pragmatism. Like Dewey, he disliked Cartesian dualism
(1955,
872). But elsewhere (1955, p. 17) he was less committed to monism. In
this
enigmatic passage he sounds as though he has swallowed a philosophical
dictionary:
Ontologically,
our position is identifiable
as a form of monism, although
in view of the many complex varieties of
ontology, the differentiation of its monistic form from its pluralistic
aspects
is hardly worth the effort. If it is a monism, it is a substantival monism that
we are talking about; yet it is neutral,
and, like Spinoza, we are prepared to
apply attributive pluralism
to the substance whenever our purposes might be
served thereby. (1955, p. 17. Italics in the original),
Perhaps the uncharacteristically pompous
tone adopted here merely indicates that Kelly knew that he was straying
out of
his philosophical depth, and felt the need to shore up what he was
saying with
some big words and names. But what was he saying? It is not at all
clear, but
we can perhaps get some indication from the direction he takes in the
next
section of his chapter on constructive alternativism. Here, he says
that: "Whether
a theory is called 'psychological', physiological' or 'sociological'
probably
depends upon its original focus of convenience" (p. 18). As he had
argued
in his Fundamental Postulate, there are not events (for example, like
emotions)
that belong exclusively in these different realms, only events that can
be
construed physiologically, psychologically or sociologically.
Presumably then,
this is 'attributive pluralism'; another phrase for constructive
alternativism.
But perhaps also, Kelly wanted to leave the door open for explanation
is
dualist terms. The vocabulary of 'construct systems', 'loosening and
tightening'
and 'constriction and dilation' does, after all, conjure up images of
cognitive
structures with causal connections to surface behaviour.
So 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 construct 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. The 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 lifeworld 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 (Es),
I (Ich) and over-I (Über-Ich) 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
person 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 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
(1969c)
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,
1969c, p.225). 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. Horizontalization - 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 with the world is primarily pre-reflective; out 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 (See 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.
Kellians 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 traces paths
through
their construct systems, and in the computer analysis of grids,
construct and
element constellations that emerge may be as much a surprise to either
party. In
his extraordinarily detailed suggestions for analysis of
self-characterizations, Kelly (1955) lists many strategies for
operationalizing
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, but 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 (1969c). In his
'personal
construct analysis' of the Eden myth, Kelly discusses it in terms of
three
choices that are entailed. These are companionship -loneliness,
innocence
-knowledge, and 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,
1969b. p10)
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. 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, 1969b),
he
rejected what he called 'sequential explanation', external causal
relationships
between events and construing. Behaviour is "man's independent
variable" (p.
36). This may be seen as over-stating individual agency, but is surely
at least
an empowering heuristic for a clinician whose task is to help
individuals to
reconstrue their lives (which is, after all, the focus of convenience
of PCT). But
certainly Kelly was moving towards what phenomenologists advocate:
describing,
contextualizing 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." (p. 44).
CONCLUDING REMARKS
At the beginning of the new 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 over-extension 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, then to 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, p. 304)
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 resonates with
phenomenology in its 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
personal construct psychologists accept the ambiguity of the lived
world, they
can contribute significantly to the understanding of it, while at the
same time
foregoing the inevitably disappointing project of trying to explain it
mechanistically. |
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nothingness. London: Methuen.
Warren, W. G. (1998). Philosophical
dimensions of personal construct psychology. London: Routledge.
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ABOUT THE
AUTHOR
Trevor
Butt, Ph. D., trained as a clinical psychologist before working
at the University of Huddersfield, where he is now Reader in
Psychology. He has published in the areas of personal construct theory,
phenomenology, and psychotherapy, and is the joint author (with Vivien
Burr) of Invitation to Personal
Construct Psychology. E-mail: t.butt@hud.ac.uk.
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REFERENCE
Butt, T.
(2004). Understanding, explanation, and personal constructs. Personal
Construct Theory & Practice,
1, 21-27
(Retrieved from http://www.pcp-net.org/journal/pctp04/butt04.html)
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Received: 24 Dec 2003 - Accepted: 7 Jan 2004 -
Published: 31 Jan 2004 |
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